A Paradise Built in Hell (41 page)

The whole world watched the obscene spectacle of people living and dying on freeway overpasses and the edges of the Superdome and the Convention Center. But few understood exactly why those people were stranded in heat, in filth, without food, without water, without medical care, without decent shelter. Even the hospitals were unable to evacuate. Katrina rolled in on a Monday morning. By midweek, most of the city’s hospitals were flooded, without power and thereby without air-conditioning or basic life-support systems like respirators and dialysis machines, without provisions, without the ability to monitor severely ill patients or perform many medical services.

A National Guardsman clad for battle stepped out of an armored personnel carrier to tell a doctor at Charity Hospital, the vast central-city complex where the poor had done much of their birthing and dying for decades, that it was “too dangerous” to evacuate her patients. Across the city, at Memorial Medical Center, where water had filled the first floor of the building and things had become desperate, the same thing happened. Many evacuation efforts had failed by that Thursday, when the doctors, nurses, and hospital workers who had stayed behind finally rounded up boats and began shipping patients across the waters to where they could be evacuated from New Orleans. A muscular state trooper with a twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun told the doctors overseeing the evacuation, “Doc, we’ll be closing down this loading ramp at five p.m. We just can’t guarantee security around here after five.” A doctor protested that he didn’t see a serious security problem.

The trooper replied, “Doc, we’ll decide what are security threats and what aren’t security threats.”

The doctor replied, “We can’t spend another night here. A bunch more people will die.” Ten people had died the night before, of heat, stress, and lack of medical resources. The trooper threatened to pull out entirely if the doctors disobeyed. They disengaged and managed to stage evacuations from the other side of the building. The doctor who wrote this account, Richard E. Deichmann, contrasted these bureaucrats preoccupied with notions of safety but unconcerned about human life with the volunteers who showed up. A Texas father and son who appeared that day in their flat-bottom boat figured out the evacuation route for the hospital. (A flooded city is full of underwater obstructions—street signs, fences—and shifting depths, so it’s easy to get stranded if you’re not careful, and the shallower the boat’s draft, the better.) The father told Deichmann, “The thing is, they wouldn’t let us put in once we got here. They tried to turn us around and make us go back. We wasn’t coming all this way to turn back. We told the cops ‘Okay.’ Then just snuck our boat in somewheres else.” Saving lives was an outlaw activity.

An armada of volunteers with boats—from inside New Orleans, from the surrounding Cajun countryside and from farther afield—had poured, often surreptitiously, into the city to be of help. These mostly white out-of-town boatmen (for they were also mostly men) counterbalance the murderous vigilantes. A remarkable photograph from soon after the storm shows bumper-to-bumper boat-trailer traffic heading into the city, as bravely altruistic as the fleet that rescued the stranded New Yorkers on September 11, 2001. (The Coast Guard and Fish and Wildlife Service also performed heroically, free of the fear and fantasy that snarled up the other government agencies.) On Thursday, September 1, FEMA officials suspended search-and-rescue operations, claiming it was too dangerous.

New Orleans sheriffs evacuated some prisoners well after the levees broke and abandoned others in the Templeman III complex altogether for days after the flood, leaving six hundred inmates without food, water, or power in a jail that flooded. Some of the surviving prisoners said others drowned in their cells. For days some adolescents were trapped up to their neck in the filthy water. Guards on the psychiatric ward were locked in to prevent desertion, prisoners themselves, and then ordered to shoot down any prisoner attempting to escape the hellish conditions. Other prisoners ended up evacuated to an overpass, where they lived for days with guns drawn on them. Many who had been arrested for minor and nonviolent offenses were lost in the system for months. Tom Jawetz of the National Prison Project said, “The Louisiana Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals did more for its 263 stray pets than the sheriff did for the more than 6,500 men, women, and children left in his care.”

