On August 26, 2005 Hurricane Katrina, at the time a category one storm with sustained winds of 80 miles per hour, cut across southern Florida just north of Miami, killing nine people, displacing thousands, and cutting power to 1.2 million. In the Gulf of Mexico Katrina strengthened to a category five storm with winds of 165 miles per hour and turned north toward New Orleans.
New Orleans was a city of nearly half a million in a metropolitan area of nearly 1.5 million. The city was 70 percent Black and 30 percent poor. The suburbs were whiter and less poor, although still predominantly working-class.
The city is a crescent of high ground, the last on the Mississippi River before the Gulf of Mexico, partly surrounding a bowl of reclaimed marshes mostly at or below sea level. The bowl is protected from adjacent Lake Pontchartrain by levees built to withstand a category three storm. If Katrina had struck New Orleans directly, the levees would have been overwhelmed, and most of the city would have been flooded immediately.
On August 27 New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin declared a state of emergency and urged a voluntary evacuation of the city. The next day he ordered an immediate evacuation. Those with cars or other transportation fled, but 100,000 without transportation were left behind. Most were poor and Black; many were elderly or infirm.
On August 29 Katrina struck land just east of New Orleans. It had weakened to a category four storm, but it was still very powerful with winds of 145 miles per hour, a storm surge of 25 feet, and very heavy rain. It devastated Gulfport and Biloxi, Mississippi, and caused enormous damage in an arc from the Florida panhandle through Alabama and Mississippi to Louisiana.
New Orleans seemed to have escaped the worst, as all but one of its levees held, limiting the initial flooding to about 10 percent of the city. Then two more levees broke, and Lake Pontchartrain flooded the city, covering 80 percent of it with water two to twenty feet deep. The water brought toxic contaminants from flooded oil refineries, chemical plants and sewage treatment facilities, and became increasingly foul with commercial and household waste and the decaying carcasses of animals and people.
The stranded residents of New Orleans were brave and resourceful, rescuing neighbors and finding ways to survive. But they quickly ran out of drinking water, food and medical supplies. 25,000 waited in the Superdome for a promised rescue, and 25,000 more at the convention center. Increasingly desperate, they broke into stores to take water, food and other supplies they needed to survive. Some took whatever else they could find, having lost everything they owned and having no insurance to replace it. The media and politicians denounced this as "looting".
Five hundred of New Orleans's 1700 police deserted. Those who remained did little to help the hurricane survivors or to maintain order. Suburban police blocked bridges, allowing cars to exit the city but turning back people on foot, saying they had no facilities for them. Louisiana governor Kathleen Babineaux sent in National Guard troops with orders to "shoot to kill" alleged looters.
On September 1 homeland security secretary Michael Chertoff claimed that the government had the New Orleans situation under control. The normally docile media mocked this claim with split-screen images of Chertoff and the 25,000 stranded at the convention center with no drinking water or food and with corpses lying in the street.
Mayor Nagin pleaded for assistance. From south to north and east to west working people identified with the survivors and were outraged. Black leaders denounced the government's inaction as racist. Democratic and Republican politicians demanded an explanation from the Bush administration: Where were the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the National Guard, and the army when the homeland was really in danger?
Former Louisiana Senator John Breaux described New Orleans as "Baghdad under water." His description was more profound than he as an imperialist politician could understand, since the resources that could have prevented the New Orleans disaster had been used instead to create the Baghdad disaster.
On September 2 the authorities finally began large-scale evacuation of the New Orleans survivors to Houston, Atlanta and other cities. The evacuees often weren't told where they were being sent. Family members were separated, and many didn't know the fate of their loved ones for weeks.
The survivors were generally welcomed in the communities to which they fled or were sent. If they lacked resources, they were provided with food, water, shelter, clothing, medical care and other basic necessities. Knowing they wouldn't be returning to New Orleans anytime soon, most began looking for jobs and enrolled their children in local schools. 75,000 college and university students were displaced; many were admitted to new schools. The US government had failed, but the people did not.
More than 1500 people died as a result of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. The real number will never be known, since many poor residents were never officially recorded and many bodies were never recovered. Officials estimated damages at $200 billion, but again the real number will never be known, since much of the damage will never be reimbursed. The economic disruption cost tens of billions more.
The population of New Orleans has been dispersed. The US ruling class and the New Orleans elite have decided to rebuild only the profitable financial, tourist, industrial and port areas. The poor neighborhoods are still ruined and deserted. More than half the former residents haven't returned. 25,000 students are expected to enroll in New Orleans public schools this year, down from 65,000 last year.
Most of the hurricane victims in New Orleans were African American, but tens of thousands were Latino -- immigrants from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. Many more Latinos lived elsewhere along the Gulf coast. Like African Americans, they suffered disproportionately from Hurricane Katrina because they were non-white and poor. Many could not turn to the authorities for help, since they were in the US illegally and FEMA is part of the Department of Homeland Security, which also deports illegal immigrants.
The flooding of New Orleans was not inevitable. Long before Katrina government agencies had developed plans to strengthen the levees to withstand a category five storm. By some estimates $2.5 billion in public works could have prevented the New Orleans disaster, and $14 billion could have protected the whole Gulf coast. Successive administrations have refused to spend the money, preferring to finance the military and to cut taxes for the wealthy. Even from a capitalist standpoint this was irrational.
From a human standpoint the refusal was criminal. Hundreds of thousands of mostly Black workers were forced to live in vulnerable lowlands. Refineries and chemical plants were located there too. When the inevitable happened, the government was unprepared to rescue the survivors. FEMA, the National Guard and the military took five days to mobilize, multiplying the number of deaths.
The New Orleans disaster has had two positive results: an outpouring of sympathy and generosity toward the survivors, and anger toward the government. Millions of workers, already skeptical of the war in Iraq and the so-called war on terror, saw that the government's priorities sacrificed real security for the people. They saw the class and racial injustice in the abandonment of poor Blacks in New Orleans during and after the hurricane. Blacks and Latinos saw this most clearly, of course, but many white workers saw it too.
Summer 2005 may turn out to have been the moment at which the Bush administration so overreached itself and a critical mass of workers and youth became so alienated and angry that the administration had to begin retreating on its policies of war, privatization, and tax cuts for the wealthy. The administration has been on the defensive ever since. Not yet a renewed working-class offensive, but a step toward it.
One year later, Katrina survivors and African American, Latino, labor and socialist activists continue the struggle for justice for the survivors. The Million Worker March movement, the People's Hurricane Relief Fund, the New Orleans Workers Center, the Katrina Neighbors On Tour, and other efforts continue to demand that the US ruling class and the Bush administration keep their promises to rebuild New Orleans. They continue to draw the lessons of the struggle, so that Katrina will be remembered not just as a tragedy but as a crime of which working and poor people refused to be victims.
In this political climate revolutionaries can discuss not only the war and the New Orleans disaster, but also the alternative to capitalist barbarism: a just and humane socialist society run by working people for working people.