Part 8 (1/2)

Case study a.n.a.lysis.

This chapter presents three case studies. Each is summarised in Table 8.1. The first case study from Bangladesh unfolds in a period of post-colonial nation building; the remaining studies from Nicaragua and the USA occur in the contemporary period of globalising capital where political dominance is not simply concentrated in the state but more diffusely spread amongst national and international private sector and civil society interests. Each case is built around direct quotations from eyewitnesses or observers with comment on the pre- and post-disaster polity. The cases serve to ill.u.s.trate that adaptation is more than a narrow technical activity, and can encapsulate the political as well. In doing so adaptation becomes a contested s.p.a.ce that competing social actors attempt to capture at the level of symbol and discourse as well as through material actions. The final impacts of disaster events are difficult to describe as with pa.s.sing time new events place their influence on political trajectories. Two possibilities have been hypothesised: a critical juncture (Olson and Gawronski, 2003) describes those moments that when pa.s.sed cannot be reversed; in contrast an accelerated status quo (Klein, 2007) is felt when pre-disaster social and political relations are further entrenched through disaster. The core distinction between these models is between change as an outcome of the successful concentration (accelerated status quo) and contestation (critical juncture) of established political and a.s.sociated economic and cultural power (Pelling and Dill, 2010).

1970, East Pakistan (Bangladesh): the Bhola Cyclone and the politics of succession.

The Bhola Cyclone devastated East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). The failure of leaders.h.i.+p from West Pakistan (now Pakistan) enabled the disaster to feed into an already popular succession movement and is a prime example of a critical juncture event.

Following two hundred years of British rule, East Pakistan was formed in 1947, governed by Western Pakistan, some 1,000 miles away. Despite their shared Muslim religious heritage, the populations of Pakistan's two territories had significant cultural differences with the predominantly Bengali population of East Pakistan enjoying close cultural relations with Indian Bengalis living near their border (Was.h.i.+ngton Post, 1971). Differences between East and West Pakistan became politicised during the nation building process; for example, through West Pakistani leaders insisting that Urdu (the lingua franca of West Pakistan) be inst.i.tuted as the state language (Oldenburg, 1985). Against this background, a popular movement for cultural autonomy had existed in East Pakistan since 1947 and was given a political dimension by the political and economic disadvantages experienced by the Eastern province.

