Essay by Ed Quillen
Natural Disaster – October 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
SOME DISTANT DISASTERS strike me harder than others, and New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina has really hit hard. For several days as August ended and September began, instead of getting any productive work done, I was sneaking off to watch TV. When I didn’t want to be so obvious, my ears were glued to the office radio while I visited Web sites to catch the latest from CNN.
“How could this be happening?” I wanted to scream. “This is the richest and most powerful country in the history of the world, and we’re leaving our own citizens standing on rooftops and freeway overpasses for days without food and water?
“We’re poor up here too. God help us if there’s ever a big flash flood or an earthquake or a devastating forest fire, because our own damn government won’t — it’s busy borrowing from our grandchildren to fight in Iraq.”
That emotional reaction wasn’t entirely fair, of course, since it reflected the almost pathological hatred I have for George Walker Bush. Before he took office, I could never understand my conservative friends who left the room whenever Bill Clinton came on TV.
Now I can, because I can’t stand to look at Bush. It’s very difficult for me to apply any sort of objective analysis to his policies or proposals. I don’t see or hear his words, I see his arrogant smirk and hear his rich-Texan “Ah own you-all” drawl, and my bile rises to a level that threatens to inundate my frontal lobes.
So I won’t go into all of the ways that his words of comfort to beleaguered Americans in Louisiana and Mississippi seemed belated and inadequate.
I’ve never been to New Orleans. So far as I know, I had no friends or relatives there to worry about when the storm hit. Yet the destruction and chaos in New Orleans struck me in ways that 9-11 never did.
I’ve long wanted to visit the Crescent City, which reportedly offered the best food and music in America. Beyond those sybaritic pleasures, though, it was a city with a lot of connections to the rest of America, including our own sparsely populated high desert (which seems, on the surface, to have little in common with a crowded sub-tropical port city).
Part of the connection is hypothetical hydraulic. Like millions of American youngsters, I read Huckleberry Finn and imagined floating away from an oppressive civilization (shoes and school always seemed particularly despotic during this season of the year) by going downstream on a raft.
The South Platte River was just a mile or so away from our house in Evans, Colo., and the map showed that it was indeed possible, at least in theory, to ride the South Platte to Nebraska, where it joined the North Platte to form the Platte, and down the Platte to the Missouri River, and the Missouri to the Mississippi and the ultimate destination of New Orleans, which symbolized freedom for 10-year-old boys like me and Huck Finn.
Only years later, when I had to re-read Huckleberry Finn for a college class, did I realize how silly that concept was, even for the characters in the book. Huck and the runaway slave Jim were seeking freedom, and yet they were borne south, ever deeper into slave territory, after they failed to reach free soil in Illinois from their slave-state home in Missouri.
But the concept of New Orleans as a sort of final freedom destination lived on, and as one nickname, “The Big Easy,” suggests, the city has a reputation for providing certain freedoms from traditional American public morality. Back in the 1980s, when Salida was a dilapidated backwater that was home to numerous poor eccentrics, a well-traveled musician friend observed that he liked our town because “Besides Salida, there are only three other places in the United States where you can be full-bore nuts and go about your daily life without being unduly bothered: San Francisco, New York, and, of course, New Orleans.”
The hydrologic connection has more realistic aspects. Almost every morning, I walk the dog along the Arkansas River — about 1,600 miles upriver from New Orleans. An Army Corps of Engineers report once estimated that New Orleans drinking water passes through 18 sets of kidneys before reaching the city. That’s not exactly a cheering thought, at least downstream, but it does establish an odd affinity.
There’s more, of course. Our mountains get carried away, grain by suspended grain, by rivers. Two of Colorado’s rivers, the Platte and the Arkansas, transport those particulates to the Mississippi, which used to carry them into the Gulf of Mexico where they settled and accumulated into the Mississippi Delta, forming barrier islands that protected the mainland from the full fury of hurricanes.
