Katrina: Bringing out the ugly side of America

For tonight's show on Straight from the Sky, we observe the 70th anniversary of the presence of the Society of the Divine Word (SVD) with the University of San Carlos, which happens to be my alma mater. USC Father President Roderick Salazar, Dr. Montana Saniel and Fr. Vicente Uy overall chairman for the Foundation Week will tell us the story of the SVD and their years and future with USC and they have a lot of stories to tell you.

This week, the USC will have a flurry of activities and at 5:00 p.m. today Prof. Resil Mojares will be conferred with the title, "Professor Emeritus" for his lifelong work in USC especially on the Cebuano Studies Center, which has helped preserve our Cebuano Culture to remind us of what we were yesterday and what we should be today. See them on SkyCable's Channel 15 at 8:00 p.m.

* * *

I'm sure a lot of you have seen the television footages of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina to cities of Louisiana and Mississippi like New Orleans, Biloxi and Gulfport and how eerily similar they look today like 3rd world countries in the midst of that devastation. What's glaring is how slowly the vaunted American might respond to the pleas for help by distraught and disaster-stricken Americans. Indeed, no matter how great you are a superpower...nothing matches the power of nature and that of God's!

What the world wasn't prepared to see was the anarchy that ensued after the Hurricane left the scene. Scores of people openly looted stores and shops in downtown New Orleans, even before television cameras, pillaging, killings, rapes done by armed gangs roaming the flooded streets, flood victims victimizing other flood victims. Americans just showed the world their ugly side...you'd think you were watching flood victims in Ethiopia, Liberia or Mogadishu. No...we're watching all this from stricken American cities!

What was the difference between what happened in the areas hit by the tsunami last year and what's happening in New Orleans and the other cities? Well, when the Tsunami struck, a huge 20-foot tidal wave went as far as kilometers deep into Sri Lanka, Aceh or Phuket devastating anything on its path and then the waters receded.

In the case of New Orleans...Hurricane Katrina brought a lot of rain and strong winds causing the main levee in Lake Pontchartrain to break and the waters of the mighty Mississippi river poured into the city with no way out. Meaning, the only way for the waters flooding New Orleans to recede is when the US Army of Engineers plugs the levee and the water is pumped out.

US Pres. George Bush cut his five week-long vacation to survey the hurricane damage and last week the US Senate approved a US $10-billion fund signed by Pres. Bush to help in the rescue effort. Of course the Bush government blames all this on that killer Hurricane Katrina, but is it just the fault of the hurricane or should the Bush government be blamed for this?

Now stories are coming out all over America putting the blame squarely on the Bush government for not giving priority to their domestic problems and focusing only on Iraq. I got one story by Will Bunch entitled, "Why the Levee Broke" from the Internet and allow me to print this quote,

"When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA. Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations, with $50 million in local aid. But at least $250 million in crucial projects remained, even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside.

Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts - was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars."

Other articles pointed to Pres. Bush's proposing to spend less than 20 percent for Lake Pontchartrain due to lack of funds. The lessons here are crystal clear...US $10 billion of American tax dollars are now being prepared to fix the problem when all they needed was just another P250 million more to shore up the levee so it could withstand a strong hurricane. Should New Orleans be abandoned? After all, it lies below the Mississippi river, Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf of Mexico. But the greater lesson that politicians here or in the US should have understood was that, a few dollars of prevention could have prevented this disaster from happening. The US is not much different from the rest of the world when it comes to natural disasters.

* * *

For email responses to this article, write to [email protected]. Bobit Avila's columns can also be accessed through www.thefreeman.com