In 1970, Bengalis were living in what would soon become one of the world's most densely populated nations. Land scarcity forced Bengalis to build homes in areas subject to recurring floods. Increasing numbers pushed southward to clear and settle the Sunderban Forest (what used to be the home to the Bengal tiger), and deep into the south coast, which exposed them to the vagaries of the Bay of Bengal. (Sommer and Mosley, 1973:120) In 1970, a ma.s.sive typhoon hit: On 12 and 13 Nov 1970, a cyclone and tidal waves. .h.i.t Eastern Pakistan (now Bangladesh) resulting in colossal damages to both human lives and properties. Some 10,000 square miles, covering a number of off sh.o.r.e islands in the Bay of Bengal were affected. Total population affected was approximately 6.4 million and estimated death toll was in the region of 2 million. (MINDEF, 1970) Soon after the catastrophe, a medical team from Dacca (Dhaka) interviewed survivors who described either a gradual increasing of flood waters over a period of hours or conversely, a sudden 'thunderous roar followed by a wall of water'. The team reported: Where the water rose gradually, people scrambled on to roofs of their houses or scaled trees. But the houses frequently gave way, and only the strongest could maintain their grip on the wet and slippery tree trunks in the face of the 90 mile-per-hour winds. In areas where the tidal bore struck suddenly, there was even less hope of withstanding the force of the waves. (Sommer and Mosley, 1973:122) One witness to the devastation described the scene incredulously: Flying out to the Bay of Bengal 23 days later on persistent reports of ma.s.sive casualties, the rivers flowing into the ocean seemed clogged by the carca.s.ses of animals and debris. n.o.body believed us when we said these were corpses of human beings, in the thousands and thousands. The Islands of Hatiya and Sandip lost part of their population. Bhola and Manpura (and tens of smaller Islands and coastal areas like Kuakata) were swept almost clean of humans, animals and houses. (Sehgal, 2005) The central government in West Pakistan was either unable or unwilling to act. Commentator Amir Ayaz suggests that both physical and social distance stayed the hand of the central government: While a tidal wave of death and destruction swept over the eastern wing, the military government was slow to respond, paralysed by what I can only think of as a sense of remoteness. East Pakistan and its coastal people were just too far away. Which is a bit like the Bheels of Thar and the Koochis and other nomads of Balochistan. Mainstream Pakistan pa.s.ses them by. Imagine if the water supply of Islamabad were to be closed for two or three days running. The howls of anguish rising as a result would touch the heavens. (Amir, no date) When the government did finally act, its measures were limited to helping the least affected population, leaving the worst hit areas virtually abandoned. The medical team from Dacca (Dhaka) reported that: While the minimal amounts of bamboo distributed by the government were adequate for repairing the roof or sides of a house in the more northerly areas, they were wholly inadequate for rebuilding the entire structure, which was necessary in the more devastated coastal regions. The results were pathetic: tiny gra.s.s and straw huts, three of four feet wide and high and perhaps six feet long, each housing a family of two to eight persons. (Sommer & Mosley, 1973:125) Consequently, villagers in less affected areas were soon busy reconst.i.tuting the fabric of society, but this was not the case in the worst affected coastal regions. The team observed that: There the men were usually found squatting despondently in the centre of the village. They lacked all the implements basic to achieving self-sufficiency, and they had no money with which to buy them. (Sommer & Mosley, 1973:12728) The Pakistani government's failure to adequately respond to the devastation of the typhoon gave East Pakistan's majority party, the Bengali Awami League, a stronger position from which to negotiate. The UNDP supported Sustainable Development Networking (SDN) project explains: [T]he regime was widely seen as having botched (or ignored) its relief duties. The disaster gave further impetus to the Awami League, led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. The League demanded regional autonomy for East Pakistan, and an end to military rule. In national elections held in December, the League won an overwhelming victory across Bengali territory. (SDN, no date) In December 1970, just one month after the disaster, national elections were held. The Awami League took all but two National a.s.sembly seats reserved for the eastern region, and was suddenly launched as a majority political force on a par with West Pakistan's People's Party (Sen, 1973). Ikram Sehgal (2005) argues that the popular moral outrage over the government's poor response to the disaster catalysed the independence movement: The Federal Government remained distant, seemingly cold and unfeeling in Islamabad. The perception of little or no relief set the stage for far reaching adverse consequences. The cyclone brought the anti-Pakistan antagonism building up over the years to a head in such circ.u.mstances it was sheer madness to go through with the scheduled November 30 elections. The political result was a foregone conclusion, a ma.s.sive protest against the Federation, as it existed then, later became a mandate against the very continuity of Pakistan as a nation. (Sehgal, 2005) The election demonstrated Bengali resistance to the continuation of martial law and support for democracy and regional autonomy had coalesced into a powerful political movement. But secession was apparently an act of desperation. Philip Oldenburg (1985) a.s.serts that the Awami leaders.h.i.+p would not have been averse to taking a leaders.h.i.+p role in a consolidated Pakistan. He points to the fact that the Awami League did not announce secession until the central government reacted to the election results with ma.s.sive violence. Robert LaPorte (1972) writes that the West Pakistani reaction to the election was to conduct 'ethnic cleansing'. He explains that in order to crush the autonomy movement, the central government acted to rid the so-called 'misguided' Bengalis of the forces that were breaking up the nation. Thus the state proceeded to arrest or kill Awami League leaders leading to a ma.s.sive exodus of Bengalis to India, and ultimately to India's decision to engage its army to back the Bengali war of succession. In April 1971 the exiled government took oath with Tajuddin Ahmad as the first prime minister. Sadly independence did not free Banglades.h.i.+s from exploitative government, political violence or natural disaster. Nationwide famine struck in 1973 and 1974 (Sen, 1981). Coups, a.s.sa.s.sinations and claims for one party states have distorted national politics. Bangladesh is now considered to be one of the countries most at risk to the impacts of climate change and her population is highly vulnerable to riverine and coastal flooding as well as drought and food security.

