The Importance of Human Response to Systemic Failure

In my previous post, which reintroduced this blog / newsletter, I wrote about watching the Hulu documentary "Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time," wondering how many of the interviewees were already struggling with personal challenges when they first responded to the disaster, and how their response was affected.

Of course, I hadn't yet watched the whole series. As I soon learned, prior trauma was a major influence on the response.

A self-fulfilling prophecy of violence

It's in Episode 2 that we first hear Sally Forman, director of communications for the City of New Orleans, describe "first responders [who] were exhausted from dealing with one crisis after another."

"During Katrina, the first responders were also victims," elaborated Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, commander of Joint Task Force Katrina. "Their homes are gone. Their families were moving from place to place to try to survive. So, when your first responders are also victims, it changed the character of the response."

Everyone was affected, up the chain of command to New Orleans Superintendent of Police Eddie Compass, who in Episode 3 described his own family wanting him to "stop being a chief" so he could be there for elderly relatives who later died.

But Compass had his hands full as it was. Communications in general were patchy at best. Radio stations filled the void with misinformation and rumors about rapes, murders, shootings and other forms of violence.

In his role, Compass needed to address an international 24/7 news cycle while "working off of one and a half to two hours sleep a day," not eating well, and dealing with migraine headaches along with self-induced pressure to be as transparent as possible with his citizens.

All contributed to a teary on-camera breakdown spurred by Compass' fear – owing to rumors – that his daughter had been raped.

With bus and ambulance drivers refusing to approach the Superdome out of fear for their safety and even the Coast Guard suspending rescues, police were rerouted back to more of a law enforcement role. "They were dead tired from saving people, but we redirected all of our resources," Mayor Ray Nagin told media.

Nagin would later declare martial law in effect, even though he did not have the authority to do so and martial law was never actually declared. Honore acknowledged this miscommunication led to much confusion on the ground.

As the days wore on, said Forman, "Unfortunately, the story of lawlessness took such a life of its own that good members of law enforcement, but also emergency personnel and surrounding neighbors... turned good people back from help."

Those people included the crowds making the hours-long, unbearably hot walk over the I-90 overpass from the Convention Center towards Gretna and Algiers like something out of Octavia Butler's "Parables" books.

In spite of the exhaustion they must have felt – the lack of food or water turning limbs to sludge and minds to numbness – some responders, along with a number of white vigilantes, believed their "desperation" would lead to the kind of violence they were ready to defend themselves from.

There are accounts of at least 10 civilians shot by uniformed police officers in front of family and friends, images of bloody bodies lying in the street and the back of a vehicle. Ultimately, the post-Katrina lawlessness became a self-fulfilling prophecy, but not from the people believed to cause it.

A militarized character of response

"The character of the response" also included National Guard troops. Maj. Ed Bush, deputy public affairs officer, layered on a different element of trauma: guards deployed to Louisiana from around the country who had been deployed to war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"That Guardsman who's in Wisconsin, who's packing their bag and they're preparing to come to Louisiana, kind of feels like they're going to a war zone," said Bush. "And they weren't. But that's the mindset they brought with them. That it was really, really bad here."

"This was not a common operation," Honore told interviewers. "There was nobody shooting at us. But federal troops had the perception of what they saw from exaggerated report on television that the city was out of control," including an anchor's statement about "thugs threatening EMS personnel."

We don't know what those just-returned troops had witnessed while in Iraq. We can glean maybe some from watching movies like The Hurt Locker or Mosul, even knowing those are dramatized accounts. But we can see the effects of the troops' emphasis on control:

• While hot, exhausted, and hungry people sat waiting for buses rather than rioting en masse, the National Guard's security forces, operating under a "zero tolerance" policy, invasively searched new arrivals, moved people or stopped them at gunpoint, even forced them to sleep.
• Military police forcibly removed people from their homes, even as rescuers still were trying to get to people trapped on rooftops and in attics in flooded areas.
• And even after buses and helicopters finally evacuated people from the Superdome and from under the I-10 as well as other points around the city, troops with guns ordered evacuees onto cargo planes, refusing to allow people to return to waiting family in other parts of the city, sometimes separating family members from one another during evacuation.

"It was a lot, and it kept you so defensive that your body ached from... just wondering what next, what next?" survivor Lucrece Phillips of the 8th Ward told interviewers.

The effort was seen by the military and news media as "Americans helping Americans," but ultimately, said Bush, the problem wasn't people -- it was system failure.

Honore characterized the issue as a problem of evacuation – transportation, logistics – rather than crime. But it's easier to see people's actions than it is to see the systemic breakdowns behind the rationales for people's decisions, and to react accordingly.

A tenuous hope

Trauma is arguably a part of life, but also arguably, hardship can be prevented from ever becoming trauma by loving care and compassion. That's depicted in the excellent post-Katrina HBO series Treme, which shows how people's resilience can bring communities back together – or form new ones – even after being fractured by large-scale disasters.

I first watched Treme around Christmastime 2021, seven months after separating from my ex. Then, I needed to witness art that was about resilience and recovery, even though I had yet to experience the falling away of people, jobs, and other community elements I thought I could rely on.

Now, I'm rewatching the series, noting how the series' opening scene – the start of the first second line since the storm – depicts crowds of people not unlike those surrounding the Superdome and the Convention Center, only this time, they're dancing to the strains of "Rebirth."

It's a hopeful show, and yet, twenty years after Katrina, knowing how many people remain displaced from their roots – homes, family, history – and how many more people have been affected by disasters since, I'm finding it hard to hope that the lessons we need to learn, can ever be learned.

At the same time, though, the more "profitable" (exploitable) disasters become, the more affected people will need other humans to manage preparedness and response with people in mind. That's my approach to learning emergency management, anyway. Subscribe to join me as I learn!