Looting Leads to Violence, Violence Leads to the Dark Side

4:03 am, 9/2/05

Looting Leads to Violence, Violence Leads to the Dark Side
The Canadians are on the ground trying to help in New Orleans, and as I've been trying to explain to people, have found that there is nothing that can be done now:

A Canadian search and rescue team in Louisiana says conditions on the ground are so dangerous, it has to wait for order to restore before they can get to work in the devastated hurricane region.

"It's far too dangerous for even the state troopers and police to wander out," said USAR member Brian Inglis in a statement Thursday on his team website, vancouver.ca/usar.

"It's absolutely crazy, the devastation is unreal -- the gunfire, the shooting, the looting is like something you see in a movie. "

Despite the 35° C heat and 98 per cent humidity, [Inglis] said they're equipped with water, and some "good ol' Louisiana cooking the locals have cooked up for the police officers and ourselves."

Ain't that nice. The situation is so bad at this point that many New Orleans police officers are turning in their badges and leaving the city, saying that the city that they're supposed to serve and protect doesn't exist anymore. I've even heard that survivors taken to shelters in Baton Rouge have gotten loose and are looting there, as well. This article claims those rumors are false, but another says that community leaders are asking the state to stop the flow of survivors and state legislators are demanding that the Governor establish a military presence in Baton Rouge. What I do know for a fact is that no transportation company in America seems willing to go in there.

So how did Louisiana turn into a Batman movie? Yesterday, I didn't feel too comfortable placing blame just yet, but now I'm starting to see a pattern.

"I do want to tell you what angers me the most," Blanco said. "Usually, disasters bring out the best in people. Now we've got people that it's bringing out the worst in. We will restore law and order ... I am just furious. Louisianans are too good, too strong, too wonderful and too noble for our reputation to be destroyed by this criminal element. We will take them off the street."

She was just furious? Something tells me that Blanco was living in something of an alternate universe if she didn't believe that the criminal underground rises up to take over society in the absence of authority. She thought that being surrounded by rotting corpses usually brings out the best in people? Does Blanco even read newspapers? Did she forget about the horrors in the aftermath on the tsunami?

Blanco is, however, legitimately pissed at having her preconceptions about society shattered, and has finally pushed for a rather firm response:

"Three hundred of the Arkansas National Guard have landed in the city of New Orleans," Ms Blanco said.

"These troops are fresh back from Iraq, well trained, experienced, battle tested and under my orders to restore order in the streets.

"They have M-16s and they are locked and loaded.

"These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will."

Blanco then stormed out of the room without taking questions. Bring on the pain, Governor Blanco. This is the only sane response, but it should've been organized days ago. This is definitely not a "hindsight is 20/20" issue like the handling of the evacuation, but rather common sense. I can understand Nagin's reasoning about ignoring the looters in order to get people out: New Orleans, as a coherent jurisdiction, is really irrelevant right now, the city cops are supposed to serve and protect is nonexistant. Nagin, however, apparently was rather naive about (or perhaps entirely resigned to) the nature of the criminal element, and never saw it coming (or perhaps couldn't get the state leadership to care) that violent gangs would actually take over the city and begin attacking rescue workers and survivors, disrupting rescue operations and dragging out the survival situation for thousands.

What this means for the evacuation effort, I'm not entirely sure. There are a lot of people in the city who still don't "get it" and think that FEMA is going to drop them tents. It ain't happening, because there's no way to sustain a population of survivors in those conditions. Tens of thousands are scattered across a major metropolitan area, and the one thing they probably absolutely need right now is fresh water to sustain them long enough for us to get them out. It was obviously not part of the original plan for it to take so long that they would have to bring in water, or, in fact, to have 100,000 people to deal with: A huge proportion of the people who stayed behind stayed behind because they simply didn't take hurricanes seriously. Either way, that's where we are now. I have no idea how we would go about door-to-door delivery of tens of thousands of gallons per day of fresh water, and frankly, I doubt it's really possible at all. Attempting bulk airdrops would create a water war as the gangs took over the water supplies and kept it for themselves or blackmailed the survivors with it.

Three hundred troops, combined with the forces already committed to the area and what remains of the New Orleans police department can probably secure the Superdome and the surrounding area, but I'm concerned that it's going to take much longer to restore order in the rest of the city, and people just can't do without water that long. If they start drinking the filth around them (and some probably already are), this problem is going to get a lot larger, fast.

There are some rather obvious mistakes here to learn from for future reference, and Blanco's comments give a rather alarming insight into how local leaders apparently imagined this would go down and that they may have not fully realized the nature of what was about to happen to them. Nagin has appeared to be walking through this entire thing in a daze (finally coming to life when he found out the first attempt at plugging the levee had been abandoned to put the helicopters on SAR, probably the one thing he shouldn't have been upset about), and you may recall Blanco's apparent tearful, shocked response when she found out that the Superdome was doing without power, toilets, and A/C. We knew this a day before the storm, but she didn't know until someone brought her inside to see the survivors?

I don't really see a reason to crucify anybody at this point, their evacuation plan rescued the vast majority of the city and perhaps as many as would leave when given the chance, but this is an error large enough that, well, I don't think we'll see Nagin's picture hanging up next to Giuliani's any time soon.

Update: Instapundit and an Instapundit reader's comments.

