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Jim Macdonald started it. He said, in AIM:
White people find things. Black people loot things.
This was literally just as Patrick was about to post:
Yahoo News photos:Photo number one: “Two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store”.
Photo number two: “A young man walks through chest deep flood water after looting a grocery store”.
Two guesses as to the relative melanin levels of “two residents” and “a young man”.
Remember, white people “find” things; black people “loot”.
(Via pecunium.)
I was about to post my own piece. While the three of us were sorting all this out, a further story turned up:
Cops Looting New Orleans.
I hadn’t yet seen the photo of the lighter-skinned couple making their way through the water. My own piece went like this:
“Looting” in New Orleans:I keep hearing on the news about looting in New Orleans. But what I’m seeing—everybody has digital cameras these days, especially reporters—are pictures of people slogging through filthy water with stashes of food, diapers, bottled beverages, etc.
The picture I’ve seen most often is a kid in his teens, up to his chest in black muddy water, trying to carry away a not-very-substantial load of black-bagged groceries plus (I believe) some cans of soda.
First, I believe it was St. Thomas Aquinas who said that if a man’s family is going hungry, it’s no sin for him to steal a loaf of bread.
Second, anything salvageable the kid finds in a grocery store is something that won’t have to be cleaned up later. Besides, where’s the store where he can make legitimate purchases?
Third, yes, I absolutely agree that looting has to be suppressed. Some people will loot any time they think they can get away with it. Others will loot if they see those first people getting away with it. It’s a behavior that’s guaranteed to snowball (which is why I still say we were at fault for allowing the large-scale looting of Iraq to get started and perpetuate itself, right after the first wave of the invasion). Civil order is important.
Fourth, I have yet to hear one mention, one murmur of a hurricane evacuation plan, that didn’t consist of “everybody gets in their cars and drives somewhere else.” This, in a city which was guaranteed to sooner or later need evacuating, and which had something on the order of 100,000 citizens who didn’t drive cars.
New Orleans kept its light rail system during that period when other cities were going over to an all-highway system. It has streetcars. It’s a walkable city. That’s a mercy to the poor: you can live a poor but decent life, get to your job, do your shopping, without having to support a car. Until, of course, the day comes when any prudent person would get out of town.
I heard the city officials, before the storm hit, explaining that the Superdome would be a shelter for people with medical problems, people with special needs, who weren’t prepared to evacuate the city. Malarkey. It was, as they knew all along, the first last and only refuge for tens of thousands of New Orleans citizens who had no way to leave the city.
Not all of them are in the Superdome, or the other refugee centers; but no matter where they are, the majority of New Orleans’ beleaguered and flooded-out residents who’ve remained are the city’s poor.
That’s not looting. That’s plain old survival.
While I was intercollating posts at near-lightspeed, Making Light regular Adamsj was posting a comment about that same police looting story, in the comment thread following Then again—, under the heading, “It must be legal,” she said. “The police are here taking stuff, too.”
No Borg jokes, now. We’re just all being simultaneously perceptive.
Addendum: Here’s a photo with another great caption from the Associated Press:
The store is dark and deserted. The “shopper” and his buddy have entered and left it via a huge hole smashed in the store’s front window. What’s happening in this photo is more obviously looting than any of the photos I’ve seen of New Orleans citizens toting their plastic bags of food through the flood waters. Yet AP is calling this activity “shopping”—perhaps, because the young man with the plastic bag is patently white.As one person looks through their shopping bag, left, another jumps through a broken window, while leaving a convenience store on the I-10 service road south, in Metairie, La., Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Further addendum:
Xeni Jardin at BoingBoing quotes Ned Sublette:
The poorest 20% (you can argue with the number—10%? 18%? no one knows) of the city was left behind to drown. This was the plan. Forget the sanctimonious bullshit about the bullheaded people who wouldn’t leave. The evacuation plan was strictly laissez-faire. It depended on privately owned vehicles, and on having ready cash to fund an evacuation. The planners knew full well that the poor, who in new orleans are overwhelmingly black, wouldn’t be able to get out. The resources—meaning, the political will—weren’t there to get them out.
Further along in her post, she quotes Ned Sublette quoting from an email attributed to a relief worker in New Orleans, describing conditions there. You might want to have a look at it.
The only rational excuse I can give for that is that it's looting if you bring a garbage bag. :P
And, since the cops are looting, now the looters are shooting cops.
Adamsj, there's something wrong with your link. Same story?
I'm proud to be a member of the Group Mind.
Er. I thought we weren't supposed to ...?
Erik, there's something wonky about your link, too. Or -- no -- I'm sorry -- there's something wonky about that site's HTML.
There was a riot in L.A. ten or twelve years ago (Rodney King verdict maybe???) where the news photos omitted the BMWs getting their trunks stuffed full at the computer stores . . .
It was the NOLA story, yes. I wonder why it's broken now? By the way, this guy is doing a good job.
Erik, how can I incorporate you in the story at lightning-fast speed if I can't tell what you were trying to link to? Please advise soonest.
Damn, I missing out on some good looting! I wanna new computer!!! :( These opportunies of anarchy don't happen too often one's gotta stock up while the can!
Thank you for this post.
I was listening to this guy from Lloyds', who was remarkably cool and collected and kept on saying "We insured, we pay, that's what we're here for, that's our job, if there weren't calamities people wouldn't need insurance" - and I almost felt for a moment that insurances were the good guys, and could almost forget that they're going to want positive proof you didn't breach the levee yourself before paying... then I remembered that most of those left in the city will have no insurance for what they've lost, including, probably, loved ones.
have yet to hear one mention, one murmur of a hurricane evacuation plan, that didn’t consist of “everybody gets in their cars and drives somewhere else.”
I have read of seniors being evacuated by bus. But basically, you're right. And this picture leaves me feeling very sad and more than a little bit angry:
Good catch, Tom. I count sixty-eight school buses there. Not only could they have been used to ferry people out of the city; if they had, they wouldn't now be water-damaged.
