The photos from last week’s flash flooding in Jeddah — the submerged neighborhoods, the cars poking out of the murk, the bodies — bring to mind images that came out of New Orleans in the late summer of 2005.
The death toll and damage won’t come close to the carnage left behind by Hurricane Katrina, but what is striking about both events is that they exposed not an act of nature, or “God’s will,” but rather down-to-earth human failing and negligence.
Following the collapse of infrastructure that submerged 80 percent of New Orleans, killing hundreds of people — especially the elderly and infirm who died in homes, hospitals and assisted care centers — local and federal lawmakers, nongovernmental organizations and, most of all, the public, demanded answers; they mobilized, they investigated and they exposed.
The public outcry embarrassed the Bush administration into conducting its own investigation that was published six months after the disaster under the unctuous title “Lessons Learned.”
People took to the Internet with their own Katrina experiences. The local media went after authorities and demanded answers. A rogue’s gallery of officials emerged from the process of accountability, most notoriously Bush’s head of disaster management Michael Brown.
Four years after Katrina, groups like levees.org and blogs like “Fix the Pumps,” as well as the local media, continue to keep the issue alive. Katrina also opened the floodgates to activism and volunteerism. College students and church groups continue to spend their summers in some of the poorest neighborhoods in the US, fixing and building homes. Celebrities like Brad Pitt, Ellen DeGeneres (a native New Orleanean) and Harry Shearer (most famous for doing many voices of “The Simpsons”) continue to keep the Katrina issue alive in the media even as the cable news cycle has moved on to more important issues, like whether or not Tiger Woods hit a tree because his wife was angry at him.
While the problems of flooding in New Orleans have not been solved, the problems have been exposed and officials have been put to the wall thanks not only to civic action but to circles inside the government itself — a system of checks and balances that encourages one part of government to investigate and call out another. This is more than playing the blame game; it’s about public accountability and, as they say in America: “Keeping honest people honest.”
Just as the outcry and demands for answers exposed the failures of local and federal officials to prevent the flooding of New Orleans, or to respond appropriately once the disaster struck, last week’s flooding in Jeddah demands the same process of accounting, holding officials responsible and, finally, identifying and fixing the problem with real resolve. Already there are signs of lasting public outcry. A Facebook profile for the Jeddah floods was formed and five days after the storm it had a membership of over 22,000 with a collection of hundreds of stunning photos from eyewitnesses. Local newspaper columnists have also found the resolve to lash out at officials for negligence and sloth when dealing with Jeddah’s failing infrastructure. For example, Al-Watan newspaper published a column calling last week’s floods the “Katrina of corruption.”
So while Jeddah continues to clean up after a man-made disaster, one hopes officials will be honest — not just about the body count but also about the cause of the flooding in the first place.
And perhaps we can learn something from the civic mobilization that occurred after Katrina when the public refused to let the story wither and die, to be forgotten until the next flood kills the next group of people.
