Jesse Walker at Reason has this article about how people respond to catastrophic events. The events in New Orleans notwithstanding, the news isn’t all that bad.
People couldn’t help contrasting the catastrophes. During the first disaster, New Yorkers remained calm, cooperative, and nonviolent; the crime rate plunged, and the city was overwhelmed with spontaneous acts of mutual aid. In the second emergency, the most basic social bonds seemed to disintegrate. As Newsweek put it, “the night was alight with fires, the pavement was alive with looters.”
If you compare 9/11 with Hurricane Katrina, you’ll provoke protests?Osama’s attacks were awful, your critics will say, but they only hit one part of Manhattan and they left most of the city’s infrastructure unscathed. But the two disasters I’m describing are the New York blackouts of 1965 and 1977. The first knocked out far more of the grid than the second, but communal ties seemed to strengthen rather than fray. The latter, by contrast, set off 25 hours of arson, looting, and chaos. The most striking quote in that Newsweek piece came from a rioter in Harlem. “We made a mistake in ‘65,” he said. “But we’re going to clean up in ‘77.”
I grew up in New Jersey and remember the 1977 blackout vividly. It seemed like the City of New York was falling apart. It was similar in many ways to what happened in New Orleans, on a smaller, more contained, scale. Had the blackout continued longer than it did, things most likely would’ve gotten worse.
As Walker points out though, history indicates that the typical civi reaction to a disaster is quite different.
When disaster strikes, the results usually look a lot more like ‘65 than ‘77. The civic breakdown we’ve seen in New Orleans is extremely atypical, not just next to smaller-scale emergencies like 9/11 but next to some of the worst natural and technological catastrophes of recent history.
So why did New Orleans go so horribly wrong ?
The full story of what went wrong has yet to be uncovered, but it seems more and more clear that, far from working closely with volunteers and local authorities, the Department of Homeland Security?the giant new bureaucracy that absorbed the Federal Emergency Management Agency in 2003?adopted a command-and-control approach that at times worked actively against the other responses. Anecdotes abound not just of well-qualified civilians being turned away from the disaster zone, but of public employees being poorly deployed, such as the 1,400 firefighters who were assigned to do community relations work. Worst of all were the squalid holding camps at the Superdome and the conference center, where authority was omnipresent but leadership was absent.
The local government clearly botched the initial evacuation of New Orleans, leaving hundred of empty buses to drown while carless citizens were stranded, but a deeper problem with the exodus might be the local initiative that was blocked. Fred Smith, the president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and, more to the point, a native Louisianan who’s been monitoring events there as closely as he can, asks: “There were avenues in and out of the city?people could have been enlisted to come into the city to make pickups, and the problem could have been alleviated much earlier. America has cars and boats and buses and vans, but they weren’t called on. In WWI, Paris was saved because taxis rushed French troops to the front. Why couldn’t New Orleans have done the same?”
In other words, the aftermath of Katrina wasn’t so much a confirmation of the inate nature of man as it was of the inate nature of government. An insanely huge federal bureaucracy was unable to respond quickly when needed and corrupt and inept local and state officials didn’t act fast enough. Worse, they seem to have actively impeded private efforts to help people and at the very least never even considered the possibility of relying on the private sector to assist in a time of crisis.
These are the people who will be called on to protect us the next time al Qaeda makes a move.
Linked with: Basil’s Blog
Technorati Tag: Hurricane Katrina
