Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and Peak Oil

By Shepherd Bliss

“When people get hungry, they do desperate things,� retired Santa Rosa, CA, firefighter Andrew Aguilar recalled at a Peak Oil meeting this summer in Sonoma County. He was referring specifically to the Mexican Revolution of 1910, during which his family fled the violence to get to safer America.

Aguilar’s words came back to this reporter as he observed the chaos in New Orleans and elsewhere on the Louisiana and Mississippi Coasts in the devastating wake of Hurricane Katrina. The dead are left lying where they fell or float eerily down rivers created by water-filled streets. The dead were not even being counted by press time, though the mayor of New Orleans estimates that the number may be into the thousands. Armed gangs assault rescue and medical crews, making the tragedy even worse. The streets are filled with the stench of human waste.

It’s a sad moment when we know that as of press time some 200,000 people were still scrambling to get out of a sinking New Orleans, once one of America’s many great cities, now laid to waste. Katrina left a million homeless and created refugee camps to house hundreds of thousands of people for weeks and months. Preliminary damage estimates top $25 billion, making it the worst “natural� disaster in American history.

“Civilization is a thin veneer,� is another quotation that comes to mind.

New Orleans will probably never be rebuilt. One wonders if this could be a preview of how some American citiesâ€