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SÃO PAULO — I’ve read here and there that post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans “brings lessons” to Porto Alegre, the capital city of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil’s southernmost state, where record flooding last month caused an unprecedented environmental catastrophe and killed more than 165 people.
In the same spirit, Mayor Sebastião Melo has hired Alvarez & Marsal, a U.S. consultancy “that worked on Katrina” — the devastating 2005 hurricane that caused 1,392 deaths and an estimated $186.3 billion in damages in and around the southern U.S. city — to draw up a reconstruction plan for Porto Alegre.
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Melo still doesn’t know how much it will cost: A&M has offered to work for free for two months before submitting a bill to the mayor’s office. “At present, the team is focusing its efforts on the diagnosis and the emergency action plan. And it will present a timetable for implementation as soon as it has the structure,” A&M said in a note published in the Brazilian newspaper Folha de S. Paulo. Asked why he chose to hire the company, Melo said: “I’ve decided to hire a consultancy. A couple of hundred have been offered to me. I’ve decided to hire this one. If it does well, well, I’ve decided, because I can do so.”
In addition to the apparent lack of decision making criteria, without listening to Brazilian experts, as revealed by the news website Matinal, Melo seems to be unaware of A&M’s disastrous performance in New Orleans.
The hurricane’s legacy
A&M’s legacy is the dismissal of more than 7,000 public school teachers, the privatization of education and health, the intensification of police and militia violence (which risks happening in Porto Alegre) and, finally, the whitewashing of the New Orleans population.
On the pretext of removing displaced residents, who were prevented from returning, an ethnic cleansing was carried out in the tourist city. The Black population, which accounted for two-thirds of the total population, fell to less than half five years after Hurricane Katrina.
To this day, the original population of New Orleans has yet to recover: there are now 100,000 fewer inhabitants than in 2005, when the city had a population of almost 500,000. The Black population, including those who have finally managed to return, accounts for 60% of the total, many of them clustered on the outskirts after losing their homes in gentrified neighborhoods during the reconstruction. Many are still struggling to pay off their housing debts.
The poorest suffer
To find out what happened in New Orleans, and to learn from its failures — which are lessons for Porto Alegre, as the BBC noted — Melo can take advantage of the fact that power has been restored in the Guarujá neighborhood, where he lives, and watch Treme, the great TV series by David Simon (creator of The Wire).
In addition to showcasing the resilience of Black culture, the series illustrates the absurdities, injustices and racial bias in the reconstruction of New Orleans, especially by the federal government under then U.S. President George W. Bush.
Treme is the name of a Black neighborhood — the cradle of jazz and of Louisiana’s African-American and Creole traditions — that was among the hardest hit by Katrina’s subsequent flooding. The series begins three months after Katrina and follows its reconstruction marked by contractors’ lobbying, authorities’ corruption and unequal treatment of black and white victims.
In Porto Alegre, as in New Orleans, the low-income population has suffered the most from the flooding.
In Porto Alegre, the case is similar. While almost the entire city has been affected by the flooding, the low-income population has suffered the most. The vast majority of this population is in shelters and is among those who will have nowhere to live — something Melo himself acknowledged in the same interview with Folha.
A survey by the Observatório das Metrópoles found that poor neighborhoods were the hardest hit in the capital and the metropolitan region. “Not all of the poorest neighborhoods were affected, but all of the most affected are poor,” researcher André Augustin told the independent news website Sul 21.
Failures and tragedy
There are other morbid similarities between the two cities, faced with a disaster that “is not a natural disaster. This is a man-made f*cking catastrophe of epic proportions,” as one of Treme’s characters, English teacher Creighton Bernette (played by John Goodman) likes to repeat.
Bernette, who uses YouTube to denounce the authorities, tells the truth that had been kept quiet: The cause of the tragedy in New Orleans was not Hurricane Katrina, but the flooding from dams that broke due to engineering and maintenance errors.
In Brazil, we don’t need to copy any more of the failures in New Orelans.
Porto Alegre’s flood prevention system, which is the responsibility of the city government and which Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva criticized, had flaws that certainly played a role in the Brazilian tragedy. In New Orleans as in Porto Alegre, there was also a delay addressing the climate emergency with effective public policies; rather, there was a loosening of environmental legislation at the state and federal level. In Brazil, we don’t need to copy any more failures.
By the way, it’s worth reminding Mayor Melo that his New Orleans counterpart, Ray Nagin, was sentenced in 2014 to 10 years in prison for corruption, bribery and money laundering in the management of his city’s reconstruction. He completed his sentence in March 2024, and is now fighting to regain the right to vote and, amazingly, to carry firearms.
We definitely don’t need such examples.
