When Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Mississippi and Louisiana four years ago, extreme weather and acute human vulnerability met head-on with tragic results. Long-standing gaps in the well-being of different groups of Gulf coast residents were suddenly everywhere in evidence - on rooftops, on I-10 overpasses, and on TV screens across the country. Many were stunned by what they saw. They should not have been. The problems of social exclusion, residential segregation, and human poverty that Katrina brought to light hide in plain sight in every U.S. state.
A new study titled A Portrait of Louisiana released yesterday in Baton Rouge and supported by Oxfam America and the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, uses post-Katrina data to examine disparities by parish, race, and gender in Louisiana, and shows that pronounced social and economic gaps left African Americans particularly vulnerable during the disaster and in its aftermath. Although improved disaster preparedness makes a replay of the worst aspects of Katrina unlikely, were a similar storm to hit the Gulf coast today, African Americans would again disproportionately lack the resources - from good health to sturdy housing to a financial cushion - to weather the crisis. People whose heads are barely above water in good times have little to draw on in an emergency.
In 2008, we produced a first-ever American Human Development Report. Using a people-centered methodology developed at the United Nations and used to assess progress in over 160 countries, we created a ranked list of U.S. states in terms of human well-being. The human development index measures health, education, and income - the basic building blocks of a good life - using official U.S. government data. This work represents the only available calculation of life expectancy by congressional district and county. On the index, Mississippi ranked last, and Louisiana was third from the bottom.
But averages can hide a lot. A Portrait of Louisiana reveals a distribution of vulnerability and resilience in the region striking in its variation and closely tied to race and place. This follows A Portrait of Mississippi, also produced by the American Human Development Report and launched earlier this year. Though both Mississippi and Louisiana rank poorly on the national list, some groups within these states enjoy some of the highest levels of well-being in the nation. Others experience health, education, and income levels that the rest of the country surpassed thirty, forty, even fifty years ago.
White Louisianans living in the New Orleans neighborhoods of Uptown, Carrollton, Central City, and the Garden District have a score on our index (6.91) that bests the top-ranked U.S. state of Connecticut (6.37). (The highest score is 10, the lowest, 0.) At the other end of the spectrum, African Americans living in rural Tangipahoa Parish have a score of 0.98, the human development level of the aver age American in the early 1950s. New Orleans whites in these neighborhoods can expect to live, on average, an astonishing ten years longer, are nine times less likely to have dropped out of high school, and earn two and a half times more than Tangipahoa African Americans.
In terms of health, in Mississippi, white women live three years longer, on aver age, than African American women; for men, that gap is four and a half years. An African American baby boy born in Louisiana today can expect to live, on average, to 68.1 years, a life span equal to that of the average American male in 1974 (and shorter than that of males in Iran, Nicaragua, Philippines, and other developing countries today).
In both states, whites earn bachelor's degrees at twice the rate of African Americans and are nearly half as likely to have dropped out of high school. Higher levels of education typically lead to higher incomes; our research shows that if all adults in these two states had at the very least a high school degree, median personal earnings would increase by $1,700 per year.
When it comes to income, whites earning the least have wages and salaries on par with those of African Americans earning the most. White men in Louisiana have earnings more than $8,000 per year higher than those of the typical American worker today, and white men in Mississippi surpass the national median by over $6,000. African American women, on the other hand, have wages and salaries typical of those that prevailed in the U.S. in the 1960s (Mississippi) and the 1950s (Louisiana). For men and women together, there is virtually no overlap between white and African American earnings in both states.
Building resilience requires investing in people. Since 2005, the Gulf states affected by Katrina have received upward of $140 billion in federal dollars for hurricane re covery. According to the Louisiana Recovery Authority, and including recent federal stimulus bill funding, at least $63.3 billion has been allocated to Louisiana. This sum represents roughly $15,000 for each and every woman, man, and child in the state--about $44,000 for the average, three-person Louisiana family.
Recovery funds must be directed not just to rebuild the physical infrastructure of Mississippi and Louisiana, but also to construct a new infrastructure of opportunity to serve the next generation of Gulf coast residents. Recovery offers a unique opportunity to empower people with the tools to lead self-sufficient lives of freedom, choice, and value and the capabilities required to meet life's disasters with resilience rather than vulnerability.
But this won't happen automatically. Evidence from disaster recovery around the world suggests that the rebuilding phase often results in a further concentration of power and resources in the hands of elites. Ensuring that recovery benefits everyone requires that Gulf state governments set concrete targets and provide easily understood reports to the general public on the use of recovery dollars. Equally critical is that the people of Louisiana and Mississippi raise their voices to demand accountability.
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The 200 or so local busses that were left flooded that some Pro-Bushies claim could have done wonders to save more people are busses that are driven by locals who needed to save their own and their families lives. FEMA should have had hundreds of busses available in surrounding states.
Also how many are aware that we could not get out of NOLA because the airport, train, and bus stations all shut down 2 days prior to the storm? I was a tourist stuck in the Superdome (my 2008 memoir, "Diary From the Dome" discusses some of these issues.)
Now let's get back to kicking some arse and rebuilding the Gulf!
Paul Harris
Do they know that New Orleans has a higher percentage of residents that remain lifelong residents of their home town than any other major metropolitan area in the US?
Do they know the vast majority of New Orleanians are honest, hard working, tax paying, law abiding US citizens and deserve their respect?
