When I came to New Orleans I had no idea how Hurricane Katrina had really hit and destroyed the town. It was a journalist who provided insight, the Feature Editor of the local newspaper, the Times Picayune. The team did a great job covering the storm and its consequences and got two Pulitzer Prices for their reporting.
We did a “Katrina Tour”. That might sound irritating at first sight, almost similar to tours you can register for at Disneyland or to see the graves of the most important writers and musicians in some cities all over the world. It was different.
He took me to the diverse parts of the city of New Orleans and I saw what one can’t imagine without seeing. What devastation nature can cause for things and for people. I knew the statistics, I had read a lot about Katrina: 55 levee breaches and 250.000 houses flooded in New Orleans. An area seven times the size of Manhattan went under water, in most parts the water rose to 7,60 meters. About 1.800 people died because of the storm or its aftermath. A vague number. Nobody knows accurately. An elderly woman dying of heart stroke after having realized that her home and parts of her family were gone. Is she a Katrina victim? It’s not about numbers, it’s about the stories of people’s lives that are told by the debris that can still be examined in some parts of New Orleans.
People lost relatives, friends and neighbours, their homes, their furniture, just everything. A lot of people lost every family photograph. The water wiped out houses, leaving nothing behind but some stairs and parts of the screen door. Many people came back after the storm and found nothing else but the brick with their own street number on it. They took it as a life souvenir.
A vast insight that I got from seeing all that I hadn’t realized like this before: It was not the storm that did all that damage to New Orleans. It was the water. It wiped out parts of the city because of misconstructed levees. They should have protected the people and the houses. This catastrophe was man made in a variety of ways.
“It is not a natural disaster”, one of the colleagues at the Times Picayune told me, “it’s more like war.” The observer today has to admit: yes, it is.
Last year I went to Miami for 5 months, so I asked my “host family� about Katrina since I knew they also lost their house back then.
They told me they wanted to stay at home first since no one really knew what would happen to their houses. Then, a few days before Katrina came, they decided to leave Miami and they went to Seattle, to my host dad’s mom. When they came back their house wasn’t completely demolished but their furniture and personal belongings were destroyed. The only thing they could save was one photo album. They showed me pictures and it was horrible. I remember me watching the news and hearing about the devastation Katrina has caused. And though I was shocked and I never felt that close to that catastrophe and to the people’s stories. But living with my host family for several months and knowing what they went through was really moving. It is quite different knowing someone who was affected or going to the place where it happened.
So I asked my host dad if he wasn’t afraid of another hurricane. He replied that he realized how fast your whole life can be destroyed and that the most important thing is your family. He is thankful that nothing happened to him or his friends. You can buy anything except a family, or friends. He wants to stay there because Miami is his home town, his friends live their and he’s been living in that district for many years.
I was kind of impressed how they got on with their lives.
My family was kinda lucky since they are pretty wealthy and they could afford building a new house. Though, many families didn’t have the money and still struggle with the consequences.
Knowing lives could have been saved is just terrible and I hope every one learns from that mistake.
“Traces of man made disaster”
As it has already often been seen, when people abdicate responsibility.
Die Geister, die ich rief…..
The pictures – they make me speechless. Is this program effective enough?
„Die Unfähigkeit von Menschen Prioritäten richtig zu setzen…“ [und mit Verstand zu handeln.]
Wer möchte darüber ein Buch schreiben? Es wäre wirklich angebracht. Mir fallen sofort einige Namen von Menschen ein, die dieses Buch dringend lesen sollten. Vor allem dann, wenn diese [bzw. deren Fähigkeit oder Nicht-Fähigkeit]über das Leben von vielen Menschen entscheiden und das sind weitaus mehr als 1.800!
Liebe Grüße, Gianna.
Is it not typical, whom the flood mainly killed? The poor people usual live in the districts, whose are endangered. When I was in Brazil, the more affluent families built their houses on heightened places because of the flood. The poor lived in the valley beneath. It is not only the state of Louisiana where persons responsible flopped. Why didn’t the emergency management work?
@walter: Regarding the posting and your answer before.
I conform to your words too. I’m sorry, you was misunderstanding me. Certainly it’s because of the letter and the language. I thought, it works without saying:
Human dignity it inviolable!
“…It is not a natural disaster,…“
Very well then, a disaster management. The outcome of this was/were flood desaster, desaster area, disaster victims.
The responsible persones don’t guard against twister and their consequences like water and flooding: No prevention in a city, it’s due to „Golf von Mexiko“ and it’s include the great „Lake Pontchartrain“ – three times bigger than the Bodensee in Germany.
My question is: Did the responsible persones deal consciously or unconsciously?
What is the motto: It’s sink or swim!
BBC Video shows Bush warning
The video shows that Bush had been briefed and warned prior to Katrina making landfall. But documents that emerged showed that there were huge problems in getting emergency help mobilized, because they had precisely not been prepared.
