Gustav

OK, so I'm sorry about cross-posting, but I've been really busy lately. Anyway, my thoughts on Gustav are over at GlobalComment.

By most accounts Hurricane Gustav was not nearly as bad as it could have been, and New Orleans appears to have been spared—though it was only after the winds and rains of Katrina had died down and we were celebrating the avoidance of a direct hit in 2005 that the levees sprung leaks and the city filled up like a bathtub.

Houma, Louisiana, a small city of around 195,000 people, 78% of them white, seems to have taken the most direct hit, and it says something about what we expected after Katrina that the man in the shelter in Shreveport, complaining of the lack of running water and cramped conditions, sounds like he’s whining. After all, he’s got a cot and bottled water, and that’s far more than anyone had in the Superdome or the Convention Center, right?

After Katrina, everyone who’d never lived in New Orleans wondered why more people didn’t evacuate. Not me. I was there in 1998 when Hurricane Georges loomed in the Gulf. I was a freshman at Tulane University, where for thirty-odd thousand a year, I got the privilege of being evacuated to the hallway in my fifth-floor dorm along with the other middle-class (and up) college kids whose parents didn’t buy them plane tickets home.

My ridiculously expensive, internationally-renowned research university thought that the best it could do for its students was to lock them out of its dorm rooms and into the halls, as if the doors were proof against water coming in.

Unlike 2005, this time the city was prepared for an evacuation and provided buses to shelters like the one in Shreveport without running water. People got out. Yet the city was spared a direct hit and the levees appear to have held. And now people are trapped in shelters with no say in when they get to go home, and they are angrily wondering if they’d been better off staying in the city. What will they do next time, if they are told to get on another bus to another miserable shelter?

read the rest.