The Disaster Profiteers: How Natural Disasters Make the Rich Richer and the Poor Even Poorer

by John C. Mutter

  When the canals were built, quite a bit was known about rivers and river flood control. The river levees were built with good historic information to go on as well as considerable experience with levee engineering. Floods that raise the river level high happen regularly; hurricanes, in contrast, don’t occur as often. For that reason, those who designed and constructed the canal levees paid little attention to the possibility of a major hurricane.

  All that changed in 1965 with Hurricane Betsy. The storm had a peculiar track and made several tight loops before making landfall in Florida and New Orleans. Unlike Katrina, Betsy posed a very difficult forecasting challenge. The death toll was only 76,17 even though Betsy was the same strength on the Saffir-Simpson scale as Katrina and it followed a similar path entering New Orleans. Betsy caused extensive flooding in New Orleans from breaches in MRGO and the Industrial Canal and because the pumping system failed, just as happened in Katrina. Betsy was a wake-up call that made clear the fact that the levees needed substantial improvement. The hurricane gave rise to the 1965 Flood Control Act and the Army Corps of Engineers’ Greater New Orleans Hurricane Protection project, which was intended to protect the city against the most likely severe storm that would hit the area. Unfortunately, that objective was not fulfilled.

  In one of the most closed governed places on Earth and in one of the most openly governed places, leaders behaved so similarly it is astonishing. Neither Myanmar’s top general nor the US commander in chief took command. Each seemed dumbfounded, transfixed, or callously uncaring. Or maybe they were in denial.

  Denial is a common reaction to fear. Eliot Aronson, the great behavioral psychologist, analyzes denial in a paper titled “Fear, Denial, and Sensible Actions in the Face of Disaster.”18 He argues, through a set of experiments, that if you scare people but give them no way to deal with the fears that you have induced, denial and inaction will most likely follow. People are not scared into action; they are scared into inaction.

  Aronson says that people need a concrete, doable, and effective strategy so they know there is a way to deal with what frightens them. The fear of lung cancer can be dealt with by giving up smoking—concrete, doable, and effective—but it may not be so easy for people who have a serious dependence.

  President Bush has said, in effect, that he was surprised by the extent of the disaster in New Orleans.19 He might also have been frightened. He was almost instantly derided for his claim that no one could have anticipated that the levees would break, because he had paid no attention at all to clear warnings. Or maybe the messages just didn’t register and he was genuinely surprised, even though he ought not to have been.

  Most of us living outside of New Orleans were surprised. We had no idea a storm of that size could do so much damage. Who but a few people in New Orleans knew that the levees were in such bad shape? If regular citizens of New Orleans did know, what concrete, doable, and effective actions could they have taken? Denial set in, and when the levees broke, people were surprised.

  Surprise can be deadly. Keren Fraiman from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Austin Long from Columbia University, and Caitlin Talmadge from George Washington University, all scholars who research security issues, discussed in the Washington Post how Iraqi forces collapsed after a surprise attack by soldiers of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, an attack that should have come as no surprise.20 The authors say that surprise attacks can panic even the best-trained forces and lead to chaos and collapse. Two ingredients for surprise are key, they suggest: poor intelligence and the politicization and corruption of security forces.

  Change a few words and you have a description of how Nargis and Katrina were handled. Neither should have been a surprise, but they both were. Michael Brown claims in his book that he told President Bush that “we have lost the city,” sounding for all the world like a general reporting a war situation to headquarters.21 President Bush either didn’t listen or didn’t want to believe.

  Scientists, like me, who are advocates of strong greenhouse gas reduction, are sometimes guilty of this too. We can’t resist describing the effects of climate change in anything less than apocalyptic terms. We cast images, inspired by science fiction movies, of cities ablaze and panic in the streets, as massive waves roll through the avenues of Washington and the boulevards of Paris, over statues and monuments in familiar parks, sweeping buildings away in their path, tsunami-like.

  And then we don’t give people the concrete, doable, and effective strategies they need to deal with the problem of climate change. We tell them that the problem is vast, and so it is, and it requires coordinated actions by global governments to do anything about it—and they are so very clearly not coordinating their actions. Climate change is made to seem beyond any individual’s capacity to solve. So to feel like we have done something, we screw curly light bulbs into our lamps and recycle everything we possibly can. These actions are concrete and doable, but they are wholly ineffective. These actions mostly make us feel better and pay more for lightbulbs.

  Were President George W. Bush and Senior General Than Shwe frightened into denial and inaction that precipitated collapse? Would Winston Churchill have dithered as well? Looking back at these incidents, I have to believe that fear is the one explanation for their inaction that seems plausible, and it does have sound psychological backing. Both men were, I believe, most frightened that they and their governments would be damaged politically by the disasters, and neither man knew what to do about it.

