Varifrank: 10 Things I learned From Hurricane Katrina.

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10 Things I learned From Hurricane Katrina.

1. For large scale disasters that are multi-state, multi-city, multi-jurisdiction in their impact, all planning that is based on the authority and existence of the local officials is null and void.

Until this disaster I have always accepted the idea that “local authority is the best authority”. It never occurred to me that there are some situations where the local authorities themselves would be destroyed along with their infrastructure. Sitting around and waiting for them to call you for help is a pretty silly idea. It seems pretty obvious now, but two weeks ago, I would not have accepted that idea. Now I know different because I’ve seen it with my own eyes.

2. 'Bush Derangement Syndrome' can lead directly to peoples deaths.

I wonder how many more people would be alive if the Governor of Louisiana and the President had a good working relationship. When you get all done calling the President every name in the book, you might find you still have to work with the guy and he has to work with you.

I don’t know when it happened, and I don’t know how it happened but at some point people stopped watching sports and started watching party politics. Katrina and its after effects is where “political bashing” stops being funny. I think the corrosive nature of our politics helped contributed to the deaths of thousands by making people who should be working together suspicious of each other.

Remember, the Civil War started first as a culture war. Try and think of “Bush Derangement Syndrome” as a new strain of “Lincoln Derangement Syndrome”, then go to Gettysburg and see where it might all lead.

If we don’t step back from the edge, we could find ourselves in a second Civil War. We might be forgiven for the first Civil War, but we will never be forgiven for the second Civil War.

3. For some people the most important part of Hurricane Katrina wasn’t how many people were killed or suffering, but how much it would effect Bush.

I found it striking how at a time when people were dying, the most important thing on some people’s minds, both left and right was how it might effect Bush. I would never have predicted that a month before Katrina. Last I checked, Bush isn’t running for anything, he’s won both his Presidential elections, and will never run again, why the preoccupation with his poll numbers? He’s not going to leave office until his term is over. With solid control of both houses of congress for the foreseeable future and a rock solid cabinet, there will be no impeachment, so what is to be gained here?

And what is to be lost? Civilization itself.

4. Civilization has a 24 hour shelf life

Modern humans think that the conditions they live in are natural; that people are nice and that they have no need for police forces or weapons and that peace in their neighborhoods will exist forever even with no authority imposed on it.

Hurricane Katrina hits and 24 hours later its “lord of the flies”. Civilization, like fresh fish, tends to go off very quickly when there is no refrigeration. You should plan accordingly.

5. If you were a corrupt and ineffective government before a disaster, you will have no standing with the locals after the disaster.

New Orleans has been known as one of the most corrupt governments in the United States. Not having moral authority in the face of an emergency is what cost the New Orleans Police force the ability to establish order after the Hurricane passed. The leadership of the force could not maintain its rigor in the emergency, as a result its membership began to break down. There are items that come to my mind such as the number of people who resign in light of being in an emergency shows just how bad the situation was within their organization

What impact does this have for the rest of us? Well lets see, Washington D.C., what kind of city government is that? Detroit? or how about the State of California or Washington? We all get endless laughs out of lame government and it’s a credit to American life how little their government impacts their lives, but in a disaster, you really need a government, at the very least, you need authority that you can trust.

Put a large scale natural disaster in any of those other places, and we will see a repeat of the same things we saw in New Orleans, not for any other reason than their governmental incompetence has lead to contempt in the minds of the populace. That is a very, very bad thing to have when things go badly.

6. Cable News reporting of the “hurricane of the weekend” has contributed to desensitizing of the true nature of the danger that hurricanes can create.

Admit it, before Katrina when you saw 24 hour wall-to-wall Hurricane reporting, you said “ oh, must be a slow news week”. The result of nonstop 24 hour coverage of even small hurricanes was to desensitize people to the true dangerous nature of Hurricanes. Humans have short memories; as a result they tend to forget. I’ve lived in the same area since 1972, in that time, I’ve probably seen 4 good floods that have resulted in people dying and 5 that left property damage, yet I still meet people who say that the area never floods and is not at risk. I’ve met people who live below sea level in the area, I point out to them that they are living below sea level by point up to the levees that they live below; I point out that the area is a drained swamp at the intersection of two major rivers. Their reaction is to say “the city would not have approved the building of these houses if it were dangerous”.

Then they tell me they didn’t get flood insurance because it seemed silly when it rarely rains here. The lesson is the same in both cases; to some people, if it didn’t happen last year, it never happened at all and can therefore never happen. The dumbest, most ridiculous phrase ever invented by the insurance industry is “the 100 year flood”. Once spoken, people actually think that they wont see another problem for 100 years and thus – there is no problem. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen a huge hurricane, the result is people act like its never occurred. We were foolish to not learn from those lessons of history, but the fact is it’s nearly impossible to get people to pay attention to natural history. You can build all the levees you want, all the pumping stations you want, if you live below sea level, you will eventually get flooded out.

After Katrina, what I worry about now is the next hurricane this season will lead to outright panic rather than the complacency we have just seen.

7. For the first time in history, individuals are blamed directly for the weather.

The weirdest and hardest thing for me to understand is the large number of people who really and honestly believe that President Bush actually caused the Hurricane. The first response from most of Europe was to say “serves them right” and to point out that the Hurricane was in fact caused by President Bush’s policies on climate, almost as if he had a big analog knife switch on his desk marked “ Bad weather” at one end and “good weather" at the other and that he would grab with both hands and flip it towards "bad weather" and giggle out loud with a big snidely whiplash laugh.

This to me is the most staggering example of human stupidity since the creation of the “Whip Inflation Now” button. Because President Bush didn’t support the Kyoto treaty means that the weather has changed for the worse is utterly asinine. There is no better example of modern mans turn from scientific reasoning than this simple belief in the minds of so many people.

