Katrina's Victims
As the article points out:
The problems that led to this disaster are not specific to Bush or to FEMA or to local Louisiana officials. The problem is that the ruling class in our social, economic, and political system simply refused to address a problem that primarily endangered the poor people of the affected region.Money and transportation  two keys to surviving a natural disaster  were inaccessible for many who got left behind in the Gulf region's worst squalor.
"It's a different equation for poor people," explained Dan Carter, a University of South Carolina historian. "There's a certain ease of transportation and funds that the middle class in this country takes for granted."
Catina Miller, a 32-year-old grocery deli worker who lived in the Ninth Ward, a poverty-stricken New Orleans enclave created in the 1870s by immigrants who were too poor to find higher ground, said she certainly would have liked to have left the city before the hurricane hit.
"But where can you go if you don't have a car?" she asked. "Not everyone can just pick up and take off."
Jack Harrald, director of the Institute for Crisis, Disaster and Risk Management at George Washington University in Washington, said emergency planners have known for years that the poverty and lack of transportation in New Orleans would be a significant problem, but the government spent more time and money preparing itself  rather than communities  for disaster.
"All issues were known," said Harrald, whose institute had been scheduling a series of emergency planning community meetings through a partnership with the University of New Orleans. "But it was still a work in progress. ... There's enough blame to go around for everybody."
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