New Orleans myths: The numbers tell a different story
September 6th, 2005
There will be plenty of time to argue about who was responsible for the slow response in New Orleans this week in dealing with those who did not choose to leave, or were unable to leave the city before the hurricane hit. The catastrophe that followed, when the levees gave way, and 80% of the city, and many of the surrounding suburbs flooded, was far worse than the hurricane itself. Already many seem to have forgotten that New Orleans officials thought they had escaped KatinaÂ’s wrath as the storm moved north from the Gulf on Monday, prior to the levees giving way.
The nation will have to deal with an extraordinary human tragedy now, with well over a million people displaced, hundreds of thousands of jobs lost on the Gulf Coast, and a cleanup and recovery process that will take many months in New Orleans and Mississippi. This of course has not prevented major broadcast media, from Brian Williams to Bob Schieffer to Tim Russert, from angrily demanding answers for why the show of federal force came 48 hours later in New Orleans than it might have.
Almost everybody now agrees that things changed dramatically on the ground over the weekend. Almost all people in the two big holding centers of the Super Dome and Convention Center have been evacuated, and the lawlessness on the streets has ebbed a bit. Some estimates are that New Orleans is now a ghost town, with fewer than 1,000 residents left of its nearly half million population.
Certainly the human tragedy in the city is and has been gruesome - in the Super Dome alone there were at least 6 murders, and 12 rapes among the enclosed evacuees, and bodies have been seen floating in the flooded streets of the city. The death toll is unknown, possibly in the thousands, and illness afflicting some of those who survived, but were living in or around stagnant and polluted waters will take a further toll over time.
But in retrospect, while those 48 lost hours provided the world and nation some awful pictures, clearly there was a media obsession of sorts in choosing to focus on the Super Dome and the Convention Center, when the havoc caused by the hurricane and the flooding was much more widespread, and encompassed several states. And this obsession fed into some of the quickly emerging story lines - that blacks and the poor were left behind, that the federal government did not care, that Bush did nothing until too late, and so on. Not unexpectedly, the media has been much harder on Bush, a Republican, than it has been on the Governor of Louisiana or the Mayor of New Orleans, (both Democrats) who have been treated as victims of federal mismanagement of the crisis, rather than participants and agents in whatever bureaucratic or administrative errors or failures occurred.
But the real human story of this tragedy will play out in the months ahead: the huge effort to deal with so many displaced persons (many far from their original homes), and so many people out of work, is just beginning. This is a much larger story and much more significant than the 48 lost hours in evacuating the Super Dome, where perhaps 3% of those affected by the storm and its aftermath were temporarily housed. But the pictures and stories of the work ahead will not be as dramatic as those of this past week. Cleanup and rebuilding never is. The highest network and cable TV ratings have already occurred for this story. And the future story does not offer the media as much low hanging fruit in their systematic effort to turn this into their conventional story line – that Bush is at fault.
Some of the coverage and the charges that have been made this week are flat out wrong, or grossly misleading, and deserve attention.
Reality #1: A very high percentage of the population of New Orleans and surrounding low lying areas were successfully evacuated before the hurricane hit. An article in 2002 in the New Orleans Times-Picayune explored the hurricane-induced flooding scenario and estimated that 200,000 residents of the city would be stranded by such an event. A Houston Chronicle article from 2001 estimated that 250,000 residents would be stranded. That is over 40% of the population of the city, which stood at 484,000 in 2000.
A recent poll of New Orleans residents revealed that an even higher percentage, 60%, would remain in the city even if ordered to evacuate with a major storm on the way. The Mayor New Orleans, Ray Nagin, estimated that at least 80% of his city's residents were out before the hurricane hit Monday. In retrospect, this must be considered a major positive achievement. How did it happen? Though you won't hear this on NBC, CBS or CNN, the National Hurricane Center urged President Bush to request that the Governor of Louisiana and Mayor of New Orleans order a complete evacuation of New Orleans. Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin agreed, and this order was given over the weekend, two days before the hurricane hit. All day Saturday and Sunday, as the TV news networks were in the midst of their all Katrina, all the time coverage, the pictures were of bumper to bumper traffic heading out of town in all directions.
If 80% of New Orleans got out before disaster hit, instead of 40% or 60%, that is an additional 100,000 to 200,000 residents who were spared the worst of this week's trauma. For this the President deserves credit, which he will not receive. Remember that the focus all week has been on the slow response to assist the 20% who did not get out. There is plenty to criticize in what happened this week for the 20% left behind, but it does not diminish the achievement in getting 80% of the residents of the city to safety before the storm hit.
Reality #2: The basic major media premise all week has been that the 20% who were left behind were all black, and poor and the rich got out of town. This is simply put, nonsense – and racist. New Orleans is a poor city (more than twice the national poverty rate). Most of those who got out of town were not rich, and were not driving SUVs, as Tim Russert sneered on the air Sunday (in a disgracefully-conducted interview with Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff).
