---

Some people took offence at the incessant branding of Hurricane Katrina’s victims as ‘refugees’. These were fully-fledged citizens of the world’s richest and most powerful country, they argued, not Third-World scum.

Yet that was the most breathtaking thing about Hurricane Katrina: How quickly one of the most famous cities in the United States could be transformed into ‘Third-World’ disorder.

More than a million people were suddenly homeless. Corpses floated in the street.

There was raping, pillaging and random shooting. Government was unable to provide essential aid, let alone basic services.

Yet they weren’t strange people from strange places, far away.

They were people just like us, from our part of the world. If they were Third-Worlders, well, we could be too.

There, in front of our eyes, you could see how it can happen to good and honest people in the space of a few short days. When things go downhill, they can sometimes go downhill so quickly and furiously that it becomes impossible to pull yourself out of the hole at the bottom.

A few things that occurred to me, while watching the disaster unfold, that Bermudians might want to think about:

Emergency plans and systems can only handle so much. When the disaster is big enough, and the chaos is chaotic enough, the plans for dealing with it collapse as well.

Many people in responsible positions simply can’t cope in severe disasters. Even the strongest people collapse in the end. When choosing our leaders, we need to assess how well they are likely to perform when things get unimaginably bad.

Hunger, thirst, fear, panic, grief, exhaustion, and the urge to look after your family first, affect everybody in a disaster zone – including people in charge of rescue and relief operations. Around 200 of New Orleans’ 1,500 police officers ‘resigned’ in the first few days after Hurricane Katrina, for example, and at least two of them committed suicide.

It is often difficult or impossible to get outsiders to understand how serious a disaster really is. It took several days of screaming before the people of New Orleans got their message through to the powers-that-be in Washington D.C.. It would surely be worse if a true disaster struck Bermuda.

Most of us can’t function without modern communications systems. When telephones, cell phones and radios aren’t working, and roads are impassible, rescuers often don’t know what to do or where to go.

It takes longer than you’d think to mobilize help, even when the plea for help has been sent and received and understood. Once help arrives, it is difficult to organize in the chaos of the disaster. It will almost certainly not be the kind of help that is required.

People with money are better off in a disaster too. They are better informed about the risks, better prepared to face them, better able to flee, better able to look after themselves in the aftermath, and more likely to have connections and contacts to help them at every step along the way.

The aftermath of a disaster is often more devastating than the disaster itself. In New Orleans it was the flooding. You can imagine the problems in Bermuda if the Causeway, the airport, beaches and docks were washed away, our fresh water supply was contaminated and our police force was unable to operate effectively.

I hope such things never come to pass in Bermuda. But we all know they quite easily could. I hope we learn important lessons from New Orleans – not only on how to look at natural disasters but how to look at ourselves. Each of us is a Third-Worlder, really, and when things go terribly wrong we are just hours from living like one. So far, we have been spared that fate by a little wise leadership and an awful lot of lucky breaks. Our job now is to pray for luck…and also to work hard and make sure everything else is working in our favour.

[[In-content Ad]]

---