How Does Hurricane Harvey Compare With Katrina? Here’s What We Know
Hurricane Harvey
Shaila Dewan and John Schwartz | The New York Times
A late August hurricane menacing the Gulf Coast. Residents plucked from rooftops. A convention center re-purposed as an emergency shelter. A test of a presidency.
Although it is still unfolding, Harvey, now a tropical storm, evokes comparisons to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Here’s a quick rundown of what we know about similarities and differences between the two.
The Cities
Katrina: Before the storm, New Orleans — with its distinctive Creole-Acadian-French-Haitian-Vietnamese cultural mélange — was a small city of about 455,000 people that lay in large part below sea level, ostensibly protected by a system of levee walls. Its population never fully recovered from the evacuation and destruction and remains below 400,000.
Harvey: Houston is a sprawling, car-dependent, diverse city, low-lying but not below sea level. It has a population of more than two million people, with a system of bayous and waterways to manage flooding.
The Storms
Katrina: It made landfall near the Louisiana/Mississippi border on Aug. 29, 2005, as a Category 3 storm and measured 350 miles across. However, the relatively low classification, based on wind speed, was deceptive because Katrina produced the highest storm surge ever recorded in the United States.
Harvey: It made landfall in Rockport, Tex., on Friday as a Category 4 storm, measuring 200 miles across, but was quickly downgraded. As of Monday, it was expected to linger for days, causing the National Weather Service to warn, “This event is unprecedented and all impacts are unknown.”
Deaths and Damage
Katrina: One of the deadliest hurricanes ever to strike the United States, Katrina was responsible for 1,833 deaths, and some bodies were untouched for days. The storm inflicted more than $100 billion in damage, with most of it caused by wind, storm surge and the failure of the levees. Katrina also left three million people across the region without power.
Harvey: Local officials have reported at least 10 deaths in Texas since the storm began, but heavy rains and flooding are expected to continue at least through Friday. Most of the damage could be caused by flooding.
As for the economy, the Gulf region’s capacity as an oil and gas hub — Houston accounted for 2.9 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product in 2015 — does not appear to have been seriously compromised, and economists were predicting that the storm’s cost would be less than half that of Katrina’s. So far in Texas, there are 300,000 people without power.
Rainfall
Katrina: Rain was not the main problem with Katrina, which yielded 5 to 10 inches of rainfall in a 48-hour period.
Harvey: By contrast, Harvey brought a deluge, with up to 50 inches of rain predicted over the next several days — more than Houston receives in a year.
Evacuation
Katrina: The mandatory evacuation of New Orleans was announced a day before the storm hit. An estimated 100,000 people remained stuck in the city. A few weeks later, in another chaotic evacuation, more than 100 people died leaving the Houston area to escape Hurricane Rita.
Harvey: Houston did not call on residents to evacuate and is now urging those who can to shelter in place. However, as the rain continued on Monday, a growing number of other jurisdictions — like Bay City, which expected 10 feet of water downtown — urged residents to leave.
Assistance
Katrina: The storm displaced over a million people and damaged or destroyed 275,000 homes. Almost a million households received individual assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Harvey: We don’t know yet how many people will be forced out of their homes. But the vast majority of homes in Harvey’s path are not insured against flooding, according to figures from the National Flood Insurance Program. FEMA officials estimated that 450,000 people were likely to seek federal aid.
The Takeaways So Far
Katrina: Evacuation chaos and mostly unfounded panic over riots and violence made issues of race, poverty and government failures impossible to ignore. The breaches of the levees compounded those problems and represented an engineering failure of grave proportions.
Harvey: Harvey will likely sharpen an ongoing debate over whether Houston, a city driven by real estate, has overbuilt at the expense of flood control. While Katrina showed a failure to build well, Harvey — depending on how it plays out — might come to represent a warning about climate change.
Correction: August 28, 2017
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of a caption on a photograph of flood waters in East New Orleans with this article misstated the date it was taken. It was Aug. 31, 2005, not Aug. 9, 2005.
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Hurricane Katrina: The Race and Class Debate
Kristen Lavelle | Monthly Review – An Independent Socialist Magazine
Following Hurricane Katrina, many people sought to answer the question of whether its social effects and the government response to the country’s biggest natural disaster had more to do with race or with class.
Media images broadcast from the Big Easy showed nearly all those left behind to suffer and die were black Americans — it looked like race.
However, those families most able to afford homes in safer flood-protected areas and that had resources to evacuate easily suffered much less than poorer families, which seemed to make it more a class issue.
There was no denying that those left behind were mostly poor and black.
As public debate escalated amidst increasing allegations of lawlessness among the evacuees, white and conservative Americans vehemently fought the idea that racism had caused the extreme levels of black impoverishment and slowed the government response.
Much public and progressive discourse sought to contribute to the “race or class” question.
Some arguing the debate’s class side asserted that what became apparent in Katrina’s aftermath was basically a class dynamic:
“Sure they’re black, but the reason they didn’t get out in time is because they’re poor, not skin color.”
