HOW HE SEES IT An act of God, assisted by humans

By JOHN HALL
MEDIA GENERAL NEWS SERVICE
WASHINGTON -- Looting in the streets, some of it while police stood by and watched; hospital patients on rooftops waving bed sheets for help that never seemed to come; dead bodies being shoved aside like so much debris; awful scenes of a general breakdown in order, as refugees were brought to the New Orleans Superdome even as it was declared unfit for human habitation.
These were scenes from New Orleans that shocked and depressed the country last week. Yet amid the chaos there were examples of people coping the best they could in one of the country's worst natural disasters. A big, rich neighboring state, Texas, came through for Louisiana without a moment's hesitation. People were snatched from roofs in daring Coast Guard helicopter lifts, though there didn't seem to be any good place prepared to put them except the Superdome, with its overflowing toilets.
Packages of ready-to-eat meals saved thousands of refugees from hunger. The Red Cross was on the way and squadrons of clean-up and rebuilding experts from the Federal Emergency Management Agency were assembling. The Navy was sending in ships laden with water and other supplies.
Yet, everything seemed dreadfully slow in arriving. At Children's Hospital in New Orleans at one point last week, sick children were reported huddling with nurses waiting in vain for help to arrive as looters were beating down the doors.
Sometimes you can look at these scenes of natural disaster and their immediate aftermath and despair that the United States has not moved very far up the scale of advanced nations. Maybe we are not so far up the list of civilized countries as our wealth and federal budget say we are.
New Orleans looked like some scene out of Armageddon at midweek, as President Bush flew home from Texas. The Associated Press reported widespread looting, in one case with a forklift, and what appeared to be a general breakdown of law and order. People were reported running out of a drugstore with baskets and coolers full of goods. The gun section of a Wal-Mart was stripped clean. A hospital delivery truck was held up at gunpoint.
Priorities
In some cases, the AP said, police stood by and let it happen, at least initially. They were under orders to take care of rescue operations first and get to law-enforcement matters later. National Guardsmen were deployed and eventually were ordered to free up the police to stop the looters, but some city councilmen objected to anyone working on law-enforcement matters while people were still stranded and in need.
Ugly choices always confront politicians in emergencies. It is what they are paid to do.
"We don't like looters one bit, but first and foremost is search and rescue," Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco declared, according to the AP, as her largest and most famous city was being pillaged. Planning for this disaster was so poor that those rescued by helicopter were taken to Jefferson Parish, the only dry land in the area, which had nothing at all to offer the refugees in the way of food, water, medicine or services. Louisiana had to go outside the state for help.
Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, a Republican who succeeded Bush there when he became president, didn't hesitate when Blanco called him. He made the mothballed Houston Astrodome available to house refugees from the New Orleans Superdome -- a move that will cost his state millions, crowd classrooms and burden social services. Perry not only cleared the Astrodome schedule to accommodate the homeless families, but ordered the doors of Texas public schools opened to admit the children for education and sent 500 buses to haul the refugees to Houston.
"We realized that, by the grace of God, we could be having these extraordinary needs," Perry said in explaining this great act of generosity.
This disaster may have been more than an act of God. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., has been trying to convince everyone for a long time that New Orleans' vulnerability to hurricanes is the doing of humans. She contends that Louisiana's buffer against storms has been eroded by the intentional rerouting of the Mississippi River over the last 100 years. Her calls for billions of dollars of expenditures on the state's wetlands to correct the problem have gone unheeded.
Now it will take many more billions for the physical, medical and social costs that lie head.
X John Hall is the senior Washington correspondent of Media General News Service. Distributed by Scripps Howard.