Who would have guessed that the next city to be evacuated in the history of human civilization would be New Orleans in America itself, laid low partly by a force even greater than American power (hurricanes) and partly by the very nature of American society itself!

To begin with, New Orleans was lying much too low anyway. Most of the city by area was below sea level, kept dry only by the levees that the Army Corps of Engineers had built over the decades, and constant pumping. To the south the broad Mississippi slowly wended its way to the sea. On the day the hurricane hit, the river was about 4.4 metres above sea level. From the north, Lake Pontchartrain, a body of water that was larger in area than the city itself, pressed against it. Its surface is normally about a metre above sea level.

For years, the Federal Emergency Management Agency had considered a hurricane hit on New Orleans as one of the top three disaster scenarios they should plan for, the other two being a terrorist attack on New York City and an earthquake in San Francisco. They had estimated that the earth levees would not have been able to withstand a direct hit from a Category 4 or 5 hurricane.

After grazing the southern tip of Florida, hurricane Katrina came bearing upon the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts, making landfall around 7 am on Monday 29 August 2005. At one point, while over the warm Gulf of Mexico, it was rated a Category 5 storm (the most powerful category), but wind speeds slackened a bit to Category 4 just before hitting land.

It also veered a little to the east, thereby sparing New Orleans a direct hit, but was still close enough to dump torrents of water on the city and the lake. And the disaster began.

Graphic adapted from AFP

There were four breaches of the levees, with the biggest one about 60 metres wide. Water from Lake Pontchartrain poured in, rapidly submerging some 80% of the city, with some neighbourhoods seeing water 5 metres deep (that's about 2 floors). The pumps were overloaded and soon gave out. Electrical power failed too. The water supply was next, and with that sewers ceased to function.

In the days following, the entire city became a big cesspool with stagnant, fetid water, in which floated trash, faeces, corpses and hypodermic needles. Meanwhile the storm had moved on, leaving hot (30 - 35 degrees), humid conditions. At many locations, fires broke out, including a particularly nasty explosion in a chemical factory about 15 blocks east of downtown, that spewed toxic fumes.

Cleaning up and drying out will take months. Meanwhile the city will remain unsanitary and in places unsafe, a prospect that has led the authorities to a decision to evacuate virtually the whole city to make the job easier.

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In the 3 or 4 days before the hurricane hit, news of an impending emergency was already arriving halfway around the world here in Singapore. Clearly, at a certain level, people were fully aware that Katrina posed a serious danger. The city advised its 1.3 million residents to leave and implemented its preplanned "contraflow" traffic scheme, under which all lanes of highways were turned into out-only routes.

The Superdome was designated the relief centre of last resort for those unable to leave, and I remember seeing on TV news here pictures of guards checking people for guns, knives and drugs before they could enter the Superdome. It seemed like American efficiency at its best.

But what was to follow was in a way also very American, excellent for the short-term, completely blind to the long-term. (If it sounds like the Iraq quagmire, it is no coincidence.)

The Superdome, to which about 20 – 30,000 people fled (and there were another 20,000 in the nearby Convention Centre too) would have been a good solution if the danger lasted only 12 or 24 hours. If, after the passage of the cyclone, people could leave and make their way home, everyone would have applauded the authorities' foresight.

But what the climate scientists and engineers knew didn't seem to have filtered up to the policy-makers: that the levees might not withstand a Category 4 storm, and that if the city should flood, there would be no way for the water to drain out by itself. It would be months before it could be pumped dry. (And if it again sounds like the way Bush's administration ignored advice by military planners, historians and political analysts about what it would take, and how long, to subdue Iraq, it is no coincidence again)

It couldn't have taken a lot of imagination to have foreseen what eventually happened. The streets around the Superdome flooded up to 2.5 metres deep, marooning the place. Water supply, electricity and airconditioning failed and the toilets seized up. There was no food, no drinking water, not even breathable air. In the bedlam, violence and rape broke out. Eventually people couldn't even stay inside the Superdome anymore. They had to come out of the stink, and stand, squat and generally roast in the sun-bleached terraces while watching the dead float by. The same scenario was repeated at the Convention Centre.

Here is a curious question: if the boffins and engineers had foreseen the risk of an entire city's submersion, why was there no plan in place beforehand to evacuate everyone? When I stumbled upon the New Orleans Police Department's contraflow traffic plan on the internet, it was dated, I think, 2001, indicating that they had begun to think about the need for speedy evacuation as far back as then. Yet the plan was only for people with cars.

