Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation (32 page)

In North Carolina, a state regularly damaged by hurricanes and floods, FEMA recently refused the state’s request to buy backup generators for emergency support facilities. And the budget cuts have halved the funding for a mitigation program that saved an estimated $8.8 million in recovery costs in three eastern N.C. communities alone after 1999’s Hurricane Floyd. In Louisiana, another state vulnerable to hurricanes, requests for flood mitigation funds were rejected by FEMA this summer. (Elliston, 2004)

After failing to win the bid for a flood mitigation project for Jefferson Parish (which one year later would represent together with New Orleans city proper 89 per cent of Katrina-affected population in the metropolitan area) (The Brookings Institution, 2005), Flood Zone Manager Tom Rodriguez told Elliston, ‘You would think we would get maximum consideration for the funds. This is what the grant program called for. We were more than qualified for it’ (Elliston, 2004).

Elliston’s interviews with FEMA employees as well as unaffiliated academics reveal that the ‘consultant culture’ of privatisation had gutted what used to be a highly effective national service. States and communities now had to bid for mitigation grants from a diminished fund and in a system that made it harder for less affluent cities and communities to compete. Privatisation eroded the agency’s institutional memory, effectively disregarding years of agency experience as disaffected staff joined the ranks of consultants. But as both scholars and practitioners observed, the lowest bidder does not necessarily do the best job, and private consultants do not necessarily accumulate and convert generations of experience into institutional memories that support effective action. In an essay submitted to the
New Yorker
, John McPhee (1987) couldn’t have made the connection between business interests and maladaptive development any clearer:

In the nineteen-fifties, after Louisiana had been made nervous by the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Corps of Engineers built the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, a shipping canal that saves forty miles by traversing marsh country straight from New Orleans to the Gulf. The canal is known as Mr. Go, and shipping has largely ignored it. Mr. Go, having eroded laterally for twenty-five years, is as much as three times its original width. It has devastated twenty-four thousand acres of wetlands, replacing them with open water. A mile of marsh will reduce a coastal-storm-surge wave by about one inch. Where fifty miles of marsh are gone, fifty inches of additional water will inevitably surge. The Corps has been obliged to deal with this fact by completing the ring of levees around New Orleans, thus creating New Avignon, a walled medieval city accessed by an instate that jumps over the walls. (McPhee, 1987)

The Army Corp of Engineers has been severely criticised for its lack of understanding of ecological systems, leading them to engage in counterproductive development and mitigation work. Nevertheless, it should be said that as engineers they recognised that the levee system might not hold up against a category four or five hurricane or even a category three if it hovered over the city. Indeed, one year before Katrina, the Corp proposed to study how New Orleans could be protected from a powerful hurricane, but according to independent journalist Sidney Blumenthal (2005), the Bush administration ordered that the research not be undertaken. Blumenthal moves up the chain of command to identify the administration as responsible for the policy that all but guaranteed disaster:

The Bush administration’s policy of turning over wetlands to developers almost certainly also contributed to the heightened level of the storm surge … Bush had promised ‘no net loss’ of wetlands, a policy launched by his father’s administration and bolstered by President Clinton. But he reversed his approach in 2003, unleashing the developers. The Army Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency then announced they
could no longer protect wetlands unless they were somehow related to interstate commerce. (Blumenthal, 2005)

Against this backdrop of maladaptation in the early morning hours of 29 August 2005, meteorologists tracking the trajectory of category four Hurricane Katrina reported that it had shifted direction away from the city of New Orleans and was heading into the Gulf of Mexico. Many thought that a major disaster had been avoided. Then reports came in that some of the levees protecting New Orleans had been breached and that vast areas of the city were flooding. Soon afterwards, televised images began to appear. Though the storm affected a wide swath of Gulf Coast and killed at least 1,300 people in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, Americans were transfixed by the spectacle of a humanitarian disaster unfolding in a major city in the United States.

The videos of mostly African-Americans struggling to survive in the hellish conditions of New Orleans’ Superdome and Convention Center, in sweltering heat, with no electricity or running water, while basic supplies and transport failed to arrive, were juxtaposed in American consciousness to those seen a day earlier: tens of thousands of cars leaving the relatively white suburbs towards safety. As reports came in that the elderly residents of several nursing homes had also been abandoned, an already alarmed nation unused to confronting inequality in such stark relief ignited a national level search for blame (Frymer
et al.
, 2005).

Shock alone has not been enough to dislodge dominant cultural attitudes towards race and class in the US. Indeed some elements of the television media in particular have been criticised for resorting to presenting the disaster through a lens of cultural stereotypes that moved close to blaming the victims of the disaster for their own vulnerability (The Brookings Institution, 2005). Moreover, interpretations of the government’s response to the crisis fractured along clear racial lines. According to a
Washington Post
-ABC poll, nearly three out of four white Americans did not believe that the government would have responded more quickly if the citizens trapped in the Superdome were wealthier and white, whereas the same proportion of blacks disagreed; and more than six in ten African-Americans believed that the poor relief effort reflected continuing racial inequity, while seven in ten whites rejected this view (Fletcher and Morin, 2005).

A second narrative in post-Katrina critique focused on administrative incompetence and had an overtly political dimension. The Democratic Party galvanised partisan anger through a mailer and email blitz focusing on the administration’s incompetence; ‘throw the bums out’ urged the on-line organisation
MoveOn.org
. The mass media fuelled the campaign by first attacking Michael Brown, the head of FEMA, characterising him as a Bush crony who was awarded the job despite, it was claimed, being unqualified for the position. Even republicans wanted to know why the federal government was so slow to act.