Interestingly, the authors cited here whose work was published in academic journals make no mention of the catastrophic typhoon in their a.n.a.lyses of the events surrounding Bangladesh independence. Whereas the authors published in public forums (NGO report and OP Ed, respectively) write as though the connection between the failure of the central state to provide for the population following the typhoon, and increased resistance to West Pakistan rule was patently self-evident. It is likely that the relative newness of treating environmental crises as politically significant events, combined with an academic avoidance of anything that could be perceived or misunderstood as environmental determinism, explains why the disaster did not figure in the a.n.a.lyses of the former.

In summary the disaster, set into motion by socio-political policies that forced Bengalis to live in conditions of high vulnerability, swelled the ranks of the discontented and radicalised many. Pakistani state violence against Bengalis, linked to the dominant ideology of the h.o.m.ogenous nation-state, effectively closed s.p.a.ce for Bengali manoeuvrability. The disaster pushed popular sentiment towards support for a war of secession.

1998, Nicaragua: Hurricane Mitch, a missed opportunity for transformation.

Hurricane Mitch exemplifies resistance in the social contract before and after a catastrophic event. Political interests both generated vulnerability and risk in Nicaragua and diluted the promise of the reconstruction period which was presented as an opportunity to break from the past and turn reconstruction into a transformative development moment. Despite transformational rhetoric including the decentralisation of development governance after Mitch, material, progressive change has been limited: a missed opportunity for adaptation to enhance progressive development.

The contemporary history of Nicaragua is eventful and dramatic. Michael Pisani neatly summarises some of the extraordinary socio-political shocks sustained by Nicaragua over the course of just 25 years: It is difficult to discuss present-day Nicaragua without describing the astounding transformation that has taken place in the country over the past generation. In brief, these extraordinary events and changes include 1) insurrection and popular revolution, 2) counter-revolution and low-intensity warfare (the Contra War), 3) 100,000 dead as a direct or indirect result of armed conflict (2.5 percent of the population) and a halving of national output, 4) a period of hyperinflation that reached an annualized 33,000 percent in 1988, 5) socialisation of the economy, 6) privatisation of the economy, 7) debt crisis including a 1990 per capita foreign debt figure of $2,867 in which per capita GDP was $469 or a foreign debt-to-income ration of 6.1 to 1, 8) seven national leaders (19792002), and 9) three debilitating natural disasters (the omnipresent 1972 earthquake in Managua and two destructive hurricanes, Hurricane Mitch in 1998 and Hurricane Joan in 1988. (Pisani, 2003:112) Given the role that Anastasio Somoza Debayle's mishandling of the 1972 earthquake reconstruction played in preparing the Nicaraguan population for popular insurrection (see Table 8.1), it is not surprising that the Sandinistas moved quickly to improve the national system for disaster mitigation and response after gaining power. The Nicaraguan Inst.i.tute for Territorial Studies (INETER) which currently houses state scientists in geology, meteorology, geophysics departments, produces the nations' maps, registers land and provides data for land use policy was created by legislation signed by the Sandinista government in 1981. In 1982 the government transformed the Nicaraguan Civil Defence into a nationwide network of civilians dedicated to promulgating the revolution amongst the Nicaraguan populace while the US funded Contras attempted to topple the government through low intensity warfare: a clear case of adaptation combining a technical and political ambition. However, the Civil Defence was not merely a propaganda machine; by the late 1980s Nicaragua for the first time had a cadre of at least rudimentarily trained emergency managers (Olson et al., 2001).

In 1990 a peaceful transition in power saw a landslide victory for the neo-liberal National Opposition Union. The new government allowed the Civil Defence to continue its functions proving effective during the Pacific Coast tsunami of 1992, and, after European Union funding helped link the organisation with the scientists of Nicaragua's Inst.i.tute for Territorial Studies (INETER, 1998), it performed especially well during Hurricane Cesar (Ibid.). Thus, in Nicaragua, three of the basic elements fundamental to effective disaster mitigation were ostensibly already in place when Hurricane Mitch battered the isthmus: 1) a national inst.i.tution housing earth scientists and providing early warning; 2) an established national network of civil defence; and 3) an organised citizenry accustomed to working with civil defence. What happened?

