Prisoners of Bellona
The FoxNews clip available on Crooks and Liars clarifies another dimension of what “trapped in New Orleans” means: the government, yours and mine, is keeping people in the city forcibly. There’s an interstate running by the Superdome that leads over the bridge to Gretna and beyond. There is a military checkpoint on that bridge. It’s not there to process evacuees in an orderly fashion. It’s there to turn people back.
In six days, able-bodied survivors could easily have walked a hundred miles in any direction. By doing so they’d have relieved enormous pressure on the scarce supplies that remained in the flood zone. They would have substantially reduced the number of people still in New Orleans who needed evacuation assistance. They could have been put to work helping their fellow refugees.
Instead, as a matter of policy, they have been and for the most part remain caged in hell. As a matter of policy.
The sheer, ungodly viciousness of it stupefies. Nor is it even unprecedented. It’s the same policy the government followed on September 11, 2001, when it sealed off the exits from Manhattan for most of the day. The impact was less, but only because that calamity was more circumscribed in space and time. Never has the libertarian cliché, “Government kills,” seemed so literal.
UPDATE: It appears I misremembered what happened on September 11. Outbound bridges were closed to vehicles but not, apparently, to pedestrians. I had recollected, I think, Seth Farber, writing about not being allowed to walk out of Manhattan for at least a couple of hours. Stupid memory.
Comment by Avram —
September 3, 2005 @ 4:01 pm
It’s the same policy the government followed on September 11, 2001, when it sealed off the exits from Manhattan for most of the day.
.
It did? My memory of 9/11 has the subways being sealed off, and bridge-and-tunnel commuters having to walk or take ferries home.
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 3, 2005 @ 4:35 pm
Dang. My recollection is that the Talking Dog wrote about having to sneak home because the bridges were closed for some hours that day. And yet, attempts to find reports of such via Google are proving fruitless. You were closer than I was and would know better. Maybe I just pulled a Lileks.
Comment by Carlos —
September 3, 2005 @ 5:12 pm
Yes, yes you did. Gotta be careful with those reflexes. The Brain Eater stalks us all, you know.
Comment by Frank —
September 3, 2005 @ 6:41 pm
Funny. I think I recall the same thing. Maybe it went down the Memory Hole.
Did you know that in addition to not letting people evacuate FEMA also have prevented the Red Cross from distributing food and water in N.O.?
At what point do we get to file murder charges?
Comment by Carlos —
September 3, 2005 @ 7:04 pm
We-ell, since my neighbor and many of my friends walked home from Manhattan to Brooklyn over the bridges, and were back before night fell, despite the million or so people who crossed with them that day, I am kind of thinking that the bridges weren’t closed to pedestrians for any great length of time.
.
But if this goes against libertarian theory, then it must not be true!
Comment by Lynn Gazis-Sax —
September 3, 2005 @ 7:10 pm
My sister stayed in her office in Manhattan until the subways were turned on again (emailing the family to let us know she was OK), but her brother-in-law was walking out across the Brooklyn Bridge, with hordes of other people, at the same time.
There’s threads which puzzle me in certain responses to Hurricane Katrina, though. On the one hand, there was all the blaming of people (many of them poor and carless) for not having managed to get their entire families out of New Orleans, in one day, and despite the Greyhound buses getting shut down on them. On the other hand, it seems as if they are now supposed to wait for food and water, wait for someone to take them out of there, just sit tight and wait for days for the government to rescue them.
Comment by Doctor Memory —
September 3, 2005 @ 7:33 pm
Just to reconfirm: the subways (at least those which weren’t going through tunnels that no longer existed) were running by 3pm on 9/11/01: I personally took one out of Manhattan to Brooklyn. My understanding is that the MTA keep the subways running (only outbound from Manhattan, of course) through most of the night.
When the blackout hit in 2003, the subways were immobilized by them, but there were policemen on the bridges keeping watch over a mostly orderly exit.
Comment by pete —
September 3, 2005 @ 8:07 pm
Two points.
First, it is reasonable to say that you don’t want thousands of people walking along an interstate highway, dropping dead of thirst, etc. That is, “don’t walk out” might well be a not totally unreasonable position.
Second, on the other side, the view that everything has to be done by government and coordinated by some government official is quite well entrenched among government types. One obvious way to evacuate would be to ask for volunteers to drive from nearby states. If 25,000 volunteers could carry an average of four people per vehicle, they could have evacuated 100,000 people in short order. But such a procession would be outside of government control, so nobody even thought of it.
Trackback by Discourse.net —
September 3, 2005 @ 8:19 pm
The State We’re In
Relief efforts (and relief prevention) More links about the unfolding disaster. It looks as if resources are finally being mobilized to begin to help out under the direction of Lt. Gen. Russel Honre, but there are still many signs of a disorganized res…
Comment by nrt —
September 4, 2005 @ 4:34 pm
just so that your readers know: Brooklyn is part of NYC. when they say no one was let out, they mean no one was let out of NYC, which means out of Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Manhattan. you couldn’t walk over the bridge into New Jersey.
n.
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 4, 2005 @ 4:38 pm
nrt, I don’t want to sound persnickety, but would you have a cite for that? I ask because Avram lives and lived (IIRC) in Jersey and he was the first to call foul on my memory. And they did allow the “American Dunkirk” flotilla to ferry passengers to Jersey across the river.
Comment by Lindsay —
September 4, 2005 @ 5:26 pm
This is in response to Pete. We weren’t allowed to drive closer so that we could volunteer to get people out.
Believe me, with all the boats we have in LA, people have been more than willing to try to get people out of attics and shelters, unfortunately, we are not allowed to.
So, all the things that make sense in this situation, are being stopped by out govt. Sad to say but, all we can do now is volunteer at shelters, take people into our homes and feed them.
Comment by the talking dog —
September 5, 2005 @ 11:13 am
My recollection Jim, is that I described walking home over the Manhattan Bridge into Brooklyn from downtown Manhattan on 9-11, the same bridge I walked over 2 years later in the blackout, by a convoluted route. For time frame, I was on the Manhattan Bridge at the moment when the second tower (the North one, the first one hit) collapsed. I was at my office at 100 Church Street facing south during both of the airplane impacts, and then left on foot…
My recollection is that for something like 2, maybe 3 years, until they reopened the PATH rail station in downtown Manhattan, the City closed inbound bridges to lower Manhattan to vehicle traffic during rush hour (unless there were 2 or more people in the car, as I recall)… again, FOR YEARS. They’re open again these days.
Anyway, NYC, which has fewer private cars per capita than every other major AMerican city (around half our population doesn’t even have driver’s licenses), a non-vehicular evacuation was somewhat more orderly; plus, given blackouts and strikes, even moving around without the subway is at least… doable. Once, anyway.
Back to topic, I have no doubt that people without large SUVs in greater NO were… I’ll be PG rated… screwed. I’ve calculated that just 100 standard issue buses could have taken 25,000 people at least 2 hours away in 24 hours… instead of the President moving every federal bus available (prisoner buses, FEMA buses, commanadeered Greyhound buses, busees borrowed from elsewhere…) he… well, never mind.
Trackback by Bloggerheads —
September 6, 2005 @ 4:38 am
Inhuman scum
I heard some chap on TV last night explaining that the humanitarian crisis that followed Hurricane Katrina wasn’t about racism, because all of the people who were unable to leave were actually “the poor, the sick, and the elderly”… That…