Asks why so few people noticed the difference in media and governmental responses to survivors of the California fires and the Gulf Coast floods
Rubin, Lillian B.
FIRE AND FLOOD. We call them natural disasters, but a closer look suggests a human hand at work as well. Three years before Katrina hit the gulf coast, Mike Parker, the former head of the...
...Nothing wrong with that, of course...
...There are even clowns down there entertaining the children," he reports...
...If the players of the New Orleans Saints, the local NFL football team, were at the Superdome to cheer up the victims, no one told us about it...
...It's outrageous...
...To which Deputy Director Harvey E. Johnson quite predictably replied that he was indeed "very happy with FEMA's response...
...Would we have done the same if they had white skin instead of brown...
...This left FEMA officials free to pretend to be reporters and toss powder-puff questions at their own boss while the cameras rolled...
...DISSENT / Winter 2008 n 5 COMMENTS & OPINIONS COMMENTS & OPINIONS Remember when, because the Superdome couldn't accommodate any more, people were taken to the Convention Center with the promise of transportation to safety, and the buses never came...
...Perhaps not...
...LILLIAN B. RUBIN'S latest book is 60 On Up: The Truth About Aging in America (Beacon Press, 2007...
...We're like animals," said one young mother, cradling her threeweekold infant close to her chest...
...But they're made measurably worse by the politics of the region where growth and development in the rugged wild lands that surround the cities have continued unabated with no serious regulation or oversight— no building codes that mandate the use of fire-resistant materials, no restrictions against the kind of residential density that feeds the flames, no requirement for cleared areas to provide a perimeter defense against the flames...
...In 2003, a series of wildfires devastated large parts of the same Southern California countryside, sweeping across nearly 300,000 acres (680 miles), destroying more than 2,800 buildings, most of them homes, and killing 16 people...
...Indeed, the public response to the San Diego fires was marked by the kind of generosity for which Americans are rightly famous...
...Three years before Katrina hit the gulf coast, Mike Parker, the former head of the Army Corps of Engineers, warned that the levees, which crumbled under the impact of the hurricane, were bound to give way one day...
...True, forest fires happen naturally in such a landscape...
...The administration's shenanigans notwithstanding, whatever legitimate reasons there may have been for the disparate treatment of the people who were flooded out as opposed to those who were burned out, we don't need the comparison to see clearly how the raceclass divide operated in San Diego itself...
...Well, that may be a stretch...
...But there was no comfort at the end of the road...
...So while white children were being entertained by clowns, Latino children and their parents were fleeing for their lives...
...Underprivileged...
...Certainly that was the government's spin, one the media trumpeted without much investigation...
...To support his plea for funds to repair them, he brought samples of the corroded steel supports to his White House superiors...
...Remember how the evacuees—all of them poor and mostly black—were trapped in the New Orleans Superdome for days without adequate food, water, or the most basic sanitary facilities...
...But then, most of the people there were too poor to be season-ticket holders...
...There were Mercedes and Jaguars pulling out, people evacuating, and the migrants were still working," one sympathetic observer told a New York Times reporter...
...Not even when California's governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, reported that all was well at Qualcomm Stadium, that yoga instructors were setting up classes, and members of the Padres, San Diego's baseball team, were in the ballpark signing autographs for happy fans...
...Until, that is, they found themselves snookered by FEMA officials who staged a fake news conference that they announced to the press only minutes before it started, giving reporters no time to get there...
...But I couldn't help wondering whether Mr...
...Just as public policy—or the lack of it— helped to create or, at the very least, worsen these natural disasters, so, too, we have a hand in how we respond to them—a response, I might add, that says a good deal about who we are and what we value...
...Remember the pain and desperation on their faces as NBC anchor Brian Williams stood in the middle of the arena describing the squalid, stinking, and dangerous conditions in which over twenty thousand men, women, and children were confined...
...The problem was, the transportation never came...
...they asked...
...No one told them to go...
...Whatever the answer to those questions, it's testimony to the invisibility of class and race in America that, although talk of Katrina filled the air while the fires were burning, few took note of the differences in who the victims were and the services and comforts offered to them...
...But reporters —the women and men who supply the words to go with the images, the ones who might ask some hard questions—were offered only a tollfree telephone line to which they could listen but not speak...
...Instead, U.S...
...For while a massive and successful effort to evacuate the white people who lived in the fire zones was under way, no one gave the signal to the Latinos in the fields...
...DISSENT / Winter 2008 n 7...
...It doesn't matter if a terrorist blows the lock up or if it falls down because it disintegrates," Parker told the director of the Office of Management and Budget...
...immigra6 n DISSENT / Winter 2008 COMMENTS & OPINIONS tion officials were waiting at the gates of Qualcomm Stadium to arrest and deport them...
...In fact, a ballot initiative that sought to regulate growth in the canyons and backcountry after the 2003 conflagration, went down to a resounding defeat with no small assist from the developers, real estate interests, and the local politicians who are beholden to them...
...Williams remembered the cold and hungry children in the Superdome when he spoke those words, whether he compared the public and private response to these two disasters and thought, as I did, What a difference class and race make...
...Fast forward to the San Diego fires of 2007 and Qualcomm Stadium, a sports facility filled largely with affluent white families...
...Tragic as they were, the effects of the San Diego fires pale by comparison to the human and social scale of Katrina, where 80 percent of New Orleans was under water, 800,000 people were left homeless, and over a thousand died...
...So it is with the firestorm that raged across San Diego County and environs this past fall...
...What lessons learned from Katrina have been applied...
...TRUE, THERE may be other factors that made a difference in how these events were handled...
...OW HAVE WE Americans come so far H down the road of fear and hatred that we can turn away frightened children because they're "illegal...
...Surely it should have been no surprise to local officials when, exactly four years later, fires driven by the same Santa Ana winds swept across the same forested land dried by drought, its dense underbrush like a tinderbox waiting for the right spark, and turned more than 500,000 acres (786 miles) and nearly 1,700 homes into ash as it ravaged everything in its path...
...A code word for black...
...Afterward, when reporters asked for her impressions of what she saw there, she replied, "What I'm hearing—which is sort of scary—is they all want to stay in Texas...
...REMEMBER KATRINA...
...But what else would she have found so "scary...
...The response from an indifferent and irresponsible administration was to force Parker's resignation...
...Brian Williams, the same reporter who spoke so eloquently about the lack of the most basic necessities in the Superdome, smiles happily describing the outpouring of help as both people and government deliver mountains of food, water, and everything else necessary to make life as comfortable as possible under these difficult circumstances...
...We pee on the floor...
...Are you happy with FEMA's response so far...
...And shortly before the wildfires of 2007 again laid waste to the land and the homes of families who live there, county supervisors endorsed a "shelter in place" strategy that permits developers to build fire-resistant structures in the same high fire-risk backcountry without requiring them to provide the roads needed to ensure safe evacuation...
...It wasn't until the workers began to stumble out of the fields, the fire at their backs, their faces covered with soot, their hands and feet burned, sometimes carrying their dead, that firefighters even knew they were there...
...Television camera crews only were welcome...
...It was supposed to be a bus stop where they dropped people off for transportation," explained a captain in the New Orleans Police Department...
...Remember later, when the evacuees were packed into the Houston Astrodome and former first lady Barbara Bush toured the facility...
...Its even possible, too, that the Bush administration learned something from its bungling of Katrina...
...Either way it's the same effect, and if we let it fall down, we have only ourselves to blame...
...So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this—this," she added with a chuckle, "is working very well for them...
Vol. 55 • January 2008 • No. 1