Yep. Wouldn't it have been cheaper to get the people out when they still had three working, water-free interstates, and access to gasoline? And they didn't have to pick said people up one by one from half-submerged rooftops?
I've just heard that the Louisiana Governor was "very disappointed" at the airlines' decision to cancel flights out of the city on Sunday morning. Well, what about declaring martial law before, and comandeering the damn planes? Come to think of it, what about saddling the airlines with the cost of caring for and evacuating all the people they left stranded?
At the risk of sounding self-righteous, I'm amazed by the excuses that the looters give. Even the cops. Stuff like, "It must be legal, the cops are doing it." Or the idea that since there aren't enough cops to stop the stealing, the cops might as well steal too.
The bright side of the looting is that we won't have to look at any flapping flag graphics while they call all the victims "America's Heroes".
I restrained my sense of humor when I blogged the cop looting thing earlier. If I hadn't had 8000 boingboing readers who I mostly don't know passing through, I would have juxtaposed Bush's remark "the federal, state and local governments are working side-by-side to do all we can to help people get back on their feet, and we have got a lot of work to do. " with it.
I'd considered those who grabbed essential supplies only as being innocent of looting, so it was already irritating me to see certain of the reports on looting. While I was certain that a lot of the looting was inexcusable, just as much would be focused on the getting of food.
I'm wondering when its going to occur to looters that they may have to trade their loot for food and fresh water at some point. Or when other looters are going to turn on them.
New Orleans may come to a Hobbesian state. Grim thoughts.
TK
On DailyKos I heard that the Louisiana Attorney General said that law enforcement efforts were primarily directed towards lifesaving at this time and property damage was a secondary concern.
I'll confess, my first reaction towards the word "looting" on the evening radio was negative, but when I found out that it was primarily food rather than high ticket items, I can't be as hard-edged about it.
Speaking of images, Whitehouse.gov now has its official Hurricane Relief page up, with a really snazzy graphical banner across the top involving a satellite image, Bush, and an American flag...
Nothing terribly useful, but they've got a page up.
Bush is going to use New Orleans as his launch pad for nationwide marital law and world domination. RUN EVERYBODY RUN WHILE YOU STILL CAN!!!!!
I'm kinda hoping some of the looters get their karmic desserts. Perhaps they'll have loaded themselves down so much with electronics and stolen merchandise that they won't be able to get food when they should. And where are they going to put their new toys? A lot of their own houses were destroyed, and they won't be able to go back to them. And well, it's going to be a couple of weeks before New Orleans has ANY power. So yer stolen DVD player ain't gonna play so well until then, and you'll have a hell of a time explaining why you're carting it around whenever you queue up for food and water rations. I hope your arms get really tired. I hope you get really tired of looking over your shoulder at your fellow looters. Frankly, I hope the lot of them are waterlogged and unusable. (I guess that doesn't really work for jewelry, but it works for electronics.)
Sorry -- in too many places.
They put in anchor references, but not the anchors themselves. Text:
Police officer shot by looter
Tuesday, 4:25 p.m.
WWL -TV was reporting that a law enforcement officer was shot in the back of the head Tuesday afternoon on the west bank. The officer reportedly approached the looter near the intersection of Wall Boulevard and Gen. DeGaulle and, while talking to suspect, was shot in the back of the head by a second looter.
Information was not available on the condition of the officer. It was unclear if the suspects had been apprehended.
Search the page for the headline. I'd blame them for the bad HTML, but they're a little under the gun/fires/waves right now.
Lis - That banner is so lame that the "designer" had to be trying to make it bad. All that's missing is a screaming eagle and a kitten dressed up as a fireman.
I made a contribution to the Red Cross today - they've set up a 2005 Hurricane Relief Fund. Really Big Corp, Inc. will match my donation. Now's a good time to support relief workers so that the poor people stuck in NO don't have to raid whatever's left in the corner grocery.
What I wonder at, is that looking at the photos, the breach is huge -- but the entrance to the canal from Ponchartrain is quite narrow. I don't think they could have ever blocked the breach itself, but the entrance looks perfectly blockable; I know that barges have been sunk as temporary blocks in similiar situations.
And it's just unbelievable that they never *tried* anything. They talked all day and never even did a thing!
Atrios has now joined the mass-mind:
http://atrios.blogspot.com/2005_08_28_atrios_archive.html#112545475089735235
Teresa, I had been about to post something similar to a private mailing list when I saw your post (and probably still will get to sending it.) I hadn't seen the picture of the other couple who had "found" food yet, but I wrote:
the last photo I saw captioned "Looter!" was a guy wading waist-deep through water with a loaf of bread under his arm and a floating tub full of some other food. Did he drop any money onto the submerged register counter? Possibly not, but I don't know and I'm pretty sure the photographer in the helicopter didn't either.I would bet the journalist who captioned it that way would have been smugly proud to have done the same thing to grab food for himself or his family too, and would have self-righteously denied that he was "looting".
By the way, I am very happy that Making Light is one place where I am not hearing "... evolution in action" parroted over and over. Grrr.
And it's just unbelievable that they never *tried* anything. They talked all day and never even did a thing!
I've read the mayor of NO complaining that the helicopters that were supposed to be sandbagging the breach were redirected to other efforts.
He was saying there were "too many chiefs" giving orders, and poor communication.
So they intended to do something, but the chaos interfered
T: You all also have Xeni for company.
Erik beat me to it, but yeah, the New Orleans Times-Picayune (where his link came from) is a web newspaper now, and their HTML skills are a bit lacking. Given the circumstances, I'm just very happy they're sending anything out. They're a great source of info right now, even if linking to them is somewhat difficult.
By the way, I am very happy that Making Light is one place where I am not hearing "... evolution in action" parroted over and over. Grrr.
Boing boing is quoting:
The poorest 20% (you can argue with the number -- 10%? 18%? no one knows) of the city was left behind to drown. This was the plan. Forget the sanctimonious bullshit about the bullheaded people who wouldn't leave. The evacuation plan was strictly laissez-faire. It depended on privately owned vehicles, and on having ready cash to fund an evacuation. The planners knew full well that the poor, who in new orleans are overwhelmingly black, wouldn't be able to get out. The resources -- meaning, the political will -- weren't there to get them out.
