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From disaster to disgrace

As we wonder why relief was so long in coming after Katrina, we should consider what other disasters the nation is not prepared for.

Most people are familiar with the fable of the little Dutch boy who, shivering through the night, kept his finger in the dike to prevent a small leak from becoming a disastrous torrent. The story is fiction but the premise is true, as the world has now seen to its shock, horror and rage.

Not only was there no finger in the dike this time, but the Army Corps of Engineers, the agency responsible for protecting New Orleans from its foreseeable (and often predicted) destruction, did not even have sensors in place to sound an alarm when water from Lake Pontchartrain overflowed a levee and began to erode it. The excuse, no doubt, will be that had they known, what could they have done?

The greater shame, though, belongs to the politicians - President Bush, the Congress and others - who for years sloughed off explicit warnings that New Orleans and its levees were sinking faster than expected, that the system was designed only for a Category 3 hurricane and was still incomplete even for that, and a flood precisely like Katrina's could occur. But as recently as this spring, the New Orleans district sustained a $71.2-million cut. At the same time, Congress happily conjured up a pork barrel bill that contemplates, among other things, the justification for an unnecessary and unwise $50-billion interstate highway through the North Carolina and Georgia mountains. The same president who signed that bill rationalized last week that nobody foresaw the New Orleans levees giving way. Only someone who prefers to dwell in ignorance could have said that.

Meanwhile, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which had begun to fulfill its potential only during President Clinton's administration, became a victim of the political agenda and terrorism myopia of the Bush White House. As part of the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA lost its responsibility for disaster planning - supposedly, that decision is now to be reversed - and three-fourths of its preparedness grants now go to counterterrorism. It also wound up with a director whose significant prior experience was in running a horse association.

It was as predictable as the flood that thousands of people, virtually all of them poor, would drown at New Orleans for lack of means to heed an evacuation order.

And so a natural disaster became a national disgrace, with uncounted corpses still floating in streets and flooded homes. The world wonders along with America why it took the greatest "superpower" the better part of a week merely to mobilize relief for the survivors.

Congress will no doubt conduct fearsome inquiries, which in no small part will be intended to cover its own backside. The investigations must do more than pass blame and point fingers. For the more urgent questions are these: For what other predictable disasters is the United States unprepared? When the next earthquake strikes, will the people of Los Angeles or Memphis be left to themselves as the victims of New Orleans were? Has anyone in Washington given thought to the active volcanoes that menace Seattle? Who will evacuate the old, the sick and the poor when a Category 5 hurricane takes aim at Charleston, Savannah or Tampa Bay?

[Last modified September 7, 2005, 18:46:32]