Katrina Response

I think the criticism by journalists and New Orleans officials of the federal response to Katrina is unfair. There is not a standing body of tens of thousands of personnel ready to respond to any emergency. Hurricanes happen, but rarely are they this destructive. Most important, the federal government is not chiefly responsible for New Orleans’ failure to invest in an adequate enginnering solution to its vulnerable location below sea level and next to a massive lake. There will undoubtedly be many lessons learned from the response to this emergency, but it’s very hard to say that from previous experience, personnel should have been able to respond on a dime to “the worst natural disaster in US history.”

There are trade-offs in every policy decision. If huge numbers of military and civilian personnel were mobilized in a levee en masse for every “what if” scenario, we’d soon bankrupt ourselves. People that do not have to make these kind of trade offs under uncertainty are too quick to assume some obvious solution had not been employed or that officials were negligent in their duty. Consider the sniping at Homeland Scurity’s elevation of security levels in the wake of 9/11. There is also a mistake of thinking that the deep floodwaters throughout New Orleans are some minor obstacle that only poor planning has turned into a challenge. For all of its comparative efficiency to other government agencies, the military does not work miracles. Floodwaters create massive problems in moving personnel into and out of affected areas of New Orleans. Helicopters cannot easily fly through gunfire when people, in the most antisocial act imaginable, shoot at rescurers.The real elephant in the room are the inadequate levees and broken-down pumps that apparently would fail from the lightest spring showers. It’s no wonder that without adequate investment this infrastructure could not handle such a strong hurricane. The fact that such a hurricane was inevitable over time makes this lack of investment the most identifiable single contributer to the magnitude of this disaster.

Within a few weeks, Mississippi and other parts of the Gulf Coast will be up and running. But New Orleans will still likely be a ghost town, which we would reasonably consider not rebuilding. The resasons for this state of affairs goes beyond a lack of foresight. New Orleanians have long joked about the inevitable flooding of the city if a big storm hit. They just didn’t do anything about it. New Orleans is fun for the same reason that it’s inefficient. It lacks the austere Protestant virtues and culture of most of the United States. It instead has a corrupt, libertine, and passive approach to life, commerce, and public policy. In short, it has the Catholic culture and values of the Mediterranean and Third World. And Catholic countries, I needn’t point out, have until recently been backwards, corrupt, authoritarian, inefficient, lazy, and poorly managed. I should say that I speak with some authority on this matter, as I’m a partisan for Catholicism. But one must speak the truth. One of the most Catholic corners of the US has been devastated by a natural disaster, and it is apparent that some defect in its inherited Gallic, Catholic culture probably contributed to its inadequate preparation for such an event. Under these circumstances, finger-pointing by the locals appears to be a desparate deflection of responsibility for their own mistakes and profligacy, which are the chief cause of New Orleans’ current troubles.