The Pulitzer for Getting Katrina Right is Yet to be Awarded
True story: One of these years, a major East Coast paper will reveal in a dramatic five-part series that New Orleans flooded because of design and construction flaws by the United States Army Corps and Engineers, and will win a Pulitzer for its efforts. Until then, we have to put up with stories like this one, a Washington Post piece on the voting plans of Katrina evacuees in Texas.
The premise: these frustrated exiles will take out their frustrations at the polls, probably to the benefit of Barack Obama. But the reporting: start with the first paragraph, in which we learn that
Hurricane Katrina uprooted (Gregory Sam) from his home town of New Orleans
As if the winds, possibly tornado-style, picked him up and deposited him eight hundred miles west.
Three paragraphs in, we learn that it was not just wind...
For the nearly quarter-million people such as Sam who were evacuated to Texas after the hurricane and its floodwaters left New Orleans devastated in 2005
So Katrina had floodwaters. Why, in a city that had a "Hurricane Protection System" under construction for the past forty years thanks to the Federal government, why was that possible? Silence. Crickets.
Back to the exile voters. They're angry, we learn...
They are angry, for instance, that Donald Trump will soon construct a 70-story hotel in the city's central business district while neighborhoods in the Ninth Ward are still rodent-infested wastelands.
This is reported as fact, from a Houston dateline. In fact, half of the Ninth Ward, the Upper Ninth, has no "rodent-infested wastelands". The reporter probably means the Lower Ninth, in which some blocks have lots covered with high weeds and rodents do reside thereon.
Then, there are the numbers. Population stats on the Katrina disaster are all over the place, but these are lulus.
Anderson is one of about 100,000 evacuees who have permanently settled in Houston. An additional 60,000 or so are in metropolitan Dallas, 60,000 are located around Austin and San Antonio, and 10,000 are sprinkled across this vast state, according to the Texas Health and Human Services Commission.
That would total up to 230,000 permanent New Orleans exiles in Texas alone. Not counting the known tens of thousands in Atlanta, and Baton Rouge, and other parts of the diaspora. New Orleans' population before the disaster was about 450,000. There are believed to be 300,000-plus citizens back now, depending on whose figures you use. The numbers in this story would suggest that the current population of New Orleans includes almost no African-American returnees, a conclusion easily rebutted by talking to some black people in the city, in Treme, Gentilly, New Orleans East, even in the Ninth Ward.
Finally, the story of Martin Jones and his wife. He's an evangelical pastor, who had a kidney transplant more than a decade ago. We learn that
... the couple longs for New Orleans, where they want to restart the growing inner-city ministry they led. But the stale air, rodents and slow recovery have made it impossible for them to go back.
In a week where everyone's yelping at the NYT for poor sourcing on its John McCain story, what's the source for "the stale air" characterization of a city? Apparently the fact that, while salvaging what they could from his house and church, he contracted a bad bacterial infection. Not to minimize that awfulness, but in most cases, such incidents occurred because of mold infestations of the flooded buildings. The city's "air" had nothing to do with it. As for the "rodents", earlier in the article we learned they infested "the Ninth Ward". But Jones' buildings, the piece reports, were
on the edge of the French Quarter
The French Quarter, it should be noted, is about a ten-minute drive from the Ninth Ward. For people.
Journalism, we're constantly told, is a matter of reporters reporting, and their editors pestering them with questions and requests to get facts right, before stories run. This piece, written about a city the reporter is clearly not in, based on what one individual may have said about the place he's left behind, seems never to have been graced by an editor's touch.
The Pulitzer still awaits....
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We may have to face the fact that the NOLA metro area will never return to its former glory. As a cautionary tale, we all might want to look at Galveston -- before and after the hurricane that killed more than 6000 people in 1900. Galveston actually hauled in huge amounts of earth to raise it somewhat above sea level, and built a substantial seawall. During the years Galveston was attempting a comeback, Houston surpassed it and Galveston has never truly recovered.
The fact is that the very existence of the canals, concrete levees, and below-sea-level communities added to the fate of NOLA, because all the building devastated the wetlands (not to mention the nutrias).
The only hope for the Mississippi delta region is for less re-building, fewer canals, fewer levees, re-routing of the oil pipelines and so on.
HARRY RESPONDS: Perhaps it need not be said, out of consideration, but New Orleans has a 300-year old culture that Galveston did not. As for former glory? New Orleans long ago made its peace about not being the opera capital of the US, as it was in the 19th century...
The major cause of wetland loss was not the levees but rather the oil companies cutting through the wetlands to supply America's SUV's.
Galveston compared to New Orleans. . .ha!
Our "glory" remains, it's just wants the federal government to take responsibility for what they did and then fix the damage they caused. I saw New Orleans after the hurricane and before the flood. I know the difference the water made and what damaged what.
