I'm a huge documentary fan. Whenever I have some time to kill, I check out HBO's documentaries On Demand. The other night I watched Spike Lee's "When The Levees Broke". I have so much to say about it I can hardly contain myself.
Before I regale you with all the funny moments from the film (yes, there are hysterical moments in the documentary about Hurricane Katrina, to me anyway), I will give you my personal opinion on this catastrophe and the aftermath.
Hurricane Katrina, horrifying situation. Obviously. Goes without saying. But I'm saying it, so that you cannot say I'm cold and dead inside.
But folks, weather happens. Hurricanes, tornadoes, hail, tsunamis, all happen. They always have, and always will. You can't stop it. Try as you might, you can't hold back the wind or the rain. If you believe in creation, Man will never beat God. If you believe in the Big Bang, Man will never beat evolution and Mother Nature. You can't have the expectation that the U.S. Government, or the military, or NASA, will ever be able to eliminate the threat of weather. Even before global warming, catastrophic weather occurred.
This documentary is full of people whining. Whining out how they were treated during and after the storm. I can't understand it one little bit.
Here's how it plays out: the mandatory evacuation is ordered. Yes, there wasn't much time to evacuate, and some folk didn't have transportation (except their legs, but I digress...), but there was warning. A lot of folks said their attitude was, "We've weathered many a hurricane, we'll weather this one". Which is a perfectly justifiable attitude. But when you take that route, you are ONE HUNDRED percent responsible for what happens to you.
New Orleans had never issued a mandatory evacuation before, so this was new territory. There's so much to consider in making a decision like that. If you issue that order, and the storm passes over or dies out before landfall, you would get TONS of crap. If you don't issue the evacuation and everyone dies, you'd get TONS of crap. So basically, you don't want to have to be the one making that call, because you know that no matter what, you're going to be covered in shit when it's all over.
But Mayor Nagin issued the order, and that die was cast. I'm sure many lives were saved due to that order.
For the folks who didn't leave the city, nature's fury was unleashed. As the media had reported it would be. The storm itself wasn't that bad, there in New Orleans. I don't think it ever reached category 5 once it made landfall. The trouble came when the levees broke. Major flooding occurred in those neighborhoods, flooding that killed many people. Those who made it to their rooftops had to wait it out until a boat came by.
The folks who hadn't left town, but wanted to leave their houses before the storm hit and move to higher ground, went to the Superdome. The Superdome is in downtown Louisiana, surrounded by high rise office buildings and hotels and restaurants.
That's right, I said surrounded by office buildings and hotels and restaurants. That were empty. Because of the mandatory evacuation. Herein lies one of my greatest frustrations. These folk that were at the Superdome for 5 days post-Katrina, whining about how no one was coming, how they had no food or water, how they had nowhere to go to the bathroom....were within walking distance of hundreds of buildings.
How many high rise office buildings do you know that don't have vending machines? How many restaurants do you know that don't have food?
These people's lack of self-preservation skill was driving me INSANE while watching this film. They were all just sitting around, waiting for Superman to fly in and save them. The sense of entitlement was palpable. They were all expending their energy shouting angrily at the media cameras, "Where is the National Guard??? Why is no one helping us?? No one cares about the Black Man!!!"
And yet there they all continued to lay, day after day. Not helping themselves.
Don't get me wrong, there was something COMPLETELY fishy going on in Washington, DC. The power struggle between the governor of Louisiana and the president seemed ridiculous. She didn't seem to be the sharpest tool in the box, and as for Bush, well...one brain cell plus one brain cell does not a catastrophe solve.
But whether or not the government should have done more, and faster, what you do FOR YOURSELF doesn't change ! When you're on fire, do you stand there until the fire department comes by with a hose? Even if you've called 911 and you know the firemen are on their way, you still stop, drop, and roll. But not these folk.
Once the National Guard made it into town, the compaints just got worse. Complaints of the chaos and the lack of sensitivity...People, there was just a major hurricane! Your entire city was just decimated! THERE'S GOING TO BE CHAOS! It's inevitable.
Then the complaints about being shipped off to different states. Complaints about how long it took to get FEMA trailers and checks...hello, it's the federal government! Do they do anything quickly?
