The sign in front of a Katrina-blasted Baptist church about 10 miles north of Pascagoula, Miss., optimistically proclaimed that "God is good all the time."
But along the Gulf Coast, where the only commodities in full supply are death and despair, faith certainly is being tested — not so much in God, as in our leaders here on Earth. For, in the wake of our government's response to Hurricane Katrina, Americans must now ask ourselves if we're safer or more secure than we were before 9/11. And the evidence offers a scary answer: Maybe not.
Katrina wasn't a surprise. Weather and disaster gurus have long warned that a hurricane would do precisely what Katrina did to New Orleans. The loudest alarm rang in 2001, months before 9/11, when the Federal Emergency Management Agency told Congress and the president that three massive disasters might hit the United States: a terrorist attack on New York City, an earthquake in San Francisco, and a category 4 or 5 storm swamping New Orleans.
Now, two of those disasters have happened. And, astoundingly, we were less prepared this time than we were the first time around.
Other cities have good reason for angst. Atlanta, the South's transportation hub and headquarters for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is particularly vulnerable to a terrorist attack. Computer models from federal weather scientists after 1992's Hurricane Andrew show that a category 4 or 5 hurricane entering Tampa Bay could rival the destruction, tidal surge and population displacement of Katrina.
If that isn't troubling enough, the administration days after the attack still didn't get it. George Bush was woefully late in acknowledging the scale of the crisis. In his first speech after Katrina, he devoted barely 5 percent of the text to the catastrophe enveloping New Orleans and the coasts of Mississippi and Alabama.
Bush later called the disaster a "temporary disruption that's being addressed." His Homeland Security chief, Michael Chertoff, beamed on Wednesday: "We are extremely pleased with the response of every element of the federal government."
At the same time, TV was beginning to show pictures of bodies floating in the streets, drowned children pulled from attics of flooded homes, murder and looting, thousands of citizens crying in distress, whole communities having vanished — and local officials screaming, Where is the federal government?
Bush shrugged: "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees."
Yet federal agencies and the media have been warning for years that precisely this disaster was coming. Fourteen months ago, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported: "For the first time in 37 years, federal budget cuts have all but stopped major work on the New Orleans area's east bank hurricane levees, a complex network of concrete walls, metal gates and giant earthen berms that won't be finished for at least another decade."
At least nine articles in the New Orleans newspaper cited the Iraq war as the reason the money was stripped from critical repairs of the levees.
As with 9/11, plenty of leaders can be faulted for ignoring the looming crisis. The warnings were coming for many years. And had the money been spent that Bush cut from New Orleans levee projects, the results may not have been enough to avert the catastrophe.
But nature's strike against New Orleans was utterly predict-able, in a way that a handful of hijackers plowing planes into specific buildings one random morning couldn't have been.
We knew where, how and, to some extent, when the hurricane would hit New Orleans. Sometime during some hurricane season, a huge storm would step up from the Gulf and thrust a counterclockwise storm surge through Lake Pontchartrain, just north of the city. That powerful right hook would punch through New Orleans' inadequate levees, and the city, much of which is below city level, would fill like a tub with chemical- and sewage-infested water. Thousands would die, amid billions of dollars in property damage.
The shipping and oil industries would suffer grievous wounds. New Orleans would be brought to her knees, perhaps never again to rise.
In one of the few bright spots, a larger disaster was averted just before the storm when New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin ordered a full evacuation of the city. Eighty percent of the city's residents managed to get out before Katrina made landfall.
But authorities turned out to be shockingly unprepared for the aftermath — especially aiding those without money or transportation to flee Katrina. As always, the poor, the sick and the elderly were left behind.
Prior to the Bush administration, FEMA had disaster plans that called for massing of relief supplies, hospital ships and other vessels in rapid-deployment staging areas near New Orleans. But the government has been dismantling FEMA in the last four years, and neither Chertoff nor Bush's FEMA chief, Michael Brown (a lawyer and GOP fundraiser), have disaster experience.
Bill Clinton's FEMA director, James Lee Witt, warned Congress last year: "I hear from emergency managers, local and state leaders, and first responders nearly every day that the FEMA they knew and worked well with has now disappeared." Witt said last week that detailed plans for a New Orleans disaster weren't followed, a biting indictment of the current administration.
Adding to the ill-preparedness, 6,500 of the best-trained Louisiana and Mississippi National Guard members — with their high-water Humvees, their helicopters and tactics tailor-made for mob control and disaster situations — were unavailable because they're in Iraq.
Our lack of preparation for the disaster itself could only be matched by our unwillingness to reduce long-term risks when that requires inconvenient changes in our luxuriant lifestyles.