 

 

 

Not every disaster features elite panic or failed evacuations. The 1973 volcanic eruption on Heimaey in the Westmann Isles off the coast of Iceland early in the dark morning of January 23, 1973, was a surprise. Even so, within six hours, the many boats docked near the town managed to evacuate all fifty-three hundred residents safely. Lava flowed for six months, buried a third of the town, and the community spent a few years in exile from the heat, damage, and fumes, then rebuilt and returned, with little of the social drama of other disasters. Iceland has a poor tradition of official political participation but a rich one of social connection, both due perhaps to the tiny size and rural background of the homogeneous population. An evacuation plan was in place when the volcano erupted, and people acted on it.

The island of Cuba is nearly the same size as Iceland but is in every other way profoundly different. It too has an effective civil defense system for the hurricanes that come more frequently but with far more warning than most volcanic eruptions. Cuba’s government has instituted disaster education, an early-warning system, good meteorological research, emergency communications that work, emergency plans, and civil defense systems—the whole panoply of possibilities to ensure that people survive the hurricanes that regularly scour the island. In a major hurricane, the entire population is evacuated from the threatened coast to higher ground. Deaths are rare. Cuban civil society matters too: people check in on each other, urge holdouts to come along, and generally prevent the kind of isolation that stranded many in Katrina or in the Chicago heat wave. A Jamaican writing about the devastating Caribbean hurricanes of 2008 commented, “Cuba is organised as a mutual aid society in which every citizen has his responsibilities, his duties and his place. When hurricanes threaten Cuba, people move out of the way guided by the neighourhood Committees for the Defence of the Revolution—CDR. They move the old and the young, the sick and the healthy and their cats, dogs, parrots, their goats, donkeys and cows, to safe places. Here is a truly incredible fact. Last week the Cubans moved 2,615,000 people—a number nearly equivalent to the entire population of Jamaica—to safety. Four people died in the storm, the first fatalities for years. It is a remarkable statistic. Three years ago when Texas tried to evacuate a million or so ahead of hurricane Rita, more than 100 people died in the evacuation.”

Those who talk about civil society sometimes call what makes Cuban disaster society work
social capital,
an odd term for the only avowedly Communist nation in the hemisphere, but this wealth of connection and care has been in Cuba, as in so many other places, critical to survival. In its 2004 report on Cuba’s superb systems, Oxfam America concluded, “The Cubans have consistently built up their social capital to strengthen risk reduction, and have done this in times of rigorous economic scarcity. Their example raises the distinct possibility that life-line structures (concrete, practical measures to save lives) might ultimately depend more on the intangibles of relationship, training, and education” than on material wealth. Every disaster is to some degree a social disaster, and though a strong and united society cannot prevent disasters, it can plan and prepare for them, protect the vulnerable or make them less vulnerable, and make response and recovery work. New Orleans in the Katrina era was a battleground between the forces that made it strong and those that helped destroy it. The latter side has won many of the battles, but the war is not yet over.

T
he media went crazy in Katrina, and so did a lot of people in power and a few groups of men with guns. They were by the numbers a small part of Katrina, but their disproportionate influence did much to shape the disaster, or rather to pile a series of man-made calamities atop a catastrophe. Even so, the majority of people reacted as they usually do in disasters, with generous improvisations to save themselves and others. Two things struck me most powerfully on my travels in New Orleans during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. One was those murders hidden in plain sight. The other was the love. There was a sweet emotional directness in many of the people in New Orleans unlike anything I’ve encountered elsewhere, and it was one of the many elements that made this city everyone knows is one of the poorest places in the USA one of the richest as well. People pouring my coffee or selling me string called me “ baby” and “sweetheart,” strangers were easy to talk to, people readily told their stories and in the telling laid bare their hearts with all the hopes and suffering within, and invited me to come back anytime with any need I might have.

