The National Guard is finally out in force on the streets of New Orleans, but for some it is already too late. Survivors recount stories of infants and elderly victims who died of dehydration and exposure after days without help. Journalists describe the situation as a war zone, with corpses decomposing in open air and rapes taking place even in supposed safe havens. Criticism in Washington mounts as refugees ask why the government relief took so long in coming. “We are throw-away people,” a refugee tells Reuters.

We won’t know for some time the full extent of Hurricane Katrina’s toll, but it will likely reveal many of the dead to be African American and poor. In New Orleans, the city devastated by a one-two punch of hurricane and levee collapse, 68 percent of the population is African American, according to 2004 statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau. One in five individuals and one in seven families in New Orleans live under the poverty line, which in 2004 was $18,850 for a family of four. “If Sept. 11 showed the power of a nation united in response to a devastating attack, Hurricane Katrina reveals the fault lines of a region and a nation, rent by profound social divisions,” wrote Mark Naison, a professor of African American studies at Fordham University, in a piece quoted by The New York Times. (Kanye West was a bit less diplomatic in his choice of words.)

Has New Orleans been ignored by the nation’s leaders? Mayor Ray Nagin thinks so. Democrats (and some Republicans) have harshly criticized the federal government for its handling of the disaster. Some have complained that the Bush administration diverted funds that could have gone to levee building and reinforcement to the war in Iraq and tax cuts for the wealthy. Matthew Barge of FactCheck.org provides an even-handed assessment of this charge, concluding that, yes, the president drastically underfunded an Army Corps of Engineers project to enhance the levee system protecting New Orleans: Bush’s budget allocated $3 million of the $11 million the Corps requested for the project in fiscal year 2004, and $3.9 million of the $22.5 million requested in 2005 (Congress subsequently raised the funding to $5.5 million in both years). That said, it’s unclear whether the money cut would have made a difference. “The Army Corps of Engineers — which is under the President’s command and has its own reputation to defend — insists that Katrina was just too strong,” Barge writes, “and that even if the levee project had been completed it was only designed to withstand a category 3 hurricane.”

What is clear is that local officials had been complaining as early as four years ago that not enough funds were being devoted to hurricane protection. Federal officials knew of the danger, but little was done. The last paragraph of the FactCheck.org analysis is especially chilling:

Whether or not a breach” was “anticipated,” the fact is that many individuals have been warning for decades about the threat of flooding that a hurricane could pose to a set below sea level and sandwiched between major waterways. A Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) report from before September 11, 2001 detailed the three most likely catastrophic disasters that could happen in the United States: a terrorist attack in New York, a strong earthquake in San Francisco, and a hurricane strike in New Orleans. In 2002, New Orleans officials held the simulation of what would happen in a category 5 storm. Walter Maestri, the emergency coordinator of Jefferson Parish in New Orleans, recounted the outcome to PBS’ NOW With Bill Moyers:

Maestri, September 2002: Well, when the exercise was completed it was evidence that we were going to lose a lot of people. We changed the name of the [simulated] storm from Delaney to K-Y-A-G-B… kiss your ass goodbye… because anybody who was here as that category five storm came across… was gone.

A terrorist strike in New York, a hurricane in New Orleans, and an earthquake in San Francisco — is our government trying to win the Triple Crown of disasters? This time, an entire American city was turned into a war zone. An entire urban population was thrown onto the trash heap. Do we have to wait for a third catastrophe for the people in charge to get the message?

UPDATE, 9/8/05, 12:20 a.m. EST: The Guardian points out that earlier allegations of rape have not yet been substantiated by authorities.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen