for nonessentials in an abandoned Wal-Mart, alleged rapes in the Superdome, a shot fired at a rescue helicopter --
have been burned into the brain of every television watcher and newspaper reader in America. But do they give us an accurate picture of the aftermath of the flood?
In fact, if criminal violence were indeed rampant in New Orleans after Katrina hit (setting aside the taking of food, water, bandages, and other necessities of survival), that would contradict much of what sociologists have learned in a half century of research about such situations. "The evidence is overwhelming," says Enrico Quarantelli, an emeritus professor of sociology and the founding director of the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware, "that in the standard natural disaster or technological disaster" -- like a chemical spill -- "you're not going to get looting."
Many observers have found the footage of looting and reports of crime to be, in the words of New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof, "one of the most dispiriting" aspect of the tragedy. Slate's William Saletan went so far as to call it "a second-wave destructive force" that must be anticipated in future disaster planning. Yet Quarantelli and a half-dozen other experts on disaster aftermaths and crowd behavior contacted last week insisted that follow-up investigations will reveal that the impression of Hobbesian violence in New Orleans over the past two weeks was created in large part by rumor and amplified by sometimes credulous reporters. The scholars' suspicions are fueled by what they say is a well-documented history of misinformation during disasters -- and a general human tendency to misread crowds, even violent ones, as more malevolent than they really are.
"As a researcher, I base what I say on evidence, and there was no evidence for a lot of what was being reported," says Kathleen Tierney, a sociologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder and director of the Natural Hazards Center there. "I don't think I've ever seen such an egregious example of victim blaming as I have in this disaster."
Are these scholars the equivalent of Donald Rumsfeld when he said television created the appearance of looting in post-invasion Baghdad by running and re-running the same footage of one man stealing an urn? It's possible, but already, as journalists like Howard Witt of the Chicago Tribune and Matt Welch of Reason magazine, have pointed out, many widely reported rumors have proved false or are at least unconfirmed.
"We don't have any substantiated rapes," the New Orleans Police superintendent Edwin Compass told the British newspaper The Guardian, speaking of the situation at the Superdome. Nor have any bodies of victims of foul play turned up there. The Federal Aviation Administration and military officials have cast doubt on the story of the rescue helicopter that came under fire outside Kenner Memorial Hospital on Aug. 31.
And television reporters' tales of refugees from New Orleans hijacking cars at gunpoint in Baton Rouge or rioting in shelters there, Witt wrote, turned out to be groundless too. The Baton Rouge police told The Washington Post that crime levels had not risen noticeably in that city. There were clearly armed thugs on the street in New Orleans -- and there are five murders there a week in "normal" times, among the highest per capita rates in the country -- but something not unlike the fog of war has so far kept us from determining just how many.
Quarantelli, who co-founded the disaster research center at Ohio State University in 1963 and then moved it to Delaware in 1985, grounds his skepticism about the looting reports in several hundred sociological studies of disaster he and his staff members have conducted over the past 40 years. Unlike in some urban riots, looting in the wake of natural disasters, when it occurs, remains furtive and taboo.
True, not all disasters have nonviolent aftermaths. After Hurricane Hugo swept through St. Croix in 1989, leveling the place, residents cleaned out local stores and malls, even going so far as to remove the lighting fixtures. What made St. Croix different from Kobe, Japan following the 1995 earthquake or San Francisco after the quake of 1989? Quarantelli argues that it was the radical inequality of a society where yacht-owners live beside subsistence-level workers, the sheer desperation of the situation (citizens were stranded with no food and no expectation of rescue), and a corrupt police force.
Of course, these conditions were all present to some degree in New Orleans. Yet Quarantelli, Tierney, and other scholars give the benefit of the doubt to the Louisianans, discounting, until they have proof, much of the reporting of a social breakdown.
Scholars who study the after-effects of disaster draw from the work of -- and, in fact, overlap with -- sociologists who study crowds and collective behavior. Crowds were a defining feature of the New Orleans tragedy. And crowds, the experts say, are very hard to read.