Is it not in the American psyche to design plans for moving hundreds of thousands by trains (is there even a railway line to New Orleans?), trucks and busses? Is that too communist an idea for American leaders?

Or is that idea alien because of a pervasive insensitivity to the poor and the lower classes [1] that goes with being such a capitalist society?

For whatever reason, thousands didn't even make their way to the Superdome. They might have wanted to protect and save their homes, or they didn't even have transport to get to the relief centres. They soon found themselves trapped in their attics and rooftops as waters rose. Many drowned where they lived.

Others died for lack of insulin, diabetes being such an epidemic in overweight America.

Those located in higher ground were able to come out, but not by far, for their neighbourhoods, while relatively dry, were surrounded by water. By Tuesday, reports of looting surfaced. People desperate for food and water were doing what they could at the nearest boarded-up store. Then it got worse as those with either drug addiction or guns, or both, joined in the fray.

When I heard over the news Wednesday that the City authorities had redirected their already exhausted police and emergency personnel to focus on curbing the looting and lawlessness, downgrading their search and rescue operations even as people were dying, I said to myself, this is going to be a very interesting story.

On Thursday, a helicopter ferrying relief to Charity Hospital was shot at, and relief missions suspended. Already the hospital was working without water, power or light. The morgue was overflowing and dead bodies were stashed under the flooded stairs. Every news agency reported the news about the sniper fire, indicating that every thinking person thought that this was the height of absurdity. Reading this, all of us outside America must have thought, "you see what happens when a country is overflowing with guns?"

At the same time, the authorities were losing personnel. Policemen were reportedly turning in their badges and walking off their jobs. It's still too early to say why this was happening, and to what extent, but in a way, it wasn't surprising either. Their own homes and families were in danger, and it might have been too much to expect them to put such worries out of their minds, especially if they, of all people, knew that government was in shambles at that moment.

No doubt, there will be finger-pointing in the days ahead. The mayor Ray Nagin has already accused the National Guard of being slow in responding. The National Guard in turn said they couldn't rev up their humanitarian response, (which they saw as their primary role) until there was law and order, which was the City Police's responsibility. Meanwhile state governor Kathleen Blanco was short of manpower herself, since large detachments of the Louisiana National Guard had been posted to Iraq helping out with the overstretched US Military. Many of them thus had to be flown back and in the rush, had to leave their heavy equipment behind.

By the week's end, some 54,000 troops had finally poured in with the mission of evacuating the entire city. On TV news, I see pictures of soldiers in battle gear, with rifles at the ready, cruising the streets in armoured vehicles. Governor Blanco had said that she had given National Guard troops orders to "shoot and kill" [2].

You have to admit, the Americans are very good at waging war, so good that sometimes you wonder, unless a natural disaster morphed into urban warfare, they might not know how to deal with it.

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Natural disasters cannot be avoided but their effects can be mitigated. However, nature wreaks its havoc on such scales that damage control can only be achieved through the agency of government.

But not any kind of government. It may be argued that in the case of Katrina and New Orleans that government, American-style, might have made things worse. Consider, for example these questions:

1. Has it been wise through the last few decades to permit so much urban development in a sub-sea-level area? Has it been wise to invest in dykes and pumps giving people a false sense of security against hurricanes and tides? Should they have let the bayous be rather than drained them for development? Or has too much faith been placed in science and technology and the inexorable conquest of the environment, the modern-day Manifest Destiny?

2. Are American governments giving enough attention to the poor? Is American society too unwilling to consider pro-active intervention for the underprivileged? Is the American electoral system such that the voice of the underprivileged is disproportionately muted, perhaps through non-participation, leading to lack of attention to their needs?

3. What good has been served by hewing to a policy of private ownership of guns, one of the hot-button issues of the American rightwing?

4. The American rightwing has philosophically begin hostile to "big government", preferring instead the notion of subsidiarity, that is, that power should reside with as local a level of government as possible (taken to its extreme, some ultra-rightists argue that all government is evil, the individual should be completely autonomous). Yet clearly in an emergency of this scale, leaving it to the city mayor in the first instance is foolish. The disaster was bigger than his fief and his resources. His own officers were not immune from losses; how could they be expected to carry on doing their jobs? Is the need for a higher level of government to move in and take charge BEFORE a hurricane strikes, e.g. to forcibly evacuate the entire city en masse, politically impossible in America?

Would more lives have been saved and suffering lessened had Pol Pot and his ruthless Khmer Rouge been given the job of clearing New Orleans down to the last man, woman and pet dog before Katrina arrived? [3]

© Yawning Bread