I just saw Geraldo Rivera holding up a baby and crying. He demanded to know why people were forced to stay in the Astrodome; people have been actually prevented from walking away from the hell hole, down the highway and over to the next city. Geraldo shouted at the camera, “let them out of here. Let them out of here.”
O’Reilly and Hannity talked to their Fox correspondents on the street in NO and tried to coax them into finding something positive to say. Instead, the correspondents almost yelled at them. When the Fox network can’t find a kind word for the Bush administration, you know things are bad.
Could this have happened in Detroit? If a disaster of equal proportions hit Detroit, would things have gone so wrong?
I think not. Even if Detroit has its problems, the state government is in working order. The South does not have decent state governments. While the Northern states professionalized in the seventies as a result of humiliations and supreme court cases, the Southern states never did. In some states, the governors have no staff, have one term limits, and have few constitutional checks over the legislature. States, like Kentucky, have legislatures that meet only every other year. The South just doesn’t have the capacity and experience of Northern state governments.
Even if New Orleans was as impoverished and corrupt as some other Northern cities, it also didn’t have a proper state government to step up to the plate.
So much rebuilding is going to happen in the next decade. Professionalizing Southern political infrastructure has to be part of the package deal, I think.
The Fox people were unable to come up with a silver lining tonight. I have one. Chicago 1871.
In Chicago 1871, Mrs. O’Leary’s cow tipped over an oil lamp igniting the hay, the barn, and eventually the whole city. Chicago was raised to the ground. To rebuild the city, city leaders brought in the finest architects and urban planners from the country, who were able test new ideas and create great beauty on a blank canvas. (And yes, I have taken the architectural walking tour of Chicago about a billion times.) I hope that the same will be done in the South.
(I’m blogging this weekend whenever I can sneak away from the guests and get to the computer.)
Apt. 11d 
Yikes. Another reason to worry about living in Rhode Island, land of the barely professionalized state government. Actually, I already knew that. We suffered the worst banking crisis since the Depression in 1990 when the credit-union system collapsed after years of unbounded indulgence by an ignorant and corrupt legislature. I would not expect a well-coordinated response to a major disaster here, either.
As for Detroit. Say it was a dirty bomb. I think it would take as long, or longer, for the cavalry to arrive, so to speak. Which is to say that I find the logistics of quick response on a large scale disaster to be quite overwhelming, even if professionalization in state government is high. But then I was probably overly influenced by Pressman and Wildavsky’s book about implementation in Oakland, California.
The events of the day have taken me to another book on my shelf: John Barry’s Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (Simon & Schuster 1997). New Orleans was “spared” in that flood because of the decision to dynamite a levee and channel flood water away from most of the city. Guess which neighborhood took the brunt? The Ninth Ward, designated for “coloreds.” Barry’s book tells the sickening tale of how the subsequent Reparations Commission manipulated procedures to shortchange the victims. That certainly helps explain the origins of the rumor — reported in today’s NTT — that some of those stuck in the city blamed the mayor for causing the levees to break in such a way that flooded local blacks, while saving white tourism.
What a wild claim, I thought earlier today, before returning to Barry’s book and being reminded that that is precisely what happened in 1927.
Gee, I *am* distracted tonight. This week, actually. Get back to those guests, 11D!
LikeLike
“Professionalizing Southern political infrastructure has to be part of the package deal, I think.”
Got that right. In the past ten years, I’ve watched emergency preparedness here in D.C. go from nonexistent to competent and methodical, if still somewhat basic at best. The difference is profound, though, and it happened only through a change of leadership: specifically, the election of a new mayor who, while hardly perfect, nonetheless began the hard work of creating functioning institutions to replace Marion Barry’s makeshift urban feudalism.
That isn’t to say that D.C. would be ready for a disaster on the magnitude of Katrina, and I’m sure we’re not adequately prepared for the obvious terrorism scenarios, but we’re less unprepared than we were a decade ago thanks to a decrease in incompetence and cronyism. I hope that postdiluvian New Orleans can benefit from the same.
LikeLike
Laura—I have read some offensive stuff this week, but this nears the top of the list. So the real problem is that Southerners are stupid and unprofessional?
There is not a state government in this country that could deal effectively with this nightmare. Louisiana failed to get people out of there while there was still time—-and they should rightly be held accountable for that. But diaster management is the job of the Feds. And they have fucked up big-time. Let’s put the blame where it belongs. (And please remember that 2/3s of Louisiana’s National Guard is in Iraq—fighting that war you thought was necessary.)
I used to work for state government in Tennessee. The people I worked with and for were highly educated, intelligent, and deeply committed public servants—no different than those I’ve known in California and Maryland (two other places I’ve lived). As an academic, you should be prepared to provide evidence for the kind of assertions that you have made in this post—-what have you got, besides some warmed-over “Aren’t we glad we don’t live down there with those ignorant Southerners” superiority complex?
You are full of shit on this one. I just hope you never have the opportunity to test your hypothesis with a major disaster in Detroit—or San Francisco.
