Black people abandoned in Houston as they were in New Orleans

Racism and the evacuation of residents during Hurricane Harvey

I have never forgotten the coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005. 

 I recall being riveted to broadcasts from Amy Goodman of Democacy Now! and hearing the searing accounts of racism and sheer inhumanity towards others.

I now realise from one discussion with a friend that many people are too young or simply don’t remember the events for various reasons.

When I saw videos of people being rescued it did not escape my attention that black faces were conspicuous by their absence except for those doing the rescuing. Lots of stories of elderly white people, even dogs and horses – but no black people.

Today I found two videos that demonstrate that the more things change the more they stay the same.

PROOF Black People Are Being ABANDONED In Houston

“They opened the levees on black neighbourhoods”

Woman tells the truth about what happening to black people in Houston

“Who do I ring to get rescued?”

“Ring Jesus”

There is not nearly the same coverage from Democracy Now! this time round but they did do this story about how the Red Cross and aid agencies are just leaving people largely to fend for themselves

The Red Cross Won't Save Houston. Texas Residents Are Launching Community Relief Efforts Instead

What I remember clearly from Hurricane Katrina is the story of how the DN team found a black corpse and their attempts to get someone to take it away. The rang the police who said “ring FEMA” (these may not be the exact agencies. They rang FEMA who said “ring the police”...and so on.

And the other story was how prisoners were left to drown in their cells by the authorities who evacuated themselves.

This is from Human Rights Watch

New Orleans: Prisoners Abandoned to Floodwaters

Officers Deserted a Jail Building, Leaving Inmates Locked in Cells

Human Rights Watch,

21 September, 2005

As Hurricane Katrina began pounding New Orleans, the sheriff's department abandoned hundreds of inmates imprisoned in the city’s jail, Human Rights Watch said today.

Inmates in Templeman III, one of several buildings in the Orleans Parish Prison compound, reported that as of Monday, August 29, there were no correctional officers in the building, which held more than 600 inmates. These inmates, including some who were locked in ground-floor cells, were not evacuated until Thursday, September 1, four days after flood waters in the jail had reached chest-level.

“Of all the nightmares during Hurricane Katrina, this must be one of the worst,” said Corinne Carey, researcher from Human Rights Watch. “Prisoners were abandoned in their cells without food or water for days as floodwaters rose toward the ceiling.”

Human Rights Watch called on the U.S. Department of Justice to conduct an investigation into the conduct of the Orleans Sheriff's Department, which runs the jail, and to establish the fate of the prisoners who had been locked in the jail. The Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, which oversaw the evacuation, and the Orleans Sheriff’s Department should account for the 517 inmates who are missing from the list of people evacuated from the jail.

Carey spent five days in Louisiana, conducting dozens of interviews with inmates evacuated from Orleans Parish Prison, correctional officers, state officials, lawyers and their investigators who had interviewed more than 1,000 inmates evacuated from the prison.

The sheriff of Orleans Parish, Marlin N. Gusman, did not call for help in evacuating the prison until midnight on Monday, August 29, a state Department of Corrections and Public Safety spokeswoman told Human Rights Watch. Other parish prisons, she said, had called for help on the previous Saturday and Sunday. The evacuation of Orleans Parish Prison was not completed until Friday, September 2.

According to officers who worked at two of the jail buildings, Templeman 1 and 2, they began to evacuate prisoners from those buildings on Tuesday, August 30, when the floodwaters reached chest level inside. These prisoners were taken by boat to the Broad Street overpass bridge, and ultimately transported to correctional facilities outside New Orleans.

But at Templeman III, which housed about 600 inmates, there was no prison staff to help the prisoners. Inmates interviewed by Human Rights Watch varied about when they last remember seeing guards at the facility, but they all insisted that there were no correctional officers in the facility on Monday, August 29. A spokeswoman for the Orleans parish sheriff’s department told Human Rights Watch she did not know whether the officers at Templeman III had left the building before the evacuation.

According to inmates interviewed by Human Rights Watch, they had no food or water from the inmates' last meal over the weekend of August 27-28 until they were evacuated on Thursday, September 1. By Monday, August 29, the generators had died, leaving them without lights and sealed in without air circulation. The toilets backed up, creating an unbearable stench.

“They left us to die there,” Dan Bright, an Orleans Parish Prison inmate told Human Rights Watch at Rapides Parish Prison, where he was sent after the evacuation.

As the water began rising on the first floor, prisoners became anxious and then desperate. Some of the inmates were able to force open their cell doors, helped by inmates held in the common area. All of them, however, remained trapped in the locked facility.

“The water started rising, it was getting to here,” said Earrand Kelly, an inmate from Templeman III, as he pointed at his neck. “We was calling down to the guys in the cells under us, talking to them every couple of minutes. They were crying, they were scared. The one that I was cool with, he was saying ‘I'm scared. I feel like I'm about to drown.' He was crying.”

Some inmates from Templeman III have said they saw bodies floating in the floodwaters as they were evacuated from the prison. A number of inmates told Human Rights Watch that they were not able to get everyone out from their cells.

