Every man for himself

The fourth anniversary of September 11, 2001 is coming up. Are you safer than you were four years ago?

If you’ve been alive for the last couple of weeks, and can read, see, hear or think, you know that the answer is a resounding “no.”

As terrible as 9/11 was, it gave the nation a resolve. We would do whatever it took to anticipate and handle any catastrophe that might strike the country. When officials excused themselves from any responsibility for 9/11 by saying “Nobody could have imagined this,” we gave them the benefit of the doubt, avoided blame and finger-pointing, and just moved on. Money was allocated, bureaucracies reshuffled and photo-ops taken by resolute-faced politicians. The nation is now supposed to be able to handle previously unimaginable threats—threats that would involve, for instance, evacuating a major urban center in a very short period of time. But the aftermath of Katrina suggests that our emergency response system—in particular FEMA, on which we here locally depend—is badly broken.

One major reshuffle was to create the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and fold FEMA into it. According to the DHS website: “In the event of a terrorist attack, natural disaster or other large-scale emergency, the Department of Homeland Security will assume primary responsibility … This will entail providing a coordinated, comprehensive federal response to any large-scale crisis and mounting a swift and effective recovery effort.”

What this means is that the Department of Homeland Security is responsible for what happened, or didn’t happen, in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. And what has been the response of its secretary, Michael Chertoff, and his boss, President Bush, to criticisms of the appalling results? Paraphrased: “Nobody could have imagined this.”

Well, if Chertoff and Bush couldn’t have imagined it, a lot of other people could, some within the DHS itself. In a FEMA simulation held just last year, a fictitious Hurricane Pam put 80 percent of New Orleans under water as much as 20 feet deep. Sound familiar? And in 2002, New Orleans newspaper The Times Picayune published a series of hurricane scenarios that read eerily like reports of what actually happened this year, down to desperate people on rooftops and thousands stranded in the Superdome.

But again, never mind. Let’s not blame anyone for failure of imagination (or knowledge). Let’s just ask: once we knew how bad it was, how did the response measure up?

Well, let’s see. DHS kept the Red Cross and other aid organizations out of New Orleans because their “presence would keep people from evacuating.” They must have missed all those clips of people screaming at the camera for someone to come and get them out. Nor was the Red Cross the only help that was refused: 500 airboats from Florida, massive offers of equipment and manpower from Canada and Chicago, water and fuel for Jefferson Parish—all were turned away. And despite their supposed concern that people evacuate, the authorities locked people into the Superdome on Friday and established a checkpoint at which they turned back anyone who tried to leave the city.

We could go on endlessly with such examples, but let’s cut to the chase: it just so happened that New Orleans was attacked by a hurricane, but an attack of this magnitude could as easily have been by terrorists and the response would have been just as indefensible. And instead of admitting, analyzing and fixing its mistakes, the administration has pretended that everything’s fine. Bush in one speech on Friday did describe the results of the rescue efforts as “unacceptable,” but then ruined the effect only hours later by telling FEMA Director Michael Brown, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”

But never fear: the government is taking care of its own. Senate majority leader Bill Frist last week moved up the vote to repeal the estate tax, benefitting the wealthiest two percent of Americans, to Tuesday (though he later delayed it again under pressure from the Democrats). And KBR will get a big contract to help rebuild the Gulf coast. Remember KBR? They’re the ones owned by Dick Cheney’s old alma mater Halliburton, whose business practices were found by Pentagon auditors to have “systematic deficiencies” after they overcharged the armed forces in Iraq by about $250 million.

But for the rest of us, the government has spelled out in no uncertain terms their policy for handling the major disasters for which, once upon a time, we thought they were responsible: every man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost. This is not the legacy we hoped for in those days of unity following 9/11, and it is unacceptable. Not unacceptable as in “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” Unacceptable as in “throw the rascals out.”

Dr. Punnybone

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