Michael Brown’s resignation shortly after the debacle caused a temporary lull in public furor. But this was revived in early March when the Associated Press distributed a videotape of Federal Disaster officials warning the president that
the storm could breach levees, and recorded Brown voicing his concern that there were not enough disaster teams to help evacuees at the Superdome. The recorded briefing occurred one day before the hurricane hit. The videotape, along with seven days of briefing transcripts, raised doubts about the administration’s claim that the ‘fog of war’ blinded them to the magnitude of the disaster, and directly contradicted the president’s statement made four days after the storm, ‘I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.’ (Fletcher and Morin, 2005)

A more nuanced discourse has arisen from academic and think tank commentary that has tended to view the disaster from the viewpoint of those involved. One of two post-Katrina reports commissioned by The Brookings Institution (The Brookings Institution, 2005) demonstrates how the once racially mixed and vibrant city of New Orleans was transformed after World War II, and how these changes affected the contours of the 2004 disaster. Jim Crow laws, deindustrialisation and white flight into suburban neighbourhoods, combined with a host of federal housing and absurdly dangerous growth and land use policies. The result was the creation of a deeply segregated population of highland dwelling middle-class whites and increasingly marginalised lowland dwelling African-Americans, racially distinct communities existing in two different universes, with the latter living on borrowed land and borrowed time. A report from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research observes that the establishment of three historically African-American colleges in the city supported the development of a highly educated African-American middle class, and that recovery projects should tap into this extremely valuable resource (Gault
et al.
, 2005). Another Brookings report is careful to observe that some middle-class whites suffered great losses, and not all of the poor are African-American (Berube and Katz, 2005). Yet all of these reports demonstrate that race, gender and poverty contributed separately and in combination with environmentally unsustainable policies to create particular citizens and communities significantly more vulnerable to hazards and crisis than others. They propose a radically different vision for the reconstruction of the metropolitan area, and offer concrete suggestions on how to integrate socio-economic diversity with ecological sustainability.

Douglas Brinkley’s (2006) tome on the Katrina disaster provides historical depth and presents an impressive breadth of knowledge of the socio-political, cultural and environmental factors leading up to the disaster. Though most actors are presented as people caught up in larger processes beyond their full understanding or control, there is no shortage of villains in this narrative. Yet he reserves special rancour for the mayor of New Orleans, C. Ray Nagin. Making painfully clear the racial tenor of the critique, he observes that the pro-business mayor has long been called an ‘Uncle Tom’ by his detractors. Brinkley asserts that the reason Nagin failed to order a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans, when it would have saved lives and prevented thousands from suffering, was because he was afraid to anger his patrons in the business community whose wealth is maintained with the profits from tourism.

As the post Katrina political repercussions continue to unfold, the partisan battles become increasingly shrill, and the mainstream press dutifully reproduces the battles for public consumption, it remains to be seen if the voices that link disaster to wider socio-economic and environmental policies that increase vulnerabilities and reduce human security, for some more than others, will be heard over the din. (Brinkley, 2006:23)

Despite the range of critical discourses following Katrina, tangible adaptive responses remain constrained. Birkland, in a study of policy learning following disaster events, undertook a review of the Library of Congress’s Thomas database two months after the disaster. He found:

Of the 293 items this search returned, 40 percent of the bills mentioned Hurricane Katrina in the title, 24 percent included the work ‘relief’ in the title, and the items ‘recovery’ and ‘reconstruction’ were mentioned in 9 and 5 percent of titles, respectively. The word ‘preparedness’ appeared in three bills (1 percent) and the word [hazard] ‘mitigation’ did not appear in any bill. Clearly [hazard] mitigation or even preparedness was not a major concern of Congress in the two months after the disaster. (Birkland, 2007:178)

Why is it that an event with demonstrable impact on popular, political and legislative consciousness failed to translate into progressive, proactive forms of adaptation built on hazard mitigation and disaster preparedness? Birkland (2007) argues that this was a result of the lack of an organised advocacy lobby around hurricane risk management, in turn a product of ‘confusion over what it takes to improve policy performance and of political constraints that prevent officials from adopting effective policies’ (Birkland, 2007:178). He argues that, in the US, incremental learning has brought improvements in risk regulation such as the Flood Insurance Reform Act (transitional adaptation) but that the political leadership required for more transformational acts such as the banning of home construction on the coastline which would need a rethinking of development policy remains absent; an absence made all the more stark when compared to the impacts of the homeland security agenda, which indeed has taken resource and political attention away from hurricane and other disaster risk management. This is perhaps also explained by the modest levels of popular engagement with direct democracy in the US. Levels of trust in government and the governance of basic needs and security provision were dented by Hurricane Katrina but already low (Nicholls, 2009) and a sense that it is the system itself that is rotten rather than individual politicians or even parties, as one local newspaper commentator suggests:

Some political ‘experts’ believe that the recent hurricanes will create a demand for bigger government and a return to a New Deal-style of economics. This view is rooted in events that took place after the 1927 Mississippi River
flood. But unlike the 2005 storms, government played a small role in the storm of 1927. Businessmen in New Orleans, who sacrificed St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes to save their own interests, were viewed as the villains. (Mainly because they never followed through with their commitment to reimburse the people of St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes for the damages they incurred.) In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina the ‘villains’ appear to be the inflexible and uncaring bureaucracy of FEMA, and the indecisiveness and often bickering local political officials, and the many problems related to the administration of the Road Home program. In stark contrast to the storm of 1927, many individuals and corporations were clearly willing and able to help those affected by providing food, shelter, and even jobs. Therefore, we see Hurricane Katrina creating further disgust against the ‘business as usual’ politics of Louisiana. History has shown us that political shenanigans are least tolerated in times of suffering and/or blatant corruption. (
PoliticsLA.com
, no date)