A creole man who struck up a conversation with me in a café told me he tried living in Seattle, but no one would make eye contact and it was hard to meet people, so here he was, trying to move back. A friend of a friend of a friend invited me to stay with her the first time we met, and by the time I’d stayed with her a few times was a dear friend I flew back to see and celebrate Mardi Gras with. The neighbor who shared a porch with her told me that her sister said it was inevitable she herself end up in New Orleans because in Chicago she so often came close to getting punched out for her forthrightness with strangers. Nearly all the older houses had front porches and people still sat on them, enjoying themselves on warm evenings, of which there are many, and on hot nights people—poorer people, probably people without decent air-conditioning, but also my friend’s more middle-class neighbors—sat out under the trees that lined some of the streets, or the shaded traffic meridians, held barbecues to which the whole block might be invited, and generally lived in public among each other. They lacked that shrinking fear of strangers and sacralization of privacy that governs much of the architecture of suburbia and the growth of gated communities, the sprawls where no one mingles or, it sometimes seems, gets out of their car except in parking structures. Theirs was an old-fashioned conviviality that could be too bacchanalian to meet the earnest desire for civic revival held by many social critics but was nevertheless vibrant and embracing.

The older African American women pierced my heart with their bold kindness. I interviewed a tough, cynical old widow in her FEMA trailer next to her ruined home in the Lower Ninth Ward. She wasn’t on the high ground there, the Holy Cross region by the Mississippi River; she was right off St. Claude Avenue in the middle of the zone where the raging waters of the broken levee had pushed houses off their foundations and floated them down the street, where cars had ended up in trees and people in one-story houses had drowned or suffocated in attics, or been stranded on roofs, where bodies were still being found months after the terrible deluge. She sat in her stark white FEMA trailer, the kind of trailer that would later be demonstrated to exude carcinogenic formaldehyde fumes, and gave me a fairly grim view of human nature and her neighborhood’s chances of resurrection. And in parting, she looked me right in the eye and said, “Just remember. Jesus loves you and so do I.”

I had long wondered whether there was a society so rich in a sense of belonging and purpose that disaster could bring nothing to it, a society where there was no alienation and isolation to undo. I’d always thought I might find it in Mexico or a traditional indigenous community. I found a little of that in New Orleans. The disaster there was so horrific it begat little of the ebullience of many other disasters—though it created some remarkable disaster communities and even positive social change (as well as social destruction: deeply embedded communities were scattered to the corners of the country, and longtime institutions like Charity Hospital and the public school system were destroyed, intentionally, in the name of post-Katrina progress).

Of course, Katrina wasn’t a disaster. It was a catastrophe, far more devastating in its effects and scale, far harder to recover from, since so many buildings, institutions, and the economy itself were shattered across a wide region (even leaving aside the intentional destruction, or disaster capitalism, that savaged long-standing public institutions post-Katrina). Many who had been scattered far across the country did not return, some by choice, some owing to lack of resources. Even Mexico City in 1985, despite the huge death toll, retained its population and a far higher percentage of inhabitable buildings. New Orleans was a watery ghost town for weeks, largely deserted for months after Katrina, and even today many homes, the majority of dwellings in some neighborhoods, remain uninhabitable or unrehabilitated.

The city had always lived with disaster, so much so that boarding up windows against hurricane winds was halfway to routine, partying through the storm was a tradition, and
hurricane
was also the name of a sweet rum cocktail served in a lot of French Quarter bars. New Orleans had always been threatened by hurricanes and floods and brutalized by the terrible summer heat (and, in the nineteenth century, by yellow fever). The great Mississippi flood of 1927 and the devastation of Hurricanes Camille and Betsy in the 1960s were part of collective memory in this place so rich in memory, because people tell stories, learn from elders, stay put, mock recent history in each year’s Mardi Gras parades, or put it in songs.

New Orleans’s poverty was easy for the media to explain in the aftermath of Katrina: it showed up in statistics about income, housing, illiteracy, crime, wages, and joblessness. This poverty was real, and it was harsh, trapping people in lives with few resources and limited horizons. It had a lot to do with the crime that was high before and after Katrina. And then there was the racism: this was far from Paradise. The white people of New Orleans had been steadily moving away for decades, leaving an urban core that was about two-thirds African American and a periphery of fear and hostility toward the city and its citizens, a geography similar to that of Detroit and its suburbs.