A sober warning in the wake of Katrina

Eschewing the blame game would seem a noble goal in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, especially with rotting bodies still being pulled from the murky floodwaters that have sunk New Orleans. Inevitably, though, the disaster almost immediately took on a political dimension, with local authorities blaming the federal government, and the federal government shuffling around and looking elsewhere before assuring the world that the fault lay with anybody else but them.

Whoever is eventually held to account over what transpired, the focus right now is on governmental incompetence. This is not necessarily borne out by the public: various polls have produced contradictory results – a CNN/USA Today Gallup poll claimed 42% of the American public rated Bush’s handling of the crisis as ‘terrible’, while a Washington Post poll suggested that his performance was approved of by 74% of Republicans. However, this incessant poll taking has been accompanied by frosty reportage from former Bush acolytes such as Fox News and the New York Times’ David Brooks. Some commentators have seen the American media’s critical response as nothing short of a revolution, an epochal moment when the normally supine hacks grit their teeth and respond with an all-out attack on federal incompetence. With mid-term elections coming looming, and a presidential approval rating already tethered by Iraq set to flatline, the administration’s formidable machinery is stirring into action. The New York Times reported on Wednesday that Karl Rove is orchestrating a plan to minimise political damage following Katrina, involving visits to Louisiana and Mississippi by high-profile administration figures, such as Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleeza Rice. For his part Mr. Bush has been flying back and forth between the South and Washington for a week now, burning up gallons of fuel whilst urging his countrymen to cut back on their consumption.

Some of the more vociferous critics of the Bush administration, including the former Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal, have laid out a whole battery of reasons as to why Katrina was solely the fault of the government. One of the more curious charges is that, by refusing to address climate change, the administration has contributed to global warming which has caused hurricanes like Katrina to become more and more frequent. It is an argument that is difficult to sustain as, while hurricane seasons are getting increasingly prolific and violent - no doubt in a large part due to global warming - it is a process that has been going on for decades. It is patently ridiculous to suggest that, had Kyoto been ratified, New Orleans would still be standing tall above the waves.

However, this line of inquiry does open up another facet of American society that is being largely ignored. The USA has, from its beginnings, considered itself a ‘frontier’ nation, well used to battling the elements and overcoming nature. Whether it was the inherent hostility of the indigenous population, the freak weather patterns, the inhospitable land, the recurrent earthquakes – America has long been a country which has prided itself in its ability to wrestle with the elements, and win. The notion of building a major city on, for example, an unstable fault line (San Francisco) or a concave bowl beneath sea level (New Orleans), seems faintly absurd, yet both feats were accomplished and great metropolises established. America’s oil consumption, the world’s largest and showing no signs of slowing down, further demonstrates the myth of dominance over nature. The country has never before met an obstacle that its rapid technological advances have not been unable to overcome. Whole spans of desert have been transformed into viable, liveable communities. Why should the oil age’s impending demise prove any different? Surely, the unspoken wisdom goes, a viable form of renewable energy will be discovered before oil supplies are gone?

Within certain departments of the federal government this myth no longer holds much sway. In 2001 the much-criticised Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) produced a shortlist of disasters that were likely to hit America over the coming decade. One was a terrorist attack on New York, which happened later that same year. Another was the flooding of New Orleans, which has duly come to pass. The third, and potentially most catastrophic, was the arrival of the fabled ‘Big One’ – a cataclysmic rift of the San Andreas Fault that could potentially return much of California to the desert from whence it rose. Were this to happen, the death toll could well be in the hundreds of thousands.

Nor are we in Britain entirely safe in our island nation. The Thames Flood Barrier is being raised more often each year – from three times in its first five years of operation, to 20 times in the winter of 2002-03 alone. More worryingly, it was initially designed to function until 2030 – and right now precious little is being done to consider what comes after that. The potential of natural disaster to subsume civilised society is becoming a greater and greater risk, and we should think carefully about the fact that the world’s richest and most powerful country was rendered helpless by the type of weather that is becoming more and more common.

It is often facetious to suggest that lessons can be ‘learned’ from natural disasters such as the one that struck the Gulf Coast nearly two weeks ago. Perhaps, in this case, it will serve to rock the myth of America’s – and, by extension, the world’s - mastery of its own land.