Blaming Katrina on faulty ACE designs and construction is not only simplistic, it is hurting New Orleans' hopes of survival. Hurricane Betsy, when it hit land forty years ago, was a much stronger storm than Katrina when it hit and it struck us in the worst possible place, slightly west, putting us on the biggest surge side. But the 17th St., London Ave and Orleans Canals did NOT overtop and flood the city. In fact those canals had no seawalls at all at the time and still did not overflow. The reason? We had thousands of square miles more land just forty years ago than now. The destruction of the wetlands is the cause of Katrina's wrath, not fauty seawalls. You can't build a levee high enough when you are suddenly on the coast. Not only that, the Supreme Court says you can't sue the ACE. So the only hope to restore the wetlands is to have the oil industry which destroyed in the last fifty years, the land equivalent to the state of Delaware, which used to protect us. You put that land back and we don't even need sea walls. Why don't you ever mention the role of the oil and gas industry, rather than continuing just harping on the ACE? This is exactly the message the oil industry is trying to hoodwink the public with.
HARRY RESPONDS: Every time I discuss what needs to be done to make New Orleans safe, I mention the wetlands, and usually I mention the cause of the destruction. But there's an ethical, maybe even a moral, distinction between heedless destruction of habitat for short-term economic gain--where in the US doesn't that happen?--and a Federal agency mandated by Congress to build a protective system to certain clear standards spending four decades and a lot of money to utterly fail at that task.
Additionally, those canals did not flood the city during Betsy because there wasn't a MR-GO funneling storm surge into the heart of the city. Finally, it's simplistic to blame just oil-and-gas for the decline of the wetlands. A major contributor was the channelizing of the Mississippi, preventing river sediment, during floods, from replenishing the wetlands.
Not to mention Galveston is not on the Mississippi or any river for that matter, so it's a pretty useless port, too.
The Pulitzer should go to National Geographic who only months before Katrina spelled out the the inevitable how, and why the city would flood from a sizeable hurricane or storm system. Yes infrastructure was an issue, but nature was a bigger one. The Mississippi flooded New Orleans, the hurricane only filled it with water, and will likely flood it again regardless of the system of dykes and pumps. It is the largest river in North America and has historically swung it's delta like a snakes tail, to and fro, for millions of years. Trying to stop it is a fantasy. So you think man will overcome nature in order to put up some towers for the Donald. A corrupt effort anywhere and everywhere you look makes it even less likely.
HARRY RESPONDS: The Mississippi definitely did not flood New Orleans, the water in the surge came from the Gulf, up channels carved by the US Army Corps of Engineers to speed the trip between the Gulf and the city.
John McPhee's excellent "The Control of Nature" was more than a little prophetic on these issues.
New Orleans flooded because it's in a flood plain, Harry .... you don't want to get lava burns, don't build your house on the side of the frickin' volcano.
HARRY RESPONDS: New Orleans is in a river flood plain, but the Mississippi did not flood the city in 2005. In fact, the river levees held solid. To say it's in a flood plain therefore it flooded assumes that it's natural for Gulf water to be funneled to the heart of the city, 100 miles upstream.
And for the underinformed, about half of New Orleans is below sea level. Those that continue to post misinformation about building below sea level should go study the Dutch dike system. it works- why? Because the Dutch government cares about doing it right.
To what National Geographic article are you referring? In October 2004, an article about the loss of wetlands briefly touched on hurricanes.
In 17 pages of text and photos, less than one page was devoted to an imaginary storm that might flood New Orleans. The rest of the article decribed the loss of wetlands, not only as a barrier to that storm, but as a disappearing natural resource.
The article said the Louisiana marsh is twice as large as the Everglades, it produces more petroleum than Alaska, it is second only to Alaska as a fishery, and it is disappearing at the rate of 33 football fields per day.
Part of that loss is due to the high priority that the nation places on navigation of the river and surrounding waters and petroleum exploitation of the marsh, in which erosion and subsidence are the cause. Part of the loss is from regional depressurization, in which oil removed from below Louisiana causes some of Louisiana to sink a little bit.
Louisiana's loss is your gain. Shouldn't you pay for the privilege?
I'll repeat it again: The Flood Protection "System" (ahem) built by the American taxpayer around New Orleans failed under conditions that were below its design standard. Please read this: http://lev
http://ngm
Given that no mainstream writer will win a Pulitzer for having "nailed" the ACE angle of the story, has anyone deserved honorable mention? Has anyone/any newspaper (outside New Orleans) come close?
HARRY REPLIES: Yes, IMHO, the lead article in Time magazine's special second-anniversary issue on the disaster last August.