This "kyoto means salvation" idea almost points back a sort of animist cult that believes that its leaders are somehow favored by the gods when things are going well and that when bad things happen that the leader has fallen from favor by the gods. I thought we had grown past that sort of thinking, but it seems that the euro-enviro-vegan cult has revived it.

8. That’s right you’re not from Texas, but Texas loves you anyway.

100,000 people migrate to Texas from the depths of disaster in the blink of an eye.An instant town springs up, a town so large that it has its own zip code and despite challenges of every type and its all working pretty well. I think that unprecedented in the history of mankind. There’s a lot to be studied here and rather than hashing out the politics of it all, people should get down to the astrodome and help out, and if you cant do that, try to take down notes of one of the truly amazing events to happen in modern history. Hurricanes happen, but evacuations and relocations of this scale, size and quality don’t.

9. The Coast Guard model works pretty good.

Once upon a time, the Coast Guard was the Navy in peacetime and was the central core on which the Navy was formed in wartime. The Coast Guard is not a 'Department of Defense' organization, and no one joins the Coast Guard to get their names in the history book. They join and very often get the chance to save lives as well as serve in the front line on the war on terror. The Coast Guard is also not burdened by the “posse commitatus” rules that entangle the Air and Army National Guard.

I politely suggest that a bigger Coast Guard is a good idea. I also suggest that the culture and organizational methods they deploy work pretty good and could serve many groups within the Department of Homeland Security.

Oh, and for those of you who really want to do something to help the country but you are too old to join the National Guard, then go join the Coast Guard Auxiliary. They are a big part of the success of the Coast Guard. The CGA is another successful model for how to integrate civilian volunteers into professional services.

10. Modern Man, for all his advances, still lives at the mercy of nature.

It is striking to me that for all the satellite models, for all the computer simulations, for all the projections of disaster, for all the communication, the net effect of all this was that we still found ourselves caught flat footed by something like a Hurricane. While on one hand I do find myself surprised by the damage, but I also know just how bad it could have been, had not satellite projections and the communication allowed as many people to leave as they did.

There is a tendency in the Modern age to think that the problems of our forefathers are behind us, and for the most part they are, but its times like this that remind you just how weak we are in the face of true disaster.

We are all living just 72 hours from the 18th century.

Posted @ September 05, 2005 07:54 PM | Current Affairs

I enjoyed reading your analysis and will refer to it from my blog. You put a lot of thought into which is much appreciated.

Porkopolis

Posted by: Porkopolis at September 5, 2005 08:41 PM

In regards to #4 above, I thought that Robert Tranciski had an excellent post. I am not sure it is wholly true, but it seems to me that it is a valid consideration. The post is at http://realclearpolitics.com/Commentary/com-9_4_05_RT.html

Posted by: Suzi at September 5, 2005 09:01 PM

In answer to your question Suzi - there is no age limit to membership in the auxillary. Heres the best part, there are few restrictions to a auxillary member for what they can do when working with the Coast Guard. CGA members cannot carry weapons and cannot act as a coxwain for boats beyond 47 feet in length, but short of that, they quite often work hand in hand with regular coast guard members. CGA coxwains often carry Coast Guard Chiefs on Coast Guard provided Boats for duty. ( A coxwain is a "boat captain"), not a bad deal for a civilian who wants to do as much as they can reasonably do.

You'll find most Coast Guard districts relay heavliy on the manpower provided by the auxillary.

Posted by: varifrank at September 5, 2005 10:56 PM

Varifrank. My trackback failed. Smoothingplane.blogspot.com If President Bush can control the weather, and any third rate insurance company would call a hurricane an Act of God, is President Bush God? If so, this means Rush Limbaugh gets to go back to being Hitler, yes?

Posted by: Vasily at September 6, 2005 04:22 PM

Varifrank, I think you've over-generalized on #4 a bit. We've currently got a real-life experiment going on which we should observe very carefully. Mississippi was hit even worse by the hurricane than was Louisiana and yet there haven't been the reports of civil disorder there that there have been in New Orleans and the relief efforts there seem to be going better than in Louisiana.

I suspect that we're going to find that much of New Orleans had already returned to a state of nature before the hurricane struck.

Posted by: Dave Schuler at September 6, 2005 07:12 PM

> After Katrina, what I worry about now is the next hurricane this season will lead to outright panic rather than the complacency we have just seen.

Tell me about it. Everyone down here in Florida just starts getting the screaming meemies whenever one looks askance at us from the coast of SoAm

Posted by: OBloodyHell at September 8, 2005 04:13 AM

> Hurricane Katrina hits and 24 hours later its “lord of the flies”

I think this ties an awful lot to the nature of the people of the area and the culture of dependency which they consider expected.

I suspect that many areas of the country both the State and the Locals would respond far more effectively (esp. AFTER Katrina) and the people would go feral much more slowly in either case

Posted by: OBloodyHell at September 8, 2005 04:16 AM

> Hurricanes happen, but evacuations and relocations of this scale, size and quality don’t.

Oh, but America sucks, don't you know this???

We don't care about anyone -- not blacks, not our own people -- no one!!

The really, really amusing thing is that we'll do this for someone else sooner or later, even if they've been carping at us for 30 years...

Posted by: OBloodyHell at September 8, 2005 04:21 AM

When Galveston, Texas, proved too risky as a port, it was moved inland to Houston. In view of the New Orleans risks, there should be no alternative to moving the port. Furthermore, many of the installations collecting oil from offshore as well as imports should be diverted to other ports--probably west of the Sabine river.

Posted by: Luther at September 9, 2005 02:41 PM