Clark McPhail, author of The Myth of the Madding Crow (1991) and an emeritus sociologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says that people interpreting the footage of looters last week often fell prey to common misconceptions about collective behavior. Two of them: that everyone in a crowd shares the same goal, and that a collective frenzy overwhelms rational thought.
For example, he says, that crowd you thought was ransacking Wal-Mart for consumer goods no doubt included people who indeed were ransacking Wal-Mart for consumer goods. But there were also mothers getting diapers, thrill seekers checking out the action, people trying to persuade their friends not to loot, and others just milling about.
"I have looked at probably more film footage of protest events than anyone else," says McPhail. And in contrast to what many people think they see in such situations, almost invariably "it's just amazing how little violence proportionally took place."
Tierney says that it would be extraordinarily counterproductive if officials, inspired by what they think of as the New Orleans example, militarized disaster operations -- focusing more on restoring "order" via the National Guard than on getting food and water to needy residents and organizing residents, who know the area, into rescue parties.
The dawn-to-dusk curfew imposed in New Orleans, she said, was exactly the wrong idea. "By putting them in lockdown, [federal officials] are preventing the people in New Orleans from helping each other," she says.
Of course, it's not just TV watchers and pundits who are worried about looters: Many residents said they were reluctant to leave the city lest they return to find all their belongings stolen. As a clearer picture emerges of what happened to the social fabric of New Orleans after the levees broke, we'll get a sense of whether they, or the sociologists, were right.
As originally published
Raping, murderous mobs of New Orleans overlooked this middle-aged lady
by Jillian McGehee, Benton [Arkansas] Courier
Sept. 9, 2005
Julie Schommer's journey to find shelter in the wake of Hurricane Katrina is a heroic tale. Early last week, the New Orleans woman, who is deaf in one ear, thought she would die on her roof, where she escaped the rising floodwaters. Little did she know then that she would get "a new beginning" in Benton thanks to her niece, Lisa Woods, who rescued her from a shelter in Bossier City, La., five days later.
Within 72 hours of arriving in Benton last Saturday, Schommer, 46, received new hearing aids, new contacts for her eyes and a complete makeover. Woods, a stylist at Wild Ivy Salon in Benton, took Schommer to the Benton Area Chamber of Commerce on Saturday to register as an evacuee.
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Julie Schommer, seated, a New Orleans evacuee, was rescued at a shelter in Bossier City, La., by her niece, Lisa Woods of Benton. Schommer says she plans to start over in Benton. Photo by Jillian McGehee
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"Everybody there took care of her immediate needs so quickly," Woods said. "Dr. Bill Simmons was able to get her new contacts. Dr. Lisa Richey was able to get her a hearing aid."
But before her new life began this week, Schommer survived the horrific conditions left by Katrina in New Orleans on inner strength that she said she never knew she had.
Dressed in new clothes provided by the Churches Joint Council on Human Needs, and with a new hairdo done for her by Woods, Schommer was able to tell her story despite a few trembles and tears.
She left her New Orleans home on the banks of Lake Pontchartrain on Aug. 28 to head out of the city on Interstate 10. "A 10-minute ride took me seven hours." She ran out of gas on the interstate, got off the highway to fill her gas tank and "when I tried to get back on the interstate, the police wouldn't let me."
Unable to evacuate the city, she went back to her house unaware of the ordeal she was about to endure.
She fell asleep on her couch that night and was awakened early the next day by water on her back, she said. Within 45 minutes, the water had reached nose level.
She said she looked outside and knew she was in trouble as her car slowly submerged in the floodwaters.
With two bags of canned goods, an ice chest, some towels and a photo album containing pictures of her late husband, Schommer climbed atop her roof to escape the rising water in her home. She had acquired the house after her father's death in March.
"I had just gotten it the way I wanted it. I looked down and my new couch was floating."
After about four hours on the roof, the cold caused by powerful winds and rain overtook her, she said. With a knife she had brought to the roof, Schommer cut some limbs off a nearby tree to provide a makeshift shelter.
The hut helped block some cold, she said, but "all I had were wet towels to cover myself with."
Although hard of hearing, she said she "could hear people screaming for help, but didn't know where the sounds were coming from." At that point, Schommer still had her hearing aids in place. She would lose them in the water later on her trek to shelter and safety.
