I am just amazed that three short years after Katrina, the debate rages in NOLA, of all places!
Storm rages over city's Gustav responseby Gordon Russell, The Times-Picayune
Saturday September 27, 2008, 10:45 PM
Six days after Hurricane Gustav's winds died down, dozens of regulars bellied up to the bar at Bruno's in Uptown New Orleans, enjoying air conditioning, football and the feel of normal life returning.
For many, it had been a rough week, starting with the stress of a killer storm gathering in the Gulf and growing with endless hours spent on clogged highways and the expense and hardships of evacuation. Then, once the storm passed, many grew angry at being asked to stay away a few more days.
Shortly after night fell, the patrons found a new reason for annoyance: Police entered and ordered everyone to go home. The reason? A 10 p.m. curfew still in effect in many neighborhoods across the city included the Riverbend area. Similar scenes played out in barrooms and eateries all over town after Gustav, in many cases well after power had been restored to surrounding blocks.
The curfew, an anti-looting measure, is just one of several aspects of a government response to Gustav that critics have faulted for heavy-handedness. Roadblocks at the parish lines and the tiered plan for re-entry, though short-lived, have come under fire for similar reasons.
Critiques have come from the other end of the philosophical spectrum, too. Some believe the government didn't do enough in the evacuation push -- arguing, for instance, that some northern Louisiana shelters were poorly outfitted or that evacuees should have gotten cash aid to offset expenses.
In short, Gustav seems to have forged an odd alliance of liberals and libertarians, who between them raise a gamut of thorny philosophical questions. What is the government's obligation, if any, to people it has ordered out of their homes? And is keeping people away from their property for their own safety the mark of enlightened leadership -- or another example of government trampling personal freedoms in a democracy?
David Melius, Bruno's owner, didn't see the sense in the curfew. How is the public good harmed, he wondered, by 50 people spending money at a business whose employees are hungry for tips after being out of work for almost a week? Does someone think patrons are stopping for a beer and a burger en route to a looting rampage?
"I think it's very dangerous for our streets to go dark at 10 p.m.," Melius said. "After a storm, especially, people need to eat and drink, and many people maybe still didn't have their fridges stocked.
"Seventy percent of our business happens after 10 o'clock. We've got 35 employees, and for many of them, this is their livelihood."
Looking back
Citizen and government reaction to storms is often driven by their experience with the last one. Clearly, some of the anger over Gustav owes to the gap between the storm's early reputation and its reality.
In 2004, Hurricane Ivan -- which was predicted to flatten New Orleans and instead created only massive traffic jams -- in a sense begat the complacency seen the next August, when some residents ignored the approach of Katrina.
The horrors of Katrina, in turn, led to the frenetic response to Gustav. Every level of government went on high alert; buses were at the ready; and most residents heeded Mayor Ray Nagin's call to flee the "mother of all storms."
It worked: Almost everyone left, and almost no one died. Thousands of National Guardsmen and cops patrolled the streets, holding looting to a relative minimum.
Still, after the storm passed without major damage to the New Orleans area, thousands of people complained of slow contraflow traffic and wretched conditions at shelters. And many people were hard-hit in the wallet: More than 400,000 households across the state signed up for subsidized emergency food debit cards.
Against that backdrop, some leaders and opinion-makers are starting to talk about a hurricane plan that relies less on evacuation -- which may strike some people as blasphemous just three years after Katrina killed more than 1,800 people.
Even Nagin, who pronounced himself generally satisfied with the response to Gustav, said the relative lack of damage may call for some rethinking.
"The fact that the levees held calls for us to re-examine just about everything we have done in the past," Nagin said Sept. 8, as he ended the curfew.
Nagin later said he would call another mandatory evacuation in the event of a threat similar to Gustav. And he urged the federal government to make leaving unnecessary.
"Our community deserves a flood-protection system that allows us to feel secure in the face of storms, rather than dealing with frequent evacuations," he wrote in a recent column published in The Times-Picayune.
Economic burden
The effect of a weeklong shutdown on the city's economy, and on its working class in particular, was put into high relief by the hours-long lines for food stamps.
