Mike Davis and Anthony Fontenot pose these questions for many unknowing Americans:
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.
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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.
Mike Davis, by the way, is the author of a book on the cemetaries of New Orleans, City of Quartz, Dead Cities and Other Tales, and the recently published Monster at our Door, The Global Threat of Avian Flu (The New Press). Anthony Fontenot is a New Orleans architect and community-design activist, currently working at Princeton University.
I’m not going to list them all, but this should give yall pause to reflect:
1. Why did the floodwalls along the 17th Street Canal only break on the New Orleans (majority Black) side and not on the Metairie (largely white) 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?
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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 tostate and local governments?
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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?
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13. Why were patients at private hospitals like Tulane evacuated by helicopter while their counterparts at the Charity Hospital (where the poor go) were left to suffer and die?
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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.)
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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?
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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?
I’ve got an answer for number 15: They would rather let it spoil than let it go to poor blacks. Or in their view, n-words. Yes, I am so blunt, but this is how some people think.
And for number 18: because the elites were given carte blanche to get Blackwater and all those other mercenaries over there at Audubon Park to protect their homes and property. Audubon Park would have been too close for these people’s comfort for hundreds of survivors–black survivors.
As the horrors of Katrina fade into history and memory…and fade out from the news media’s lenses, we need to continue to do research and keep an eye on what happens to New Orleans and its residents. Because what happens there could ultimately happen in any of your communities.
Good questions.
Thanks for the diary. All of these questions are disturbing but perhaps number 19 is the most disturbing of all.
My understanding about number 19 was that it was Aaron Broussard (of “We’re comin’ to git you momma, we’re comin’ to git you, and she drownded” fame) who ordered the guarding of that bridge. The thing that most amazes/disturbs me about that is that GERALDO! even spoke to them/about them in his convention center coverage, and it’s gone ignored and nquestioned in the media.
Just curious to know where you heard that, CabinGirl.
Aaron Broussard was responsible.
He has/had emergency powers to control the flow of pedestrian and mobile traffic into Jefferson Parish.
Not everyone who would have crossed that bridge would have been a gangbanger.
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Dutch specialist with emergency pumping units were, as all International support, requested after a ten day DeLay. The specialists are leaving New Orleans today, the mobile pump units will stay behind and will be operated by U.S. engineers.
Dutch radio reporter Tom Grijsen interviewed both Dutch – Rijkswaterstaat – and U.S. engineers — remarkable bit of information :: The Dutch specialists need only 4½ hours to have their mobile units installed and running, the U.S. Corps of Engineers needs 4-5 days before pumps are operating.
Dutch Assistance
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I forwarded this article to a good friend who is a long-time New Orleans resident and rental property owner, and one-time neighbor of one of the authors. He sent me back a detailed response. The following is quoting (with permission) his email:
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This has lots of misinformation in it.
For example:
Tests have shown almost from the very beginning that the debris (with the exception of the oil tanks being ruptured in Chalmette and Mereaux) is not toxic. It is septic. It is much like a giant toilet overflowed.
The 17th street canal did break on both sides. The NOLA side blew out the under laying earth, in what is know as a “heave”. Heaves are literally an explosion, with lots of displaced earth that mounds upward, leaving whatever is on top high and dry. The Metaire side “topped” rather than heaved. This process takes longer, and was stopped by Jeff parish officials and volunteers. Aaron Brusaard commented on it in his famous first Meet the Press interview.
This was a brand new levee. It was a total blowout of the system, which everyone knew was under designed as a result of the “W” budget cuts.
This gets thing backwards. The barge did hit the wall, being driven by 150 mph winds. The Industrial Canal wall, after being hit, broke INTO the canal, letting water OUT of the lower 9/ St Bernard. The storm surge was what flooded St. Bernard and the lower 9th Ward.
Again, a misinterpretation. This has to do with the comprehensive levee design. The primary levee protecting StB/Lwr 9, was an earthen levee, 17 feet high. Katrina’s eye crossed that levee while heading NW, with a surge of 22 ft at that point, and 30ft waves. The tides totally submerged the earthen levee, at which point it started acting like a reef, with waves breaking on it. This was something that it was not designed for. It liquefied almost immediately, acted as a sandbar, rather than a reef, and dispersed, giving almost no resistance to the storm surge, which raged in to St B, then the lower 9.
I have friends whose neighbors stayed in Mereaux. They said the flooding was at the 1-foot level for 3 hours, then raised 14 feet in 5 minutes. They snagged a neighbors boat, jumped in and survived. My friend’s house currently has a car on the roof, another in the totally fenced back yard, and a 40 ft shrimp boat half on his roof half off. He is at least 2 miles from the nearest navigable water.