And given this, you know - I can't get all worked up about these people looting, even if it means breaking into houses and taking away somebody's precious pearls.
Personally, I think that under the conditions prevailing in New Orleans right now, taking food and clothing and even medications, wherever you can find them, is sensible resupply.
Taking a wide-screen tv, though, that's just fucking stupid. Anybody who does that should be shot on sight, not for looting but for the egregious counter-survival display.
The looting will have another deliterious effect. It will selectively enhance compassion fatigue:
[sanctimonious tut-tutting]
"Why should I send money there when they helped themselves to whatever they wanted the moment the law turned its back?"
[/sanctimonious tut-tutting]
In reality, the value of the stuff being looted is going to be peanuts compared to what will be needed to feed, house, and medicate tens of thousands of displaced people. But the "Left Behind" will be judged for the looting, and you can bet the media will hype it up.
A lot of the food will spoil anyway. There are really only two outcomes for perishables. They can rot and be covered by insurance, or they can be eaten for survival and covered by insurance. Even a lot of non-perishables would be written off with out immediate use. Life will be, and has been, cruel enough for most of these people. A pilfered case of Coke or loaf of bread under the circumstances seems like very small change.
Taking a wide-screen tv, though, that's just fucking stupid. Anybody who does that should be shot on sight, not for looting but for the egregious counter-survival display.
It may well be long-term thinking. The waters will recede, the Red Cross will leave, and then people will be scratching out a living in a shattered city with few jobs for people not skilled in construction.
One of the very few useful things I learned from reading Heinlein: Trade goods are a survival tool.
"Trade goods are a survival tool."
Exactly. Barter may be a necessity soon enough.
THANK YOU for saying it better than my tired brain (this late at night) can formulate. At band practice tonight some of my less enlightened friends were going on about "shoot on sight", etc. What a bunch of buffoons. I gleefully forwarded all your succinct thoughts to them.
Maybe they can buy a clue.
I have a vague memory that when Tracey levelled Darwin in 1974 there was some looting. (Darwin was, at the time, on the end of a thousand miles of two-lane blacktop miscalled a highway, without rail links, and it was hard to get supplies to it in cyclone season.) But nobody got shot. The cops patrolled the streets, and they set up roadblocks on the road out and gave cars coming through the once-over. Some people got charged with theft, where what they'd pinched was hardly survival gear, but nobody, so far as I know, bothered their heads about food or drink or genuine meds or basic supplies.
I don't believe an Australian government can order a police force - or its own military - to fire on its own residents, if all they're doing is stealing something. I could be wrong, though, and my memory may be faulty.
Did you see the story about the evacuation of the county jails.
After the hurricane, and after the flooding started...
I think that was on the Times-Picayune blog.
Well, I just saw my first "OMG! People are stealing FOOD! Terrible display of the WORST OF HUMAN NATURE!" news story:
Crisis Grows as Flooded New Orleans Looted
I'm about to write AP and explain to them that their hype really disappoints me.
Insomnia must be useful for something.
Actually, I suppose it's not very useful, but I still did it.
In direct comment to the actual post:
I admit when I heard about 'looting', I presumed they meant stupid asshats taking TVs and stuff. Then I heard a bunch of news sources/personal accounts that mentioned most people seemed to be taking things like food, and I was like, um, okay, that's not really so much 'looting' as it is 'completely understandable needs being met any way they can be'.
And I was totally not surprised to load up Making Light and see this same basic point being made, only much more eloquently.
Too bad more people aren't going to see this post.
basically, if to survive in your society is criminal then the smartest move is to become a criminal. At least then you have a chance.
hey what about all those zombie movies when afterwards the survivors go looting. I always get a thrill of justice when the zombie takes a looter out.
pandagon suggests this is the start of a major media meme that the victims are to blame
http://www.pandagon.net/archives/2005/08/busting_out_the.html
let's try it on for size with a fake winger soundbite:
I think it's clear from the events that we have seen that so many people remained behind was because they had a plan, a plan to loot and enrich themselves at the expense of their neighbors. That a lot of these people died is regrettable but in some cosmic sense just. Given that they were in New Orleans and not in the SuperDome I think there is every reason to ascribe bad motives to them. I only wish the police had been more proactive and stopped the looters before they began, preferably lethally, but I guess the Democratic leadership of the city were too concerned about the rights of criminals to protect the property of noncriminals.
wow, that's scary. I am totally expecting to see something like that in the next couple of weeks. anyone wanna take bets?
you know, there is also a metafilter thread on this subject http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/44689
Beth, I'm with you. There is a huge difference between steeling food/medicines and stealing electroni s. Frankly, I've never understood why grocers just don't bring the food out and leave it out once the worst of a storm is over, and once it's clear the power is going to be out for a while.
Most of the "looter" photos I saw yesterday were black people taking groceries, though one guy was carrying a tub of beer and another had about 16 pairs of blue jeans.
Is there anything in a flooded-out store in New Orleans which is going to be worth cleaning for resale, after a couple of hot and humid weeks?
Nasty thought: there are often clauses in insurance policies which exclude whole classes of event. "war risks" is one of the terms I recall. I wonder what the martial law declarations are going to do to insurance cover against theft.
While this is indeed regrettable phrasing, the wording on many, many pictures of both black and white looters found at http://www.nola.com/hurricane/photos/ is simply "People remove items..." or "People remove goods...", so maybe -- just maybe -- the discrepancy between black people looting and white people finding was not on purpose.
Interestingly, on CNN, it's "A young man drags groceries through chest-deep water in New Orleans on Tuesday."