But dams halt a lot of the sediment today, and for that and other reasons (among them, channelizing the Mississippi for barge traffic and development in the Delta for petroleum production), the barrier islands are eroding away, rather than growing as nature intended. Once upon a time, however, our Rocky Mountains created their delta.
SUCH CONNECTIONS might partly explain why I felt for New Orleans — and felt so ashamed of my government. Over the years, the federal government has invested billions in fighting nature, presumably for the benefit of New Orleans, but in recent years our government apparently didn’t care that the place was deteriorating (at least not until after Americans expressed astonishment and indignation upon seeing the city converted into a ghost town overnight).
This Federal indifference seemed familiar. It was sort of like Climax getting encouragement for maximum production during World War II and the Korean conflict, then getting told “we don’t care” in 1981. Or the Tennessee Pass railroad line deserving troop protection 60 years ago as a vital national transportation artery, and rusting in idleness now. One day you live in an important place worth saving, and the next day you don’t — and what you need and how hard you work no longer matters.
It also comes to mind that the land I walk my dog on, just across the river from Salida, came into the United States on account of New Orleans. With New Orleans in Spanish and then French hands, American commerce was at the mercy of foreign powers. So President Thomas Jefferson bought New Orleans (and a whole lot more) in 1803.
That transaction, known as the Louisiana Purchase, included rather vague boundaries, but in 1819 the Transcontinental Treaty between the U.S. and Spain established a border in our part of the world: the Arkansas River. And thus the United States acquired a fair chunk of Colorado when it purchased New Orleans.
Since then, New Orleans has lost much of its early prominence. As America grew, its trade with Europe increased, and New York was a closer port. Then, with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, New York acquired much of the upper Mississippi trade that had once passed through New Orleans.
Likewise, the growth of railroads diminished New Orleans’ influence, by making American commerce more of an east- west phenomenon, rather than a north-south arrangement. And the Civil War exacerbated that trend.
Slowly, New Orleans lost its commercial importance — until the petro-chemical industry grew up around it after World War II. But what a cultural influence it had. New Orleans was the birthplace of jazz, and if rock-and-roll was born in Memphis, it sure spent a lot of its childhood in New Orleans. Pioneer rockers Dr. John and Professor Longhair were based in New Orleans, and the city appears in many lyrics, like “House of the Rising Sun” and “Johnny B. Goode,” and that paean to American passenger trains, “The City of New Orleans.”
I’m probably too Midwestern in my outlook, too square in my lifestyle, and too unaccustomed to humidity and buzzing insects, to have ever felt comfortable in New Orleans for any extended period. But I liked knowing it was there, just as I like knowing that wilderness areas are there, even if I don’t visit them.
New Orleans might have been famously corrupt and legendary for frivolity and decadence, but from far upriver it was one of those dazzling, uninhibited and flamboyant places where freedom rang.
Just having it in the country made America a better place. And now it might be gone, along with hundreds or thousands of its residents.
Granted, much of the city sat below sea level in an area subject to violent tropical storms. So maybe the physical city was always living on borrowed time, and perhaps the same is true for San Francisco.
But we all know about San Francisco’s exposure to earthquakes and the city’s consequent building codes, response plans, and the like.
Most of us didn’t know that the levees of New Orleans were built only to handle a Class 3 tropical storm. Or that the city had to run pumps continuously so that toilets would flush. Or that such a significant percentage of America’s agricultural exports and petroleum imports and production came through southern Louisiana. Or that New Orleans was so terribly vulnerable.
When it was taken out by weather — that no one important seemed to anticipate — the effect was more devastating than the attack on the World Trade Center towers. Hundreds of thousands of Louisiana residents have been forced to evacuate, creating a refugee situation which is unprecedented in U.S. history. And there’s no telling when they can return home – or if they will.
Talk about National Security. In retrospect, New Orleans’ citizens had none.