Time magazine, August 13, 2007
http://www
The Cover Story begins with this:
"The most important thing to remember about the drowning of New Orleans is that it wasn't a natural disaster. It was a man-made disaster, created by lousy engineering, misplaced priorities and pork-barrel politics. Katrina was not the Category 5 killer the Big Easy had always feared; it was a Category 3 storm that missed New Orleans, where it was at worst a weak 2. The city's defenses should have withstood its surges, and if they had we never would have seen the squalor in the Superdome, the desperation on the rooftops, the shocking tableau of the Mardi Gras city underwater for weeks. We never would have heard the comment "Heckuva job, Brownie." The Federal Emergency Management Agency (fema) was the scapegoat, but the real culprit was the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which bungled the levees that formed the city's man-made defenses and ravaged the wetlands that once formed its natural defenses. Americans were outraged by the government's response, but they still haven't come to grips with the government's responsibility for the catastroph
It goes on for 8 pages.
The Pulitzer goes to AP writer Cain Burdeau who writes about what no one else is willing to...the 900 pound gorilla http://www
Last time I looked most cities require that after 3 months of living in that city that you become a resident of said city. So how does this get 'overlooked' by the PTB. New Orleans requires it. Houston too. So I'm thinking I can now live anywhere, claim to be an exile and vote in LA (that's Louisiana) races even though I don't live there anymore. Hmmm...
Look it's almost 3 years later, I've been here since I was allowed back, moved into the upstairs of my house in April of 05 after spending weeks here and there. I'm still working on the flood damage downstairs but I'm home, I'm paying my bills, my taxes. I figure if these 'exiles' are not back by now, they've moved. They are free to spend their government money on a house anywhere in the US.
You'll be waiting awhile. If the Democrats take the White House and both houses of Congress, the press might begin to pander to them instead of the Republicans. And if enough Democrats seize on Katrina as an issue, we might see one or two hard-hitting articles about how little progress has been made 5 years after the "hurricane" hit New Orleans. They might even mention levees and the Corps of Engineers. Sadly, that's a lot of "mights" and "ifs."
Thanks as always for keeping the fire burning.
I'm beginning to think that Harry Shearer is beating a dead horse, that whatever time there was for righting (writing?) the wrongs of Katrina are long past, that a whiter, corporate illusion of New Orleans is all that we will have for the future and that nobody, nowhere, nohow will ever be held to account for this or Iraq or Guantanamo
A dead horse can raise a pretty bad stink.
In 1986, an unusually smart equine running under the name of "Richard Feynman" used a glass of ice water and snippet of rubber to cut through layers of testimony and finger-pointing to identify the root cause of the accident.
Challenger was destroyed not by an unforseeable statistical fluke, but professional incompetence. Engineers who knew better stayed silent, crossed their fingers, and lost the gamble.
The Challenger commission finished its work and issued its report. Seventeen years later, another Shuttle is destroyed after NASA's luck ran out on another longstanding design flaw. Feynman, who never won Belmont but did bring home a Nobel prize for Physics, wasn't around for that investigation. But his spirit was there the day investigators shot a hunk of foam at a Shuttle airfoil and punched out a two foot hole.
As the our current President once tried to say, "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me". The same applies to NASA, and also to US Corps of Engineers, who are exhibiting the same deer-in-th
How many levee failures, dam breaks, and bridge collapses do we need before we realize the horse ain't dead? If a downed Shuttle with less than a dozen astronauts aboard warrants independent oversight, why are we not supervising the keepers of a levee system that killed over a thousand?
In early 2006, the grass roots group Levees.Org submitted the detailed analysis that Harry dreams of to two East Coast papers. The piece was called "Missed by Katrina; Hit by the Corps." Every fact was documented, a gargantuan task to create. Both news sources turned it down.
"Journalism, we're constantly told, is a matter of reporters reporting, and their editors pestering them with questions and requests to get facts right, before stories run."
Journalism is a matter of creating sufficiently interesting material to con the rubes into looking at the ads. "Journalism" just delivers the eyeballs. Always did. Always will.
The "news hole" isn't called that for no reason.
Yeah, I got up on the cynical side of the bed this morning. The cat was taking up the other side and I didn't want to wake him.
Pithy laziness masquerading as cranky cynicism is no way to run a country.
So, I offer the following, from which we learn: 1. that only one of the six definitions offered by Merriam-Webster remotely refers to the eyeball-delivering function, 2. that presentation of facts without interpretation does indeed fit the definition and 3. that "always did" extends only to 1828 (at which time New Orleans was already 110 years old).
http://www
Journalism
Main Entry: jour·nal·ism
Pronunciation: \jər-nə-li-zəm\
Function: noun
Date: 1828
1 a: the collection and editing of news for presentation through the media
b: the public press
c: an academic study concerned with the collection and editing of news or the management of a news medium
2 a: writing designed for publication in a newspaper or magazine
b: writing characterized by a direct presentation of facts or description of events without an attempt at interpretation
c: writing designed to appeal to current popular taste or public interest
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