"Helicopters would fly by me, I would yell for help, but evidently they thought others needed to be saved first."
Sometime Tuesday afternoon, a Jefferson Parish police helicopter flew over Schommer, sent down a basket and rescued her from the roof, she said.
"They took me and some others to a bridge. I figured I was going to Ochsner Clinic Foundation (a New Orleans hospital) for shelter." However, she was turned away when she arrived at the hospital.
"They told me to go to Zephyr Stadium in Metairie." Fatigued and devastated, Schommer began her journey to the stadium with no shoes on her feet. The distance from the hospital to the stadium is about five miles.
Schommer's hope of finding a shelter was shot down again. "I got to the stadium, I was told FEMA was supposed to set up a shelter there."
That wasn't the case. "I was told a Miami rescue group was going to set up there and there wasn't room for me. They told me to go back to the hospital."
Schommer turned around and started walking back toward the hospital. "I was going to tell them I was having a heart attack or something so I could get in."
However, on her way back to the medical facility, Schommer passed out in the median in front of Jefferson Parish Waterworks.
"I woke up to a guy grabbing my hand saying 'come on baby.' He took me inside [the Waterworks building] and fed me a Lean Cuisine, an orange and a cookie, and from 7 at night to 7 in the morning I slept on a cot in the air conditioning."
Those simple luxuries didn't last long. Later Wednesday afternoon the man who rescued her from the street arranged for someone to take her to East Jefferson High School, where a shelter was supposed to have been established.
"But there was no shelter there. So we went to a fire department across the street, and the man told them to make sure they took me to a shelter."
Schommer finally reached a shelter at Barnable High School. With her eyes tearing up, she said that when she arrived "they told me to 'grab a piece of concrete;' that was going to be my home."
Schommer's sense of loneliness and hopelessness quickly turned to a sense of belonging, however. "A couple grabbed me and took me under their wing."
In a large group of displaced individuals and families, "we were working together as a team." One boy went outside to pick leaves off a tree "so I would have something soft to sleep on." Another boy tied his big pants around my feet "to protect me from the mosquitoes."
She worked in the Salvation Army's food line "so I could bring some extra food to my group." For the small amount of time spent at the shelter, "they were my family and they thought I was their guardian angel."
While a bond had developed among Schommer and the others, an unrelenting need to leave the shelter overwhelmed them, she said. As the leader of the pack, Schommer left in search of gas to fill up the couple's car so she and six others could leave.
"I saw a gas can in front of a house, knocked on the door; no one was home, so I took it." Recalling the event, she said "I feel guilty about taking it, but we had to get out of there."
Later, back at the shelter, "I asked a police officer to please get us some gas. He said he had confiscated it. So I got another one, and I asked him again and he said he had confiscated it."
Schommer didn't give up. "I got another one and went to him and said, 'please, I'll do anything.' He gave me the gas can filled with gas and said to not tell anyone what he did."
"I took the gas can back to the group and said 'we're outta here, y'all.' "
In a small car packed with seven people, including one pregnant woman, the group made it to Bossier City, La., by late Thursday. At a rest stop on the way, Schommer was able to text-message her sister to let the family know she was OK and on her way to Bossier City, which is just east of Shreveport. Her sister and family had evacuated from New Orleans to their brother's house in Walker, which is just outside Baton Rouge.
At a shelter in Bossier City, a woman paid for a hearing aid for Schommer, as well as nerve and pain medicine and Zoloft "because I was so shaken." Another couple wanted to "adopt me," she said.
Schommer told her recently developed "family" goodbye when her niece came Friday night to bring her back to Arkansas. "I'm am so happy to be with my family. I love Arkansas. Lisa had a room ready for me. This is a new beginning for me."
Woods said she "was really worried about Julie and the rest of my family. I cried everyday watching the news because I didn't know what was going on."
She said she "had to focus on doing something, so I started cleaning out a room. I didn't know who I was going to take in, but I was going to take in somebody."
Schommer said she plans to make Benton her home, though she said she would like to go back to her lakefront home to determine what she could salvage.