What turned Mitch from a natural hazard into a human disaster was a chain reaction of social vulnerabilities created by long-term climate change, environmental degradation, poverty, social inequality, population pressure, rapid urbanization and international debt. (Rodgers, 1999) Multinational companies financed many of the coffee plantations neatly terraced into the mountainsides of Nicaragua and the banana plantations cared out of the lush coastal regions of Honduras. Both types of plantations were viewed as beneficial economic enterprises but they had the secondary effect of displacing small farmers further into the mountains where they in turn cut down forests to grow subsistence crops[...]But the long term environmental consequences of clear-cutting land for agricultural purposes were never antic.i.p.ated in the region's development plans. Potential economic losses were never calculated, nor were mitigating actions taken to reduce the harmful effect of erosion. (Comfort et al., 1999:40) Comfort et al. (1999) identify austerity measures required by externally imposed structural adjustment programmes as the impetus for cutbacks in public services such as health and transportation, which are in turn responsible for reductions in the capacity of local and national governments to respond effectively to the disaster. Olson et al. (2001) provide evidence of how these policies affected Civil Defence where almost half of the 58 officer positions distributed across seven regional offices were not filled.

From October 2131 1998 the western and northern coasts as well as the central region of Nicaragua experienced from three to five times the rainfall ever recorded. According to the Nicaraguan government Hurricane Mitch destroyed or damaged 151,215 homes, 512 schools, 140 health centres, 5,695 roads and 1,933 bridges. The government confirmed 3,045 people dead as a result of the disaster (Olson et al., 2001). These human and material losses occurred in a country with a population of only 4.5 million people. Two thirds of the total fatalities a.s.sociated with the storm occurred in one ghastly 'disaster within a disaster': The single most horrific event occurred in Nicaragua on October 30, 1998, when the side of the Casita volcano collapsed. Loose volcanic ash acc.u.mulated from centuries of eruptions became a deadly flow of mud and debris known as a lahar. During the night, it hurtled downhill at speeds of up to 60 miles an hour for seven miles, burying 2,000 people in the villages of El Porvernir and Rolando Rodriguez. (USAID, 2005:4) The magnitude of the national disaster was not due to a lack of an early warning system. Meteorologists from INETER tracked and duly reported the location and acceleration of the storm (INETER, 1998), providing the government with the information it possessed in a timely and efficient manner. But this was not sufficient: knowledge of the hazardous geology and population at risk was not available and had certainly not been acted on to reduce development of this area (USGS, 1999). Risk was produced as a result of a combined lack of appropriate scientific knowledge and an underlying political economy that allowed, or forced, the poor to colonise a hazardous location. Political inaction aggravated the impact of Mitch. Despite the enormity of the environmental phenomenon taking place, and several days into what was becoming a regional catastrophe, President Aleman failed to act on government ministers' advice that a state of emergency should be declared and evacuations and rescue missions organised. In an essay published shortly after the disaster, the Director of the Nicaraguan Centre of International Studies, Alejandro Bendana, suggests that one reason President Aleman refused to initiate a ma.s.sive, organised emergency operation to mitigate the effects of the storm was that this sort of action would be reminiscent of the populist campaigns conducted by his political nemesis, the Sandinistas: 'No he said, such a mobilization would be something that the Sandinistas would do and he certainly was no Sandinista' (Bendana, 1999).