I am so heartened to see so many people responding to the ugliness of the "looting" reporting. For myself,I would very much like to see Col. Terry Eberrt, the Homeland Security person being quoted ad nauseam in the media, be made to shut up. He's the one who said that thing about the "die-hards" who wouldn't leave would soon be "dying hard" and then he said that it wasn't so bad because there weren't "thousands" of bodies floating around -- this after the breaching of the 17th St levee became clearly unrepairable by anything as tiny as never-appearing 3000-pound sandbags.
The other thing about casualties is that the current administration -- which certainly does have cupability for both the state of the New Orleans flood defences and the inadequate evacuation plane -- is going to do everything it can to delay and obscure that this event has killed many more people than 9/11 did. (Right down to what is looking like a policy to not count the dead at all.)
Conservatively, there were 100,000 people left behind in New Orleans; all it takes is 3% not having sufficient mobility to get to a rooftop or through the flooded streets for them to be dead. Three percent is unfortunately very likely to be seriously on the low side; there are a lot more than 3% of old people, small children, and folks with mobility issues in a population of 100,000.
This is ignoring everybody else along the coast, the probable consequences of a lack of sanitation facilities and potable water, the side effects of the severe toxic contamination going on in New Orleans, and the side effects of the transportation infrastructure being severely degraded. This is just the consequences of the deliberate policy to not evacuate poor people from New Orleans.
Let me explain to you how pissed off this entire situation makes me. Reading the NY Times and seeing the words "chose to stay" in regards to those who couldn't do anything but remain in their houses and hope for the best. There many have been a few residents who chose to stay rather than leave or seek shelter, but I doubt that the masses left had any choice. These were people trapped because the security plan didn't have a way out for them. I wonder how much access these people had to a shelter. Should they have been expected to walk to the Superdome if it were miles away?
The TV reporting on Sunday included regular mention of special bus services being run in New Orleans to get people to the shelters. It wasn't a total abandon-the-poor-to-die plan. And until the levees failed it looked as if the plan had worked.
I don't know where the buses came from. I don't know what the weather was like on the routes they could have taken had their last run been carrying people out of New Orleans, but it might explain the 60-odd school buses which were reported parked up in New Orleans and flooded out.
"Chose to stay" is often like "Chose not to continue treatment." Why? Because you couldn't afford it.
Where would they go? Many of the evacuees are in hotels. They can't afford that.
The problem is this: We don't test entire city evacuation plans, and if we did, people still wouldn't go. They may be poor. They may be proud. They may not want to. They may not be able to. They may prefer to die, rather than fight.
We can't tell.
Setting up the Superdome as a shelter of last resort was okay, insofar as it was just that. The second phase of the plan wasn't there, though -- what do we do after the storm?
As to buses: Not enough. You could make it workable by bussing people to major interchanges, then offering a simple deal: for every seat you have open for someone else, we'll give you gas. Or, in bastard mode, nobody gets on this highway until every seat in your car is filled. I'd probably use both. "Okay, 5 seats, five people. Here's eight extra gallons of gas and a small stack of MREs. Head north to exit 105, a team there will tell you where to go for the night.
Say 60 people per bus. How many buses? Six thousand people per hundred buses. How many did we need to move, and how far? Far enough, they can't come back for more.
Trains would have been better, but the scene when the last train leaves with a crowd on the platform?
There's always a better way. But you can't find that out until you've done it, and next time, enough will be different that your plan is likely to bust in different ways. Witness the disaster when they evacuated for Ivan, and the rebuild of the contraflow plan, which worked better, but was still a big problem.
I'm just meandering. I'm looking over a MetaFilter post, trying to find every plausible excuse to deny what it says. Then you look at the Gulf Coast, and the recorded storm surge, and the fact that, of course, all eyes were on New Orleans, and you realize that the post is probably exactly true. (The only hope I have left is the conspiracy bit at the end, and, of course, the ultimate source.)
There aren't hundreds lost. There are thousands. We're taking about losing New Orleans, and forgetting that Biloxi, MS, is already gone.
And it's another day in New Orleans, and the waters are still coming -- and all that rainfall is heading down. I don't think the river will be an issue -- but all that water in central MS is heading to Lake Ponchartrain, which means it won't drop for some time. Realtime streamflow data, scroll down to the Lake Ponchartrain basin. Anything here is in the lake, or heading there. The lake proper looked to have peaked, and has fallen some three feet, but the rivers are still high, and they fall by filling the lake.
It's another day. Forecast: High 95F, 40% chance of thunderstorms. New Orleans needs the pumps to handle the rainfall. They don't have them.
It's another day.
One report I heard indicated that the authorities and such relief workers are were on-hand in New Orleans were removing food, bottled water, and other goods from stores for distribution. That's salvage, though, and not looting, right?
Last night I talked to my aunt, who was counting her blessings--a yard full of small branches and pine cones is something to be grateful for, when you can see what other people had happen to them. Her take on people going after food and other supplies "Jesus Christ Himself would not stand in their way. Besides, it would all go to waste otherwise."
Food from flooded stores, even canned goods, gets thrown away, for safety's sake--better to let people have what they need before it's ruined.
Among the other reasons why some people didn't leave, add this: if you've lived somewhere your entire life, and have never been anywhere else, it's very hard to imagine what you would do if you did leave, to consider where you would go, and what you would do when you got there. I suspect many who remained behind were trapped between competing fears--fear of staying, fear of leaving, and very likely fear that if they left, they wouldn't be able to make it to safe place in time. I realize that some of you will find it hard to understand how someone could be so afraid to leave a familiar place that they'd stay through a hurricane, but in my job, I've dealt with people for whom a two-hour drive from their home to Nashville for a doctor's appointment was as big a deal as a cross-country trip would be for most of us. It's amazing, but it does happen, and it's probably more common than we realize.
That "poorest 20%" without cars doesn't consist of just the poor. I'm not poor and I don't have a car - I don't even have a driving license. I choose not to get one because I too live in a walkable city. I can walk to my office, the railway station, the bus station or the supermarket within half an hour, or catch one of the buses that go right past my house every ten minutes. I'm saving money, improving my health, and trying not to wreck the planet any more than I have to. And when a disaster hits my city, I want one of those buses to pick me up and take me out of there.
