El encabalgamiento de ámbitos y su fecundidad

To capture the voices of the individuals on the ground a team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania (Fischer et al. 2006) carried out 58 field interviews in autumn 2005 with first responders and confirmed that “the responders were victims as much as the others in their communities” (p4). Their impressions were summed up by one that

“when we emerged after the storm passed, we could not see any roads … anywhere … that is when I knew we were really in for it” and another “we had no vehicles to begin

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140 search and rescue … there were no roads to drive on … there was no electricity … we couldn’t pump [fuel] “(p4).

The first thing that strikes one from the edited transcripts is that the individuals clearly knew that it was serious but had little idea of the extent except for one who used his generator to power his TV. “All I knew was from the mass media when I turned it on … That is how I eventually knew how big the event was and how long it was taking, and going to take, to get help to all of us” (p8).

Well before the hurricane struck the emergency services were already in action but badly managed so that as another responder noted “To make matters worse, we were already exhausted before impact even occurred … we went into full alert for several days before impact … we emerged in the rubble and then had to begin search and rescue – but we were already exhausted” (p4).

Medical staff reported they had broken into a pharmacy “to acquire needed basic medical supplies since we had no other recourse” adding that “even after we could communicate with officials, they still did not deliver what they promised” (p6). An ambulance crew reported their initial fear of survivors based on a being mobbed which on reflection they realised was because “they saw the ambulance and assumed we would have something they could shoot themselves up with … they were desperate for the drugs they could not now buy since they were cut off from their dealers” (p8).

The social and moral impact on the police was also severe resulting in them experiencing hostility, whether deserved or not (Kemmelmeir et al. 2008) and being reduced to surviving and at best performing as zero responders (Hustmyre 2006). In her analysis of the immediate response phase of Katrina from a criminological perspective Hicks (2007) uses Barton’s (1969) typology to explore the environment in which local police had to operate, that of social disorganisation on the one hand and the development of an altruistic community on the other.

Whatever happened after Katrina struck, the New Orleans police were already vulnerable. It had a reputation of corruption, poor education, low morale, bad management and consequently high turnover, low retention, and difficulties with recruitment. They were low-paid, hence many had second jobs, and were policing one of the most violent cities in the USA (Deflem & Sutphin 2009). It was a condition of employment that officers live in the city and so after Katrina passed 300 officers had to be rescued from rooftops and 70% of the force lost their homes. After Katrina 60

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141 officers resigned, 45 were fired, two committed suicide (Anderson & Farber 2006) and eight were eventually charged with crimes related to fatal shootings of civilians by police (Hampton 2016; Associated Press 2016).

Seeking to explain the seemingly irrational inter-group aggression between survivors on the one hand and first responders, usually the police, on the other, during the response to Katrina, Kemmelmeir et al. (2008) draw on a wide range of data from interviews and the media. Their aim was to examine what happened as “by survivors attacking their rescuers, they are rebuffing the very help that they so desperately need. Conversely, when rescuers aggress against survivors, they completely subvert their helping roles and deny the professionalism that is typically found in first responders” (p212).

Officer Dumas Carter who was one of a small group left to police the Convention Centre gave a long and frank interview to a journalist (Carter 2005) which provides a rich description of the stress they, or at least the interviewee, were under,

“…police cars destroyed … radios weren’t working … people are freaking out … the captain refuses to command us … four of us stayed at the hotel, two of us stayed at the station, and everybody else ran like I don’t know what … Lots of people on the street asked me where to go. I’m telling them the truth, which is I don’t know”. He goes on “Those people went to the Convention Centre, and there was no food or water … there’s no police, everybody’s left the city except six of us. And there’s 20,000 people with no extra security down there … the captain is saying they’re going to riot … they’re going to burn the fucking hotel down … it’s going to be a massacre” (Carter 2005 online in Kemmelmeir et al.

2008: 224).

A more empathetic view was given by another officer at the nearby Superdome, “We are over here, we are outnumbered … we are stranded as well … when they see nothing [help] it becomes a sense of helplessness, and then they tend to of course get hostile … I can pretty much understand why they feel the way they do” (Gordon 2005 in Kemmelmeir et al. 2008).