  FEMA under Michael Brown was ill prepared and inept. After the agency was incorporated into the Department of Homeland Security following 9/11, its entire focus was shifted to fighting terrorism, real or imagined. Bush had appointed Joe Allbaugh as his director of FEMA, and Allbaugh immediately vowed to downsize the organization, suggesting that it might have grown too large under the Clinton administration. Bush wanted to privatize much of FEMA’s work, and Allbaugh went along, saying in May 2001 that “many are concerned that federal disaster assistance may have evolved into both an oversized entitlement program” and that “expectations of when the federal government should be involved and the degree of involvement may have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level.”22

  That lack of relevant experience in disaster management prompted many scathing editorials, including one in the Los Angeles Times by Ken Silverstein titled “Top FEMA Jobs: No Experience Required.”23 This sort of blatant cronyism is in every sense the mirror of that practiced by the generals in Myanmar, and the consequences were a mirror as well.

  While FEMA was flailing around, utterly failing to perform the function for which it was created by Congress, and officials at all levels were pointing fingers at one another, the news media was busy covering the mistakes and inept response to the crisis. Those “in charge” at FEMA actually turned back offers of aid from the private sector and others. Walmart sent three trailer loads of water to New Orleans that were turned back by FEMA officials, who also prevented the US Coast Guard from delivering much-needed diesel fuel for generators. The issues all concerned who was in charge and who was authorized to do rescue and recovery. Although FEMA was failing completely, it refused to let others help, perhaps out of fear of embarrassment that its own pathetic efforts would be exposed, but certainly not because any of its staff thought they were doing a better job than others could do.

  In this, FEMA’s actions are no different from the generals in Myanmar who would not let foreign aid into the country for fear of losing control.

  One of the most effective agencies during the days of rescue and recovery was the US Coast Guard, despite FEMA’s efforts to thwart it.24 One of the Coast Guard’s basic missions is search and recovery of victims stranded by boat accidents, and its troops are trained and well prepared to work in harsh conditions. They had moved 40 percent of their helicopters and other equipment into the vicinity before Katrina arrived, and those helicopters were first to enter the city
. Though doing so is very dangerous and typically avoided when possible, the troops were prepared to work at night in the flooded city using night-vision equipment.

  Canada sent a first-tier urban search-and-rescue team from Vancouver that arrived the first full day after the storm, well before help from FEMA arrived. Canada also sent three military vessels, a Coast Guard vessel, and several helicopters and coordinated their efforts with the US Coast Guard.

  The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries (LDWF) also acted quickly and brought scores of small craft to the city, equipment its staff knew would be needed for rescue. Members of the LDWF are skilled boat handlers and carry out many aquatic rescues, often of animals but also of stranded people. One of its agents, Sergeant Rachel Zechenelly, stayed in the New Orleans Convention Center the day before Katrina arrived so that she could be on site as soon as the storm passed, ready to do her duty. She charted routes that enabled LDWF boats and trucks to get into the most difficult areas of the Lower Ninth Ward. In the end, the LDFW made 21,000 rescues.25

  Professionally trained, serious individuals who had risen through the ranks by fair assessment of skills and demonstrated dedication to duty acted well and saved many lives. No doubt the fog of disaster was dense in New Orleans, but this is no excuse for FEMA’s failure. That failure was sealed by the appointment of proxy leaders, Bush administration cronies whose job it was to diminish the scope of the agency so that private actors could move in. They did that job very well.

  Amid the cavalcade of mistakes and malfeasance in the days after Katrina, a radical switch took place: a shift from underreaction to overreaction.26 The administration had been caught out. Either it was caught flat-footed because it didn’t know or didn’t want to know just how bad the situation was, or it was exposed as part of an uncaring elite. Either way, faced with the obvious—that New Orleans was drowning in catastrophe—the administration had to do something. Then a miracle happened.

  Just as the crescendo of criticism of FEMA was peaking, the attitude of the press took a sharp turn to a profoundly different focus. The news media saw the opportunity for framing the disaster in a way that would have the most impact and bolster the standing narrative of disasters, myths and all. “Framing” is an all but essential part of almost all news reporting and was very much a part of the coverage of Katrina.27

  The framing of disaster coverage is a deadly mix of misunderstandings and prejudices. Many of these misunderstandings are based in persistent myths about how people behave in disaster situations. Anthropologists, such as Enrico Quarantelli of the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center, have through their disaster studies made a strong case that what our instincts tell us about human behavior in disasters is likely to be largely wrong. First, Quarantelli argues that people don’t usually panic, despite the persistent portrayal of panic in almost all disaster movies from the very beginning of the genre. Susan Sontag’s brilliant 1965 essay, “The Imagination of Disaster,” describes the elements of a typical science fiction movie—which are, she insists, always disaster movies—that inevitably include panicked masses running along highways to get away from some sort of an alien monster.28

  Likewise, people do not withdraw into fetal positions and await the inevitable. People may be initially stunned and disbelieving, but generally Quarantelli’s research shows that they act in a more or less rational way.29 I was made aware of this fact when reading about the way people evacuated the World Trade Center during the 9/11 terrorist attack. People went down the many, many flights of stairs to get out in a relatively orderly manner. The stairwell was not clogged with bodies of trampled people and others clamoring to climb over them to get out as fast as possible. Instead, people recognized that the best way to get out was to do so in a reasonably systematic and cooperative sort of way. People who work in tall buildings are frequently told that is the most likely way to survive, and at least in this case, that’s exactly what they did.

