25 Questions About the Murder of New Orleans

Mike Davis & Anthony Fontenat - This essay was reprinted with permission from tomdispatch.com

We recently spent a week in New Orleans and southern Louisiana interviewing relief workers, community activists, urban planners, artists and neighborhood folks. Even as the latest flood waters from Hurricane Rita recede, the city remains submerged in anger and frustration.

Indeed, the most toxic debris in New Orleans isn't the sinister gray sludge that coats the streets of the historic Creole neighborhood of Treme or the Lower Ninth Ward but all the unanswered questions that have accumulated in the wake of so much official betrayal and hypocrisy. Where outsiders see simple "incompetence" or "failure of leadership," locals are more inclined to discern deliberate design and planned neglect--the murder, not the accidental death, of a great city.

In almost random order, here are twenty-five of the urgent questions that deeply trouble the local people we spoke with. Until a grand jury or Congressional committee begins to uncover the answers, the moral (as opposed to simply physical) reconstruction of the New Orleans region will remain impossible.

1. Why did the floodwalls along the 17th Street Canal only break on the New Orleans side and not on the Metairie side? Was this the result of neglect and poor maintenance by New Orleans authorities?

2. Who owned the huge barge that was catapulted through the wall of the Industrial Canal, killing hundreds in the Lower Ninth Ward--the most deadly hit-and-run accident in US history?

Rest of the 25 questions at The Nation link:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051017/davis

10. What significance attaches to the fact that the chair of the Transportation Authority, appointed by Mayor Nagin, is Jimmy Reiss, the wealthy leader of the New Orleans Business Council, which has long advocated a thorough redevelopment of (and cleanup of crime in) the city?

11. Under what authority did Mayor Nagin meet confidentially in Dallas with the "forty thieves"--white business leaders led by Reiss--reportedly to discuss the triaging of poorer black areas and a corporate-led master plan for rebuilding the city?

When did this "confidential" meeting take place?

peace.

4. A mandatory evacuation means everyone. The delay occurred while Mayor Nagin and the city attorneys crafted exemptions for the hospitals and hotels.

5. Because Chertoff's a dickhead.

9. Where would the buses have gone? Maybe to the Superdome or Convention Center -- but as mayor, Nagin had no authority to call Baton Rouge or Lafayette and bark, "We've got 2,000 coming. Get ready."

10. Wouldn't I like to know! Reiss has made some pretty ugly statements about "not allowing poverty back". :scared:

11. Ditto. Anyone have more details on this? :scared: :scared:

19. The Gonzales Justice* Department? Are you kidding?

23. Because FEMA is a bunch of dickheads.

24. I have managed to make contact with an old buddy of mine who is a judge down there. Once he gets back in (it's Mid-City, could be a while) and starts exchanging ideas with yours truly (former N.O. resident from '89-'91), at least one such plan will be out there.

25. Bush** happens.

Nagin said he didn't have the drivers necessary for those buses.

Judging from the political comments made by...

-- Texas authorities "We're not going to do things like LA"; and

-- Barbara Bush: "What I'm hearing which is sort of scary is that they all want to stay in Texas. Everybody is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway so this (chuckle) – this is working very well for them"...

I do wonder how hospitable & accomodating they would have been if Nagin did have the drivers needed for a successful evacuation. Without the media's spotlight on the neglect & desperation and a need for Republican officials to one-up Democratic officials in an armchair quarterbacking moment, what would they have done if all those buses had shown up without the fanfare?

precisely the questions we were raising here on DU (and for which we were being called tinfoil-hatters -- even by some fellow DUers). But I think the fact The Nation has lept into this foray removes any suggestion of mad-hattery -- or tinfoilishness of any other sort. In fact maybe the posters who assembled the original Katrina Aftermath threads will now send them on to The Nation as helpful information -- including the thread that was locked for its speculation the horrors of the aftermath were deliberate expressions of methodically crafted Bush policy: genocide and ethnic "cleansing".

And info that we would like to have answers too. :smoke:

We will all be asking a lot of questions.

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

Another * Administration crime to investigate and prosecute.

Why isn't FEMA scrambling to create a central registry of everyone evacuated from the greater New Orleans region? Will evacuees receive absentee ballots and be allowed to vote in the crucial February municipal elections that will partly decide the fate of the city?