What do you think people did before the Dept. Of Homeland Security? Before FEMA? When a catastrophe struck in ages gone by, people took care of themselves. They were grateful that they had survived, and they picked themselves up and moved on.
Should the levees have held? Sure. In a perfect world, everything would work perfectly and nothing would ever break. And unicorns would fly out of my butt and candy corn would grow on trees. But this is why insurance companies exist. Because we don't live in a perfect world.
Yes, it would be nice if someone helped you. But you can't expect people to help you. People aren't required to help you. You can only control yourself. Instead of whining about how no one's helping you, why don't YOU go help someone?
I'm amazed that humans have lasted this long. In the game of Survival Of The Fittest, Louisianians would have lost out.
In my personal opinion, the media made it worse. Every major network had cameramen down there, interviewing the poor neglected victims. If those folk had been truly neglected, they may have gotten up and found some water. Put a camera in someone's face, work them up with a few well placed comments like, "How do you feel that the government seems to have forgotten you?", and you place ideas into their heads.
Sure, you can't know for sure what you would do in a situation like this until it happens to you. But it's not in my nature one little bit to sit around and wait for someone to take care of me or my children. I can do it better than anyone else can anyway.
My main point in this rant is this: take care of yourself. Period.
I've completely re-irritated myself, so I'm going to wait until tomorrow to share the comedic portions of When The Levees Broke. But don't take any of this to mean that this film isn't worth watching. It's actually well worth your time, very thought provoking (obviously!).
"you cannot say I'm cold and dead inside."
ReplyDeleteMaybe not, but you do seem somewhat misinformed. The people that annoyed you so much were only about 4 or 5% of New Orleans' population. Consider that you might be blaming flood victims inappropriately. You might be promoting myths. It feels like mean spirited slander from my perspective. It hurts my feelings, and makes me want to try to counter what you say with factual corrections. I will not stop 'whining' until the slander and myths about my city and its people stop. Your lack of empathy is kind of alarming.
Did you know that 90% of the metro area evacuated before the storm? It was the most successful evacuation of a metropolitan area in this country’s history. Could your city do as well? I evacuated my entire family to Houston before the storm.
Did you know that 70% of New Orleans home owners had flood insurance? - a rate higher than almost anywhere else in the country. I had it, thank goodness, but it wasn't enough to rebuild or replace our stuff. Like most, despite our house also being crushed by a huge tree, our homeowners insurance denied us our loss of use coverage and paid zero on contents and tried to drop us, even though we had been faithfully paying that premium every month for 18 years. Our insurance story is pretty typical.
Did you know that the flood, proportionally, killed and damaged just as many rich, middle class and poor as well as black, white, Hispanic and Asian New Orleanians - educated and uneducated? The only demographic that suffered more than the rest were our elderly who suffered the worst, by far. Did you know many thousands of New Orleanians died in the months after the storm from stress and depression, and are still dying? Think poorly of me if you must, but I still cry uncontrollably nearly every day, for example.
Did you know that the Lower Ninth Ward is but only 2 of the 140 urban square miles (in just Orleans Parish) that flooded when our flood control structures, designed by the Corps, fell down like cheap movie props. -something like 17 zip codes swamped.
Did you know that 50% of New Orleans is above sea level? Not our house, but we rebuilt above the floodline as did most of my neighbors in the floodzones.
Did you know ships must travel 96 miles upriver from the Gulf to reach New Orleans? - we are not a ‘coastal’ city. 96 miles upriver! BTW, tonnage wise, ours is the busiest port in North America.
Did you know know the Corps is mostly responsible for the losses of our wetlands that use to serve as a storm surge buffer for New Orleans? We demand it be rebuilt - to help save our city.
Did you know know that New Orleans has a higher percentage of residents that remain lifelong residents of their home town than any other major metropolitan area in the US?
Did you know the vast majority of New Orleanians are honest, hard working, tax paying, law abiding US citizens and deserve your respect?
Blaming levee and floodwall failures on Katrina is like saying a bridge collapse was because of traffic. Would you blame the drivers Suzanne?