Her niece has no qualms about Schommer moving in. "I think I'm gonna keep her."
"We're survivors. Anybody can be a survivor, but we're overcomers," Woods said.
She said she was surprised at Arkansans' support of Katrina evacuees . "Their hearts have been pouring out."
Her voice cracking, Schommer said she is overwhelmed with the support shown to her since coming to Benton. "Everybody has been wonderful. I'm floored."
The two couldn't say enough about Lynn Hart, a county employee who assists County Judge Lanny Fite. Hart helped take Schommer different places and make arrangements for her.
As originally published
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There's much more than this at Unknown News.
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Commentary:
When combined with that marvelous first hand report from the paramedics, the sociologists' take on this seems even more likely.
I do not doubt that armed violence took place, but I do doubt it was as widespread as people think it was.
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Quarantelli and a half-dozen other experts on disaster aftermaths and crowd behavior contacted last week insisted that follow-up investigations will reveal that the impression of Hobbesian violence in New Orleans over the past two weeks was created in large part by rumor and amplified by sometimes credulous reporters.
The scholars' suspicions are fueled by what they say is a well-documented history of misinformation during disasters -- and a general human tendency to misread crowds, even violent ones, as more malevolent than they really are.
* * *
"We don't have any substantiated rapes," the New Orleans Police superintendent Edwin Compass told the British newspaper The Guardian, speaking of the situation at the Superdome.
Nor have any bodies of victims of foul play turned up there.
The Federal Aviation Administration and military officials have cast doubt on the story of the rescue helicopter that came under fire outside Kenner Memorial Hospital on Aug. 31.
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The article below, about Charmaine Neville, seems to include a first-hand account of people shooting to get the attention of the rescue workers; a more plausible rationale for the reports of gunfire.
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Some of her neighbors committed suicide, she said:
"Because nobody was coming to help them, they were killing themselves. Some people that just went crazy."
Helicopters would pass over and "we would do the SOS on our flashlights" but they never stopped.
Thousands were still trapped in their homes -- old, young, pregnant, children.
Some men fired guns as choppers approached, but they "weren't trying to hit the helicopters.
They figured maybe they weren't seeing us.
Maybe if they heard this gunfire, they would stop, but that didn't help us."
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Be not Sheeple.
=The Coyote is Watching=
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Commentary:
I don't doubt that New Orleans was more violent than usual, as and after the city was flooded. I do doubt that New Orleans became the rampaging zoo, the festival of rape and pillage that the media portrayed.
I don't doubt that it was hellish and frightening, that many people were violated, robbed, and killed by the lesser citizens of New Orleans. I do doubt that such lesser citizens were commonplace, everywhere, or that they ever became the norm in New Orleans, even at the disaster's lowest points or worst neighborhoods.
Assholes have always walked among us, and always will. That's why we're armed, and why the Second Amendment is important.
But I don't believe the worst, most dangerous parts of New Orleans are even a fraction as killer-filled and conscience-deprived as America's White House.
=H&HH=
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Charmaine Neville's horror and heroism
by Greg Mitchell, Editor & Publisher
Sept. 7, 2005
Every time you think you've heard it all about the horrors of New Orleans in the past week, something like Charmaine Neville's experience comes around the bend, or the blog, and smacks you over the head like a club. It's a story of dead babies in the water, alligators eating people, heroism (she commandeered a bus to save dozens) and despair (she was raped).
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Yes, she is a singer and one of the famous Nevilles. Her father, Charles Neville, performs with uncles Aaron, Art and Cyril in the Neville Brothers band. The Boston
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Charmaine Neville
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Globe has declared that there are "simply no limits to her skills," and The New York Times said she "electrifies audiences." As a frequent visitor to New Orleans, and a JazzFest attendee, I know the Nevilles’ work well. But that connection matters little when you consider her story.
It is just one more tale -- although surely one of the most horrific -- that everyone ought to ponder in considering exactly which officials and agencies failed in their rescue and relief responsibilities, from the top down, in a depraved disregard for life.
