You could say that Hurricane Katrina, which roared up from the Gulf of Mexico in 2005 like an apocalyptic whirlwind, laying waste to city and country alike, was the Vietnam of American storms.
There had been deadly and destructive storms before in this country, but Katrina exposed social and logistical weaknesses that Americans had preferred to ignore. The shocking images from New Orleans, which seemed to emanate from a Third World country on the brink of civil war, showed a global viewing audience how deeply race, politics, and money are still intertwined in this country.
Katrina showcased a tone-deaf president; an inept FEMA; paralyzing tensions between federal and state authorities; cronyism in the White House; incompetence in the Army Corps of Engineers; an utter breakdown in law and order in a historic city; and the cynical divisions in our country between white and black, North and South, and above all, rich and poor.
Some of us were so disgusted by the government’s response to the storm – an event that was forecast for days, unlike, say, a terrorist attack — that we said to ourselves, “No one’s going to help us in an emergency; it’s up to us to prepare.”
A few even went so far as to search out a self-sufficient little place far from the city – just in case. For instance, in the rolling hills of Perry County.
And, in fact, when Hurricane Irene stomped up the East Coast last week, the Olshans were comfortably installed on St. Peter’s Church Road, bottled water and hand-cranked radio at the ready.
As it turns out, a hundred miles from the storm track, behind the powerful shoulder of Blue Mountain, which helped to block the worst of the storm, Hurricane Irene was a windy, rainy night, not so different from any other powerful summer storm.
It was a different story in Baltimore, where gale-force wind and torrential rains wreaked havoc with the power grid. As I write this, five days after the last of Irene’s clouds melted away, there are hundreds of thousands of people without electricity in the region.
Those further north, however, got the worst of it. By now we’ve all seen pictures of the extreme flooding in New Jersey and the ruined roads and bridges of Vermont.
There’s an interesting overtone to the post-Irene clean-up and reconstruction. Many of the comments attached to online news stories bemoan the official response, on the one hand, but offer self-satisfied congratulations about the community response, on the other.
“Here in New England,” the consensus seems to be, “we pull together in a crisis, neighbor helping neighbor. That’s just the flip side of our flinty independent streak. Unlike those…people in New Orleans!”
For the record, I’d just like to remind these people of some of the key differences between Katrina and Irene:
Hurricane Katrina was the sixth strongest hurricane ever recorded, and the third strongest ever to make landfall in the United States. It was a category 5 storm — meaning, sustained wind of 175 mph — the day before landfall, and a strong category 3 — 120 mph sustained winds — when it churned into the Louisiana and Mississippi coast.
Whereas:
Hurricane Irene strengthened into a category 3 storm over the Bahamas, but weakened as it traveled towards the U.S. coast. It made landfall on the Outer Banks of North Carolina as a category 1 — sustained winds of 85 mph.
A category 1 hurricane is a serious storm. Winds of that intensity, when applied to trees whose root systems have been compromised by rain-saturated soil, can add up to massive damage to homes and power lines.
But flooding has been the real legacy of Irene, as it is for most hurricanes. You might remember the brief euphoria after Katrina passed over New Orleans as a much weaker storm than had been feared –- a mere category 3, as opposed to a city-leveling category 5. But the euphoria was short-lived, as the levees and pumping stations failed, one by one; we all watched in horror as the bowl-shaped city slowly drowned.
Something similar happened with Irene. Many people, inconvenienced by evacuation plans and transit shut-downs, were critical of what they saw as a government overreaction to the storm. But then, in light of the floods that followed, the deadly seriousness of the storm sunk in.
The grimmest statistic of all? Katrina killed more than 1800 people; the death toll from Irene, to date, is around 50.
Any loss of life is painful, but it could have been much, much worse. We learned valuable lessons about storm preparedness from Katrina. But let’s not draw spurious conclusions about the hardiness of one part of our population versus the weakness of another.
Irene was a much smaller storm.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 08 September 2011
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