I'm sorry, my last comment came out sounding more selfish than I intended. My point was that most people who live in cities shouldn't need cars. Not for disaster evacuation, not for any other purpose - at least, not if the cities are properly planned and public transport is adequate. Sooner or later when oil becomes too expensive, we're going to have to learn to live without our cars. Something tells me that the city planners of the last few decades are going to come in for a lot of flack when that happens.
Among the pictures I've seen this morning was an entire lot of now-unusable schoolbuses. I count at least 100 buses visible, seating 50 apiece that could've made a nice contribution to the evacuation of those without private automobiles.
[The auto dealership lot was private property, but I can't help thinking of the accounts of rental car agencies running out of vehicles and wondering whether these couldn't've been put to better use.]
I find this all terribly heartbreaking.
No question, things are getting a bit Hobbsean. From Nola.com:
In Uptown, one the few areas that remained dry, a bearded man patrolled Oak Street near the boarded-up Maple Leaf Bar, a sawed-off shotgun slung over his shoulder. The owners of a hardware store sat in folding chairs, pistols at the ready.
Uptown resident Keith Williams started his own security patrol, driving around in his Ford pickup with his newly purchased handgun. Earlier in the day, Williams said he had seen the body of a gunshot victim near the corner of Leonidas and Hickory streets.
"What I want to know is why we don’t have paratroopers with machine guns on every street," Williams said.
Well, where are they, anyway?
(And I think we can save time this year and just send the local news and public service Pulizers to the T-P and nola.com staffs, whereever they end up.)
People lifting jewllery and plasma tv: ok, long post.
Taking a plasma tv from a shop is very stupid, yes. It shows a lamentable lack of foresight among other things. It's also theft. I agree that theft is bad.
But it seems to me that some priorities are strange here.
To me, protection of private property is important but it comes below protection of human life. (Hell, it comes below protection of animal life: I've long thought what I'd do and I'd take my cat instead of my pearls from a flooded house.)
A lot of people woulndn't leave. And they are probably regretting it now. But a lot of people are not me. They are not young, fit, adaptable. They may genuinely think that being evacuated in a refugee camp (or the Superdome for that matter) is a fate worse than death.
A lot of people did not KNOW what was barrelling towards them. I, sitting here in my comfortable house in Italy with a good net connection and satellite TV, and a morbid attraction to natural disasters, knew what was likely to happen. I knew that the deal was, you may face terrible destruction or you might just DIE. I saw Walter Maestri in TV and on the net. They didn't. They may not have had cable, they may not be news junkies, they may have had jobs and lives and not enough leisure time to surf the net to its remotest corners.
Come to think of it, a lot of them, stranded in water with no power and no phone lines, batteries for radios flat by now, still don't know what hit them. They don't know that the water isn't going away any time soon and power is not coming back for weeks and weeks. I've been in NYC during a two-days blackout. Nobody knew anything, and we weren't wading in water and dead bodies.
So they're thieves. Bad. Bad people.
But it was concievable that the real picture might have been drilled better into people's head. A lot of people acted all surprised at the fact that it wasn't the hurricane itself that was the disaster. Didn't they know? Didn't the people whose job it was to plan and provide listen to their own weathermen?
Is this better or worse than helping yourself to a nice pair of new jeans or a plasma tv you've always lusted after and is left in front of you by people bailing out from the shit you're left wading in?
And, if martial law is concievable to protect public order and private property, it was possibly concievable beforehand to save human life. Calling in the NG and having them round up people at gunpoint would not only have saved lives, it would have freed up resources to concentrate on actually reparairing the levee breaches, on actually evacuating hospitals and jails and ensuring communications and so on. So it was pretty authoritarian. OK, so barring people from flying is excusable on the grounds that there's a faint possibility of terrorists trying to hijack planes a second time, and so is deporting people to be tortured, locking them up for years without trial, and shooting them dead if they're trying to make away with your STUFF is ok, but dragging them off kicking and screaming in buses to safe ground is a bit too much?
According to my parents who're in Baton Rouge, there are reports that nobody bothered to provide the Superdome with a supply of potable water when they were setting it up as a refugee center. I find myself wondering how many people that will kill...
Yup, they obviously chose to stay, because private cars are owned by all Americans who count. The rest just didn't provide properly for themselves, and will have to pay the price for their lack of good planning. Hell, they didn't probably even have the prudence to donate to the Bush campaign.
One more point regarding the Ned Sublette quote.
A commenter on Pandagon made an excellent point regarding judgmentalism against those who stayed:
What if they had fled, and the storm had spared New Orleans?
You've got no food, no shelter. And the hurricane veered away from New Orleans at the last minute, so there's no disaster relief funds to help you.It's a tough decision with powerful risks either way if you choose wrong.
Elanor, that's not selfish. That's expecting the government to do what it's supposed to do.
If the only harm the Republicans did in the world was making people believe that was selfish, that'd be enough to make it a goddam pity there isn't a hell for them to go to.
Oh, wait. It _is_ a pity, isn't it?
Now we have the oil companies doing what they already planned for raising the gas prices to unbelievable high prices. They make a nice profit and we the public are now going to suffer in everyway possible. Everything will be going up; it will be a domino effect. All the taxes that the city, county and state put on a gallon of gas is very high. We are taxed to death and no sign of relief. Salaries just stay the same.
This looting, the panic, the flooded city. It all seems so familiar. I remember passages from one of Barbara Hambly's books that evoke the aftermath of such a thing. Now that I think about it, I guess with her love of NO, she would have imagined such a thing long, long ago. Wow.
-R
I am duly chastised for my own hard-ass attitude towards looting. I admit, a lot of my anger yesterday was, "These people are victimizing their fellow victims! That's lower than low!" On the other hand, the reports I was hearing focussed on what sounded like opportunism: not desperate scrambling for the necessities of life, but organized expeditions to grab jewelry and electronics and such. Granted, as you all have been saying, barterable goods may well be life-savers when the opportunity to trade them arises; but it's hard to give them the benefit of the doubt when you hear about looters shooting cops in the head.