Inmates broke jail windows to let air in. They also set fire to blankets and shirts and hung them out of the windows to let people know they were still in the facility. Apparently at least a dozen inmates jumped out of the windows.

”We started to see people in T3 hangin' shirts on fire out the windows,” Brooke Moss, an Orleans Parish Prison officer told Human Rights Watch. “They were wavin' em. Then we saw them jumping out of the windows . . . Later on, we saw a sign, I think somebody wrote `help' on it.”

As of yesterday, signs reading “Help Us,” and “One Man Down,” could still be seen hanging from a window in the third floor of Templeman III.

Several corrections officers told Human Rights Watch there was no evacuation plan for the prison, even though the facility had been evacuated during floods in the 1990s.

“It was complete chaos,” said a corrections officer with more than 30 years of service at Orleans Parish Prison. When asked what he thought happened to the inmates in Templeman III, he shook his head and said: “Ain't no tellin’ what happened to those people.”

“At best, the inmates were left to fend for themselves,” said Carey. “At worst, some may have died.”

Human Rights Watch was not able to speak directly with Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin N. Gussman or the ranking official in charge of Templeman III. A spokeswoman for the sheriff’s department told Human Rights Watch that search-and-rescue teams had gone to the prison and she insisted that “nobody drowned, nobody was left behind.”

Human Rights Watch compared an official list of all inmates held at Orleans Parish Prison immediately prior to the hurricane with the most recent list of the evacuated inmates compiled by the state Department of Corrections and Public Safety (which was entitled, “All Offenders Evacuated”). However, the list did not include 517 inmates from the jail, including 130 from Templeman III.

Many of the men held at jail had been arrested for offenses like criminal trespass, public drunkenness or disorderly conduct. Many had not even been brought before a judge and charged, much less been convicted.

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Here are two other stories.


The Democracy Now! archives on Hurricane Katrina can be found HERE

African American Residents Tell Story of Survival, Blast Racially-Skewed Government Response

Democracy Now! producers get reports from African-American survivors of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. We hear from a woman at the convention center and a record store owner from the city’s Algiers neighborhood. [includes rush transcript]

One week after Hurricane Katrina smashed into the Gulf Coast, nearly the entire population of New Orleans has been evacuated. The streets are deserted and littered with fallen trees and twisted metal. Nearly 80 percent of the city remains submerged in water and the number of dead is unknown.

Most of the nearly 500,000 residents of New Orleans have been driven into what the New York Times calls a "modern-day Diaspora of biblical proportions."

But before the evacuation, tens of thousands of mostly poor African-American residents endured days of appalling conditions as they waited to be rescued. Survivors told horror stories from inside the SuperDome and the convention center. Others had stayed at home to avoid the mayhem.

Democracy Now! producers John Hamilton and Sharif Abdel Kouddous traveled to the convention center on Sunday afternoon. The site was completely evacuated–well almost. Three people remained at the site from the tens of thousands that had passed though over the previous week. They sat alone among the rows of empty chairs strewn outside. One of them told her story.

We speak with three residents of New Orleans who were forced to flee–David Gladstone, Beverly Wright and Curtis Muhammad–about who gets saved and who doesn’t and even the question: will New Orleans be rebuilt? [includes rush transcript]

Well there are is still no official toll of the numbers left dead by the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. But as the Army Corps of Engineers began pumping the water out of the city earlier this week, officials estimated that the death the toll could be as many as 10,000 making it one of the worst natural disasters in the history of the country. More than 500,000 evacuees from Hurricane Katrina are being relocated to other states all across the country. It is a historic exodus and it is unclear what will happen to them and what support they will receive to try and rebuild their lives. An Associated Press analysis of Census data shows that the people living in the path of the hurricane’s worst devastation were twice as likely as most Americans to be lower income and without a car. The dead and the displaced are largely the ones who had no where to go, and no means to get there. They were the ones who waited for days at the New Orleans Convention Center and at other places throughout the city, without adequate food, medicine, housing and security. And they were mostly black and largely poor.

New Orleans is a city that is almost 70 percent black with nearly 23 percent of its residents living in poverty. Many African Americans are asking if this calamity would have been allowed to happen if the demographics of the city were different. And they are asking if the response would have been quicker if New Orleans had been a predominately white, wealthy city. On his way to Louisiana a few days ago, Reverend Jesse Jackson said that racial discrimination and indifference to black suffering was at the root of the disaster response. He went on to say, "In this same city of New Orleans where slave ships landed, where the legacy of 246 years of slavery and 100 years of Jim Crow discrimination, that legacy is unbroken today."

The Reverend Al Sharpton spoke in Houston on Saturday and noted the difference between the government’s rapid response to the hurricane in Florida last year that hit mostly white upper-middle class areas and to Hurricane Katrina that hit the mostly black New Orleans and Mississippi.

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Looking back after 10 years

"George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People": Reflections on Kanye West's Criticism 10 Years After

Just in case you think that this is all about heartless Republicans, George W Bush and Donald Trump here is a story from 2011 and Hurrican Irene.

NYC Criticized For Failing To Evacuate Prisoners at Riker's Island Ahead of Hurricane Irene