Katrina tells us that nature is more powerful than any of us mere mortals can comprehend. But still, mere mortals do the best they can-as an emergency management type in a small rural Washington state county, I don't see any thing else that could have been done. In short, the local officials did a brilliant job in evacuating a major city within 30 hours. They established a location people could go to so they wouldn't die in flood waters. And the response thus far has been magnificent-is there looting: yes; are there other infirmaties of human nature? Of course-but let no one doubt, the response to this major natural disaster has been superb. And small nitpicking critics will cavil and snipe-but consider what might have been.

Well, it could have been worse, certainly. I do think that a firmer hand with looters early on, in line with "broken windows" theory, might have forestalled the more egregious lawlessness we're seeing now. But this is a natural disaster without parallel in American history -- like the Chicago Fire if it had spread across three states -- and disaster relief isn't like calling Domino's. Nor does the fact that we're Americans somehow offer supernatural protection from the consequences of a calamity like this.

Bridges are out, roads are blocked, boats are sunk, and all sorts of other infrastructure is down. Aid can't get through in quantity until that's fixed, at least somewhat. In a situation like this, the first week you get a trickle, the second week you get enough, and the third week you get pretty much all you want. We're still in week one. That, as I've noted elsewhere, is why the standard disaster-preparation advice is to have enough food and water to get you through a week on your own.

Absolutely, and in fact that's exactly what I wrote before. If you don't have, at the very least, a bugout kit in your trunk, it's not rational to be surprised when you have to bug out and find yourself totally screwed. If you don't have a bugout kit and live in, for example, a giant washbasin, you're on borrowed time, and New Orleans is now the case study for that concept. There appear to be a lot of people who didn't even try to prepare for a disaster they all had been told was coming for a generation (then were told, point blank, 24 hours in advance, was now imminent) because they imagined that FEMA or the State of Louisiana had magical powers to save them, and it just doesn't work like that.

That said, the lawlessness issue is one that could potentially alter the scale of this catastrophe by an order of magnitude. There are tens of thousands of people in Mogadishu-on-the-Mississippi, and they should be getting out now, not next week. Relief teams should be able to work safely to try to get these people water and a bite to eat. Helicopters should be able to drop supplies to hospitals and pick up stranged New Orleaners without being shot at or without being accosted by an armed mob on the landing pad threatening to turn Black Hawk Down on them. Hopefully, the roving bands of gangers won't cost many of these people their lives, but because it could, it's an error in judgement that needs to be highlighted both for consideration in our response to this situation, and for consideration in planning our methods of responding to future catastrophes of this kind. Because there will be another, someday, and while we can be glad that what might have been wasn't, every person we can pull out alive is one little victory.

Update: Apparently, I'm not the only one who thinks Governor Blanco was asleep at the wheel.

"What disgusts me is the way Louisiana government seems to have reacted by way of paralysis--do nothing and hope the Feds take over quickly."

"The govenor of LA should be tressed and hung over the stadium."

"I knew the Louisiana government was in way over its head and that their incompetence was going to cost lots of lives when in the very first press conference, they said they had things under control with their local search and rescue units and the Coast Guard rescue helicopters. I did the math based on their rough estimates, assuming a 20 minute round trip, and figured they would be rescuing the last person sometime in February. 2008."

"Simple solution- disaster occurs, big disaster. Someone takes overall charge who has overall control over the things that help during a disaster. Lets call this person a 'national disaster coordinator'."
"the 'coordinator' position you're describing exists -- it's called the governor."
"You mean the Governor?"

I, uh, wouldn't go so far as to the "hanged from the Superdome" bit, but there's a reason that the main thing the federal government does to relieve disasters is give money to the states affected. It's because the states are supposed to decide how to spend it.

Unfortunately, this kind of "it's everyone's job but mine" buck-passing bureacrophilia is the kind of crap that happens when you start blurring responsibilities by creating federal agencies to take over things that the federal government has no business fiddling with in the first place, like education and disaster management. I won't name names.

Seriously, though. I hope Blanco took the last night to get her head together.

Update: A lot of gunfire, footage on FOX News of gangs riding around in pickup trucks waving rifles, chased by convoys of (cops? soldiers?) in black Dodge Rams. Some fires have broken out with little water pressure to put them out and a chemical plant exploded sometime this morning.

More troops are moving in, ordered up from active duty by Washington, and people are now being evacuated straight to one of the New Orleans airports, numerous choppers, including heavier Chinooks, flying over.

Update: Jeez, finally, lady.

Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco has requisitioned school buses throughout the state to help evacuate people from New Orleans.

The governor ordered all school superintendents to work with local law enforcement to provide at least one peace officer to ride in each bus and two marked patrol cars to accompany every 10 buses.

Wow, troops and buses? Good morning, Governor. Glad you could join us.

It appears, as well, that there are now so many evacuees in Baton Rouge that the population of the city has almost doubled, from about 250,000 to over 415,000.

Update: FOX News has footage of a major amphibuous freight convoy rolling into the Superdome with food and supplies, at least a half dozen helicopters setting down on the upper deck. Another is crossing through much higher water from Jefferson parish. The buses are coming back in now that the National Guard has cracked down, and airliners are coming in to evacuate from the airport. Now they can reestablish some infrastructure to ramp up operations. This is the big step forward.