I'm torn. On the one hand, I understand that if my mother owns jewelry, left behind in a house that is miraculously still intact, and when she finally returns home it's gone, it was probably taken by people who needed its cash value more than she. On the other hand, I can't get out of my mind her laments about never having invested for the future, and the way she called her tangible possessions "my retirement fund" in a less than tongue-in-cheek fashion.
I have never been a good judge of whether my own needs outweigh someone else's. It instinctually raises my hackles to see others make that call in their own favor when the result of that decision is armloads of others' pawnables. I freely acknowledge that my hackles may not be acting in the best interest of humanity.
Looking back now on Tuesday's network coverage (evening news) from New Orleans, I feel some bitterly ironic echoes of Bush's "Mission Accomplished!" declaration about the Iraqi War. Anchormen stood on dry ground, saying the city had essentially been spared. Ah, if it were only true!
The combination of callousness, fumbling and miscalculation that left so many people behind to drown or starve or shoot each other may just have been the miserable way we humans operate. When I try to picture a truly efficient evacuation plan, it seems like it might take a "benevolent dictatorship" to pull that off. (Please, I don't mean to ignite a political firestorm on this thread. That's just a dour passing thought.)
Has anyone yet compared this to the recent huge death toll from floods in India? We may think of ourselves as First World, but the so-called Third World seems to be right here right now, in the Katrina aftermath coverage.
Damn.
I just read that they're planning on moving the Superdome refugees to the Astrodome in Houston. Excuse me, but wtf?!? Why aren't they planning to shelter people in hotels, camps, anything but another sports stadium? I cannot imagine such a venue being anywhere near comfortable or appropriate for long-term shelter. Will the refugees be forced to stay inside the Astrodome?
I also see something sinister in the underreporting of casualties. The Metafilter comment referenced by Eric Olsen is absolutely shocking.
He got very quiet with me when I told him the numbers that have been public so far. He asked what have they said? I told him 50-80...he said "dude..we are picking up 30 at a time...thousands are dead...why aren't they saying...I guess I better shut up then...don't give my name" word for word in the call..
At first I thought it may have been because the media will only report *confirmed* casualties. But then I thought back to 9/11, when the original estimates were at 10,000, then revised downward over time to 3,000, give or take a few. Why the serious underreporting of deaths in LA and MS?
The Times Picayune is reporting that:
"the governor said Wednesday the situation was worsening and there was no choice but to abandon the flooded city."
I wondered in my LJ about the so-called looting on Monday afternoon. You can see it, the drive by nastiness it got me, here.
I'm so sick at heart I don't even know where to start.
MKK
Nicole, I don't mean that people helping themselves off my valuables were I forced to leave them behind were justifiable. I do point out that removing people from disaster zones does, among other things, keep looting down.
And when you have the luxury of knowing in advance that a disaster is coming (which is more than San Francisco can say, or Seattle for that matter) it's smart to move the people before the roads become impassable and you have to chinook them out. Granted, this time the warning wasn't much. But I still remember scratching my head before Katrina struck and wondering how come they weren't forming special trains and bussing them out and flying them out on cargo planes.
Anna--I know you didn't mean that. It's a complex situation without the comfortable black&white morality my simplistic soul would like.
I've got the live coverage at WWLTV.com up right now, and I have to say that local news anchors and personages have seemed much more sensitive to the motives prompting some of the "looting"/"finding" going on. The... Sherriff of Baton Rouge? ...on the... State O. E. P.? I tuned in late ...responded to questions about looting with much sympathy and benefit of the doubt. Someone asked him about escalating violence, and he said it wasn't so much a climate of violence as it was of desperation, fear, frustration with the situation. I've heard that kind of generosity a lot over the past few days.
I guess this is why I haven't turned on the TV since Monday morning. I've been trying to stick with WWL, WDSU, and bloggers.
The main thrust of the press conference was the impending evacuation of the Superdome refugees to Houston.
Crystal:
IMO the reason they're planning to use the Astrodome is simple: it's available. No team is currently using it, it's got room for the 30K or so folks (last I heard) at the Superdome, and it has services.
No, it won't be comfortable. No, it's not nearly as good a choice as splitting the folks to smaller shelters. No, it's not very dignified, nor likely to be any good kind of long-term solution.
It's a start. If they can go from there to other shelter, then things will work. If the Astrodome becomes a long-term, no-choice shelter (as I suspect and fear it will), then it will suck. Though not as badly as being in the Superdome, with a ripped roof, no A/C, no potable water or food, etc.
Crystal, part of the problem appears to be that all the hotels, schools, parts and so forth are already full with the million or so people who left Sunday. As far away as Texas, Oklahoma, and Missouri.
Also, splitting a mass of refugees into smaller makeshift shelter camps means you create headaches when it comes to delivering necessities from that point on, as you will have hundreds of distribution points where before you had one.
Considering I live without a car in a major metropolitan area, I'd have to have to leave with a day's notice or less. I could take the commuter rail another 30 miles north, *if* it were running the right direction and if I could get a ticket, but even if I got that far, I'd be stuck.
I can't fathom why the city and state officials didn't commandeer (or whatever the legal term is), all the city, school, and private line buses and ship people out by triage from the gathering point of the Superdrome.
Not to mention that trains would have been the best people movers possible, even if they had to ride in cargo cars and packed in like sardines.
Gods. Now the NOLA forums are reporting that those people still in the Bonnabel and West Esplanade area were fearing for their lives due to looters with guns going through whatever houses are unflooded.
Granted, that's a predominately white area that may simply assume that black people in the neighborhood are armed thugs; I don't know the truth of the matter. But, if true, there's certainly a difference between cleaning out the grocery store and committing armed robbery on frightened unevacuated neighbors.
Another argument for sending people to a central location first is that it's easier to get a head count and determine special needs cases, check for developing health problems (whether from lack of medication, injury, infectious disease, or what have you), vaccinate for things like hepatitis and other diseases, and so on in a central depot, and then send people to better long-term housing.