Political scientist Adolph Reed, Jr. argued that for liberals to blame racism for the Katrina disaster was a terrible political strategy.
Although acknowledging discrimination historically, Reed asserted that those citing contemporary racism do so to feel righteous. Because the current government is not moved by accusations of racism, addressing the response to Katrina as a race issue is useless.1
Others, like Michael Dyson, said that the argument for class over race was used by many only to deflect attention away from race and thus discourage a deeper discussion about the ways race and class intertwine.2
To represent well the structure of New Orleans, or any urban area, one must look at the development of race and class there from past to present.
We argue that race and class have always been used as tools by the white elite and have usually been supported by the white citizenry, first and foremost, to maintain white supremacy and white privilege.
We view race and class as inextricably intertwined categories because of this country’s centuries of racial oppression.3 The reason the Katrina disaster seemed like a race issue was because it was. The reason it seemed like a class issue was because it was.
In reality, race and class are deeply intertwined in New Orleans primarily because of a long history of well-institutionalized racism.
In a nationally-televised address from post-Katrina New Orleans, even President George W. Bush admitted that “deep, persistent poverty” in the area “has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America” and acknowledged a “duty to confront this poverty with bold action.”4
Although Bush administration policies have not shown a commitment to ameliorate discrimination, Bush’s comment was here on target. To illustrate this, we now discuss the historical structuring of New Orleans around race and class from the antebellum city of slavery to the contemporary city hard hit by Katrina.
[Follow the discussion by clicking the link below]
Conclusion
Even now, these powerful tools of white racism are used to justify racial inequality and perpetuate the still fundamental racist relations of the United States of America.
Under the watchful eyes of white elites, New Orleans and the United States of America generally, have developed structurally over fifteen generations now to maintain these alienated and alienating racist-relations in major societal institutions.
In this manner, white elites, as well as rank-and-file whites, have kept a large proportion of our African American citizens in unjust poverty — with chronically underfunded schools, diminished job opportunities, and limited housing choices.
This unjust impoverishment takes place within a continuing framework of well-institutionalized racism, which provides most whites with the current benefits and privileges coming from many generations of unjust enrichment.
In the history of most U.S.A. cities and rural areas, whites have imposed racial oppression so long and so often that it has long been a foundational and undergirding reality routinely shaping both the racial dynamics and the class dynamics of U.S.A. society.
Today, as in the past, systemic racism encompasses many negative realities, including the reality that the white majority has only rarely attended to the pained voices and racism-honed perspectives of black Americans.
The Katrina catastrophe, at least for a short while, forced white America to hear and listen to some of those impassioned and insightful black voices. These voices often expressed views, albeit in the language of everyday survival, similar to those we develop here.
In the future, only by attending carefully to the perspectives of oppressed Americans can the United States of America ever expect to see improvement in the direction of real democracy.
Attending well to those perspectives will enable us to understand that the survival of the United States, and indeed of humanity, requires us to see and act beyond the boundaries of our own racial group and social class interests.
Just before his assassination by a white man, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote that all human beings live in a “great world house,” in which we must find a way to go beyond individual selfishness and group dominance:
“From the time immemorial human beings have lived by the principle that ‘self-preservation is the first law of life.’ But this is a false assumption. I would say that other-preservation is the first law of life precisely because we cannot preserve self without being concerned about preserving other selves.”
https://monthlyreview.org/2006/07/01/hurricane-katrina-the-race-and-class-debate/
Race and Class Are the Biggest Issues Around Hurricane Harvey and We Need to Start Talking About Them
Charles D. Ellison | The Root
Our national conversation on Hurricane Harvey should be much like those about Charlottesville, Virginia., or Flint, Michigan. But as the Houston area braces for much more flooding, that won’t happen until receding floodwaters reveal the dangerously gaping holes of disparity between white haves and black have-nots.
Right now, the nation just sees flooding and burly, boat-owning white dudes saving people from immediate disaster. There’s no talk of what is happening to Houston’s vast population of disproportionately low-income black and brown residents.
And public officials, like Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott — each playing public hot potato over who will, ultimately, bear responsibility for a lackluster response — don’t seem to care about that part, either.
And FORGET ABOUT ANY SHRED OF EMPATHY from President Trump.
Yet the socioeconomic aspect of Harvey is the biggest part of the story. We’re already seeing those random television reports of frustrated black women stuck in flooded apartment buildings, getting busy signals for 911 and helplessly watching helicopters fly overhead.
That’s already getting worse because several hundred thousand Houston-area residents didn’t have the luxury of packing up and leaving, despite Abbott’s calls to do so.
Houston was already in over its head with poverty numbers as high as the next round of flooding: Nearly 30 percent of Houston residents struggle with income below the poverty level, along with 17 percent of Harris County residents. And nearly 26 percent of black residents in Houston are living below the poverty level, surpassed by 27 percent of Latinx residents.
In a more glaring data point, 45 percent of households earning $10,000 or less in income are black, while 80 percent of households earning $200,000 or more are white. So, if your neighborhood is flooded out, where the hell do you go?