As far as I can tell, Charmaine's story first appeared in print earlier this week in The Advocate of Baton Rouge. It is just starting to make the rounds of the Web (such as at Daily Kos) in an even more powerful form -- a six-minute video that appeared on Baton Rouge TV station WAFB. Here, she speaks to a priest or minister, shortly after her rescue and relocation to that city, where she was reunited with her son.
To really feel her story in all its dimensions, you have to watch the tape. (It's found here.) But her saga in a crude nutshell goes something like this:
Neville makes, or made, her home on Pauline Street in New Orleans' poverty-stricken Ninth Ward. When the hurricane warnings came, she, like many of her neighbors, felt she did not have the resources to flee. She had no money, no car, so she barricaded herself in the house, with an elderly man, and prayed.
Barely surviving the storm, she found shelter at the school across the street from her home. In a flat-bottom boat she helped rescue nearby residents, including stranded policemen. With a crowbar, she smashed a hole in the roof so people could climb to safety. For the next day or two, she waded back and forth in waist-deep water to bring food and drinking water to the growing number of people in the school, but conditions worsened and desperation grew by the hour.
Neville and others tried to get the attention of helicopters from the school's roof. Time after time they signaled for helicopters to help them but there weren’t nearly enough in the air. And they dropped no food or water, either. "We couldn't understand why they couldn’t help us,” she says on the video. The National Guard, she recalls bitterly, was absent.
"When we realized they weren't going to pick us up, we had to leave," she told The Advocate. "So we just started walking, in water, with dead bodies, and fish this big, and alligators, filth, trash. The smell was horrible."
On the video tape she gets more specific: There must have been hundreds of bodies in the water. Some of them were babies. The alligators were chomping on bodies. Gangs and looters descended. Old ladies and children were raped, herself included. Others were murdered.
Some of her neighbors committed suicide, she said: "Because nobody was coming to help them, they were killing themselves. Some people that just went crazy." Helicopters would pass over and "we would do the SOS on our flashlights" but they never stopped. Thousands were still trapped in their homes -- old, young, pregnant, children. Some men fired guns as choppers approached, but they "weren't trying to hit the helicopters. They figured maybe they weren't seeing us. Maybe if they heard this gunfire, they would stop, but that didn't help us."
On the video she continues, "I want people to understand is that if we had not been left down there like the animals that they were treating us like, all of those things wouldn't have happened."
At first, Neville thought her group could find refuge at the Superdome or the Convention Center. She escorted dozens, including "two old women in wheelchairs with no legs," to dry ground in the French Quarter, but didn't find any help there, either.
Finally at the French Market, Neville helped commandeer a city bus. She broke a window to get in, loaded up dozens of people, some in wheelchairs, and off they went. “And we drove and we drove,” she says on the tape, bursting into tears, “and millions of people were trying to get me to help them to get on the bus with them ...."
After she found shelter in a Baptist church, this Neville sister was evacuated to Baton Rouge. "There are many, many heroes that have come out this,” she told The Advocate. “People talk about what I did. I didn't do nothing. Everybody did something."
Referring to getting raped, Neville said, "What he took from me was nothing, because he can't take my spirit, he can't take my soul. My soul is New Orleans."
As originally published |
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Human kindness and
decency in Superdome
by Kris Lindbeck,
New Orleans Times-Picayune
Sept. 13, 2005
I am a visiting assistant professor at Tulane. Because I did not have a car, and through a degree of fecklessness and independence, I became one of the few professionals -- perhaps the only professor -- to live through the Superdome. I want to bear witness to two truths that the media is neglecting.
First, amid the stress and squalor of the Superdome, I was overwhelmed by countless acts of human kindness and decency among families and strangers. Mostly poor people of all races and degrees of education pulled together to survive the just adequate food, iffy security, and almost total lack of information.
Second, people will need time to recover emotionally and psychologically as well as practically. I myself am financially secure, healthy, and reunited with my husband without overt trauma. Nevertheless, my friends hurry to remind me that I may take weeks to recover my energy and direction. What about those who lost homes, family members, and all that is precious to them? Anyone who assumes that mere subsistence support will get evacuees and their children back on back on their feet, happy and grateful, is profoundly clueless.
As originally published
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