Why am I getting better, more detailed reportage about New Orleans from ordinary people's blogs than I am from the NY Times, the Washington Post, and CNN put together?
I'm really starting to think this is all rooted in that 'Rotten Elites' link Patrick posted.
Most of us in this country don't live in New York or Washington, and the media simply doesn't f*cking care about us, even peripherally. Worse than that, they don't even see us.
Pardon the language, but I think the cursory coverage being given to this immense disaster is outrageous and appalling.
The only thing I can come up with for a rational explanation in the differences in photo captioning is that the one of the white people was from AFP and the black man was an AP photo.
There's an excellent take on the socio-economics of evacuation and disaster here.
I, personally, must admit that I'm fascinated by the whole thing, but that's the researcher in me. I think I would be more horrified if I were on the ground dealing with it all.
I will grant many of the points already made upstream. But I would like to point out a couple of things.
First off, we have witnessed what may be the most successful major urban evacuation ever carried out. The NOLA metro population was about 1.3 million, and most of them were under mandatory evacuation orders of one kind or another -- about a half million in NO proper. Some of the estimates released on Sunday claimed an 80% compliance, which is wildly better than the most optimistic predictions of about 60%. The core strategy of any successful evacuation plan these days is to maximize the number of people who can get out of the way of the disaster themselves -- it is simply more cost effective, saving more lives with the same base of resources.
And as reports at the time indicated, there was a lot of bussing going on:
As many as 100,000 inner-city residents didn't have the means to leave, and an untold number of tourists were stranded by the closing of the airport. The city arranged buses to take people to 10 last-resort shelters, including the Superdome.
Nagin also dispatched police and firefighters to rouse people out with sirens and bullhorns, and even gave them the authority to commandeer vehicles to aid in the evacuation.
Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard said some who have ridden out previous storms in the New Orleans area may not be so lucky this time.
"I'm expecting that some people who are die-hards will die hard," he said.
And bus transportation was arranged to evacuate rest homes and such. Some patients were left in facilities like Charity Hospital as they were considered safer there than in some bus moving north towards Baton Rouge at 2 mph.
Also, current reports make it pretty clear that what police are available are generally ignoring property crimes and even picking up the dead in favor of tying to save those who are still perched on top of their houses or trapped inside their attics.
As for all the school buses that are being commented on, it might have been difficult to use them when the available bus drivers are leaving town with their families as fast as they can -- and an underpowered school bus overloaded with frightened people in heavy traffic and bad weather is a lousy spot for OJT. And sometimes, when you only have 12 hours to move a million people, you run out of people to organize and control things.
Erik V. Olsen: You could make it workable by bussing people to major interchanges, then offering a simple deal: for every seat you have open for someone else, we'll give you gas. Or, in bastard mode, nobody gets on this highway until every seat in your car is filled. I'd probably use both. "Okay, 5 seats, five people. Here's eight extra gallons of gas and a small stack of MREs. Head north to exit 105, a team there will tell you where to go for the night.
So you, your spouse, your three kids, and your grandmother will get on a bus that will take you to an unsheltered area, where you and a few thousand other people will stand around and wait as a Class 5 hurricane bears down on your city. You will be separated according to how many seats perfect strangers have available in their cars. You have no way to contact each other once you've been separated, no assurances that these strangers won't harm you or your loved ones, and no reason to think you all won't be shoved out of the cars as soon as you're out of sight of the guys with gas, MREs, and guns. You have no provisions. You have no reason to believe that the government that hasn't taken much interest in your welfare before the storm is going to think to see to it that you have the necessities now.
Yep, that would work.
The BBC strikes a careful distinction:
Heavily armed police have been trying to impose a form of martial law to stem looting. While some looters are stealing non-essential goods, others are simply trying to find food and water.
What sends me into despair is that they'll pay for none of it. The fact that they are butchering FEMA, that they defunded the levees, it'll all be passed over by the talking heads. A few articles in the newspapers no one reads, that's all. And Bush's friends will get fat 'reconstruction' contracts that will result in crappy rebuilding. And the next election they'll scream 'the gays are going to getcha' and many of the very same people who they've fucked over will obediently come to heel and vote for them.
And another quiet voice in my head wonders if the complete military takeover of New Orleans is practice...
Maybe it would be a good idea to start the evacuations with those who can't get out on their own. Not sure how it might be done, but certainly there could be some effort made to get out the handicapped people and the elderly first. And give them ID tags with name, address, and next-of-kin or contact name, so families could be put back together when it gets into long-term situations. Or so they can at least find out where the rest of their people are.
The problem, as the problem always is when trying to plan the ideal way to do things, is people.
I see this problem all the time in urban studies: you can plan for the best of all possible worlds, and watch it go to hell because people are not universally good, or you can plan for the worst of all possible worlds, and watch it go to hell because people don't like living in conditions designed to contain the worst of human behavior. What you have to plan for is something somewhere in the middle, where you imply trust in people and set yourself up to accomplish your goal, while also setting up checks on those people who will exploit the goodness of others.
So, in the case of, say, an evacuation, the middle course would be to supply drivers with only enough supplies to reach the next checkpoint, where further supplies waited. The only way to obtain the supplies at the next checkpoint is to deliver the people that had been assigned to that car at the first checkpoint. Sure, some people would take the gas and food and run, leaving people behind, but most people, given incentive to get to the next stop, would follow the rules.
Once again, the motto of 'Trust, but verify' holds true.
Teresa, I thought you might like this, if you haven't seen it already. Very well said.
For my own part, I'm finding it difficult to care about the looting of Snickers bars and Wal Mart jewelry. I've heard that there is looting in the few residential areas that haven't been flooded, and caught myself wishing, Let that be happening to my neighborhood.
Let them take my TV and stereo, if that means that my house is still standing, still dry. The looters won't bother with the photographs and the home videos, with the books, with the small stupid mementos that have no monetary value and infinite emotional worth. I can buy another TV and stereo. I can't buy back destroyed memories.