If they're not listed as dead, why not have them show up to vote by absentee ballot? The government had a remarkably accurate body count with names after 9-11. For Katrina we don't even have an official database of people missing/known dead/found, the closest we have is the Red Cross missing persons registry, and that is all voluntary by people looking for loved ones. Very, very suspicious.

questions | posted September 30, 2005 (web only)
25 Questions About the Murder of New Orleans
Mike Davis & Anthony Fontenat



PRINT THIS ARTICLE
EMAIL THIS ARTICLE
WRITE TO THE EDITORS
TAKE ACTION NOW
SUBSCRIBE TO THE NATION

This essay was reprinted with permission from tomdispatch.com

We recently spent a week in New Orleans and southern Louisiana interviewing relief workers, community activists, urban planners, artists and neighborhood folks. Even as the latest flood waters from Hurricane Rita recede, the city remains submerged in anger and frustration.

Indeed, the most toxic debris in New Orleans isn't the sinister gray sludge that coats the streets of the historic Creole neighborhood of Treme or the Lower Ninth Ward but all the unanswered questions that have accumulated in the wake of so much official betrayal and hypocrisy. Where outsiders see simple "incompetence" or "failure of leadership," locals are more inclined to discern deliberate design and planned neglect--the murder, not the accidental death, of a great city.

In almost random order, here are twenty-five of the urgent questions that deeply trouble the local people we spoke with. Until a grand jury or Congressional committee begins to uncover the answers, the moral (as opposed to simply physical) reconstruction of the New Orleans region will remain impossible.

1. Why did the floodwalls along the 17th Street Canal only break on the New Orleans side and not on the Metairie side? Was this the result of neglect and poor maintenance by New Orleans authorities?

Because that's the way the wind was blowing. There was a small construction barge moored in the 17th St. Canal which very likely contributed to the failure. Even if it did not, the counter-clockwise wind circulation would have primarily clocked from NE through SE during the storm, placing additional stress on the floodwall on the Lakeview side. Similarly, the barge that almost certainly damaged the Industrial Canal was driven by the same storm winds into the eastern side.


4. Why did Mayor Ray Nagin, in defiance of his own official disaster plan, delay twelve to twenty-four hours in ordering a mandatory evacuation of the city?

Nagin gave a general evacuation order on Saturday (withing the 48 hours stated by the city plan), and a mandatory evacuation order on Sunday.

I have seen discussion (and will have to go hunt down the particulars) that the plan was to first call for the voluntary and then the mandatory evacuation, to create a phase departure. The idea of creating zones based on risk is problematic because, as was seen in Texas, there just aren't enough police, etc. to enforce a zoned plan. The city of New Orleans plan worked.

9. Why were the more than 350 buses of the New Orleans Regional Transportation Authority--eventually flooded where they were parked--not mobilized to evacuate infirm, poor and car-less residents?

I can't believe I'm still answering this one. The average bus carries 66 people. There are 125,000 carless citizens in New Orleans. That means there are seats for 23,000 people, tops. These buses can only make a one-way trip due to contra flow.

Some buses need to be reserved up until curfew is imposed or tropical force winds, to carry some of the 125,000 carless New Orleanians back to their homes and families, further reducing the available seats.

And some bus drivers would almost certain fail to report, in a situation in which the NWS had upgrade Katrina briefly to a Cat 5 storm, making it The Big One.

Even if the mayor had been able to commander the school buses and drivers (a seperate discussion), you only gain about 250 buses. That still leads 65,000 carless people behind.

Who would they be? Those who refused to board an evacuation bus at work and started across town on foot to find their children or elderly parent to make sure they got out OK? Those two young or old or infirm to fight their way onto a bus, when everyone would know that there aren't enough seats to go around?

17. Why didn't the Navy or Coast Guard immediately airdrop life preservers and rubber rafts in flooded districts? Why wasn't such life-saving equipment stocked in schools and hospitals?

Cities haven't stocked piled emergency supplies since the Civil Defense days of the Cold War. This wasn't a local failure of New Orelans. How well could your city provide food and water and medical care with all utilities shut down and zero transporation?

18. Why weren't evacuee centers established in Audubon Park and other unflooded parts of Uptown, where locals could be employed as cleanup crews?

Because they're black. And because the idea was to get people entirely out of the city. Interstate 10 west was blocked. The logical way out was across the Crescent City Connection and down the west bank expressway.

21. Where were FEMA's several dozen vaunted urban search-and-rescue teams? Aside from some courageous work by Coast Guard helicopter crews, the early rescue effort was largely mounted by volunteers who towed their own boats into the city after hearing an appeal on television.

Not to answer this one, but to point out that the State of Louisiana responded to the storm by mobilizing the entire boat fleet of the Wildlife and Fisheries department. Before you scoff, hundreds of shallow-draft boats were deployed as soon as Tuesday, rescuing more people than the U.S. Coast Guard did.

find more dead? are they ever going to search the houses? are they counting those who are too far decomposed to find a cause of death as flood victims if circumstances seem to indicate it?