  Other myths that Quarantelli describes include “role abandonment,” in which emergency workers such as nurses will give up their civic duties and opt to stay home and help their families. Quarantelli describes this as “role conflict,” the very understandable notion that police officers, say, may feel a stronger duty to stay with their spouse and children and protect them in a disaster situation than to report for duty and try to save others, leaving their family to fend for itself. Although some may yield to this impulse, Quarantelli claims most do not abandon their public responsibility. First they try to make their families as safe as possible (helping them evacuate, for instance) and then they report for duty.30

  What Quarantelli is saying is that the way we think people will behave in a crisis is an example of Daniel Kahneman’s System 1 thinking. It’s an instinctive reaction, perhaps fueled by the disaster movies Sontag described, and it is quite wrong.

  But the most important and most controversial of the myths is that of rampant antisocial behavior, especially looting. We encountered the issue of looting in our discussion of the earthquake in Haiti and its tragic consequences for one 15-year-old girl. In New Orleans in the days following Katrina’s landfall, media reports of looting and other forms of criminal and antisocial behavior were rampant. They overshadowed reporting on FEMA’s incompetence and changed the disaster narrative completely. In fact, these reports gave FEMA and the Bush administration the cover they needed to duck discussions of their incompetence.

  Kathleen Tierney—a professor in the Department of Sociology and the Institute of Behavioral Science at the University of Colorado and director of the University of Colorado Natural Hazards Center—was a student of Quarantelli’s. Together with two students, she wrote a very important and insightful analysis of the media coverage of Katrina.31 They collected newspaper reports on the hurricane from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the New Orleans Times-Picayune. A few examples, taken directly from their paper with original sources cited in the notes, are quoted next by date.

  August 31

  Even as the floodwaters rose, looters roamed the city, sacking department stores and grocery stories and floating their spoils away in plastic garbage cans. . . . Looting began on Canal Street, in the morning, as people carrying plastic garbage pails waded through waist-deep water to break into department stores. In drier areas, looters raced into smashed stores and pharmacies and by nightfall the pillage was widespread.32

  Officials watched helplessly as looters around the city ransacked stores for food, clothing, appliances, and guns. . . . “The looting is out of control. The French Quarter has been attacked,” Councilwoman Jackie Clarkson said.33

  September 1

  Chaos gripped New Orleans on Wednesday as looters ran wild . . . looters brazenly ripped open gates and ransacked stores for food, clothing, television sets, computers, jewelry, and guns.34

  Things have spiraled so out of control [in New Orleans] that the city’s mayor ordered police officers to focus on looters and give up the search and rescue efforts.35

  September 2

  Chaos and gunfire hampered efforts to evacuate the Superdome, and, the New Orleans police superintendent said, armed thugs have taken control of the secondary makeshift shelter in the convention center. The thugs repelled eight squads of eleven officers each he sent to secure the place . . . rapes and assaults were occurring unimpeded in the neighborhood streets. . . . Looters set ablaze a shopping center and firefighters, facing guns, abandoned their efforts to extinguish the fires, local radio said.36

  September 3

  America is once more plunged into a snake pit of anarchy, death, looting, raping, marauding thugs, suffering infrastructure, a gutted police force, insufficient troop levels and criminally negligent government planning.37

  In just a few days, the narrative had changed from criticism of government inaction to one describing a “war zone.”38 Rescuers, instead of helping victims, became engaged in
a counterinsurgency activity akin to the conflict in Iraq from which many of the National Guard soldiers called to New Orleans had recently returned.

  Lisa Grow Sun studied the same issue but from a legal standpoint.39 In her paper, she included a number of the more extreme statements made on TV and by foreign journalists as well. She writes:

  New Orleans was, we were told, a city descending into anarchy—a place, according to the New Orleans Police Superintendent, where “little babies [were] getting raped” in the Superdome, a shelter of last resort; a place, as New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin recounted to Oprah Winfrey, where hurricane survivors had descended into an “almost animalistic state” after days of seeing dead bodies and “watching hooligans killing people, raping people.” The mainstream press—including some of the most respected media outlets—built on official accounts of lawlessness to paint an unrelenting picture of bedlam and atrocities in New Orleans. . . . The Financial Times of London likewise reported that, at the Convention Center, another shelter of last resort, “girls and boys were raped in the dark and had their throats cut and bodies were stuffed in the kitchens while looters and madmen exchanged fire with weapons they had looted.” London’s Evening Standard took a more literary tack, alluding to The Lord of the Flies in its descriptions of New Orleans.

  Sun established that at the peak of the deployment, there were 50,116 National Guard troops and 21,408 active-duty federal troops in New Orleans. It has never been very clear how many residents remained in the city. The population at the Superdome, where people who were stranded in New Orleans sought refuge,40 is thought to have been around 20,000 at its maximum. The total population remaining in the city may have been closer to 100,000. Many were elderly and infirm. Even if you take an absurdly high guess and suggest that 30 percent of the remaining people became looters and rapists, that means there were more than twice as many soldiers as supposed criminals in New Orleans in the days after the storm passed. The ratio is more likely to have been 10 to 1.