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Hurricane Irene: In disasters as in struggles, solidarity helps

Published Aug 31, 2011 1:20 PM

Hurricane Irene threatened 55 million people as it swept up the U.S. East Coast, following a rare track for a late-summer storm. Many capitalist politicians, on national, state and local levels, strove to present an image of compassionate and effective concern — equally rare sentiments. Before its winds slowed as it reached the Northeast, Irene struck the Leeward Islands and the Bahamas full force and dumped major amounts of rain on Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. government has spent tens of billions of dollars on “homeland security.” This has strengthened the state’s repressive apparatus. But there is still no coordinated plan for confronting national disasters that affect millions of people.

The TV weather forecasters’ consistent refrain was that Irene was a serious storm and people in the U.S. were lucky to have avoided more damage and destruction. For example, Irene’s “eye” came ashore in New York City an hour after high tide. The retreating tide countered the water the hurricane was pushing into the harbor and lower Manhattan escaped major flooding.

As Irene churned along, various governors, mayors, Federal Emergency Management Agency administrators and Red Cross officials held press conference after press conference pushing the same plan: Individuals should put together a “go” bag, listen to press announcements, and head for higher grounds and safer shores.

They didn’t explain how to do this without a car; how the elderly, infirm, home-bound could do it; and when to leave. The threat affected the whole community. But officials pushed an individual response, lacking any sort of solidarity.

Outrage over Rikers Island

An extreme example of the politicians’ calculated response was how billionaire New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg abandoned the prisoners at Rikers Island, the large prison the city runs on an island off the Queens shore. Rikers has an average population of 14,000, almost all Black or Latino/a, many youths, many awaiting trial who can’t make bail. Even though Rikers was surrounded by Zone A areas which were designated to be evacuated, the city put it in Zone B and stubbornly refused to develop a plan to move the inmates.

It was encouraging that a section of the progressive movement concerned about prisoners – on the initiative of Critical Resistance, The Jericho Movement and some radical attorneys — mobilized to demand an evacuation plan for Rikers. Enough complaints reached the mayor’s office that officials were forced to make public statements on the issue and the media reported it. It was a dress rehearsal for a greater storm.

Socialist Cuba’s disaster responses

Cuba, much smaller than the United States and much poorer than Manhattan, is frequently hit by major storms. It does cooperate in exchanging information about hurricanes with U.S. forecasters. (New York Times, Aug. 21, 2009)

But its civil defense against hurricane devastation is much different.

Every household gets an evacuation plan long before the hurricane’s arrival, and drills are held regularly. As the hurricane approaches, news media issue warnings and civil-defense officials alert local response teams, which reach each resident of each block of each town and village.

Schools and other buildings are quickly turned into shelters, and a doctor, and sometimes a nurse, is assigned to staff them and deliver medicine and medical care to those who need it. There are stocks of blankets, water and food. Forty-eight hours before the expected arrival of the hurricane, people prepare to evacuate.

When the storm is a day away, volunteers go door-to-door to ensure everyone gets out of harm’s way. Government buses, cars and trucks transport people to safety. The shelters take in anyone who can’t find another safe place to stay, though many take shelter with friends or relatives. During Hurricane Ike in 2008, Cuba evacuated 2.6 of its 11.4 million people to safety. (AP, Sept. 18, 2008)

In North and South Carolina, where Irene first made landfall in the U.S., and southern Virginia, most people directly threatened were tourists with their own vehicles who could flee with only encouragement from the authorities.

As Irene lingered over land and cooler water, its winds lost much of their punch, but the accompanying rains presented a major danger. This year’s wet summer left much of the East Coast’s land soft and saturated. More rain and the remaining wind brought trees down, which blocked roads, brought down overhead power lines and caused some deaths. Up to a million households and businesses lost power in Virginia.

Maryland and New Jersey ordered beach resorts evacuated, turning highways into one-way, out-only byways, especially in New Jersey. There were scattered reports of local residents forced into shelters not ready for the influx. The ensuing chaos and confusion took authorities a day or so to straighten out.

Response in New York City

The authorities in New York City, the financial and media capital of the U.S., had reason to believe Irene might hit the city head-on. It was the first such hurricane in three decades. They also knew that their lack of preparation for and completely inadequate response to the Dec. 26, 2010, blizzard ground the city to a halt, in some communities up to several weeks, and led to heavy complaints.

The city’s Office of Emergency Management had a map defining three areas at risk of flooding. Roughly, Zone A was likely to flood with a Level 1 storm or above; Zone B with a Level 2 or above; and Zone C with a Level 3 or 4 storm. Higher areas were considered safe to stay in. (Full disclosure: I live on the boundary of Zones A and B and decided to evacuate.)

Mayor Bloomberg issued a mandatory evacuation order for everyone living in Zone A, and the city began evacuating disabled patients in Zone A hospitals and nursing homes starting Aug. 25. Some of these evacuations went smoothly. Others had a lot of problems, with missing medications, incompatible electronic records and resistance of some business operators to the costs they might face.

Not evacuating was a misdemeanor, although the mayor promised not to prosecute. For the affluent residents of Battery Park City in Manhattan, where rents start at $4,000 for efficiency apartments, spending a few nights in a hotel and using cabs or a car service were no budget-breakers.

For Lower East Side residents of New York City Housing Authority high rises, it was a totally different story. While evacuating on the subway at a stop without an elevator, I met an elderly woman with a disabled daughter who had to be manually carried down the stairs before boarding a train to Brooklyn, where a relative would met them.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority announced Aug. 26 that it was stopping both subways and buses at noon on Aug. 27. Most city residents went along with shutting down the subway system, the first voluntary shutdown to protect the subway cars in its 100-year history. There was less support for shutting down the buses because they were under less threat. However, the shutdown meant many people couldn’t get to work on the weekend — which meant they lost wages.

And the shutdown meant that hundreds of NYCHA residents who depend on public transport had no way to get to the shelters the city had opened. Nevertheless, the city still forced them out, threatening to turn off elevators.

Local elected politicians started raising a stink, and the city finally scrounged up some school buses and got fire fighters to drive NYCHA residents to shelters, particularly those in Coney Island and the Rockaways, which are barrier islands facing the Atlantic in Brooklyn and Queens.

The city boasted that it had 92 shelters, with space for 70,000 people, though not enough beds. Though there were 370,000 people in Zone A, only about 9,000 people took advantage of the shelters, according to the media. They slept on cots that were cheek-to-jowl. As soon as the storm passed on Aug. 28, people left the shelters

Downgraded to a tropical storm after it hit landfall in New York City, Irene still dumped much rain, producing flooding and mud slides in Connecticut, New Jersey and upstate New York and major flooding, power loss, road closings and vanished bridges in Vermont.

The clean-up and restoration of services have begun, though thousands of people are newly homeless and many businesses are in ruins. Already Republican politicians are saying that the multibillion-dollar cost of rebuilding must be taken out of cuts in the federal budget. That’s not what Cuba would do.