How the Poor Got Trapped

By Will Bunch, Attytood. Posted September 6, 2005.

Last week, you learned how how locals and New Orleans-based Army Corps of Engineers begged the Bush administration to spend more money on shoring up the city's levees, to no avail. But as the hellish situation in the city slides deeper into anarchy, there is clearly another failure of equal importance -- and this time there's blame for everybody.

In the months leading up to Hurricane Katrina, it became increasingly clear to local officials that in the event of a killer storm, the No. 1 problem in a city with a 30-percent poverty rate was some 134,000 residents who did not have a car. They knew these people had no way to get out of town -- and that a Category 3 hurricane or stronger would likely bring a flood of Biblical proportions.

And so the plan was...to do nothing.

Well, almost nothing. This summer, as local officials were streamlining the counter-flow interstate traffic plan so that better-off New Orleans residents could leave more quickly, they also prepared a DVD for local churches and civil groups urging the poor to find a ride out of town.

They didn't say who from. They only said who it wouldn't be: The government. Even more amazing, the mayor of New Orleans took the city's buses -- the most viable means for getting poor residents out of town -- and used them to bring people to the Superdome, even as he was acknowledging that conditions there were bound to deteriorate.

This is from a story I filed last week for Philadelphia's Daily News.

"You're responsible for your safety, and you should be responsible for the person next to you," local Red Cross executive director Kay Wilkins explained to the Times-Picayune just six weeks ago. "If you have some room to get that person out of town, the Red Cross will have a space for that person outside the area. We can help you. But we don't have the transportation."

Ironically, the Red Cross has run a network of shelters in New Orleans in the event of hurricane warnings. But it decided several years ago not to open them for a Category 3 or stronger storm that it was more important to get people out of the below-sea-level area -- despite the lack of any organized system for transporting them.

Indeed, as Katrina bore down on New Orleans last weekend, Mayor Ray Nagin marshalled a fleet of city buses -- not to take the city's poor out of town but to the large shelter at the Superdome, where civil order would fall apart as the week progressed.

"Keep in mind, a hurricane, a Cat 5, with high winds, most likely will knock out all electricity in the city, and, therefore, the Superdome is not going to be a very comfortable place at some point in time," Nagin warned on Sunday. "So we're encouraging everyone to leave."

"It's almost as if the planning stopped at the flooding," said Craig E. Colton, a geography professor at Louisiana State University, wondering as many have at the lack of foresight.

By the way, here is more of the Times-Picayune story from July 24 this year about the city's DVD warning. The story begins: "City, state and federal emergency officials are preparing to give the poorest of New Orleans' poor a historically blunt message: In the event of a major hurricane, you're on your own." It says lower down:

Their message will be distributed on hundreds of DVDs across the city. The DVDs' basic get-out-of-town message applies to all audiences, but it is especially targeted to scores of churches and other groups heavily concentrated in Central City and other vulnerable, low-income neighborhoods, said the Rev. Marshall Truehill, head of Total Community Action.

Will Bunch is a senior writer at the Philadelphia Daily News and author of the blog Attytood.

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