But what Katrina really revealed, as you’re pointing out, was that the disaster had been long in the making and has its roots in the class and race disparities. A set of articles, pretty much analyzing Katrina along these lines, at the Social Science Research Council website: http://understandingkatrina.ssrc.org/Smith/
There is one article on that website that talks about the clean-up and the toxic traces. The article brings up not only environmental justice, but also environmental racism, which seems a pretty interesting idea.
What was particularly striking in the news right after Katrina was how many reporters, politicians, and volunteers commented that they would have never expected to see such destruction in the US — “In poor parts of the world, yes, but in the US? No! Unbelievable!” — Which is unfortunately terribly revealing … which at least was also criticized by a lot of people in letters to editors, blogs, and by ever-chided all-too-leftist academics and intellectuals.
Right after Katrina, there was a real opening for a debate about the structural iniquities and how race and class work to perpetuate the injustices and render parts of the populus systematically vulnerable. For example, in most states and districts, schools are funded via property tax. Consequently, in areas with low property value, the tax revenue is low, and schools underfunded and crappy. But the rethinking post-Katrina and the larger political discourse ripe for really talking about redistribution of wealth quickly receded again.
BBC Video shows Bush warning
The video shows that Bush had been briefed and warned prior to Katrina making landfall. But documents that emerged showed that there were huge problems in getting emergency help mobilized, because they had precisely not been prepared.
But what Katrina really revealed, as you’re pointing out, was that the disaster had been long in the making and has its roots in the class and race disparities. A set of articles, pretty much analyzing Katrina along these lines, at the Social Science Research Council website: http://understandingkatrina.ssrc.org/Smith/
There is one article on that website that talks about the clean-up and the toxic traces. The article brings up not only environmental justice, but also environmental racism, which seems a pretty interesting idea.
What was particularly striking in the news right after Katrina was how many reporters, politicians, and volunteers commented that they would have never expected to see such destruction in the US — “In poor parts of the world, yes, but in the US? No! Unbelievable!” — Which is unfortunately terribly revealing … which at least was also criticized by a lot of people in letters to editors, blogs, and by ever-chided all-too-leftist academics and intellectuals.
Right after Katrina, there was a real opening for a debate about the structural iniquities and how race and class work to perpetuate the injustices and render parts of the populus systematically vulnerable. For example, in most states and districts, schools are funded via property tax. Consequently, in areas with low property value, the tax revenue is low, and schools underfunded and crappy. But the rethinking post-Katrina and the larger political discourse ripe for really talking about redistribution of wealth quickly receded again.
When you read this posting a big question arise – Why? If this was a man made catastrophe why did it happen?
Well, you could start with Al Gore, who besides being former Vice President and presidential candidate is an environmentally concerned person, who got an Oscar for making the documentary “An incontinent truth�. What he points out in that film is – human beings have changed everything.
Because we live the way we live, we have put the global ecosystem under enormous pressure. And because of the way we live the difference between rich and poor are lager than ever.
Is it human greed? Is it negligence? Or is it just our lack of ability to comprehend something that is more than 3 weeks or 6 month in front of us? If it’s a mortgage you might be able to look 20 years ahead, but if it’s an environmental or social issue it is, for many people, almost impossible to look further ahead than the next television show or newspaper article that points out the problem. And to look 200 or 1000 years ahead is, for most people, just not possible. It’s easier to look the other way and just live in the present.
Maybe part of the catastrophe in New Orleans happened because everybody lived too much in the present. Levees were build “for the presentâ€?, and houses were build “in the presentâ€? – maybe in places where they, for safety reasons, were never supposed to be.
Warnings were not taken seriously enogh, maybe because it was easier just to hope that the whole thing would go away and that the “worst case scenario� would never happen. It was more convenient to believe that everything would be okay. And then there is the social issue, who cares if your house is not really safe to live in, if the alternative is not to have a place to live at all?
Another issue is the authorities handling of the catastrophe once it had actually happened. The American society, which under normal circumstances presents itself as superior, failed in a way that was both surprising and scary.
A lot of individuals and groups did the best they could, but from the outside it looked like there were no real coordination and no efficient leadership.
All in all, the whole thing is hard to comprehend. To watch it from the outside is sad, to be there must be oppressive, and to live it must be devastating.
@Clö (8. April, 23:33 Uhr)
My question was not a blame, only a question. This was not even misunderstanding but dialogue.
I read, that Brad Pitt (Actor) is organizing a project building ecological houses for the people in New Orleans. On every place, where a house should build, they should installed a pink cube and a foundation should support the citizens, who lost their homes. Did you see these pink cubes? How does the New Orleaner’s think about this project?
I think it’s not even bad when celebreties like Pitt, di Caprio or Gore start to do s.th protecting environment, but I fear as long as the government and the economy doesn’t see the necessity to change their priorities, it will be a drop in the bucket.
since few days i got some problems opening this blog. does anyone else too?
No, it´s ok.
