Nick Coleman's Invincible Ignorance

Nick Coleman, inevitably, holds forth on the New Orleans disaster.

Is he on-target?

Oops - my title sort of tipped my hand, didn't it?

Coleman, like a lot of pundits, compares the '97 Grand Forks flood with New Orleans - or, as we say in the punditry business, "compares apples with oranges".

Floodwaters filled the streets while buildings burned. Many people fled. But others, too old, too broke or too stubborn, stayed, only to end up sleeping on cots and grumbling angrily about having to live like rats. I am not talking about New Orleans. I am talking about North Dakota.

The Big Freezy, not the Big Easy.

G'huk, g'huk! A North Dakota joke!

In April 1997, I waded through hip-high floodwaters in Grand Forks in the middle of the night as street lights shorted out and transformer stations blew up in arcs of blue light. The Red River of the North had burst through the dikes and smashed through the city, shattering homes and buildings and pouring inside.

I'll never forget the scene at a six-story senior citizen residence where a fiery red sun rose over a surreal disaster scene. The elevator shaft was filling with water and screeching fire alarms made an unceasing din while a handful of rescue workers carried old people in wheelchairs, trundling them down flights of stairs, sloshing through a lobby where the furniture was swirling around in a freezing vortex.

The Grand Forks flood was indeed a miserable time; a flood in freezing weather. But - and this is sort of important - it didn't follow a hurricane. It didn't hit by surprise - unlike New Orleans' vague predictions of catastrophe, Grand Forks pretty much knew that when the Red hit a certain depth, the dike system would probably fail. Grand Forks had had similar, though lesser, floods many times in the past. And the area involved, huge as it was in comparison with Grand Forks, was much smaller than the catastrophe in New Orleans.

Thank God for the National Guard deuce-and-a-half, a vintage troop truck standing outside, its diesel engine rumbling, a 22-year-old kid with freckles at the wheel. After being loaded up with old folks, it moved off like a tour boat through the dark waters, ramming away a giant Dumpster floating down the street.

Praise the Lord and call up the National Guard.

That was the good old days, 1997, when Americans expected their government would assist them, and back before those who governed bragged that they wanted to drown government in a bathtub. Along with whoever was in the way.

And it's here that Nick Coleman, as in few other places, shows what a deeply, abidingly, invincibly stupid man he truly is.

I use the word "stupid" fairly rarely, actually, and usually to refer to acts of man rather than men themselves. I usually try to eschew namecalling - it's usually the sign of insufficient brightness

But I think it applies, here.

Quick, Nick Coleman - show us a single tax-cutting crusader who wants to gut the military, or the National Guard.

In fact, it's your side who, when there's no emergency going on, puts on bumperstickers; "Wouldn't it be great if the Schools had what they needed, and the Air Force had to put on a bake sale...", that kind of bilge.

Grand Forks was a picnic compared with what has been happening in New Orleans [Duuhhhhh - Ed.]. But the pictures from New Orleans make me nostalgic for a time when college kids and grizzled military veterans signed up for service in the National Guard so they could be relied upon to help their neighbors get out of trouble in fires, floods, tornadoes and -- yes -- hurricanes.

Almost a week after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, there are supposed to be 7,000 National Guard troops in New Orleans, including 2,000 from states other than Louisiana.

Way too little, way too late.

Perhaps Mr. Coleman is unaware; the disaster covers the entire Gulf Coast. Biloxi and Gulfport and much of the lower Mississippi Delta are all in a ruinous state. The National Guard - much of which was gutted during previous administrations to help cash in the "Peace Dividend" - was stretched thin all over the southeast, from Florida to Louisiana.

Grand Forks was a small (geographically, anyway) disaster; the Military could concentrate its efforts on a fairly small area. And - this is kind of important - they were ten miles from a major air force base, to which evacuees could be transported over intact roads from a city that, while flooded, was both readily accessible and fairly small.

None of which applies in New Orleans.