WHY DIDN’T THE GOVERNMENT order the evacuation of New Orleans before the hurricane hit?
Well…. Actually it did, and about 80% of the population got out before the levees broke. The evacuation procedure, however, assumed that everyone had a car, and that wasn’t the case. Therefore, many of those who remained didn’t do so out of deliberate choice; they were people who relied on public transportation.
And that’s dangerous in modern America, because public transportation is vanishing before our eyes. The airlines are going bankrupt. The Republican Congress just about zeroed Amtrak this year; our last passenger train ran in 1966 and our railroad line has been out of service since this millennium began. Part of our stretch of America, from Pueblo to Montrose, lost its Greyhound bus service this summer. So the automobile is our only way out now. If you don’t have a car, you many not have a life.
But it becomes more expensive to drive every day. Along U.S. 50, I saw gas prices jump from $2.659 to $3.059 per gallon overnight in early September. That might be gouging, as some allege, but I believe the official explanation, and it says the supply has shrunk because so many Gulf Coast refineries and pipelines and tanker terminals are down on account of Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans.
I think that’s probably true, but I don’t understand it. Clearly those levees were of national and strategic importance, so why didn’t our government do something to improve them? Instead, the Feds reduced the budget of the U.S. Corps of Engineers which maintains those levees. And fixing the current damage is going to cost billions upon billions. So what were they thinking?
One reason that New Orleans suffered so terribly is that money which might have gone to improving its levees has gone to the Iraq war. And some national guard troops and equipment, which might have staved off chaos, hunger and thirst in New Orleans, were deployed to Iraq.
In theory, America is being protected by the war in Iraq, and yet Americans have been suffering and dying in their own country because American resources are in Iraq.
Furthermore, U.S. citizens couldn’t join the evacuation because they didn’t have cars.
So what kind of national security is that?
WE HAVE THIS NEW AND IMPROVED Homeland Security Administration, and with two days of warning before the hurricane struck, we still ended up watching as the Ninth Ward of Orleans Parish made Somalia look like a Sunday School picnic.
In those horrible, yet soul-searing, days after the attack on the World Trade Center towers, I had visions of 9-11 transforming America. We would do everything in our power to prevent such a disaster from ever happening again.
We would do our best to get ourselves out of the Middle East by eliminating our dependence on foreign oil. We would build houses close to work. We would build good mass transit. And we would see that true national security means a dispersed economy not so reliant on long-distance transportation (how many days could Salida survive if the Safeway and Wal-Mart food trucks quit arriving?).
THUS WE’D BUILD a good passenger-rail network so that we wouldn’t need all of those jets which terrorists can commandeer. Our economy would go back to encouraging family farms and small town businesses. Instead of outsourcing jobs to India and Mexico, we’d outsource them to Western Nebraska and Eastern Colorado. Instead of free trade we’d tout fair trade, and thereafter establish partnerships with any country willing to abide by compatible wage and environmental protections.
Our state governments would help young citizens by providing good educational opportunities and by increasing access to health care and home ownership. Perhaps we’d even build all of our new housing developments with passive solar homes, and we’d assign space for public parks and community gardens, and we’d create auto-free communities reliant on solar carts or public transit rather than autos.
And while revamping our towns and transportation systems in order to establish an oil independent, self-sustaining nation, we would remember all of our talk about “democracy” and the importance of governments which treat citizens fairly, and we would work harder to do just that.
But that’s not what happened. Instead, it’s “drive or die” down in New Orleans, and our economy here teeters along on auto-based tourism that might survive at $4 a gallon or even $5, but will doubtlessly falter as the price climbs.
Along the way, we get to watch an American city disintegrate, and learn that if disaster strikes here at home, there will be no way out except our cars, and we might not be able to afford to put gas in them.
And now we can’t even reasonably fantasize about floating down to New Orleans. That may well be the least of the tragedies associated with Hurricane Katrina, but it’s still sad.