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ReplyDeleteDid you know the majority of damage occurred between the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal and the 17th Street Canal where our outfall canal floodwalls fell down without even being overtopped by storm surge water (at well less than half their design loads) because of negligent engineering in the design of those floodwalls’ foundations by engineers employed with the US Army Corps of Engineers as reported in the official levee failure investigation reports and reported to Congress by Corps leadership in June of 2006 and as decided by US 5th District Judge S. Duval in January 2008. The flooding was very preventable. The sheet piles were driven only one-third as deep as needed to have prevented the flood - because of engineering mistakes by federal engineers.
The levee failures and subsequent flooding were NOT because of hurricane category level or winds or barometric pressure or our corrupt local levee boards and politicians or because of weak soil, trees, barges, wind, rain, land elevation, not because of our levee heights, subsidence, budgets, democrats, republicans, crime, not an act of God, not school buses, not our culture, maintenance, environmentalists or neighborhood groups. It wasn’t even caused by FEMA, our Sewage and Water Board or our state’s Department of Transportation, or our poverty, lack of education or any of the other red herring issues very successfully promoted by so many. It was not the fault of flood victims like they want you to believe. Despite MamaD's claims in that movie, no one blew up the levees - they fell apart all on their own, because they were designed wrong.
The levees did not fail because they were ‘overwhelmed’. Federal engineers made lots of big stupid mistakes. Our disaster was the worst engineering catastrophe in the history of North America and the engineers that designed and built and were responsible for those failed levees are the same engineers tasked to rebuild our storm surge protection system. And, the federal government gives us no choice (and never did), but to accept the Corps’ work. Locals were only supposed to have to mow the grass, and we did that very well.
Since the floods, the Corps has relentlessly misinformed the public about the past, present and future in regard to their flood control structures which are life and death important to New Orleanians. They have successfully attacked and damaged most of their critics. There is even a PR firm with a $6M contract with the Corps’ New Orleans district to improve their image and they constantly push the myths so as to try to have the myths recorded in the history books rather than having the Corps and civil engineering community cited in history as being the cause for the losses.
It is a myth that anyone knew the levees would fail. We all knew that they might not be tall enough and we were worried about levee overtopping and the potential for levee breaches if overtopping occurred, but no one expected them to fail when the height of storm surge waters was many feet below the top of the floodwalls.
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ReplyDeleteThe myths seemed to stem from journalists parachuting in with preconceived notions and lazy but flowery language and they typically reported it all wrong. Countrymen and politicians used our problems as partisan political fodder. New Orleans and its residents have been ruthlessly slandered like no American city has ever experienced. Lazy media reported a ‘natural’ disaster and too many of our fellow US citizens feel we deserved our disaster and should even be denied the right to exist. It is plenty enough to hurt your feelings. Our fellow US citizens don’t care that all the misinformation has seriously disillusioned and disturbed so many.
My family home marinated in salt water up to the ceiling fan blades for weeks. It took us 27 months, but we rebuilt our home elevated above the Katrina flood line. We had to rebuild a 1275 square foot home to replace our flood destroyed 1700 square foot home because money was so tight and costs were so inflated. We feel so very lucky and are so thankful to have at least gotten enough money through that government homeowner's grant combined with our savings and a low interest SBA loan to rebuild our smaller, but elevated home.
My neighborhood is 60% re-inhabited only because my neighborhood has high land value. The people living in poorer neighborhoods have not been so lucky. We keep life jackets on the coat rack and a pirogue on the porch because we have no confidence in the engineering forced upon us by the US Army Corps of Engineers.
My family was chased out of Nova Scotia by the British in 1765 and we have lived here in South Louisiana ever since and will likely live here for another 250 years. I feel like a fish out of water anywhere else. I’d be willing to live on a houseboat if necessary. This is the only place where I own property and I cannot afford to move my family elsewhere even if I wanted to. My work is here. My life is here. We ain’t leaving.
So, I cannot wait to read what you find so funny about our catastrophe.
I'm not sure why you're so upset at my post. I agreed that this was a terrible situation. That mistakes were made all over. But mistakes will ALWAYS be made, all the time. Humans are fallible. Weather is unpredictable. Why be so angry about things that you should expect and be prepared for?
ReplyDeletePray for the best but prepare for the worst, as my Daddy always says.