Creeping deep below the fast-rising floodwaters of Harvey are the countless thousands who have no home insurance, no assets to tap into for recovery, no savings (if any) to access for a sudden move and no transportation options when cars get flooded (if they have those).
And since federal disaster response — including an underfunded National Flood Insurance Program — is geared toward homeowners, those who either rent or who are stuck in public housing find even fewer options.
As was the case post-Katrina, black families end up receiving fewer dollars on average for home recovery because they live in undervalued neighborhoods.
Race, racism and class will dramatically gut-punch an unprepared national discourse on the topic of climate change. And with 30,000 people about to get crowded into stuffy emergency shelters, watch how long the typically short-fused racial patience lasts.
Not only does Harvey represent the permanency of climate change, but it also exposes those who are fast becoming the permanent victims of it: underserved populations “of color” in densely populated urban cores.
When hurricanes hit, they affect over a quarter of the nation’s black population, which is concentrated in the most exposed Southern states (like Texas).
Increasing sea level rise is also threatening mostly poorer, perpetually less-resourced black neighborhoods.
During a 2016 Congress for the New Urbanism presentation in Detroit on how cities were re-engineering in the face of climate-change-instigated flooding, the all-white panel kept calling it “nuisance flooding” and didn’t give a thought to what would happen to coastal black communities that didn’t have any kind of loot allowing them to adapt.
Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was the most illustrative example of every disparity converging on an unprotected, unprepared black community all at once (patternwise, Harvey is shaping up as the next).
Everything intersected during Katrina: climate change, natural disaster, bad government response, rudderless leadership, institutional racism, classism and the massive displacement of black populations that ended up creating an unintended diaspora scattered mostly throughout the Southwest United States.
But Katrina wasn’t the first time, really, and it won’t be the last.
The “unprecedented” nature of Harvey indicates that more severe storms will come as climate change patterns intensify. And that leaves much of the national black community in the worst spot.
Clearly, state, local and federal government preparations and post-event response aren’t adequately addressing the needs of vulnerable, underserved black and brown populations — nor is the government exhibiting a desire to do so.
But black state, local and federal elected officials, along with community advocates and black media, must be much more proactive and preparatory.
Our conversations around climate change need more urgency and greater awareness, and yet this is not happening. For example, climate change threats aren’t big topics when influential African Americans converge for conferences:
When the National Association of Black Journalists convened in New Orleans this summer, climate change didn’t even make the agenda.
“We were surprised to find that wasn’t being discussed,” said Myron Jackson, Senate president of the Legislature of the U.S. Virgin Islands, a majority-black territory that has long dealt with devastating hurricanes and is bracing for more as destructive weather patterns intensify. While at a Council of State Governments discussion in Connecticut (where this writer was a panelist), Jackson shared thoughts on the lack of internal community conversation after attending NABJ. “It was rather disappointing,” he added.
Nor was climate change a prominent feature at other major black organizational conventions this summer, and few expect that it will be.
The black church is just as bad. Houston’s Mayor Turner is one glaring example of how black elected officials won’t intersect climate change with aligned issues such as poverty. If he had, his response planning would have been a lot more holistic.
“New Orleans literally rebuilt their school system after Katrina,” says former Obama-administration appointee and Colorado state legislator Peter Groff. “Houston has the opportunity to remake previous poor areas, but black elected [officials] need to be on guard for gentrification.”
Climate change demands this kind of discussion and planning. Equally tragic is that black communities themselves fail to robustly engage in an intersectional and action-steps dialogue on climate change in the context of broader and rather familiar socioeconomic themes.
It can’t be that certain segments of the black advocacy community already focused on climate justice are the only ones leading this discussion — all of us need to lead it.
“It’s difficult because there’s a finite amount of social justice capital to go around,” said KFI AM (Los Angeles) broadcaster and commentator Mo Kelly on WURD Radio’s (Philadelphia) Reality Check.
“This issue is not in our face like other issues, since it’s a slow-moving glacier.”
Still, we can’t afford to wait on a headline or folks screaming for help on social media before we get working on this issue. Before the next big calamity strikes, let’s make certain we own it.
Dan Rather on Facebook:
Jorge Perez- confirmed dead.
Yahir Vizueth – confirmed dead.
Benjamin Vizueth – missing.
Gustavo Rodriguez-Hernandez – missing.
Please pause to read the names above.
The stories of heroism and tragedy in the wake of Hurricane Harvey have hit me hard and this one struck me with a particular poignancy.
The four men listed above took it upon themselves to rescue families in distress.
After two missions, they headed out again and their boat drifted into a downed power line, electrocuting them and sending them into the swirling currents.
Two of them were brothers, a third brother survived as did two journalists on board documenting these acts of quiet heroism.
These men were fathers and husbands. Their loss leaves holes in many lives.
In our current fractured climate, there are some who would look at their ethnicity, their last names, the fact that they spoke Spanish and say they are not one of us, NOT part of our nation.
But in a time of need, NO ONE asked for their papers.