After the Storm

Hurricane Katrina and the failure of public policy.

Jacob Sullum, Jesse Walker, Ronald Bailey, Kerry Howley, Jeff Taylor & David B. Kopel from the December 2005 issue

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In New Orleans there were some genuine firsthand accounts of violent assaults, but the rumor mill worked overtime as well. Meanwhile, we also heard stories of spontaneous cooperation on the ground--notably the heroic tales of Deamonte Love, the 6-year-old boy who led five toddlers and a baby out of the flood zone, and Jabbar Gibson, the young man who commandeered an abandoned school bus, drove it to Houston with around 70 people aboard, and arrived there well in advance of the official convoy. The Baltimore Sun described a group of about 40 people who turned the Samuel J. Green Charter School into a well-supplied, well-fed, well-protected little republic. The New Orleans Times-Picayune recounted how a neighborhood association in Algiers Point formed a "makeshift militia" to protect the area. Rolling Stone talked to civilians in motorboats who spent days ferrying flood victims to dry land, rescuing far more people than the authorities did during the first week that followed the storm. Neighbors saved neighbors from the rising waters, volunteers patrolled their communities, and evacuees who owned vehicles gave lifts to people who didn't. Quarantelli is almost certain we'll learn that such cooperation and initiative greatly outnumbered the widely reported crimes.

There was one additional factor in Katrina that wasn't present in the other cases: what Quarantelli calls "the worst mishandled disaster I've ever seen in my life, and I've been studying disasters since 1949." The full story of what went wrong has yet to be fully uncovered, but it seems more and more clear that, far from working closely with volunteers and rival authorities, the Department of Homeland Security--the giant new bureaucracy that absorbed the Federal Emergency Management Agency in 2003--adopted a command-and-control approach that at times worked actively against the other responses. Anecdotes abound not just of well-qualified civilians being turned away from the disaster zone but of public employees being poorly deployed, such as the 1,400 firefighters who were assigned to do community relations work. Worst of all were the squalid holding camps at the Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Center, where authority was omnipresent but order was absent.

The local government clearly botched the initial evacuation of New Orleans, leaving hundreds of empty buses to drown while carless citizens were stranded, but a deeper problem with the exodus might be the local initiative that was blocked. Fred Smith, the president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and, more to the point, a native Louisianan who monitored events there as closely as he could, says: "There were avenues in and out of the city--people could have been enlisted to come into the city to make pickups, and the problem could have been alleviated much earlier. America has cars and boats and buses and vans, but they weren't called on. In World War I, Paris was saved because taxis rushed French troops to the front. Why couldn't New Orleans have done the same?"

The most appalling allegations come from the leftist activists Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky, who were attending a conference of emergency medical services workers in New Orleans when the hurricane struck. Their widely circulated story is a litany both of inspiring self-organization on the ground and of astonishing official mistreatment and neglect. Among other things, they claim that a police officer broke up their embarrassingly situated encampment--it was adjacent to the command station--by falsely telling them that buses were waiting for them on the other side of the Greater New Orleans Bridge. They also wrote that armed officers then blocked them from entering Mississippi on foot. (The latter allegation has been corroborated by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Fox News, among other outlets.)

At that point, they say, some of them took direct action:

"Our little encampment began to blossom. Someone stole a water delivery truck and brought it up to us. Let's hear it for looting! A mile or so down the freeway, an Army truck lost a couple of pallets of C-rations on a tight turn. We ferried the food back to our camp in shopping carts.

"Now--secure with these two necessities, food and water--cooperation, community and creativity flowered. We organized a clean-up and hung garbage bags from the rebar poles. We made beds from wood pallets and cardboard. We designated a storm drain as the bathroom, and the kids built an elaborate enclosure for privacy out of plastic, broken umbrellas and other scraps. We even organized a food-recycling system where individuals could swap out parts of C-rations (applesauce for babies and candies for kids!).

"This was something we saw repeatedly in the aftermath of Katrina. When individuals had to fight to find food or water, it meant looking out for yourself. You had to do whatever it took to find water for your kids or food for your parents. But when these basic needs were met, people began to look out for each other, working together and constructing a community."

I can't vouch for their account, but I can attest to that final point. People do look out for each other in emergencies, even when other social bonds begin to break. The best response to a disaster will embrace that fact. The worst will work against it.

Managing Editor Jesse Walker ([e-mail]) is author of Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America (NYU Press).

Defenseless on the Bayou
New Orleans gun confiscation was foolish and illegal.
Dave Kopel

During the weeks after Hurricane Katrina, the government of New Orleans devolved from its traditional status as an elective kleptocracy into something far more dangerous: an "anarcho-tyranny" that refused to protect the public from criminals while preventing people from protecting themselves. On the orders of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, the New Orleans Police Department, the National Guard, the Oklahoma National Guard, and the U.S. Marshals Service began breaking into homes at gunpoint, confiscating lawfully owned firearms, and evicting the residents. "No one is allowed to be armed," said P. Edwin Compass III, the superintendent of police. "We're going to take all the guns."

Those thousands of New Orleanians huddled in the Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Center got a taste of anarcho-tyranny. Everyone entering those buildings was searched for firearms. So for a few days, they lived in a small world without guns. As in other such worlds, the weaker soon became the prey of the stronger.

In the rest of the city, some police officers abandoned their posts, while others joined the looting spree. For several days, the ones who stayed on the job did not act to stop the looting that was going on right in front of them. When homes or businesses were saved, the saviors were the many good citizens of New Orleans who defended them with their own firearms.

These people were operating within their legal rights. The law authorizes citizen's arrests for any felony, and in the 1964 case McKellar v. Mason a Louisiana court held that shooting a property thief in the spine was a legitimate citizen's arrest.