JAZZMAN CHRONICLES:
DISSEMINATE FREELY
ANOTHER STORM OF THE CENTURY
By Jack Random
You tell me over
and over and over again, my friend,
Ah, you don’t
believe we’re on the eve of destruction.
The Eve of
Destruction
Barry McGuire
If you’re living anywhere along the Gulf Coast, you must be
tired of hearing that this is the storm of the century. If you’re living in the city of
Houston, you might recall Tropical Storm Allison in 2001 or Hurricane Rita on
the heels of Katrina in 2005. Rita
was the “most intense tropical storm ever observed in the Gulf of Mexico.” It took one hundred and twenty lives
and cost an estimated twelve billion in damage. Of course that pales in comparison to Katrina, which took
well over a thousand lives and cost over one hundred billion. [1]
I refuse to reenter the debate on whether you can blame
global climate change for any specific climate catastrophe. If you’re in the path of the storm or
know someone who is, the game is over.
You can no longer deny the overwhelming truth without inviting a
diagnosis of schizophrenia.
It is bitterly ironic that those who reside in the victim
zone are most likely to deny the realities of global warming. Of course, the rich and powerful from
Florida to Corpus Christi will always escape the danger posed by hurricanes,
tropical storms and floods. Their
homes are built on higher grounds and they can afford to evacuate at a moment’s
notice. The poor and working class
find housing where they can – inevitably in flood zones – and simply cannot
afford to get out of harm’s way.
Katrina was an opportunity for the moneyed class to
reconstitute their city, to rid themselves of tens of thousands of poor black
folk with their substandard housing, and bring in gentrification. A lot of money was made on the backs of
the poor who lost their homes and their places in the city of jazz.
What will happen in
Houston?
Hurricane Katrina uncovered a
slew of dirty little secrets. The
most damning was this: The Army
Corps of Engineers knew the levees would fail – if not from Katrina, then some
other storm. The work of shoring
up the levees was neglected and substandard. Katrina was a catastrophe waiting to happen. The people in the lower ninth
ward and other low-lying areas slammed by a twenty-foot wall of water would
lose their lives, their homes and their roots. The insurance companies would not cover even those who
bought substandard policies. The
government would offer little assistance – pennies on the dollar – for a
lifetime of hard work and accomplishment.
As the residents of the New
Jersey shore would learn years later after Hurricane Sandy, government talks a
good game while the cameras are still rolling but the money comes up short when
it’s time to rebuild the lives of working people.
Of the hundreds of thousands who
fled New Orleans, as many as half that number never made it home. They were poor people and the city that
gave them life and raised them from generation to generation could no longer
afford them. They were replaced
with people who had more to offer – in terms of money and resources. The color of New Orleans
lightened. Significantly more
black people than white people were permanently displaced.
Ironically, the city that
inherited more of Katrina’s diaspora was Houston, Texas, where they became
trapped in a deadly cycle of poverty and tragedy. A disproportionate number of the displaced from Katrina and
Rita ended up in FEMA apartments in the high-crime neighborhoods of Houston’s
southwest sector. They suffered
the Memorial Day floods in 2015 and the Tax Day floods in 2016. Now this. [2,3]
In New Orleans, decades of
industrialization and lack of planning destroyed the wetlands that protected
the city. In Houston, the dirty
little secret that will come to light as this disaster unfolds in slow motion
on the news station of your choice, is that the development on the prairies and
wetlands surrounding the city have hastened the city’s demise. Those wetlands and prairies used to
soak up water – water that now flows through the city streets.
Much has been and will be said
about the failure to call for a mass evacuation. The truth is:
The state of Texas, the city of Houston and indeed the entire nation is
not prepared for mass evacuations.
We don’t have the transportation infrastructure. It would require a massive influx of
expenditures with elevated mass transit from every major coastal city to inland
evacuation centers stocked with warehouses of food, water, medicines, fuel,
generators and shelters. We are in
fact not even willing to invest in our roads, tunnels, bridges and the dams
that now stand between the current disaster in Houston and a tragedy of truly
biblical proportions. Those dams
were built in the 1940’s.
Our president has proposed
cutting the budget of the Federal Emergency Management Agency by $600
million. So much for emergency
preparedness. It won’t happen
again. Right. It can’t happen again. Right. It’s fake news.
It’s a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese. Right. Unless
you’re in the path of the storm.
Our president would rather
invest more blood and treasure into the bottomless pit of war in Afghanistan
than rebuild our own nation or prepare for the inevitable disasters to
come.
Whatever happened to America
first?
We don’t need a wall on the
southern border. We need flood
walls on the Gulf of Mexico. We
don’t need money for endless wars across the globe. We need money to mitigate the harm from global climate
change.
Jazz.
1. Wikipedia: Blake, Eric S; Landsea, Christopher W;
Gibney, Ethan J. National
Hurricane Center (August 2011).
The Deadliest, Costliest and Most Intense United States Tropical
Cyclones from 1851 to 2010 (And Other Frequently Requested Hurricane
Facts).
2. “10 Years Later, There’s So
Much We Don’t Know About Where Katrina Survivors Ended Up” by Laura Bliss. Citylab, August 25, 2015.
3. “Houston Wasn’t Built for a
Flood Like This” by Henry Grabar.
Slate, August 27, 2017.