LikeLike
um… very quickly… re: Southern governments being unprofessional. First of all, I didn’t pull that out of my ass. There is a lot written about this. Secondly, what is meant by all of this is not that the individual government workers are incompetant, but that they don’t have the same capacity as Northern government workers. They have less power, less administration, and a smaller budget. I would be happy to provide a list of very boring academic studies on this topic. When I have time.
LikeLike
Paigeb:
There are some specific competency issues that come up with New Orleans’ municipal government, but those are well-known. The current Mayor ran on an explicit platform of trying to reform deep structural corruption in NO’s city government.
But the basic point that Laura made is not about competency, intelligence or anything else. Read again. It’s about capacity: e.g., sheer resources at ready command, financial, logistical and human. Most state governments in the South don’t have the same resources: their bureaucratic networks are smaller, their ready-state resources are far more limited, the list of services they provide to citizens is smaller, and so on.
LikeLike
Well, Detroit does have its problems but…
I can no longer find a citation to support this, but I remember reading, after the Blackout of 2003, that Detroit was one of the few (perhaps the only) metropolitan area in the region affected that had actually done most of its Disaster Preparedness work. Yeah, things were bad, but they had a checklist ready for “in case of event X in Y weather, employees of agency Z should report here and being doing Q.” Example: Employees of the housing authority knocked on every door (maybe every door on the list of the elderly and disabled residents of public housing) and distributed water and just plain checked on them.
I don’t know, though, if anyone could really have been prepared for the raw numbers of people, and the problme that you’ve got a thousand tiny islands of humanity out there, separated by filthy poisonous water. But yeah, a state with better centralized authority and/or a more powerful executive might have been better able to pull together the disparate strands of rescuers into a united and focused whole.
I’ve been arguing elsewhere that this illustrates the role of the federal government – you need, in a case like this which crosses state lines, which crosses lines of municipalities and governments, to have a centralized force. A place that information can come into, be processed, and then used to direct rescue efforts to the most needed areas. When hundreds of people show up to help – they need to know where to go. They need to know where they can take the injured, where they can drop the homeless. The people who in turn take in the homeless need to know where to pick them up. Someone has to be in charge….
LikeLike
No doubt there is plenty of blame to be placed on the LA govt. However, if you have been following any of the local LA news services (and I can highly recommend nola.com as a source of some excellent reporting that doesn’t make it onto CNN) you will notice, that in this case, the New Orleans/LA govt have been pleading for *years* for the funds to build up the levees and protect the wetlands buffer zone for just such a storm as this one. Funds that began to trickle in under Clinton, but were cut by Bush in 2001…and then diverted to Iraq.
No city North or South could have coped with Katrina alone; and while things could definitely have gone better on the city’s end, without the protection and repair of those levees, there was always a limit to what they could do.
On a north/south note, I think what has shocked many of the Northerners I know up here is the extreme poverty they are seeing, that obviously preceeded the flood. I’ve been to NO, and lived in the South, it was no surprise to me. But my native NY friends really had no idea. The shameful truth of poverty in our country is something most of us online are sheltered from; in Louisiana and some part of Kentucky and elsewhere, it’s still 1933 for a whole lot of people.
LikeLike
<>
Timothy—-hard to get around that statement, methinks.
emjaybee has it right—“No city North or South could have coped with Katrina alone…” Period.
LikeLike
“The South does not have decent state governments”
That would be the statement I was trying to quote. Sorry.
LikeLike
I think by decent here Laura means, “functionally adequate to the task”. Like, “I have a decent amount of space in my house” or “I have a decent number of bookshelves”. But she can tell me whether I’m right or not. I think it’s quite clear that she doesn’t mean “decent” in the sense of moral judgements, e.g., that state governments in the South are indecent.
LikeLike
Thanks, Tim. Yes, that is exactly the way I meant the word, decent, although it was hastily written.
I should have been more clear in my post. State capacity is just something that I have read so much about that I forgot that others might use words like “professionalization” differently.
Hey, it’s good to blog for exactly these reasons. Keeps us from getting so sucked into our specialization that we get lazy and assume that everyone know what we’re talking about.
And I also didn’t mean to imply that the capacity of LA’s government was the sole variable or even the most important variable that explains the poor recovery effort. Certainly, this was a bad-assed storm and every state would have struggled with it. I just wanted to isolate this one factor to get some ideas from you all.
LikeLike
When you have the time, that list of studies sounds very far from boring (and useful).
LikeLike
Sure, Carlos. I was just surfing around to see what I could find on line for you. Thad Beyle writes a lot on this subject and I found this article on line.
This looks like it has a nice summary of the literature.
STATES AS LABORATORIES: A Reprise
Sarah M. Morehouse, Malcolm E. Jewell
Annual Review of Political Science, May 2004, Vol. 7, Pages 177-203
abstract here
Virginia Gray and Russell Hanson also have an excellent reader with great charts breaking down the states with strong and weak governors, different resources, all that good stuff.
LikeLike