The president's refusal to respond appropriately to the needs of the Nicaraguan population before and after the storm was judged by international a.n.a.lysts as likely to result in political fallout: a.s.sessments of the political impact of the hurricane are necessarily highly tentative at this stage. However, early indications suggest that in the medium term, the disaster may lead to an increase in popular opposition to the government of President Arnoldo Aleman Lacayo. For several weeks before the hurricane struck, producers had been calling for government a.s.sistance to help them cope with the impact of higher than usual rainfall through October. However, the government did not call a state of emergency until early November, after the hurricane had struck. This is likely to reinforce a growing sense among the populace that the current administration is indifferent to popular sentiment. (EIU, 1998:7, cited in Olson and Gawronski, 2003) The partisan politics of Nicaragua were not the only hazard facing Aleman, who was also conscious of the need to conform to the expectations and conditionalities imposed by international financial inst.i.tutions. His biggest concern was maintaining the approval of the International Monetary Fund: The fact that the government hesitated greatly before even declaring a state of emergency after Mitch is evidence of a desire to avoid the responsibility for allocating ma.s.sive resources to emergency a.s.sistance, thus increasing public spending and violating the conditions imposed by the structural adjustment programme. Another possible reason for not declaring a state of emergency was that a failure to mobilise large-scale human resources for the relief effort would (and did) expose the extremely limited capacity to respond to such situations by the scaled-down civil service. (Rocha and Christoplos, 2001:249) Indeed, what led to Aleman's political downfall and eventual conviction on multiple counts of corruption was not the loss of popular support, but the loss of support from international financial inst.i.tutions. In Nicaragua authoritarianism is the norm and corruption is extremely high, but these issues have typically remained low on the list of popular concerns (IDESO, 2001). President Aleman's top-down and personalised approach to governance and his stunningly high level of corruption before and after Mitch (Walker, 2000) failed to significantly change pre-existing popular opinion of regime legitimacy. However, carrying out the Was.h.i.+ngton consensus required that the leaders.h.i.+p maintain international legitimacy. When this was lost and it became clear that international players favoured Enrique Bolanos it set off a chain reaction as Aleman's support network realigned itself to accept the new internationally approved leader, and abandoned Aleman to his fate. A change in president had been affected, but this served to strengthen the neo-liberal orientation of government so that ideological regime change was not achieved.

Human security has not prospered under neo-liberalism. Effective risk management has not met expectations post-Mitch in El Salvador or Nicaragua (Wisner, 2000) despite receiving international aid and adopting a national rhetoric of 'learning the lessons of Mitch', neoliberal state restructuring has precluded their implementation. Comfort et al. (1999) use the Honduran and Nicaraguan cases to support their argument that risk and hazard mitigation strategies should be integrated into social policy, especially development schemes. They point to ways in which the s.h.i.+ft in the social contract under neoliberalism from local to global interests is given material expression through land use and ultimately the distributions of risk in society.

Hurricane Mitch was remarkable because of the tremendous loss of life, social upheaval and economic devastation that it wrought but also because of the various local, national, regional, international and especially supranational responses it engendered. The restructuring of Central American states to conform to the United States' political and economic agenda for the post-Cold War period, which is sometimes referred to as the Was.h.i.+ngton Consensus, did not of course begin with Hurricane Mitch. However, this disaster gave the United States, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, and the Inter-American Development Bank a platform from which to further their visions for region-wide transformation. Indeed the name adopted by the group of advisors was the Consultative Group for the Reconstruction and Transformation of Central America, and its logo states that 'reconstruction must not be at the expense of transformation'. The second meeting of this group, held in Stockholm 258 May 1999, resulted in the 'Stockholm Declaration' in which six goals were elaborated: * Reduce the social and ecological vulnerability of the region, as the overriding goal.

* Reconstruct and transform Central America on the basis of an integrated approach of transparency and good governance.

* Consolidate democracy and good governance, reinforcing the process of decentralisation of governmental functions and powers, with the active partic.i.p.ation of civil society.

* Promote respect for human rights as a permanent objective. The promotion of equality between men and women, the rights of children, of ethnic groups and other minorities should be given special attention.

* Coordinate donor efforts, guide by priorities set by the recipient countries.

* Intensify efforts to reduce the external debt burden of the region.