Why do outsiders believe these myths?
The myths seemed to stem from journalists parachuting in with preconceived notions and lazy but flowery language and they typically reported it all wrong. Countrymen and politicians used our problems as partisan political fodder. New Orleans and its residents have been ruthlessly slandered like no American city has ever experienced. Lazy media reported a 'natural' disaster and too many of our countrymen feel we deserved our disaster and should even be denied the right to exist. It is plenty enough to hurt your feelings. Our fellow US citizens, even folk from all over the world, don't care that all the misinformation has seriously disillusioned and disturbed so many.
People don't seem to know that the flood, proportionally, killed just as many rich, middle class and poor as well as black, white, Hispanic and Asian New Orleanians? The only demographic that suffered more than the rest were our elderly who suffered the worst, by far. Did you know many thousands of New Orleanians died in the months after the storm from stress and depression, and are still dying? Rarely does a day go by when I don't cry and I'm white, educated and managed to rebuild.
Do people know that 90% of the metro area evacuated before the storm? It was the most successful evacuation of a metropolitan area in this country's history. Could their city do as well? We get no credit for that major accomplishment.
Do they know that 50% of New Orleans is above sea level?
Did you know ships must travel 96 miles upriver from the Gulf to reach New Orleans? - we are not a 'coastal' city.
Do they know that the Lower Ninth Ward is but only 2 of the 140 urban square miles (in just Orleans Parish) that flooded when flood control structures fell down.
They should know that 70% of New Orleans home owners had flood insurance? - a rate higher than almost anywhere else in the country. We paid those premiums for decades.
While all New Orleanians worried that our floodwalls would one day be overtopped by an 'overwhelming' storm, none of us knew they would fall down when the storm surge water was still four feet below the top of the wall.
Blaming levee and floodwall failures on Katrina is like saying a bridge collapse was because of traffic. Geez, it seems most people would blame the drivers?
The levees did not fail because they were 'overwhelmed'. Federal engineers made lots of big stupid mistakes. Our disaster was the worst engineering catastrophe in the history of North America and the engineers that designed and built and were responsible for those failed levees are the same engineers tasked to rebuild our storm surge protection system. And, the federal government gives us no choice (and never did), but to accept the Corps' work. Locals were only supposed to mow the grass.
Our outfall canal floodwalls fell down without even being overtopped by storm surge water (at less than half the floodwall's design loads) because of negligent engineering in the design of those floodwalls' foundations by engineers employed with the US Army Corps of Engineers as reported in the official levee failure investigation reports and reported to Congress by Corps leadership in June of 2006 and as decided by US 5th District Judge S. Duval in January 2008.
The levee failures and subsequent flooding were NOT because of our corrupt local levee boards and politicians or because of weak soil, barges, wind, rain, land elevation, levee heights, dredging subsidence, budgets, democrats, republicans, crime, an act of God, school busses, our culture, environmentalists, neighborhood groups. It wasn't even caused by FEMA, our Sewage and Water Board or our state's Department of Transportation, or our poverty, lack of education or any of the other red herring issues very successfully promoted by so many. It was not the fault of flood victims.
You must be including payouts from the National Flood Insurance Program - because 70% of us had flood insurance. I bet the majority of the rest of it went to Shaw & Haliburton, or whom ever it was that came in before they would even let us residents return, and 'cleaned up' all of our 'debris'.
I've been doing a study too. I think Baton Rouge hates us and will do anything they can to try to bury us. The feds gave Baton Rouge our recovery money and it is really hard to tell if any of that money has been spent here in New Orleans. Yea they fixed up the Superdome and many of us homeowners received a grant to help rebuild our homes - but that grant program was full of unjust policies and typically didn't give a flooded homeowner enough to rebuild - especially in neighborhoods with low land values. Plenty of it went to un-flooded areas. We were able to get an SBA low interest loan to complete our rebuilding, but a lot of families didn't qualify for that. Some of our 'recovery' money has partially rebuilt our flood protection system, but that system is not to be trusted being that the same organization that short-sheeted us is flush with our recovery cash making plenty of mistakes all over again and only putting on a big show we fear.
if you don't address the root cause of the Flood of New Orleans 8/29/05, to wit: Engineering Failures by the US Army Corps of Engineers, then all of these other facets to your scenario are simply charging at windmills. No matter what you do, no matter how much Initiative you want to throw at the issue of Where and How people live, if you don't take care of the Engineering then we are all lost.
Yes, the devastation exposed our Cultural Underbelly as a nation. But that facet of our National Identity is in evidence in more ways and places than just New Orleans and Southwest Louisiana. To suggest other wise is disingenuous at best and Dangerous at worst.
The Flooding of New Orleans was a Man Made Disaster.
Had the Corps done their job then you would not be reading this study as such.
To address any aspect of the Flooding of New Orleans without laying its cause in the hands of the US Army Corps of Engineers is to diminish the Cultural Illness which you seek to alleviate.
I was living there that first week of the Flood. You need to correct your view of the Cause.
Thank you
Politics trumps everything else.
We saw how that trump card played on 8/29/05, eh?
A Real Winner, eh?
So you want to keep playing Russian Roulette with the Corps? Or would you rather focus on America's Poor? If you don't take care of the Corps then we are all going to suffer, black white rich poor smart stupid coast to coast.