Wasn't also another part of the evacuate problem not only that a number of people were poor and had no vehicles, but also didn't want to leave relatives who could not travel or pets who weren't allowed in shelters behind?
The news said in passing that at least two people died Monday in the Superdome (old, frail people, one imagines).
I'm still kind of stunned that one of the "poster families" on NBC's Today Show the last two days were some people who lived in a really old house (that had survived Camille) and tried to ride out the storm on the Mississippi coastline. The whole household wound up clinging to a large tree in the back yard as the house was swept away. One of the survivors was a man in his 80s. But why didn't they board up their homes, get in a car and go north?
When you have the means to get out of harm's way, WHY DON'T YOU?
I'd go. I don't have much of an attachment to homes, but I'd make sure my laptop and photoalbums were with me. Everything else is replaceable, but my family isn't.
Just heard this in a comment thread on Cherie Priest's Live Journal: They closed the New Orleans Greyhound station on Saturday.
That's a single-source infobit, no confirmation as yet; but if true, appalling.
It seems to be true Teresa (according to a fast check of Google News) -- Both Amtrak and Greyhound shut down the station Saturday. Amtrak had to shut down as the railroads that actually own the tracks had issued an absolute embargo on further travel as Katrina approached. Other reports had Greyhound cancelling all inbound routes on Sunday, keeping outbound buses running, but I'm not sure for how long.
The station is reported to be surrounded by water now, so it will remain closed for now.
RE: Evacuations - I was talking to my friend, who lives about an hour or so north of New Orleans (but closer to Baton Rouge, I gather--not totally sure). The hurricane caused minor damage there but they had power and everything was soon functional. She notes:
Classes at LSU have been cancelled through next Tuesday. Workers have put 8 dorm beds in each of the empty apartments in my building, including the 3 next to my apartment. These apartments are only 600 square feet so the idea of it being shared by 8 people seems outrageous to me, but when you have no place to go in 95 degree heat, a tiny apartment with electricity and air conditioning must sound like heaven to someone. One of the workers told me people will start moving in tonight. I've already put aside some extra food and the two toasters I was going to donate to the thrift store. [personal info removed]....I'm going....spend the rest of the week volunteering at one of the Red Cross shelters.
Teresa/Claude - Wow, that goes beyond bad planning. The weather wasn't that bad until sometime Sunday night.
Grant Kruger was reporting no power in his area of Jackson, Mississippi, but they do have water and no real house damage (though lots of tree damage). His work is open and the power is on there. He was upset about the people driving around his neighborhood and gawking, but not doing anything to help anyone. Can't say I blame him.
Teresa -- an August 28th excerpt from scyllacat's livejournal:
This morning, I made sure the screens were on the store. Then I tried to make arrangements to leave. All car rentals, airlines, bus lines and the train station are now closed until further notice. They aren't even sure when they will be operating again. It's only after they are all closed that the Mayor orders evacuation -- then he orders incoming roads closed so no one can come get me out.
This is the same scyllacat who posted two brief and frightening entries from inside a collapsing building, having failed in a sincere attempt to get out of the city. Later reports on the same LJ are that she made it out, but it was ugly...
Anna, the courts established long ago that US officials can't force people to evacuate. Every time a hurricane comes near the coast, emergency workers risk their lives trying to talk people into obeying the evacuation order. In the end, they just collect next of kin information and try to find shelter themselves.
Related to this is the tale of the Interdictor. Which started out funny as a bunch of folks and their diesel generator keeping their ISP open during the storm, to something that's has a paramilitary, us v. them smell to it.
Looting? So was Wall Mart etc. going to resell the groceries that were left in those flooded,wrecked buildings? It would be considered garbage not loot!!!
Photograph: Police participating in the looting of a Wal-Mart, via Looka!
A report on the CBS evening news last night (Aug. 30) made the same distinction as the BBC report noted above--namely, that some of the "looting" is just people trying to survive.
I've been thinking: In April, a few weeks after I'd moved to San Francisco, a friend and I showed up at Lotta's Fountain at god awful o'clock on the morning of April 18th. Every year, the survivors of the 1906 Earthquake (and the subsequent fires) get together and tell people what they remember. Since next year will be the 100 year anniversary of the earthquake, you can imagine that survivors are A) very old indeed and B) remember very little that actually happened. Mostly they have memories of being snatched up by an older parents or sibling, and camping for months in Golden Gate Park. It was the camping for months, the idea of being without any home other than a tent or borrowed shelter that reminded me.
So I went to look up the earthquake again, and the first thing that caught my eye was this notice:
http://www.sfmuseum.org/1906.2/killproc.html
And yet, if I read these timelines aright, the city burned for up to four days after the initial earthquake. People couldn't stay in houses that were destroyed, and yet, they were told to remain indoors at nights, or risk getting mistaken for looters and other malfeasants.
If history is any guide, maybe folks should take a look at one of the US's other crown jewels coming to the brink of destruction and anarchy. We might find some parallels.
http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist10/06timeline.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1906_San_Francisco_earthquake
Compare: 1906
At least one thing I'm taking from this: Our nation has nearly lost one of its cities before and survived and rebuilt. I hope the same fate can be salvaged for New Orleans.
Teresa, if those had been white cops, they'd have just "found" those DVDs.
Hello--just popping in (via a link from somebody-or-other's LiveJournal) to share this very provocative news story:
Headline: "Did New Orleans Catastrophe Have to Happen? 'Times-Picayune' Had Repeatedly Raised Federal Spending Issues"
Summary: Significant Federal funds to fix the levees so that this exact type of disaster scenario would *not* happen, were severely gutted by the Bush administration so the funds could be diverted to the Iraq war and to "homeland security" (editorial aside: which latter, apparently, does not include protecting one of the US's major shipping ports and domestic oil sources from strategic disasters).
This connection between NO and Bush Iraq policy is, IMO, devastatingly crucial. I hope all you nice people will help me keep this story from getting buried. The only reason I even know about it is that Air America, bless their l
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