Despite the abuse of authority and racism, and abandonment of their posts by some officers, others responded to the situation. Many lost everything in the storm whilst others had no knowledge of the whereabouts of their evacuated families. An oral history project has interviewed 24 officers in depth (Cave 2007; Historic New Orleans Collection undated) but the transcripts are sealed for 25 years. Similarly, Kroll-Smith et

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142 al. (2007) were not permitted to record their interviews with their sample of eighteen first responders for political reasons but also themselves felt it was an intrusion. They started with a preconceived idea of the successful first responder as a “bricoleur”, in contrast to reliance on protocols and training certificates and found that some people were constrained by plans and procedures whilst others rose to the occasion, re-inventing themselves. As one respondent put it “some people would do the wrong thing the right way [and other people were] committed to doing the right thing any way” (p16) unwittingly paraphrasing Bennis and Nanus (1985: 21) on management and leadership.

Less rigorous accounts are available from a range of sources. One example is a report in The Nation that describes a detective who with a diver and a national guardsman went out recovering bodies every night. This was to avoid the heat and media because it was a job that required wearing a hazmat suit. He felt frustrated that “We were under strict orders to remove only bodies but there were still lots of people on the roofs or leaning out of windows. They were crazy with fear and thirst” (Davis & Fontenot 2005: 2).

Writing for a law enforcement readership Hustmyre (2006) gives sympathetic accounts of local police initiatives and improvisation in the aftermath of Katrina. For instance, a SWAT team took their privately-owned boats to work and affected rescues in flooded areas and this was replicated by a group of drug and vice officers. Police commanders, operating without communications or bases commandeered a casino and attempted to coordinate the influx of police volunteers from out-of-state.

Looting became an issue during the aftermath of Katrina (Trainor et al. 2006). There undoubtedly was some looting of luxuries but much of it was best described as acquiring necessities. As one responder put it “We did what we had to do: we prioritised needs … It looked like a third world country around here, I’m afraid we had to act like it, too” (Fischer et al 2006: 5)

3.2. Survivors as Zero Responders

The first responder concept was extended by Cocking (2013) to those members of a community already in place, that is survivors or victims who respond and help others, for whom he coined the term zero responders. He found evidence from the 2005 London Bombings that among the survivors “figures of influence emerged, who then had a positive effect on the general co-operation to help others” which then allowed

“brave individuals to emerge … who can then exert social influence to encourage more

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143 pro-active cooperation amongst survivors” (p10), the emergent crisis leaders. The scale of events, poor decision making and the destruction of infrastructure meant that first responders, both in the formal policy sense and colloquially, were often relegated to the status of victims or at best, zero responders.

Hurricane Katrina as a catastrophe is described in raw terms by survivors, adding to the professional yet emotional testimony of Bahamonde (2005) and Roth (2010) quoted in Chapter VIII. One example is the less articulate interviewee, Bernie Porche, who described the fate of survivors marooned on an overpass waiting for rescue: “… you had dead bodies on the bridge … people from different areas trying to survive the storm … trying to survive this bridge action … she came on the bridge [unidentified police officer], she had a pump [shotgun], she pumped it and looked at everybody, like everybody on the bridge was a suspect, you know, did like a crime or something”

(Lindahl 2013: 104).

Many of the survivors that were interviewed in relation to events during and after Katrina were poorly educated and often inarticulate with the interviewers keeping the dialect and slang of the original in their transcripts for authenticity (Vollen & Ying 2008;

Ancelet et al. 2013).

A professional account of the aftermath of Katrina is provided by two stranded paramedics who were attending a medical conference in New Orleans and formed part of a group of other delegates, tourists and residents that appeared to be abandoned by the authorities and after several days decided to self-evacuate. Based on their experience they concluded that “the official relief effort was callous, inept and racist.

There was more suffering than need be. Lives were lost that did not need to be lost”

(Bradshaw & Slonsky 2005:3).

They describe an encounter with local police which vividly illustrated the social breakdown in New Orleans when evacuees tried to cross a bridge to the neighbouring town of Gretna, “As we approached [New Orleans Bridge] armed sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions” (p2).

Soon after that encounter with police they “decided to build an encampment in the middle of the [elevated] Ponchartrain Expressway” (ibid) for security whilst they waited to be evacuated. They went on to describe their ad hoc emergent organisation

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144

“Our little encampment began to blossom. Someone stole a water delivery truck and brought it to us … an army truck lost a couple of pallets of C-rations [military rations] on a tight turn. We ferried the food back to our camp in shopping carts … cooperation, community and creativity flowered. We organised a clean-up and hung garbage bags ... We made beds from wooden pallets and cardboard. We designated a storm drain as the bathroom and the kids built an elaborate enclosure for privacy out of plastic, broken umbrellas, and other scraps. We even organised a food recycling system where individuals could swap parts of C-rations for applesauce for babies and candies for kids!”

