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I did not seek out professor van Heerden about Bush's deadly silence. Rather, I'd come to LSU to ask him about a strange little company, "Innovative Emergency Management," a politically well-connected firm that, a year before the hurricane, had finagled a contract to plan the evacuation of New Orleans.
Innovative Emergency Management knew a lot about political contributions, but seemed to have zero experience in hurricane response planning. In fact, their "plan" for New Orleans called for evacuating the city by automobile. When Katrina hit, 127,000 wheel-less New Orleans folk were left to float out.
And van Heerden knew all about it. Well before the hurricane, I discovered, he'd pointed out flaws in the "Innovative" plan - and was threatened for the revelation by a state official. The same official later joined the payroll of Innovative Emergency Management.
When I asked the company, at their office, for a copy of the plan, they body-blocked our Democracy Now! camerawoman and called the cops.
Not everyone shared the harsh fate of van Heerden. Just this month, Innovative Emergency Management, the firm with the drive-for-your-life plan, was handed a fat contract by the State of Alabama to draft - you guessed it - a hurricane evacuation plan for Mobile.
The City That Care Forgot
After the flood, I filmed the uplifting story of Common Ground, the commune of Katrina survivors who, under the leadership of the community organizer Malik Rahim, rebuilt a shattered hulk of a building with their own sweat and donated materials. They housed 350 displaced families.
Since I broadcast that film
in 2006, Rahim and the tenants were evicted by speculators who bought the
building. Just before Christmas, elderly residents were carried out and dumped
in the street, literally, by marshals. The speculators paid the families who
build their new edifice not one dime. We also filmed the story of Patricia Thomas, a woman fighting to return to her home in the beautiful Lafitte public housing project. Speculators have long lusted for this property on the edge of the French Quarter.
And now the speculators have it. Patricia's home, unscathed by Katrina, was nevertheless bulldozed. As Rahim puts it, "They wanted them poor niggers out of there and they ain't had no intention to allow it to be reopened to no poor niggers." Their plan succeeded. Patricia, homeless, died last year.
This Friday, take a moment to remember a courageous professor, an indefatigable activist and the refugee families who once lived in what was once called, "The City That Care Forgot."
Now, in 2009, you could call it the city that everyone forgot.
Part 2 tomorrow. A new warning; the next Katrina and Big Oil
For one week only, the International Humanities Center is offering, free of charge, a download of Greg Palast's investigative report for Democracy Now!, "Big Easy to Big Empty - the untold story of how the White House drowned New Orleans" at www.GregPalast.com.
