Stateside with Rosalea Barker
When The Levee Breaks
When I moved to this poor part of Oakland last year, one of the things I noticed first about it was the amount of
subsidence and number of potholes in the streets. A friend, used to living in the poorer quarters of cities in the US,
told me that was par for the course. City councils, she said, spend money on infrastructure where the tax base
is--around high-priced properties and businesses. So the well-heeled neighbourhoods are well-paved and well-lit, and
poor folks get to stumble around in the dark.
So it didn't surprise me that one of the first blogging comments I read about the Hurricane Katrina situation in New
Orleans was a *lack* of surprise that the pumping station that failed was in one of the poor neighborhoods, the Lower
Ninth Ward. Whether you ascribe that failure to lack of maintenance or to design--a very dark thought indeed, because it
would be tantamount to the City trying to flush people out so they can condemn the neighborhood and hand it over to
developers--those pictures of the houses in water up to their roof are pretty horrific. Especially when you consider
what's in the water.
Hurricane Katrina is going to be a very long drawn-out story, on a number of fronts. Wikipedia has a lot of background
material, and the Community Data Center of Greater New Orleans has census data and maps that help to make the news
pictures you're seeing more understandable.
Greater New Orleans: http://www.gnocdc.org/index.html
rosalea.barker@gmail.com
--PEACE--