(ibid).

This seems a perfect example of emergent organisation and much of it ties in with other stories from survivors. Their account was published in the left-wing Socialist Worker and indicates the authors leanings by opening with reference to “the real heroes and

‘sheroes’ of the hurricane relief effort: the working class of New Orleans” (p1). Their account was quoted by Freudedburg et al. (2009) in their analysis of Katrina but this left-wing connection may explain why the wider media did not follow-up the story.

These incidents were confirmed in other accounts such as that of a Canadian tourist, Jill Johnson, who was interviewed on radio some weeks later (Burnett 2005), and a similar incident experienced by a USCG rescue boat crew who were threatened twice with a shotgun by an individual police officer when they tried to land evacuees near Louis Armstrong Airport (Canney 2010: 95).

3.3. The Emergent Virtual Community

Several internet sites were created immediately after Katrina listing details of missing persons to match them with persons found safe, something usually done by the authorities, e.g. Casualty Bureau (College of Policing) in the UK and the American Red Cross in the US. It is frustratingly slow and meticulous process because it can involve identifying partial human remains. Within hours of landfall the Katrinahelp Wiki was established (Majchrzak et al. 2007) hosted on a student’s server in The Netherlands.

Information on missing persons, shelters and government resources, children’s activities, and employment opportunities, was made available by an “emergent continuously changing set of participants” (p149) according to need and circumstances.

Once the site recorded 1 million hits per day the private sector assumed responsibility for hosting it. Informal sites had proved useful after 9/11 and the Asian Tsunami but

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145 using experience gained from the latter a collaboration of individuals, not-for-profit firms, and corporations, in a matter of days developed software, PeopleFinder, that could consolidate data to pass to the Red Cross (Jones & Mitnick 2006). Many blogs were created immediately after Katrina, mostly expressing frustration at government inaction, and continued to grow in number mobilising civic participation in the recovery of New Orleans (Ostertag & Ortiz 2015). Perhaps a legacy of Katrina is that similar ephemeral initiatives have now become an important humanitarian resource linking social media to digital mapping (Meier & Munro 2010; Meir 2012) and communities with established responders (Liu & Palen 2010; Herranz et al. 2014) as well as being an active research field (Vos & Sullivan 2014); Hyvärinen et al. 2015).

3.4. The Media as First Informers

In Chapter VIII I drew attention to the media’s early sensationalised reporting and re-reporting which may have contributed to the delayed response but the media also played an important part in getting journalists to the scene immediately when officials were holding back for safety and logistical reasons, thereby putting pressure on government to step up the response (Miller & Goidel 2009). One first responder queried “How come emergency organisations could not get there but media organisations could?” (Fischer et al. 2006: 7) something that struck me when I was interviewed live in London from New Orleans by Sky News. May (2006) was the rapporteur at a post-Katrina media conference to explore how the disaster had changed the information landscape. He extended the concept of first responder to his own discipline with first informers (ibid) in recognition of the dependency on the media for timely information. The conference observed that digital communication had led to novel ways of passing information “that empowered citizens and created ad hoc distributive information networks” which created a challenging new but double-edged

“cadre of first informers” which “exacerbated the pre-existing problems of sorting out truth amid chaos” (pxi). Among the many predictable recommendations concerning the relationship of crisis managers and the media was one relating to the community response, that “alternative and ethnic media and community networks of minority and disadvantaged groups should be tapped” (pxiii).

3.5. Nonprofit Organisations

The nature of Katrina as a catastrophe (Quarantelli 2006) can be seen by the impact on nonprofit organisations that were important to community life before Katrina and might

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146 have had a response role. A survey found there were 3,200 nonprofit community service organisations in Louisiana when Katrina struck (Auer & Lampkin 2006). They built and managed affordable housing as well as providing local health care and supporting the public education system for poorer communities. Most were severely affected by Katrina and later that month by Hurricane Rita, the worst situation being New Orleans where over 54% were non-functioning and the remainder offering limited services. Despite this, faith-based organisations responded immediately with volunteers, churches and premises for temporary shelters, and cash handouts. The same authors report that in another survey “residents rated the response by churches as more effective than those of city, state, and federal governments and local and national nonprofits” (p6). Often themselves victims, the nonprofit and faith-based organisations that survived were effective perhaps “because they were not encumbered by the bureaucracy” (Green et al. 2007:41) and furthermore given the hollowing-out of government agencies (Busch & Givens 2013) such groups could fill the gaps in services both within organisations and as part of a network.