Aug
25
Katrina and the Rising Tide
August 25, 2006 |
Thousands still cling to their homes where the upper floors are yet dry, but thousands more have need to be removed in boats and established in great camps on the higher ground. Other thousands are camped upon broken levees. This is the pitiable plight of a lost battle.
27,000 square miles were inundated….An estimated 330,000 were rescued from rooftops, trees, isolated patches of high ground, and levees. The Red Cross ran 154… tent cities. A total of 325,554 people, a majority of them African American, lived in these camps for as long as 4 months. An additional 300,000 people outside the camps were fed and clothed by the Red Cross. Most of these were white. Of the remaining 300,000 people most fled. A few cared for themselves surviving on their own food and on their own property.
The first quote above is from the U.S. Commerce Secretary and the second from a New York Times report. The commerce secretary was Herbert Hoover and the flood occurred in 1927.
“Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America” (John M. Barry)
As we commemorate the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, I believe it is important to try ond put things in a broad perspective. I was speaking with Jerry Goolsby at the AMA Educators Conference in Chicago earlier this month. Jerry teaches at Loyola University in New Orleans and I asked him how things were progressing with the reconstruction in Lousiana and environs. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised at his reply which was to say that things were still in pretty bad shape.
From an “up north” perspective, since news coverage had dwindled and time had passed, I figured that things must be getting back to normal. My conversation with Jerry and the subsequent television coverage as the anniversary of Katrina neared, showed a more accurate picture.
Jerry also recommended that I read “Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America” (John M. Barry) a 1997 book which deals with how this country has tried to ‘tame’ the Mississippi River and the Delta region and culminates in the great Mississippi flood of 1927.
The book is fascinating on many levels. It talks, not only about the development of the levee system and the impact of the flood, but it makes connections between the flood and the social, political and economic conditions that resulted in the northern migration of the black workforce as well as the election of Herbert Hoover as President. Much of the discussion that revolves around the political and governmental machinations that led to mismanagement and ill-advised policies that affect us to this day, seem both tragic and ironic in light of the devastation of Hurricane Katrina 78 years later.
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