A little elementary math will address this canard. According to the 2000 census, New Orleans' population of 484,000 included approximately 136,000 whites, and 326,000 blacks. The white figure includes 7,000 Hispanics who classify themselves as white on the census forms. If 80% of New Orleans residents got out early – and this is the Mayor's number – then only about 97,000 residents remained. Assume all of them were black, (which of course they were not). That would mean that 229,000 blacks got out early, and 136,000 whites along with them. In other words, the successful mass evacuation substantially benefited black residents of the city.
At least 70% of black residents of New Orleans got out of the city before the storm (assuming 100% of those left behind were black), and undoubtedly more than that (since all those left behind were not black). It is almost certainly the case that the great majority of those who were left behind were black. There are obvious reasons for this, including the fact that New Orleans is overwhelmingly a black city to begin with.
Another factor is that 35% of black residents of New Orleans do not own automobiles, while 15% of white residents do not. So to the extent that getting oneself to the highway was the best method to get out of out of town, blacks were disadvantaged. That is where local officials failed. With many hundreds of school buses available, the city chose to provide safe shelter for those who did not or could not leave town in the Super Dome. Close to 30,000 people moved there.
These people would have been much safer, and had a much better week, had they been bused out of town. But for this one, you can't blame FEMA, or Homeland Security or George Bush. So too, why move 30,000 people to an enclosed space and not provide enough water, and food for them for a few days?
Louisiana has one advantage over every other state for this kind of catastrophe. A higher percentage of Louisiana residents were born in their state than is true in any other state (79.2%). So many of those who left the city or could have been bused out may have had relatives living elsewhere in the state. This obviously enabled some to get out of town without the financial worry of having to pay for hotels, restaurants, etc. Many in New Orleans may have stayed on because their monthly government check, whether social security or welfare, would come at the start of the month. While this concern would be very real for those living check to check, getting people to safety and housing them in shelters, and having the Red Cross to feed them and provide medicine, would have been a lot better for the residents than staying behind. In this case, the evacuation message was incomplete. Putting the city buses on the road and taking people to specific destinations where help was available, was not communicated as a viable option, and would have been better than taking people to the Super Dome.
As of today, almost 300,000 people are now in shelters in Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee, just to name five states. Many of these people drove out, not knowing what would await them where they went. So the insecurity about what comes next was still there for many of those who left by car. As to the charge that Bush and his administration did not do enough because they do not care about blacks, as charged by an angry, and obtuse rapper Kanye West on an NBC benefit show, one should not have to dignify the charge with a response, though both Bob Schieffer and Tim Russert felt obligated to repeat this slander on the air while interviewing Secretary Chertoff Sunday.
Reality #3: The destruction from the storm affected far more whites than blacks. This is the ultimate answer to the racism charge that Bush did not do enough because the victims were black. If more whites than blacks were storm and flood victims, and the federal response was slow, than I guess by this logic, the response was insufficient because Bush is a racist towards whites. As James Taranto pointed out Friday, in his opinionjournal.com column, the three Mississippi counties that were hardest hit - Hancock (home to Pass Christian), Harrison (home to Biloxi and Gulfport), and Jackson (home to Pascagoula and Ocean Springs) are among the whitest counties in Mississippi, the state with the highest African American percentage of the population in the country (36.3% in 2003). But in these three counties, the white population in 2003 was estimated at 280,311, and the black population was 71,070, a white to black ratio of 4 to 1, much higher than the overall ratio in the state of about 5 to 3.
Similarly, Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana acknowledged, as did Congressman William Jefferson, who represents much of New Orleans, that the storm, and the flooding did not choose victims by race. Four of the five parishes worst hit in the New Orleans area flooding, Jefferson, Plaquemines, St. Bernard and St. Tammany, are majority white (ranging from 67% to 88%). Only Orleans Parish (New Orleans) is majority black (67%).
One can be unhappy with the federal response (and with the local and state response, though if one is in the same political party as the state and local officials, one tends to be quieter about it), and not assume that racism is at the bottom of what did or did not happen. That demagogic route, is always the option of a Jesse Jackson or an Al Sharpton, but this week that view was shamefully echoed by major media voices, who should have known better. For Brian Williams and comrades, the only victims this week were the blacks in the Super Dome and Convention Center, who were forced to wait an extra few days to get out due to bureaucratic incompetence, or worse, an uncaring attitude by the federal government. When a storm like this hits, it will always hit harder those with less mobility: the elderly, the infirm, the poor. These people are more vulnerable, and need help. They do not need the race card.
Reality #4: There were many victims of the storm this week that the media largely ignored. On the Mississippi coast, the hurricane caused damage we expect to see from a big storm, but far worse than last yearÂ’s Florida hurricanes. Buildings, both commercial and residential, cars, boats, and roads were leveled or destroyed by the powerful 145 mile per hour winds. Many areas of the Gulf Coast have been unreachable, even without the major flooding that occurred in the New Orleans area. In low lying areas of Louisiana near the coast, there are also communities that have not been reached yet, where many likely died.
New Orleans got almost all of the attention this week, in part because it is a major media market, and all the broadcast news reporters were there to report the coming storm. Another reason might be that Mississippi has a Republican Governor Haley Barbour, who could not be relied on for the desired interview sound bytes trashing President Bush. The media went for the easy story, those left behind in New Orleans, and shifted to the “Bush is to blame” game.
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