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New Orleans: Beignets and broken infrastructure

By Peter Ewart

By Peter Ewart

My wife and I were in New Orleans just a couple of months ago, and, as part of our daily tramp through the colourful, humming, noisy downtown, we would stop at a restaurant that served strong, black coffee and mounds of that sinfully delicious New Orleans version of the doughnut – the beignet. These beignets come dusted with powdered white sugar that ends up all over your hands, chin and cheeks no matter how delicately you try to eat them.

While we chewed on our beignets and listened to the old black jazz trumpeter on the sidewalk wailing out a song, we couldn’t help notice the high levee that loomed up just a few feet away. On the other side of the levee, is the great, lumbering Mississippi river as it approaches the Gulf of Mexico. After our coffee and beignets, we climbed the stairs to the top of the levee. And it is only then that it became clear to us that the river was higher than the ground on the other side. Indeed, much of New Orleans is below the level of the river and of Lake Ponchartrain.

The only thing that stands in the way of all this vast expanse of water is the levees that surround New Orleans. And it is this infrastructure, the levees, that gave way to the enormous destructive power of Hurricane Katrina. As a result, a tragedy has enveloped the great city of New Orleans. The city could do without its sugared beignets and still survive, but it cannot do without its levees and other infrastructure as the flooded streets, destroyed homes, and upended lives so tragically reveal.

How could this happen? How could this city be devastated in one fell swoop by a tropical storm system? After all, New Orleans is part of “hurricane alley”. Every year, hurricanes come barreling up the Gulf of Mexico, and one part or another of the Gulf Coast is hit. And this has been going on since the time New Orleans was born in the midst of tobacco, bales of cotton, and slave markets, hundreds of years ago. Hurricane Katrina was a Level 4 hurricane. But it turns out that the levee infrastructure around New Orleans was designed to protect against only a Level 3 hurricane. Why? No one seems to know, although prominent scientists and engineers have warned the federal government repeatedly over the past few years that a disastrous storm was inevitable.

Furthermore, reports are coming out that funding that had been promised to repair and upgrade the levees had been slashed by the Bush administration and diverted to help pay for the invasion of Iraq. Clearly, the evacuation plan was seriously flawed, with spectacular and appalling levels of incompetence shown at the federal and state government levels, leaving many people, especially the poor, elderly, and disabled behind to face the hurricane. It is fine to say that they should have left, but it is becoming apparent that many did not leave because they had no place to go, no means to get there, and no money to pay for accommodation. In other words, little, if any, planning was done to deal with the problems facing the tens of thousands of residents with no money; and New Orleans, despite all its skyscrapers and gleaming tourist attractions, has many who are desperately poor.

Thus the people of that once lively and beautiful city are finding out just how, in modern society, everyone and everything is so vitally dependent on infrastructure, whether it be roads, rail, electricity, heat, fuel, or communications.

We look with sympathy upon the plight of the people of New Orleans and with shock at how fast the infrastructure that glued the city and state together utterly collapsed. Yet how far away are we, in Northern BC, from a similar plight? What would happen if natural gas and / or electricity flows were interrupted in the middle of winter when it is minus 40 degrees below zero? What would happen if a train derailed in the bowl area of Prince George city and released clouds of a toxic gas such as chlorine? These events are not science fiction, but very real possibilities.

One would think then, that our infrastructure must have the highest priority, not only to maintain our quality of life, but also to prevent New Orleans types of disasters. Yet, we allow foreign companies, often with dubious track records and based thousands of miles away, to run our infrastructure, the lifeblood of our society.

Take for example our railways. CN Rail was privatized by the Federal Government in the early 1990s, and the same thing happened to BC Rail only a couple of years ago. Today, CN Rail (which now owns BC Rail) is an American based company with a questionable safety record (seven derailments in BC and Alberta in the last month alone). Sooner or later, if things proceed as they have, one of these derailments is going to unleash a disaster of unprecedented proportions for our city and region.

Then we have our natural gas, which is absolutely vital for homeowners, businesses, and institutions all year round, but especially in the frigid depths of our northern winters. Yet, we are cavalierly allowing another American monopoly, Kinder Morgan, to take over our vital natural gas infrastructure, and, most bizarrely, some of our politicians and media are hailing this as some great thing for us.

Kinder Morgan has made no secret that its main aim in buying Terasen Gas was to get control of the pipelines that ship oil and gas to the U.S. and other countries. The gas infrastructure for home and business in BC appears to be only of sideline interest. What kind of priority will this infrastructure way up here in the North have if Kinder Morgan gets into financial trouble? Do alarm bells get raised when we learn that the CEO of Kinder Morgan was a former executive in the disgraced and bankrupt company Enron?

The American government and corporate elite does not even prioritize the infrastructure of its own cities like New Orleans. And we have seen their appalling lack of competence regarding that unfortunate city. Why should British Columbians expect to be treated any better if some catastrophe is inflicted on us?

We, too, like the residents of New Orleans, can do without our sugared doughnuts, whether they are beignets or Tim Horton’s. But we can’t do without our infrastructure. We should make sure that it always stays in our hands and that it always has the highest priority. But we need elected representatives and governments who will fight for this, not fawn before every foreign monopoly, which in the words of a spokesperson for Kinder Morgan, want to establish their “footprint” in our province. The last thing we want is to become, like New Orleans, another disaster story on CNN.

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