These were exciting times. Disaster management in other words, proactive, integrated climate change adaptation had been explicitly tied to the goals of inclusive governance, decentralised power, citizen partic.i.p.ation, the promotion of human rights and debt reduction. A number if a.s.sessments of progress have, unfortunately, not found these goals to have been met (Christoplos et al., 2009). Even shortly after the declaration Rocha and Christoplos (2001) observe that while some conceptual advances were made at the national level, such as the recognition that more appropriate agricultural practices and soil conservation may mitigate future disasters, and that environmental concerns such as forest fires and extensive clear cutting for cattle ranching must be addressed, not all post-Mitch initiatives were working to reduce risk. For example, the World Bank proposed to the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry that they establish a publicly financed scheme of 'rainfall insurance', which would reimburse farmers' losses during times of drought or flooding: The economic justification for such a programme is to encourage farmers to adopt higher risk strategies. Agro-ecological risk-reduction practices, such as inter-cropping, are described as obstacles to achieving maximum potential production. The argument is that if farmers knew that they would be reimbursed for losses they would take the risk of abandoning agro-ecological production techniques in order to obtain greater profit. (Rocha and Christoplos, 2001:243) As with other areas of political life, discursive compet.i.tion was decisive in shaping policy. Feeding the Stockholm Declaration goals through the dominant neo-liberal lens had some curious but perhaps not surprising results. In the name of improving state performance, while some advances were made in citizen partic.i.p.ation and corruption, more marked was support for large scale privatisation of state a.s.sets including sale of the state-owned telephone company, the restructuring of the electrical company, the private administration of water supply and the opening of the petroleum sector to private investors (IADB, 1999).

Rocha and Christoplos (2001) conclude that any impact on policies or their implementation is doubtful. This is for structural reasons that extend beyond the state and the influence of international inst.i.tutions: 'The isolation of NGOs, as elite inst.i.tutions with little base in true civil society, must be broken if they are to become a vehicle for the integration of disaster mitigation and preparedness concerns in national policies and inst.i.tutional practice' (Rocha and Christoplos, 2001:250).

Demeritt et al. (2005) argue that international financial inst.i.tutions fostered government policy in post-Mitch Nicaragua have promoted the liberal modernising of the state through the legal creation of a disaster prevention system (SINAPRED). This structurally links virtually all state ministries, while at the same time privatising key state services converting Nicaragua into a lucrative site for transnational disaster prevention agencies. The continuing transnationalisation of security in Nicaragua has resulted in the creation of a cohort of high level bureaucrats who are ostensibly responsible for designing and orchestrating a national disaster prevention plan; however, their primary work consists of middle-managing foreign projects and their work product is monitored and evaluated by World Bank officials, not the Nicaraguan people (Demeritt et al., 2005).

2005, New Orleans, USA: transformation denied by political dilution.

Hurricane Katrina has become a touchstone event in the USA. It demonstrates well the deep social, and in this case racial, determinants of individual adaptive capacity and vulnerability and the ways in which successive administrative systems failed first to mediate in the urban development that generated exposure and then to respond to the disaster and recovery. The disaster brought scrutiny and questions of legitimacy for local and national politicians, leading to reform in technical and administrative systems but limited indication of transformational reform. The lack of transformation is not for want of alternative visions or discourses but the failure of these to overcome popular rejection of politics and the dilution of political power through privatisation, which simultaneously removes public accountability (see below).