"There are thousands and thousands of people in this town who don't have two weeks' worth of money," said Bill Quigley, head of the Poverty Law Center at Loyola University.
Some politicians believe government -- preferably the federal branch -- should pay for evacuation expenses, at least in part. City Councilman James Carter, for instance, a candidate for Congress, would like to see the federal government give out cash cards that could be activated in a mandatory evacuation.
"We need a front-end system, whereby before residents hit the road, they know that have resources to sustain themselves," he said.
While such an idea would likely get support from New Orleanians, it's not clear what kind of reception it would get in Washington, where disaster fatigue seems to be creeping in.
So far, FEMA has been unwilling to cover many of the costs borne by residents who evacuated for Gustav, saying, for instance, that free shelters were available to those who couldn't find or afford hotels.
Regardless of available government aid, some locals think it's time to stop running from storms.
Brobson Lutz, who was the city's health director under Mayor Marc Morial, thinks leaders should rethink mandatory evacuations. He's never heeded one.
"We have public buildings, substantial buildings in the nonflood zones, that people could go to if they didn't feel safe in their own homes," Lutz said. "If the city totally disintegrates, like it's done once in 300 years, then people are already in groups where, with a good government effort, you could get them out of town."
Trying to get home
Even if people are told unequivocally to leave, many believe they should be allowed back whenever they want.
After all, evacuees are the ones who obeyed their government, which raises a basic question of fairness: How can the government punish the compliant by keeping them out, even as those who ignored orders to leave move about town freely -- and in some cases get their businesses restarted to capitalize on the return?
Officially, New Orleanians weren't welcomed back until Sept. 4, more than 48 hours after the storm ended, though some came back sooner.
In Jefferson Parish, families waited at a roadblock in Avondale a day after the storm passed -- frustrated, broke, out of food and water, and unable to get to their nearby homes. A tiered re-entry system, designed to allow people providing essential services back in first, added to the heartache, as many would-be returnees were unaware of the system.
Citizens returning home shouldn't be considered a burden, said criminal defense attorney John Reed. "I believe people coming back contributes to the speedy recovery of the city. Citizens shouldn't be viewed as a hindrance," he said. "This notion that we have to turn to somebody to take care of things for us is, I think, mistaken."
Lutz agreed. "You tell people, 'This is a miserable place, it's hot and humid and you're probably not going to have electricity when you come back,'¤" he said. "But if you want to come back, come.
"Anyone who has been on a Girl Scout camping trip and is more or less physically able can handle themselves in a post-storm situation with no power," he said.
'A delicate balance'
If anger over re-entry policy was exemplified by motorists stuck at roadblocks, those who depended on public transportation -- many of whom spent a week outside the city -- felt even more cut off, said the Poverty Law Center's Quigley.
"People in the shelters felt they lost their citizenship," he said. "A hurricane doesn't erase the rights of being a United States citizen."
Even after people were allowed back, a curfew lingered for four more nights in parts of town, another decision that, in the eyes of critics, further delayed the return to normalcy.
Local officials defended both the re-entry policy and the curfews. Col. Jerry Sneed, New Orleans director of homeland security, said city officials share the goal of quick repopulation, "but not at the expense of public safety."
But Melius, the bar owner, saw irony in the city asking business owners on Wednesday to come back and reopen on the one hand -- and keeping a curfew in place on the other.
City Councilman-at-large Arnie Fielkow praised the smooth evacuation but criticized the re-entry policy as unduly harmful to businesses. He has convened a "working group" of business leaders and officials to make recommendations on ways to minimize the economic hardships.
City Councilwoman Cynthia Hedge-Morrell said it's important to learn from Gustav, but noted that in stressful times people often react with emotion rather than logic.
"To me, there is a delicate balance that has to happen between the needs of people who are healthy enough to come back and rough it, versus those people who hear what they want to hear," Hedge-Morrell said. "Some of them didn't hear there's no electricity, there's no pharmacies.
"We have to make sure people understand that. I don't see anything wrong with it if you clearly state that if you come back, you're on your own."
Gordon Russell can be reached at grussell@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3347.