‘since few days i got some problems opening this blog. does anyone else too?’
Geschrieben von Jette am 9. April 2008 um 13:16 Uhr
- Perhaps due to the pictures (viral scanner, Popup) and the YouTube video?
(It works with Firefox.)
danke! :-) scheint wohl doch nur MEIN problem zu sein, ich probiere gleich mal einen anderen browser.
aber schön, dass ich euch “treffe”! ;-) deshalb gleich noch zwei fragen:
1. wie verändert ihr denn einen link bzw. eine adresse in einen anderen text?
2. lassen sich damit links umgehen, die so endlos lang sind, dass sie die seite in der breite sprengen?
Jette zu 0: With ie – yes!
Jette zu 1: ? Verstehe ich nicht so ganz.
Jette zu 2: Try: http://tinyurl.com/
firefox doesn’t work much better. it takes the same long time for opening. :-/
test:
http://tinyurl.com/5j4l5a
Mh, mir fällt da leider nichts mehr zum technischen Problem ein.
Scheint mir ein Fall für Cate zu sein, die ist da immer ganz gut im erklären. Cate ?!
(Das denke ich auch.)
das verkürzen funktioniert erstmal, besten dank an fabian! :-)
Men made disaster- all disasters are men made, aren’t they?
Catastrophes exist only in our human observation and denomination. Nature does not know disaster.
Was Katrina made by men? We don’t know and will never.
What counts is how humans react on ‘catastrophes’, which meaning they give them. Katrina was a catastrophe for the concerned people and the whole US american nation, because similarly to September eleven the great nations government could neither manage the disaster nor communicate empathy and help to the people of New Orleans. So it was a production of plastic words without consequences and substance that made angry and helpless not only the concerned but also all other observers worldwide. The behaviour of the Bush government seemed partly cynic. This won’t be forgotten.
(Wikipedia Dutch: Kritiek …pas 48 uur na het begin van de ramp onderbrak president Bush zijn vakantie.) Krrr…
@Jette
Kleiner Link-Kurs (kleines Linkum ;o):
Wenn du einen Link setzen willst, dann stell dir vor, dass du an einer bestimmten Stelle des riesigen www-Meeres einen Anker setzt und die Positionsboje sinnvoll beschriftest.
Das englische Wort für Anker ist anchor, was eine gute Eselsbrücke ist, um sich den Buchstaben zu merken, mit dem man einen Link einleitet, einem “a”! ;o)
Überall, wo sogenannte html-Tags gesetzt werden – das sind Anweisungen, die bestimmte Eigenschaften für Webseiteninhalte vorgeben können – müssen diese spitzen Klammern eingesetzt werden. Alles was sich nun innerhalb dieser Klammern befindet, ist eine spezielle Anweisung für den Webserver und wird als lesbarer Text, wenn man nichts falsch gemacht hat, nicht angezeigt.
Man beginnt also mit der geöffneten Klammer Jetzt ist der Moment für den prägnanten Verweis gekommen! Dabei ist es völlig egal, was man schreibt, ob “hier” oder “Link” oder “Wer das liest ist doof!” spielt keine Rolle… Alles was bis zur vollständigen Beendung des Tags eingefügt wird, ist später als ein Link klickbar (übrigens auch Bilder, aber das ist hier wohl eher nicht möglich… ;o) Nach Ende des Verweisnamens, muss wieder eine spitze Klammer geöffnet werden Das war’s auch schon! ;o)
Nochmal übersichtlich, aber in verfremdeter Form, damit der Server nicht denkt, es sei ein echter Link ;o) Wenn man alle Nullen rauslöscht, hat man das Grundgerüst:
0An diese Stelle kommt der Verweisname0
Vielleicht etwas ausführlich, aber ich denke, sehr effektiv! :o)
Man kann einfach keine spitzen Klammer verwenden. Der Server merkt’s immer ;o) Sorry… Das Grundgerüst ist also Murks…
Also, Jette, was hatte ich geschrieben? Alles, was zwischen diesen spitzen Klammer steht, ist als normaler Text nicht lesbar… Wie war es doch ist! Damit ist mein Text absolut unbrauchbar, weil die Hälfte fehlt. :o( Warte!
Ha haa! ;o)
(Boh. Und das um diese Uhrzeit. Reicht für heute…)
Cate, ist die Grafik von Dir? Toll und verständlich!
Hab ich schnell mit Photoshop gemacht. Könnte aber etwas übersichtlicher sein… ;o)
Super, Cate! :-)
23:14 ???
okay, ich versuche dann mal mit “beschriftung” zu “ankern”:
OECD
jaaa, es hat geklappt! :-) der kommentar ist zwar noch nicht freigegeben (muss auch nicht, denn der link war komplett off topic, nur eben schön lang), aber es taucht nur der von mir gewählte text unterstrichen auf, und der ist auch verlinkt.
vielen dank für deine mühe, Cate! du hast mir sehr geholfen. :-)