The Mysteries of New Orleans
Twenty-five Questions about the Murder of the Big
Easy
By Mike Davis and Anthony Fontenot
posted September 27, 2005 at 8:58 pm
We recently spent a week in New Orleans and Southern
Louisiana interviewing relief workers, community activists, urban
planners, artists, and neighborhood folks. Even as the latest flood
waters from Hurricane Rita recede, the city remains submerged in anger
and frustration.
Indeed, the most toxic debris in New Orleans isn't the
sinister gray sludge that coats the streets of the historic Creole
neighborhood of Treme or the Lower Ninth Ward, but all the unanswered
questions that have accumulated in the wake of so much official betrayal
and hypocrisy. Where outsiders see simple "incompetence" or "failure of
leadership," locals are more inclined to discern deliberate design and
planned neglect -- the murder, not the accidental death, of a great
city.
In almost random order, here are twenty-five of the
urgent questions that deeply trouble the local people we spoke with.
Until a grand jury or congressional committee begins to uncover the
answers, the moral (as opposed to simply physical) reconstruction of the
New Orleans region will remain impossible.
1. Why did the floodwalls along the 17th Street Canal
only break on the New Orleans side and not on the Metairie side? Was
this the result of neglect and poor maintenance by New Orleans
authorities?
2. Who owned the huge barge that was catapulted
through the wall of the Industrial Canal, killing hundreds in the Lower
Ninth Ward -- the most deadly hit-and-run accident in U.S. history?
3. All of New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish east of
the Industrial Canal were drowned, except for the Almonaster-Michoud
Industrial District along Chef Menteur Highway. Why was industrial land
apparently protected by stronger levees than nearby residential
neighborhoods?
4. Why did Mayor Ray Nagin, in defiance of his own
official disaster plan, delay twelve to twenty-four hours in ordering a
mandatory evacuation of the city?
5. Why did Secretary of Homeland Security Michael
Chertoff not declare Katrina an "Incident of National Significance"
until August 31 -- thus preventing the full deployment of urgently
needed federal resources?
6. Why wasn't the nearby U.S.S. Bataan
immediately sent to the aid of New Orleans? The huge amphibious-landing
ship had a state-of-the-art, 600-bed hospital, water and power plants,
helicopters, food supplies, and 1,200 sailors eager to join the rescue
effort.
7. Similarly, why wasn't the Baltimore-based hospital
ship USS Comfort ordered to sea until August 31, or the 82nd
Airborne Division deployed in New Orleans until September 5?
8. Why does Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld balk
at making public his "severe weather execution order" that established
the ground rules for the military response to Katrina? Did the Pentagon,
as a recent report by the Congressional Research Service suggests, fail
to take initiatives within already authorized powers, then attempt to
transfer the blame to state and local governments?
9. Why were the more than 350 buses of the New Orleans
Regional Transportation Authority -- eventually flooded where they were
parked -- not mobilized to evacuate infirm, poor, and car-less
residents?
10. What significance attaches to the fact that the
chair of the Transportation Authority, appointed by Mayor Nagin, is
Jimmy Reiss, the wealthy leader of the New Orleans Business Council
which has long advocated a thorough redevelopment of (and cleanup of
crime in) the city?
11. Under what authority did Mayor Nagin meet
confidentially in Dallas with the "forty thieves" -- white business
leaders led by Reiss -- reportedly to discuss the triaging of poorer
Black areas and a corporate-led master plan for rebuilding the city?
12. Everyone knows about a famous train called "the
City of New Orleans." Why was there no evacuation by rail? Was Amtrak
part of the disaster planning? If not, why not?
13. Why were patients at private hospitals like Tulane
evacuated by helicopter while their counterparts at the Charity Hospital
were left to suffer and die?
14. Was the failure to adequately stock food, water,
portable toilets, cots, and medicine at the Louisiana Superdome a
deliberate decision -- as many believe -- to force poorer residents to
leave the city?
15. The French Quarter has one of the highest
densities of restaurants in the nation. Once the acute shortages of food
and water at the Superdome and the Convention Center were known, why
didn't officials requisition supplies from hotels and restaurants
located just a few blocks away? (As it happened, vast quantities of food
were simply left to spoil.)
16. City Hall's emergency command center had to be
abandoned early in the crisis because its generator supposedly ran out
of diesel fuel. Likewise many critical-care patients died from heat or
equipment failure after hospital backup generators failed. Why were
supplies of diesel fuel so inadequate? Why were so many hospital
generators located in basements that would obviously flood?
17. Why didn't the Navy or Coast Guard immediately
airdrop life preservers and rubber rafts in flooded districts? Why
wasn't such life-saving equipment stocked in schools and hospitals?
18. Why weren't evacuee centers established in Audubon
Park and other unflooded parts of Uptown, where locals could be employed
as cleanup crews?
19. Is the Justice Department investigating the Jim
Crow-like response of the suburban Gretna police who turned back
hundreds of desperate New Orleans citizens trying to walk across the
Mississippi River bridge -- an image reminiscent of Selma in 1965? New
Orleans, meanwhile, abounds in eyewitness accounts of police looting and
illegal shootings: Will any of this ever be investigated?
20. Who is responsible for the suspicious fires that
have swept the city? Why have so many fires occurred in blue-collar
areas that have long been targets of proposed gentrification, such as
the Section 8 homes on Constance Street in the Lower Garden District or
the wharfs along the river in Bywater?
21. Where were FEMA's several dozen vaunted urban
search-and-rescue teams? Aside from some courageous work by Coast Guard
helicopter crews, the early rescue effort was largely mounted by
volunteers who towed their own boats into the city after hearing an
appeal on television.
22. We found a massive Red Cross presence in Baton
Rouge but none in some of the smaller Louisiana towns that have mounted
the most impressive relief efforts. The poor Cajun community of Ville
Platte, for instance, has at one time or another fed and housed more
than 5,000 evacuees; but the Red Cross, along with FEMA, has refused
almost daily appeals by local volunteers to send professional personnel
and aid. Why then give money to the Red Cross?
23. Why isn't FEMA scrambling to create a central
registry of everyone evacuated from the greater New Orleans region? Will
evacuees receive absentee ballots and be allowed to vote in the crucial
February municipal elections that will partly decide the fate of the
city?
24. As politicians talk about "disaster czars" and
elite-appointed reconstruction commissions, and as architects and
developers advance utopian designs for an ethnically cleansed "new
urbanism" in New Orleans, where is any plan for the substantive
participation of the city's ordinary citizens in their own future?
25. Indeed, on the fortieth anniversary of the 1965
Voting Rights Act, what has happened to democracy?
Mike Davis is the author of many books including
City of Quartz, Dead Cities and Other Tales, and the just published
Monster at our Door, The Global Threat of Avian Flu (The New Press)
as well as the forthcoming Planet of Slums (Verso).
Anthony Fontenot is a New Orleans architect and
community-design activist, currently working at Princeton University.