In the Red River flood of 1997, Guard troops helped ward off a larger disaster. Thousands helped -- building dikes, rescuing the stranded, maintaining order. Some isolated towns like Hendrum, Minn., literally were saved by citizen soldiers to the rescue.

Hendrum was saved when a National Guard unit, given plenty of warning by a State government that knew what it was dealing with, built a flood wall around the city, leaving it an island surrounded by five feet of water. But - and this is sort of important - the flood in the Red River Valley behaved predictably; Minnesota knew that it needed a Combat Engineer unit in Hendrum before a certain time on a certain day, when the flood waters would be above a certain height.

Nothing in New Orleans has been that predictable - or at least the Louisiana state government hasn't known how to predict it, either way.

Some folks want to pretend that the crisis in New Orleans can be blamed on the people who were stuck in an abandoned, drowning city. Not many prosperous Norwegians, like up in Grand Forks, you know. But I am telling you there were a lot of unhappy Norwegians in North Dakota, and if they hadn't had food or water for four days, things might have gotten not so nice.

Naturally - but again, he's comparing apples and oranges. No, by this point he's down to apples and axles.

The Air Force base near Grand Forks is both dry, above the flood plain, and has nearly 10,000 servicepeople. Imagine if a military base housing 100,000 troops were located ten miles from New Orleans, were somehow immune from the storm and the flood, were connected to the city via ten miles of intact (but flooded) roads passable by the thousands of vehicles at the base. Think things might be different today?

Coleman inverts things, of course:

Human nature is human nature. But New Orleans didn't have to look like the end of the world. It could have looked like Grand Forks. The difference is Grand Forks had timely help, from neighbors in uniform.

And a lack of Category Four Hurricanes, and a civil infrastructure that didn't wash away, and a disaster that was mathematically predictable. Had the Grand Forks flood been accompanied by 145 mph winds, a town set permanently below the level of the Red River (it is not!), and accessible by causeways and bridges that could fall apart under the abuse of the weather, Grand Forks could have looked like New Orleans. Just smaller, whiter and much, much colder.

Today, many citizen soldiers are far away, their boots and bodies being used as Hamburger Helper to stretch out the ranks of the regular Army in Iraq. All to make America safer while our cities fend for themselves and Army Corps of Engineer flood control programs are slashed.

He's stupid, and he's a liar; 3/4 of the Louisiana Guard is in Louisiana; the Army Corps of Engineers budget has nothing to do with the fact that no levee programs that would have affected New Orleans were in any way affected by the budget cuts.

There were at least 2,000 Guard and military personnel in or on their way to Grand Forks the day the flood hit.

Grand Forks is a base town!

And some Guard units had equipment to make 65,000 gallons a day of potable water from contaminated flood water -- something that might have saved countless lives in New Orleans.

Nick!

Read a fecking book or two! Water purifications units are all over the place in Louisiana; there was, for whatever reason, no way to get all that potable water into the city!

Coleman wants to blame - in his feckless, elephantine style - the Bush Administration and, I guess, the Taxpayers League for the City of New Orleans' unwillingness to plan for disasters, or the State's unwillingness and inability to drive the National Guard into New Orleans, to quell the looting by force.

The New Orleans metro area has 13 times more people than the Grand Forks region, and maybe 25 or 50 times the number of poor and elderly people, the folks who are often unable or unwilling to evacuate during a natural disaster. So a comparable troop ratio for New Orleans would have meant 25,000 on hand before the disaster. And more now.

So...is Coleman calling for...what? Military garrisons in major cities?

Grand Forks is a base town!

I know. We are at war, fighting "them" over there so we don't have to fight them here. But with 40 percent of our troops in Iraq coming from the ranks of Guard and Reserve forces (2,600 more Minnesota troops will soon be on their way), Katrina has made it clear: The home front is un-Guarded.

No. It has not.

It has made it clear that the home front is run by politicians whose forte is not planning for disasters.

And it's served by a news media that does no better a job of covering the home front than they do in Iraq.

Posted by Mitch at September 4, 2005 08:07 AM | TrackBack