Folks where I live in the extreme southeastern corner of Texas aren’t indifferent to the suffering of others. Our area was the first to take in those neighbors to the east fleeing Katrina, and fled with Katrina evacuees when Rita rammed our area.
But Southeast Texans and even some of those from Southwestern Louisiana grew weary and downright exasperated once Rita had torn their communities to shreds while the national news media and government leaders continued talking ad nauseum about Katrina. Since that time this area has been hit by Hurricane Ike and other parts of the area were also damaged from Humberto in 2006. Southeast Texas was spared damage from Gustav this year but only after many left their homes for destinations North.
While the national news media have focused a little more this time on the aftermath of Ike, New Orleans and Katrina still generates a lot of ink and a lot of air time.
As a sometimes media type, I understand the fascination with Katrina. It killed a couple thousand people. It wiped out the Mississippi Gulf Coast and caused both a physical and humanitarian disaster in New Orleans. Katrina will perhaps, next to Iraq, remain for many years the legacy of George W. Bush’s failed presidency.
Although I believed it would have been a long time before I could bring myself to read any in-depth literary work about Katrina, I have recently found myself intrigued by Douglas Brinkley’s “The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.”
Brinkley, a historian and biographer familiar from his frequent cable news show appearances and who now is the Distinguished Professor of History at Rice University in Houston, chronicles a week of chaos as Katrina pounded the coast and led to the levee failure that killed hundreds in New Orleans flooding. While he examines the failures of the federal government that were a result of the Bush administration’s incompetence he also notes the shortcomings and negligence of those at the state and city levels of government.
While only a quarter of a way through Brinkley’s 700-some-odd-page hardcover I note that three years later and three months after Hurricane Ike struck our area, the Bush administration and elements of the federal relief structure still don’t get the lessons of Katrina. This is evidenced by people still living in FEMA trailers in New Orleans from Katrina and some only recently moving into FEMA housing from tents after Ike. A slow systemic response by FEMA in the wake of Ike clearly indicates that the agency and perhaps the U.S. Department of Homeland Security of which it is a part needs to be torn down and reconstructed.
Let’s hope former Arizona governor and Obama Homeland Security nominee Janet Napolitano can provide the leadership, foresight and possess the ability to pick knowledgeable people who will shepherd this nation through what will be surely more disasters to come.