I’ve been purposefully silent about any comparisons between Hurricane Katrina and the California wild fires. I didn’t want to jump to any conclusions or be disrespectful of the people of another state who are going through a disaster. Many Californians came to Katrina-affected areas and volunteered to help us in our time of need. Many still come here to help us continue to rebuild. I am and will always be thankful for their help.
Similarities to Katrina
- People fleeing wild fires had to evacuate their homes with little notice.
- Many people’s homes burned to the ground and they lost everything they couldn’t take with them.
- They have to deal with FEMA.
- Partisan politics are involved in their aid and recovery.
Differences from Katrina
- The wildfire, while large, were still of a much smaller magnitude than Katrina.
- The nature of the disasters was entirely different. Recovering from fires is far different than recovering from hurricanes.
- The affected people were middle class, upper middle class, or wealthy. Many people affected in the Gulf Coast region were extremely poor.
- Affected people had their own transportation and didn’t have to rely on state-provided transportation to evacuate. In Louisiana, no transportation came to evacuate the people who didn’t have their own.
- Evacuation shelters were actually safe areas. There was no safe place in New Orleans where thousands of people were left to drown, suffer and/or die.
- Only 20 civilians died as a result of the wildfires in California. 1600 people died in Louisiana and Mississippi as a result of Hurricane Katrina.
- Outlying developments in affluent areas of Southern California were affected in the wildfires. A major U.S. city was affected in Katrina.
- People were permitted to return to their homes within days instead of months to assess damage and begin rebuilding.
- People were not evacuated to other states or spread to the four corners of the United States with no choice of destination.
- Most people affected by the wildfires had proper homeowners insurance to cover their losses. Many in New Orleans didn’t have insurance or didn’t have the right kind of insurance (flood insurance) and their losses were not covered.
- 80% of those who lost anything to everything to Katrina didn’t qualify for the SBA loans that were supposed to help them rebuild (myself included).
- California had a Republican Governor at the time of the wildfires. Louisiana had a Democrat Governor when Katrina struck.
- The President of the U.S. did not bad-mouth the California Governor on TV worldwide.
DIFFERENCES DISCUSSED
The wildfire news during the earliest reports sounded like commercials for how great California is to its residents and how well it took care of them, unlike Louisiana. It sounded to me like the media was being very tightly controlled by the government early on to keep a very positive spin on FEMA and the federal response to the California disaster. The phrase “FEMA’s lessons learned from Katrina” was used so often I think it must have been queued to every teleprompter and news feed throughout California.
The same rage seems to be going back and forth in the Southern California newspapers about building in disaster-prone areas and then expecting protection.
Hurricane disaster survivors just don’t seem to receive the same level of attention as wildfire survivors. There are still people living in FEMA trailers in Florida after Hurricane Charlie hit in 2004. I haven’t heard or read a thing about FEMA trailers in California. Maybe I’m missing the news. Hurricane recovery is slower by years than recovery from wildfires as well.
Infrastructure Failures and Rebuilding
It’s the same and yet it’s different from New Orleans. The areas of Southern California that burned were not inner city areas. Los Angeles didn’t burn.
There is no infrastructure in place to prevent wildfires from burning large areas so there was no infrastructure failure. There are procedures that could be followed to reduce the amount of natural fuel available, and in effect construct fire buffer zones around developed areas. There isn’t enough money allocated to do the controlled burning required to make such zones.
But in Louisiana, 80% of the largest, most populated city in the state flooded. The levee and flood control systems that were supposed to protect the city from such an event failed. There are many reasons why they failed, man-made and natural. But the biggest issue is it failed in a storm that it was supposed to have been built to withstand, a category 3 hurricane. Katrina was a category 3 storm when it made landfall.
The system failed in another category 3 hurricane in 1965, too. Hurricane Betsy was a category 3 storm and a lot of New Orleans flooded. The difference is there were fewer people living in New Orleans in 1965 than in 2005, there were far fewer surrounding wetlands filled in and developed, and there were a whole lot more wetlands between New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. There was also no CNN.
Forty years of subsidence and erosion have brought New Orleans 2 feet lower below sea level and 2000 square miles closer to the Gulf of Mexico. It takes 4 linear miles of wetlands to absorb one foot of hurricane storm surge. A thirty foot storm surge requires 120 miles of wetlands between the Gulf and a populated area to keep the surge from hitting the populated area. One-hundred twenty miles of wetlands haven’t surrounded New Orleans in a very long time.
Los Angeles doesn’t get closer to the wildfires. It gets farther away as the years pass and the developments around it spread, removing natural fuel sources.
Poverty and Affluence
The California wildfire disaster brought to light the affluence of the residents affected.
Hurricane Katrina brought to light the poverty of the residents affected and shined a beacon on the depth of poverty in America that so many people just can’t seem to believe exists.
Well, wake up, America! There are people in our own country who are just as impoverished as in any third-world country.
Maybe we should consider aiding our own citizens before we aid third-world countries. It would cost less and bring a minimum living standard we all would consider to be decent to every American. If we spent half of what we spend on aid to foreign nations on our own poor citizens we could have a truly rich and prosperous country from which to give generously. What does the current situation say about us as a whole? We’re a bunch of hypocrites.
Discrimination
Discrimination is still alive and well in the south in case you had any doubts about it. It’s getting better, but it will still take several more generations to wipe it out completely. I don’t think racial hatred and discrimination will end within my lifetime or even my son’s lifetime. I’m very sad to say that, but I believe it’s true. I hope I’m wrong.
What will eventually happen in both regions of our nation speaks loudly of the class divide in America. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer and much of the middle class is only a few paychecks away from slipping into poverty.
How are we as a nation going to deal with disaster recoveries? I hope better than we have in the past.
See more pictures in the Hurricane Katrina Picture Book by Jeffery Morgan.
Read Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City by Jed Horne.
Technorati Tags: California Wildfires, competent response, FEMA, Hurricane Katrina
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Posted on December 25th, 2007 by joubess
Filed under: Stories | 1 Comment »
