I spent the last few days at a work retreat in New Orleans, where, as an after-hours team-bonding exercise, we went on a “ghost tour” of the city.
No, I don’t believe in any supernatural, spooky stuff. But I can play along in this kind of thing for a bit of harmless fun.
It became very serious all too quickly, however, when, out in New Orleans’s cemetery sprawl known at the “Cities of the Dead,” we stopped off at the memorial to the victims of hurricane Katrina.
The infamous mega-tempest devastated New Orleans in 2005. The levee holding back the waters broke, and the storm surge flooded some neighborhoods with up to 20 ft (6.5 meters) of water. 80% of the city was flooded, and more than 1800 people died.
Seeing the hurricane coming, New Orleans authorities had sought to evacuate the city, but many could not or would not leave, and the announcement came late, giving people little time. Some spent days on their rooftops waiting for help. People endured a desperate lack of food, water, essential medical services, sanitation, and shelter.
Local emergency services, their buildings flooded as well, couldn’t cope, and it took days, even weeks, before state and federal agencies started to get on top of the situation.
A five-month inquiry by a select bipartisan committee in the US House of Representatives concluded with a 520-page report in 2006 detailing woeful inadequacies and long-term neglect.
The levees protecting New Orleans “were not built for the most severe hurricanes.” The federal Department of Homeland Security and the state governments “were not prepared.” Rescue and relief services showed a lack of coordination and poor communication.
"What started out as a natural disaster became a man-made disaster — a failure of government to look out for its own citizens," President Barack Obama summarized on the tenth anniversary in 2015.
The roots of the problems run even deeper, too, of course. Louisiana authorities have long failed to protect the economic and social rights of those who live there. A quarter of the state’s children live in poverty. For Black Louisianans, the situation is dramatically worse.
Black males in the state live seven years less on average than white males. More Black people in Louisiana did not graduate high school than earned a bachelor’s degree. In New Orleans, Black household income is a third that of white.
The communities most affected by Katrina were disproportionately Black, exactly the people whom those in power had been neglecting for so long.
Significant chunks of the predominantly Black Lower Ninth Ward have never recovered, and today, you can still see abandoned patches where houses and Black-owned small businesses stood 17 and a half years ago. Rescue service code numbers – showing the date rescue teams finally arrived and the number of bodies found inside – have been maintained on some house fronts as small reminders.
Back at the Memorial in the Cities of the Dead, what stands out most are the above-ground mausoleum blocks. They hold the bodies of 83 unclaimed victims, many of whom were never identified. The black-granite faces to the units are all smooth and blank, with no names.
These anonymous entombments seem a disturbingly fitting symbol of the willful neglect of generations of political leaders.
How can scores of people in a modern city in a wealthy country die from a predictable situation the authorities should have been better prepared for and should have responded to more quickly? And how can there still be victims left unidentified?
Standing there in the dark, staring into the polished, nameless granite, I sensed the presence of a malevolent spirit. It wasn’t a ghost. More like the haunting feeling that comes from the realization of how our leaders too often neglect the most vulnerable among us.