For years, FEMA and dozens of other experts had said development should be restricted along the coasts — yet our federal and local governments are spending vast amounts of tax dollars and outlaying massive insurance guarantees to encourage development.
Ten million people live along the Gulf Coast, almost quadruple the number during the 1950s. In Florida, 6.8 million live in Gulf counties, plus close to 5 million in the vulnerable southeast corner of the state. Alabama's coast is — or was — home to 727,000 people; Mississippi, more than 600,000; and Louisiana, 3.6 million.
A sampling of growth, the lethal precursor to disaster: Florida's southwest Lee County (Fort Myers) grew from 105,000 to 500,000 between 1970 and 2000; Miami-Dade from 1.2 million to 2.3 million. Georgia's Camden County from 11,000 to 45,000. Mississippi's Hancock from 17,000 to 45,000.
Experts have long advised that protecting and even rebuilding coastal wetlands would provide buffers from storms. But wetland protection has been weakened, falling victim to the heavy lobbying of developers and now of political appointees who don't even believe in the very wetland-protection laws they're sworn to uphold.
In Louisiana, wetlands are overrun at the rate of 28,000 acres a year. Barrier islands in the state — and through the South — have been overrun with condominiums and luxury homes. The isles' natural storm protection has been reduced to the equivalent of a condom after repeated punctures with an ice pick.
If any environmental lessons are to be learned from this disaster, Mississippi's governor doesn't seem interested. With the ruin of his coastal communities all too apparent, Haley Barbour told reporters last week that "We will rebuild and the coast will be bigger and better than ever."
Whether insurance companies — which are now paying claims from the most expensive natural disaster in the nation's history — will underwrite Barbour's ambitions remains to be seen. True leadership would be to preserve the coasts with as little development as possible — and thereby avoid the human and financial tragedy of another Katrina.
But official wisdom is in as short supply as potable water along the Gulf Coast.
There are many reasons to fret about future Katrina-like disasters. Three weeks before Katrina struck, William Gray, a University of Colorado weather researcher, upped his estimate of named storms this year from 13 to 20. There has been a steady increase in storm activity since 1995 — keep in mind that 1992's Andrew was the first hurricane that year, yet it happened at about the same time in August that Katrina, 2005's 11th storm, was forming.
Meanwhile, an article in the July issue of the journal Nature stated that North Atlantic storms' destructive power had doubled during the last 30 years. The article, by Massachusetts Institute of Technology meteorologist Kerry Emanuel, pointed to slight increases in ocean temperatures, the result of global warming, as a contributing factor.
Yet the Bush administration's response to such information has ranged from indifference to hostility. Bush's energy policies have utterly failed to address global warming issues, and the administration has repeatedly subjugated science to politics.
Katrina portents a far more disturbing scenario for America than the destruction of one city and one booming coastal region.
In Mississippi's Gulf areas the day after the hurricane hit, all semblance of government had disappeared. People wandered aimlessly, thousands of cars were abandoned, homes stood wrecked. At a time when leadership at all levels — especially the federal — was urgently needed, there was a void.
The television cameras focused on New Orleans looters and chaos, overshadowing the heroic stories of people helping people. When two CL reporters stopped a car along a Mississippi road near the hamlet of Petal, a teenager, Bo Bingham, rushed out of his devastated trailer home to see if there was aid he could provide.
"We gotta help each other," said Bingham, who had survived the storm huddled in a roller-skating rink.
Motels opened their larders to refugees. Police officers, with little guidance from federal or state officials, worked tirelessly to ease distress. A scrawled sign in front of a Mississippi farmhouse offered: "We have room for a few refugees."
But no single person or group has the wherewithal to ameliorate the tragedy of a Katrina-scale disaster. At the most basic level, that's one of the most compelling reasons we have government. And government utterly failed the citizens of New Orleans and coastal Mississippi.
Much as 9/11 shifted the nation's discourse rightward — pushing values like privacy and open discourse aside for national security — Katrina may revive an appreciation for dealing with the natural world in a way that doesn't invite so many problems.
Perhaps this trauma will begin to cleanse our lenses a bit and allow us to view things as they really are, rather than as they are spun…
Or perhaps it will not. Perhaps this nation must stumble blindly through more such tragedies until finally we learn that reality matters.
John Sugg is senior editor of the CL media group. Ken Edelstein is editor of Atlanta's Creative Loafing. Staff members Rebecca Ford, Alejandro Leal and Coley Ward contributed to this report.
This article appears in Sep 7-13, 2005.
