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Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Midwest floods are no Katrina
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
He grew up in a small Iowa town.
It’s a place where practically everybody knew everybody. No road rage here. Motorists would wave, Jamie Horner recalled, as they drove by. People looked out for each other. Cared.
“All in all, Oskaloosa was a place with a good feeling,” said Horner, 36, of Norcross.
Before Oskaloosa, home had been Clinton, Iowa, a town on the west banks of the Mississippi River. Horner remembers the river flooding, but nothing along the scale of last month, when water swelled over the banks of more than 20 levees that stretched between Dubuqe, Iowa, and St. Louis.
The Horners moved to Oskaloosa when Jamie was 12. They’d barely settled into their new home when a neighbor — who later became a high school friend — knocked on the door. He told them a bad storm was in the area, to be careful and to monitor the weather reports.
“It was like that,” Horner told me. “Everybody looked out for each other. We played night games at night. It was safe to let your kids run rampant. Something goes wrong, we’re going to help our neighbors.”
Those sentiments flooded Horner’s mind when Mother Nature ravaged the Midwest. Corn crops were washed away. Houses and businesses in towns like Cedar Rapids were severely damaged or rendered uninhabitable. Lives were lost. Eighty-three of the 99 Iowa counties have received state disaster declarations.
Some pundits have pegged the flooding the “Katrina of the Midwest.” It’s a headline-grabbing title, but its hard to compare the two. Many try. Why, just the other day, I received an e-mail titled, “Just Wondering.” It’s a collage of photos of the ravaged Midwest, with captions that compare it to Katrina and pose questions:
Why aren’t the celebrities and the media focused on the region like they were on New Orleans? Where are all the media asking where the FEMA trucks are? Where are all the looters stealing high-end tennis shoes and big-screen television sets?
The e-mail links two tragedies together then cleverly cherry-picks what they consider egregious events from New Orleans to compare and contrast, to make one community’s reaction (the Midwest) appear more noble than the other’s (New Orleans). OK. It is. But not for the reasons the author of the photo essay intends.
Consider: Infrastructure in New Orleans experienced a one-two punch - first by the hurricane, then by levee breaks. All it did was flood in the Midwest. Bureaucratic fumbles didn’t plague Iowa and elsewhere as they did relief efforts in the Crescent City. FEMA was already in place to aid Midwest victims. And no Midwesterner spent three days on top of a roof in 90-degree heat.
Yes, some blacks and whites (wrongly) looted in New Orleans, a city that’s majority black and very poor. No excuse for it. But consider also that one person’s looting got reported as another’s survival instincts. I distinctly remember a photo of two people leaving a New Orleans store with items. The caption of the black man with a grocery cart said he was looting. The caption of the white female said she was finding food.
Bottom line is, it’s shameful to take two natural disasters and selectively view them through a prism meant to divide, that pits inner city against farm community. Like it’s a competition.
The flood-stricken Midwest deserves kudos for weathering the storm. But this was no Katrina II. Not even close in scope.
That doesn’t mean you can’t be like Horner - proud of the Midwest’s self-reliance, strength.
“It would be hard to move back because of this stage in my life,” he told me. “But it’s the greatest place in the world to raise a family.
“Absolutely.”
Rick Badie’s column appears on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Contact him at 770-263-3875 or e-mail: rbadie@ajc.com.
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