Editor’s note: This op-ed is by Telly Halkias, an award-winning freelance journalist. His column originally appeared in the Bennington Banner.
If Gov. Peter Shumlin does nothing else during his current term, he will have offered the public a valuable service by addressing frustration with the national media in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Irene.
His reply to a journalist’s question on the state’s emergency preparedness was instructive on many levels. Part of the retort: “What are we supposed to do, evacuate the entire state of Vermont? You can see one community that didn’t look like it gets hit at all, and two miles down the road a community that is totally devastated. And obviously, there is no one that can predict which community where, why or how.”
Not quite as well expressed as New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg — more on that later — but still true.
While journalists have a job to do, Mr. Shumlin called them to task. He reminded us of the law, and at the same time, should make us reconsider some of the ways we went about covering Hurricane Katrina as a political event rather than what it was: An unavoidable natural disaster.
Despite extensive radar modeling from the National Weather Service and popular dissemination — many argue hype — by The Weather Channel, no one could flawlessly predict Irene’s path, intensity or effects.
Nevertheless, local officials along her trajectory took actions they felt necessary, and waited. That’s all they could do. Even the legal profession and the insurance industry refer to the capriciousness of these events as “acts of God.”
Note the focus on state and municipal authorities. The constitutional principle of states’ rights and control of events within their borders makes local governments foot soldiers on the disaster relief front. They are directly accountable to the public for preparation, and what happens afterward to ameliorate damage. Not FEMA. Not the president.
In this way, Mr. Shumlin’s frustration was understandable, but still misdirected. This time, unlike with Katrina, the press had it right. While President Obama said all the right things and FEMA took all the proper measures, both were inconsequential until their assistance was specifically requested by affected states and cities.
In contrast, during Katrina, politicos such as Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin made terrible decisions that directly influenced all subsequent relief efforts.
Ms. Blanco waffled her way to mobilizing the National Guard and asking the feds for help, then took seven weeks to appoint a recovery commission. Mr. Nagin’s evacuation prep lacked urgency, and his rushed decision to use the Superdome as a quick-fix shelter turned into a months-long health and crime crisis in its own right.
This didn’t absolve FEMA for its own anemic efforts, or the Bush administration of its accountability therein. But it did suggest the press had grown so used to one punching bag, we kept wailing away at it without digging deeper into the story.
For example, Ms. Blanco and Mr. Nagin were never effectively taken to task for the above mistakes, yet the Army Corps of Engineers was roundly criticized for the levee breaches, even though it has no control over the purse strings to make upgrades happen.
In retrospect, and at its worst, such reporting was demagoguery. At its best, laziness.
Yet as a result of Katrina, Americans now have a better handle on who is supposed to be doing what to whom during such a malaise. And as noted by the aforementioned Mr. Bloomberg, while hyping Irene was unfortunate, he wouldn’t apologize for erring on the side of caution.
For his part, Gov. Shumlin was right to be frustrated, and astute in his analysis, but expressed himself in a way that came across as whining. Still, he didn’t go as far as to point his finger at the feds, something both Ms. Blanco and Mr. Nagin didn’t flinch to do during Katrina.
Yes, critics will argue that comparing New Orleans, a concentrated, mostly black city of 1.2 million, and Vermont, a dispersed, mostly white rural state of half that population, is an apples and oranges proposition.
But putting demographics aside is exactly what’s needed to make the message clearer: In covering acts of God, the press must see them for what they are, not as political football. The politicians in their midst are often not too different than the folks in the storm’s path.
After all, even the best preparation in the world wouldn’t have kept the Gulf of Mexico out of New Orleans, or Vermont’s rivers from jumping their banks.