Michael Dyson (2006) found racial inequity in New Orleans an important enough factor in the Katrina disaster to begin his book with a discussion of some of the social conditions that reproduce it: New Orleans has a 40 percent literacy rate: over 50 percent of black ninth graders will not graduate in four years ... Louisiana expends an average of $4,724 per student and has the third-lowest rank for teacher salaries in the nation. The black dropout rates are high and nearly 50,000 students cut cla.s.s every day. When they are done with school, many young black males end up at Angola Prison, a correctional facility located on a former plantation where inmates still perform manual labor and where 90% of them will eventually die. New Orleans's employment picture is equally gloomy, since industry long ago deserted the city, leaving in its place a service economy that caters to tourists and that thrives on low-paying, transient and unstable jobs. (Dyson, 2006:8) Part of the shame of New Orleans that cast doubt on political judgements was its predictability. In September 2004, just shy of one year before Hurricane Katrina, Jon Elliston published an article ent.i.tled 'Disaster in the Making'. The article carefully details how within months of gaining the presidency, George W. Bush presided over the dismantling and privatisation of the FEMA. Critical programmes developed over years were dropped, the agency's budget slashed and by 2004 FEMA had lost much of its capacity to fund mitigation projects. Meanwhile, following the 11 September 2001 attacks, the burden put on cash-strapped states to pay for anti-terrorism projects made them increasingly dependent on FEMA for help with disaster mitigation. But by 2004 the agency was forced to turn many away: In North Carolina, a state regularly damaged by hurricanes and floods, FEMA recently refused the state's request to buy backup generators for emergency support facilities. And the budget cuts have halved the funding for a mitigation program that saved an estimated $8.8 million in recovery costs in three eastern N.C. communities alone after 1999's Hurricane Floyd. In Louisiana, another state vulnerable to hurricanes, requests for flood mitigation funds were rejected by FEMA this summer. (Elliston, 2004) After failing to win the bid for a flood mitigation project for Jefferson Parish (which one year later would represent together with New Orleans city proper 89 per cent of Katrina-affected population in the metropolitan area) (The Brookings Inst.i.tution, 2005), Flood Zone Manager Tom Rodriguez told Elliston, 'You would think we would get maximum consideration for the funds. This is what the grant program called for. We were more than qualified for it' (Elliston, 2004).

Elliston's interviews with FEMA employees as well as unaffiliated academics reveal that the 'consultant culture' of privatisation had gutted what used to be a highly effective national service. States and communities now had to bid for mitigation grants from a diminished fund and in a system that made it harder for less affluent cities and communities to compete. Privatisation eroded the agency's inst.i.tutional memory, effectively disregarding years of agency experience as disaffected staff joined the ranks of consultants. But as both scholars and pract.i.tioners observed, the lowest bidder does not necessarily do the best job, and private consultants do not necessarily acc.u.mulate and convert generations of experience into inst.i.tutional memories that support effective action. In an essay submitted to the New Yorker, John McPhee (1987) couldn't have made the connection between business interests and maladaptive development any clearer: In the nineteen-fifties, after Louisiana had been made nervous by the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Corps of Engineers built the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, a s.h.i.+pping ca.n.a.l that saves forty miles by traversing marsh country straight from New Orleans to the Gulf. The ca.n.a.l is known as Mr. Go, and s.h.i.+pping has largely ignored it. Mr. Go, having eroded laterally for twenty-five years, is as much as three times its original width. It has devastated twenty-four thousand acres of wetlands, replacing them with open water. A mile of marsh will reduce a coastal-storm-surge wave by about one inch. Where fifty miles of marsh are gone, fifty inches of additional water will inevitably surge. The Corps has been obliged to deal with this fact by completing the ring of levees around New Orleans, thus creating New Avignon, a walled medieval city accessed by an instate that jumps over the walls. (McPhee, 1987) The Army Corp of Engineers has been severely criticised for its lack of understanding of ecological systems, leading them to engage in counterproductive development and mitigation work. Nevertheless, it should be said that as engineers they recognised that the levee system might not hold up against a category four or five hurricane or even a category three if it hovered over the city. Indeed, one year before Katrina, the Corp proposed to study how New Orleans could be protected from a powerful hurricane, but according to independent journalist Sidney Blumenthal (2005), the Bush administration ordered that the research not be undertaken. Blumenthal moves up the chain of command to identify the administration as responsible for the policy that all but guaranteed disaster: The Bush administration's policy of turning over wetlands to developers almost certainly also contributed to the heightened level of the storm surge ... Bush had promised 'no net loss' of wetlands, a policy launched by his father's administration and bolstered by President Clinton. But he reversed his approach in 2003, unleas.h.i.+ng the developers. The Army Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency then announced they could no longer protect wetlands unless they were somehow related to interstate commerce. (Blumenthal, 2005) Against this backdrop of maladaptation in the early morning hours of 29 August 2005, meteorologists tracking the trajectory of category four Hurricane Katrina reported that it had s.h.i.+fted direction away from the city of New Orleans and was heading into the Gulf of Mexico. Many thought that a major disaster had been avoided. Then reports came in that some of the levees protecting New Orleans had been breached and that vast areas of the city were flooding. Soon afterwards, televised images began to appear. Though the storm affected a wide swath of Gulf Coast and killed at least 1,300 people in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, Americans were transfixed by the spectacle of a humanitarian disaster unfolding in a major city in the United States.

The videos of mostly African-Americans struggling to survive in the h.e.l.lish conditions of New Orleans' Superdome and Convention Center, in sweltering heat, with no electricity or running water, while basic supplies and transport failed to arrive, were juxtaposed in American consciousness to those seen a day earlier: tens of thousands of cars leaving the relatively white suburbs towards safety. As reports came in that the elderly residents of several nursing homes had also been abandoned, an already alarmed nation unused to confronting inequality in such stark relief ignited a national level search for blame (Frymer et al., 2005).

Shock alone has not been enough to dislodge dominant cultural att.i.tudes towards race and cla.s.s in the US. Indeed some elements of the television media in particular have been criticised for resorting to presenting the disaster through a lens of cultural stereotypes that moved close to blaming the victims of the disaster for their own vulnerability (The Brookings Inst.i.tution, 2005). Moreover, interpretations of the government's response to the crisis fractured along clear racial lines. According to a Was.h.i.+ngton Post-ABC poll, nearly three out of four white Americans did not believe that the government would have responded more quickly if the citizens trapped in the Superdome were wealthier and white, whereas the same proportion of blacks disagreed; and more than six in ten African-Americans believed that the poor relief effort reflected continuing racial inequity, while seven in ten whites rejected this view (Fletcher and Morin, 2005).

A second narrative in post-Katrina critique focused on administrative incompetence and had an overtly political dimension. The Democratic Party galvanised partisan anger through a mailer and email blitz focusing on the administration's incompetence; 'throw the b.u.ms out' urged the on-line organisation MoveOn.org. The ma.s.s media fuelled the campaign by first attacking Michael Brown, the head of FEMA, characterising him as a Bush crony who was awarded the job despite, it was claimed, being unqualified for the position. Even republicans wanted to know why the federal government was so slow to act.

Michael Brown's resignation shortly after the debacle caused a temporary lull in public furor. But this was revived in early March when the a.s.sociated Press distributed a videotape of Federal Disaster officials warning the president that the storm could breach levees, and recorded Brown voicing his concern that there were not enough disaster teams to help evacuees at the Superdome. The recorded briefing occurred one day before the hurricane hit. The videotape, along with seven days of briefing transcripts, raised doubts about the administration's claim that the 'fog of war' blinded them to the magnitude of the disaster, and directly contradicted the president's statement made four days after the storm, 'I don't think anybody antic.i.p.ated the breach of the levees.' (Fletcher and Morin, 2005) A more nuanced discourse has arisen from academic and think tank commentary that has tended to view the disaster from the viewpoint of those involved. One of two post-Katrina reports commissioned by The Brookings Inst.i.tution (The Brookings Inst.i.tution, 2005) demonstrates how the once racially mixed and vibrant city of New Orleans was transformed after World War II, and how these changes affected the contours of the 2004 disaster. Jim Crow laws, deindustrialisation and white flight into suburban neighbourhoods, combined with a host of federal housing and absurdly dangerous growth and land use policies. The result was the creation of a deeply segregated population of highland dwelling middle-cla.s.s whites and increasingly marginalised lowland dwelling African-Americans, racially distinct communities existing in two different universes, with the latter living on borrowed land and borrowed time. A report from the Inst.i.tute for Women's Policy Research observes that the establishment of three historically African-American colleges in the city supported the development of a highly educated African-American middle cla.s.s, and that recovery projects should tap into this extremely valuable resource (Gault et al., 2005). Another Brookings report is careful to observe that some middle-cla.s.s whites suffered great losses, and not all of the poor are African-American (Berube and Katz, 2005). Yet all of these reports demonstrate that race, gender and poverty contributed separately and in combination with environmentally unsustainable policies to create particular citizens and communities significantly more vulnerable to hazards and crisis than others. They propose a radically different vision for the reconstruction of the metropolitan area, and offer concrete suggestions on how to integrate socio-economic diversity with ecological sustainability.