Well, Katrina changed directions. On Saturday, it was supposed to hit over by Mobile. It DID hit Bay St Louis (after crossing St B and lower Plaquimines), it did NOT hit NOLA.
NOLA flooded as a result of the sesh, which is sloshing (like in a teacup) on a grand scale. The sesh resulted from a storm surge in the north side of Lake Ponchartrain. When the low pressure passed, and the mound was released, it sloshed in a sesh. The winds were less than 30 mph when the 17th St canal heaved.
A reading of Rising Tide shows that this is actually a venerated (albeit fucked-up) tradition. Locals would not consider this group to be led by Reiss, but by Canizaro.
Are you KIDDING? A decision by WHOM? Believe me, the thoughts of the Disaster Planners had not penetrated the mindset of the typical New Orleanian. Anthony should know that.
This is attempting to retroactively apply order to chaos. Perhaps the authors never believed that NOLA was literally the “City that Care Forgot?”. Orleanians prided themselves on the quality of their hurricane parties! Besides that, what “officials” are they talking about?
Anyone with sense (including all the bus drivers) fled for their lives. Those who stayed were heavily in DENIAL. If this surprises anyone, I should talk to them about the mindset of 20% of my client base.
20-20 hindsight.
What stock of rubber rafts? If equipment HAD been stocked in schools and hospitals, it would have 1) been stolen long ago, 2) been eaten by rats
How are you going to get all the way uptown, which is on the other side of the city from where the action was? There was debris everywhere. It’s not like you could cruise up St Charles in a streetcar.
Good question. One thing I will tell you though. I have talked to Gretna residents, both black and white, all of whom back the decision. The black residents do not relate to the Jim-Crow slant.
It definitely was racist. It was also provincial. Personally, I think they ought to prosecute those bastards.
I live in the “Lowest” Garden District. I believe (author) Anthony used to live right down the block. He lived there about 1999, or 2000.
I can assure you that Constance Street has for over 20 years been where you score. After the St Thomas project got torn down, the “St Thomas Gang” moved in, and had a turf war with the locals. The NOPD, and DEA made a joint month long project of Constance from Race St to Erato, and made 200 arrests.
I bought into to LGD in the 80s, when NOBODY wanted those abandoned buildings. This was not a “blue collar area that was a target of gentrification”, it was an ABANDONED area that had been totally disinvested.
There has never been “proposed gentrification”.
There have been individuals, who bought abandoned buildings, rebuilt them, and profited from their efforts. I personally did 5 buildings from 1989-2005. In that period, my block had: 4 murders, raids by the ATF, raids by NOPD SWAT, multiple Arson fires (mostly bums lighting fires in winter in abandoned houses), countless dope busts, drive by shootings, active hookers living on the block, and one raid by the Federal health dept, looking for a woman who was deliberately giving HIV to men.
When I bought in, in 1989, no one even wanted to go to that area. It was like a ghost town.
Calling this a “blue collar neighborhood” is disingenuous. There are LOTS of 4-5000 sq/ft “mini-mansions” in this neighborhood. There are also small, working class houses, corner stores, light industrial and other applications. The LGD is totally chopped up, from a zoning stand point. It ranges from wealthy patricians to blue collar to industrial zones.
I agree with the authors. Not a penny to the Red Cross from me.
Sadly, not. As co-chair of the LGD’s “Implementation Committee” of the “Strategic Renaissance Plan”, and Transportation Sub-Committee Chair of the “Riverfront Development Advisory Committee” I have been part of the planning in NOLA for 15 years. I am also the author of the “Keller Plan” which offered an alternative to the Morial Convention Center’s HORRIBLE plan for the Tchoupitoulas Corridor and the Lower Garden District. After talking with politicians, activists, and staffers of the Regional Planning Commission, it is clear that Nagin is handing things off to Canizaro, Kabicoff, Cummings and crew. The City Council has been bypassed entirely.
Remember, Nagin is VERY conservative for a black guy. He has supported several Republicans in elections. Also remember that more historic buildings have been demo’d under his watch that the previous 4 administrations.
Not much, really. We don’t have a democracy. We have a republic, with representative democracy. The greed, gerrymandering, corruption and incompetence are actually quite typical of many parts of our nations history.
I personally believe that the great grandsons of the “robber-barons” are attempting to “roll back the clock” to the time when they controlled everything. “W” is the bluest of blue-bloods. His grandfather, Prescott dug up Geronimo’s skull, and took it to the tomb of his secret society at Yale. These guys are trying to return the power to where they believe it rightfully belongs… with them.
that also came from their speaking to many people who may be in the know, not untold hundreds. And they weren’t all living in the Quarter, on high ground. They even interviewed Cajuns in rural areas.
