![]() ![]() ![]() In one well-publicized example, the Associated Press released two photographs of New Orleans residents wading through chest-deep water, carrying food obtained from a grocery store. However, much of the media coverage cruelly manipulated racist stereotypes in its reports. Hundreds of black evacuees seeking escape on a bridge across the Mississippi River were confronted and forcibly pushed back into the city. As the levees collapsed and the city’s predominantly black Ninth Ward flooded, tens of thousands of evacuees were herded into the Superdome and Convention Center, where they were forced to endure days without toilets and running water, food, electricity, and medical help. ![]() Meanwhile, hundreds of dead bodies floated in New Orleans’s streets and rotted in destroyed houses.Įven before Hurricane Katrina struck, it was obvious that the overwhelming majority of New Orleans residents who would be trapped inside the city to face the deluge would be poor and working class African Americans, who comprised nearly seventy percent of the city’s population. Thousands of urgently needed generators, communications equipment, trailers, and freight cars of food went undelivered for weeks. Florida’s proposal to send 500 airboats to assist rescue efforts was blocked by But the incompetence went deeper than that.ĭirector Michael Brown actually instructed fire departments in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama not to send emergency vehicles or personnel into devastated areas unless local or state officials communicated specific requests for them – at a time when most towns and cities lacked working telephones, fax machines, and internet access. ’s bureaucratic blunders was amply documented: its insistence that vital supplies of food, water, and medical aid were impossible to deliver to thousands of people stranded at New Orleans’s downtown Morial Convention Center, though entertainers and reporters easily reached the site following the storm its inability to rescue thousands of residents marooned on the roofs and in flooded houses for days the failure to seek deployment of active duty troops in large numbers until three days after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast region. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), established in 1979, had been plagued for years with financial mismanagement, administrative incompetence, and cronyism. But what made the New Orleans tragedy an “unnatural disaster” was the Federal government’s gross incompetence and indifference in taking the necessary measures to preserve the lives and property of hundreds of thousands of its citizens. Bush defensively argued that no one could have possibly anticipated the flooding experienced throughout much of the city, despite the fact that a number of scientists and investigative reporters had, for years, predicted that such a catastrophe was inevitable. "Do Not Tear Down" sign on a house left behind by the owner.Īfter the disaster struck New Orleans, President George W. ![]()
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