The Politics of Disaster: Katrina, Big Government, and a New Strategy for Future Crises

Why was the government not capable of responding to human need in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina? How will the "Katrina failure" impact the next presidential election? And just what should we expect--and not expect--from the government in times of crisis?

"Big government didn't work," says veteran journalist and political analyst Marvin Olasky. "And it is clear that a new paradigm for responding to national crisis has emerged. Private and faith-based organizations have stepped in and politics will never be the same."

I N T R O D U C T I O N

We act as if we're immune.We build below sea level, or on barrier islands, or on hillsides with brush that annually burns, or over earthquake faults-and we're shocked, shocked when disasters occur.We use levee repair funds to build parkways or spruce up gambling casinos, and we're shockedwhen old levees give way.

We think that if we have well-built houses we're immune. British colonials had grand homes in Calcutta, but their roofs came off and many of their walls fell in when a cyclone struck the port on October 5, 1864. The cyclone also blew away rickety native huts as if they were twigs: eighty thousanddied from the wind and the forty-foot-high wall of water it created.

We think that if we build big, strong buildings we're immune. In the 1988 Armenian earthquake, the 1995 Japanese earthquake, and the 1999 Turkish earthquake, new multistoried buildings-including ones that conformed to California's Uniform Building Code-collapsed. Japan's calamity left fiftyfive hundred dead and was, according to a subsequent risk management report, "a terribly striking example of what earthquakes can do to a modernindustrialized society."

We think that with enough warning we're immune. However, San Franciscans knew that an earthquake was coming, and New Orleans residents knew that a hurricane was coming. Many people over the years have had volcanoes as neighbors. Mount Krakatoa in Indonesia began erupting in May 1883, three months before its enormous explosion killed thirty-six thousand, but undisturbed residents even climbed to the volcano's peak to peer inside. Six years later in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, residents had a running joke that "the dam has burst; take to the hills."When it did break, therewas little time to run, so twenty-five hundred died.

Some people in New Orleans who thought, or hoped, that the city was immune behind its levees should have read about the city's 1927 flood or about how the Yangtze River flood in 1954 killed forty thousand and left one million people homeless. The United States had planned to build the world's largest dam on the Yangtze River, for both power and flood control, but China's new Communist government used clay soil to build levees thatcollapsed, submerging an area twice the size of Texas.

Disasters happen, but the number of fatalities increases when short-term goals take precedence over long-term safety. Before Mount Pelee erupted on the French island of Martinique in the West Indies on May 8, 1902, residents of the nearby city of St. Pierre smelled sulfur fumes for weeks. Compared to Martinique officials, Louisiana's recent leaders seem like geniuses. The governor in St. Pierre did not want anything to get in the way of his May 10 reelection, so he set up roadblocks to keep constituents from leaving before they could cast ballots. The local newspaper mocked those who worried. Itseditor, along with forty thousand other residents, died during the eruption.

Building houses below sea level or along a hurricane-hit shore makes as much sense as the southern European practice, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, of using church vaults to store gunpowder. Churches had steeples or bell towers susceptible to lightning strikes: a lightning strike, fire, and subsequent gunpowder explosion in Brescia, Italy, in 1769 killed three thousand people. A similar lightning strike and explosion on the islandof Rhodes in 1856 killed four thousand.

Unanticipated problems are inevitable, but politics and pride can turn them into disasters. In 1912 some fifteen hundred died when the "unsinkable" Titanic sunk on its first transatlantic voyage, in part because of a prideful lack of concern about icebergs and in part because of a technical flaw: the separating walls in its "watertight" compartments did not extend all the way to the top, so the water flowed from one to the next. Two years later, one thousand voyagers died on the St. Lawrence River when the Empress of Ireland, going too fast amid fog, slammed into a coaling ship.These were not acts of God. They were acts of men.

Why do such disasters happen? Thousands of books and articles have tackled the subject of theodicy, asking whether catastrophes disprove the belief that God exists and that He is good: at the end of 2005, Google showed 275,000 mentions of "theodicy." "Anthropodicy," the question of whether man acts rightly (and whether "human intelligence" is an oxymoron), garnered only 145 mentions. Our tendency to put God rather thanourselves on trial is evident.

In 1946 the Winecoff Hotel in Atlanta, after running ads announcing it was "Absolutely Fire Proof," caught fire and 119 died. Twelve-inch-thick brick walls made the structure fireproof, but everything inside burned. The fifteen-story hotel had no fire alarm or sprinkler system, no fire escapes orfire doors, just one spiral staircase plus elevators. An act of man, surely.

Hurricanes, earthquakes, and the like are acts of God. The extent of the damage they cause often depends on the politics and economics of man. That goes for good news as well as bad.When Hurricane Fifi wreaked havoc in Honduras in 1974, widespread starvation ensued. Yet when Hurricane Katrina destroyed homes, a robust American economy kept famine from being a fear. Still, we are not immune to natural catastrophe, terroristcauseddisaster, and the unnatural amplification of both.

In one sense, personal disasters surround us. Every ten seconds in the United States a person is injured in a motor vehicle accident. Every twenty-six seconds a person has a heart attack. Every fifty-seven seconds a person dies from cancer. But this book examines incidents, some partially preventable, that have a major negative impact on the ability of an entire community to live peaceably. Some disasters, like hurricanes or earthquakes, are suddenly explosive. Others, like pandemics or the plagues of terrorism or revolutionary bloodletting, may start slowly and conclude with prolongedwhimpering.

This book examines the politics of disaster in six parts, each with three chapters. Using the Hurricane Katrina disaster as a case study, part 1 details what went wrong with government and media responses to Hurricane Katrina and explains how those problems were part of a long trend in disaster responses. Part 2 describes what went right by assessing the work of three Katrina responders that were effective: business, the military, and religiousgroups.

Part 3 proposes a reconceptualization of how we respond to disaster and suggests specific public policy measures based on our experience. Part 4 looks in detail at the role of faith-based organizations in disaster response. Part 5 examines several recent disasters abroad and the effectiveness of key responders in meeting the challenges. Part 6 examines three disasters that many believe are likely to occur in the United States sometime during the coming decades-a California earthquake, nuclear terrorism, and a pandemic-and assesses how prepared we are to respond.

We'll be investigating some new and frightening developments, but it's important to remember that disasters aren't new. Brimstone buried Sodom and Gomorrah about four thousand years ago, and an earthquake about three hundred years later brought the Minoan civilization on Crete to an end. Greek philosophers such as Plato knew about disaster: an earthquake and tidal wave buried the Greek city of Helike in 373 BC. In AD 79 medieval disasters destroyed cities such as Dunwich, England, and Rungholt, Germany.The 1755 Lisbon earthquake became a propagandistic windfall for Voltaire.

Nor is the way we respond entirely new. The National Academy of Public Administration, in 1993, expressed concern about the "CNN Syndrome":"Disaster and emergencies provide...