One aspect of the Katrina aftermath that was kind of murky to me in the early days, but has cleared up considerably lately, is the odd paradox of the news footage we were seeing of thousands of people packed in and slowly dying from lack of medication, water, and food at the Convention Center. The reporters seemingly were coming and going at will. Why didn’t the people stuck at the Convention Center just walk out?

Well, as it turns out, because they couldn’t. The nearby bridge out of the city was sealed off by local law enforcement officials who, reportedly frightened at the prospect of desperate looters invading their suburban enclaves, used gunfire to turn back advancing groups of would-be self-rescuers.

This makes sense in light of that wild video of Geraldo Rivera and Shepherd Smith from the Convention Center, when they were yelling at Sean Hannity about how officials should just let these people leave (see Crooks and Liars video).

It’s one thing to have a culture so geared toward people affluent enough to own SUVs that you disregard those without vehicles in the initial evacuation. It’s disturbingly worse to carry that cultural bias forward to the point of forcing thousands of refugees to die slowly over a period of several days because you’re not allowing people to walk across a freeway bridge into your community.

Much has been made of the “Third World” quality of the images that emerged from New Orleans. But in some ways this is worse than that. In the Third World, at least, refugees would have been streaming out of the city on foot from the first day. In the USA, though, we sealed them up in a hell on earth and waited for them to die.

That’s really pretty horrible.

Anyway, here’s some discussion of the issue, including links to the firsthand accounts of people involved, from Rogers Cadenhead of Workbench (Police trapped thousands in New Orleans) and Kevin Drum (Savagery and Savagery… a followup).

(For those keeping score, note that these were local law enforcement authorities manning the bridge. I haven’t mentioned Bush, or the lackluster federal response to the disaster, at all in this piece.) (Oops. Until now, dammit. Well, as long as I’ve gone ahead and mentioned them, it’s important to recognize, I think, that this is precisely the sort of inadequate response by overwhelmed local authorities in the wake of a large-scale disaster that argues for a robust, rapid response by federal authorities. Which, obviously, we didn’t get in this case.)

This entry was posted by jbc on Saturday, September 10th, 2005 at 9:30 am and is filed under the_usa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.