Number one, these men are not idiots or liars. They do want to get people thinking.
To me, these questions need to be aired. And if it seems too tinfoily for some of you…just remember that time definitely will tell, just as rapes during the flooding and at the Dome/Center are finally being reported.
Furthermore, I do not trust people from the real estate industry sending so-called kiboshes not only to DailyKos but to Booman Tribune. There is a method and meaning to that madness. Nagin did meet up with city fathers. We have no idea what has been lost and what will be sustained from that encounter. And there won’t be much left for the poor of New Orleans who wish to return.
They are still not investigating the possibility of more remains in other parts of the 9th Ward still rotting away or half-eaten by alligators. And this is an absolute crime.
Of course they had a right. And someone else has a right to present another point of view. I’m not in the “real estate industry” and neither is my pal who I posted this for, he is just a small-time landlord in NOLA who has renovated about a dozen houses. He’s not a realtor, and he’s not some bigshot developer with an agenda. He addressed the things in NOLA that he knew specifically about. I posted it in the interest of hearing all points of view, not just the PC ones. If you think there is some kind of conspiracy in the response I posted, I do think your tinfoil hat is showing.
I said nothing about a conspiracy; I said that I don’t think anyone from the real estate industry (small landlords included) is free from suspicion about their motives at this crucial time. You and your friend do not have all the answers, nor do you know what your left hand is doing at the present time.
So put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Blksista, will all due respect, I find it very odd that you think this guy’s motives are somehow suspicious just because he owns a few houses in New Orleans. He lost two of his houses houses and all of his income after Katrina hit. His motives at this point are basically that he wants to get back on his feet again and go back to work.
I’m not sure what other “motives” you are imagining that he has, would you care to be more specific? Is it not politically correct to make a living from renovating and renting houses? His “real estate empire” consists of rebuilding crack houses, and renting brand new houses to single moms and elderly. 14 of 15 of his tenants happen to be people of color.
I’ve personally seen the new duplexes he built as rentals in central NOLA and they are by far the nicest places in the neighborhood, which he rents for the same price as the older, trashed-out places go for. In other words, he provides high quality housing for a fair price, and is actually helping to improve the city of New Orleans IMO. That town could certainly use a few more enlightened landlords.
and as I said before, you and that landlord don’t know everything, as what happened in the closed door meetings Nagin had with Reiss and the NO business community and also, why certain levees failed and others did not.
Plus the way your friend treats his tenants or how he fixes up his houses REALLY IS NOT THE POINT in this thread.
Get this: People will sometimes report and believe only what looks or seems good to them, even according to their own class background and prejudices. The real story is that most of New Orleans and those in the outlying areas and in Mississippi have been on their own. They have not been given any answers or information by their government, even by their local leaders, and they have been treated like shit. They can only go by history about what happened before in 1927 and in 1965. And in that vacuum, almost anything seems likely whether it proves true or not. And because your friend says so, doesn’t make it right or true either.
Furthermore, the amount of contempt for NO black poor by Republican representatives, by the Red Cross and FEMA, by the NO upper class, and by national leaders is proof positive that they consider this disaster an answer to their prayers, and that is to get n-words off property that they don’t want to fix up with them on it, and get a better set of people (read white) in them. This is a dangerous precedent–to use a natural disaster to disperse an entire racial and cultural group.
That is why I say that you and your friend don’t know hell what your left hand is up to. And on that note, I bid you adieu.
“People will sometimes report and believe only what looks or seems good to them, even according to their own class background and prejudices. “
Proof positive that you are nothing less than a freeper troll.
I am Playon’s friend who wrote the comments regarding “questions”, which I emailed to Playon. I find it interesting to be flamed by Blksista.
As a courtesy, I sent a spell checked version (the version I sent to Playon was stream-of-keyboard) to Anthony & Mike. Much to my surprise, Mike replied with the following:
“I don’t agree with all of your corrections or rebuttals, but think on the
whole your response is caustically brilliant. (By the way, we simply
polled a spectrum of people and recorded their questions.) With your
permission, I would like to circulate it. Anthony and I will be back in
November, and we’d love to meet up with the owner of such wit and
insight..”
The authors and I have “agreed to disagree”.
On another note, I am spending my time scrambling to fix the damage to the buildings, so my clients (who REALLY want back to their homes) can return.
Crawled under any houses, climbed any roofs, cut any downed trees or cleaned any muck and mold lately Blksista?
Sent money to any relatives, asked about the welfare of friends, worried about an elderly aunt, a wheelchair- bound cousin and a cousin with a brain tumor with three sometimes uncontrollable teenagers LATELY?
I hope that no harm will come to them.