1NC Disaster

Federalism prevents effective natural disaster response Schneck 09 (Federalism and Its Impact on Emergency Response to Disasters and Catastrophes, Debra Schneck, Graduate Student at
the University of Indiana, April 24, 2009 http://www.indiana.edu/~workshop/publications/materials/conference_papers/Schneck_Spring%202009.pdf,)

There is preliminary evidence, supported in this paper by network analysis and anecdotal evidence, to reach the conclusion that the general reluctance of the Mayor of New Orleans and the Governor of Louisiana to relinquish control, based on their perceived role within the American federalist system, led to further chaos and confusion, complicating even further the emergency response to a devastating hurricane and its consequences. The institution of federalism, so important in the American political system, and which supports in essence local and state response without federal interference to routine and smaller emergencies, can be one of the critical challenges to an effective response to a major disaster or catastrophe. Local and state authorities, literally and figuratively, in the eye of the storm, may be reluctant to turn over responsibilities for dealing with an emergency to federal entities, thus federalizing the response.

Unmitigated disasters cause extinction SID-AHMED 05 (Mohamed, Al-Ahram Online, Jan 6-12, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2005/724/op3.htm)
The human species has never been exposed to a natural upheaval of this magnitude within living memory. What happened in South Asia is the ecological equivalent

The extinction of the species has become a very real possibility, whether by our own hand or as a result of natural disasters of a much greater magnitude than the Indian Ocean earthquake and the killer waves it spawned. Human civilisation has developed in the hope that Man will be able to reach welfare and prosperity on earth for everybody. But now things seem to be moving in the opposite direction, exposing planet Earth to the end of its role as a nurturing place for human life. Today, human conflicts have become less of a threat than the confrontation between [Humanity] Man and Nature. At least they are less likely to bring about the end of the human species. The reactions of Nature as a result of its exposure to the onslaughts of human societies have become more important in determining the fate of the human species than any harm it can inflict on itself. Until recently, the threat Nature represented was perceived as likely to arise only in the long run, related for instance to how global warming would affect life on our planet. Such a threat could take decades, even centuries, to reach a critical level. This perception has changed following the devastating earthquake and tsunamis that hit the coastal regions of South Asia and, less violently, of East Africa, on 26 December. This cataclysmic event has underscored the vulnerability of our world before the wrath of Nature and shaken the sanguine belief that the end of the world is a long way away. Gone are the days when we could comfort ourselves with the
of 9/11. Ecological problems like global warming and climatic disturbances in general threaten to make our natural habitat unfit for human life. notion that the extinction of the human race will not occur before a long-term future that will only materialise after millions of years and not affect us directly in any way.

We are now forced to live with the possibility of an imminent demise of humankind.

2NC Ethics Impact

This is nawt acceptable Human Rights Watch 05 *New Orleans: Prisoners Abandoned to Floodwaters,
http://www.hrw.org/news/2005/09/21/new-orleans-prisoners-abandoned-floodwaters] As Hurricane Katrina began pounding New Orleans, the sheriff's department abandoned hundreds of inmates imprisoned in the citys jail,
Human Rights Watch said today. Inmates in Templeman III, one of several buildings in the Orleans Parish Prison compound, reported that as of Monday, August 29, there

were no correctional officers in the building, which held more than 600 inmates. These inmates, including some who were locked in ground-floor cells, were not evacuated until Thursday, September 1, four days after flood waters in the jail had reached chestlevel. Of all the nightmares during Hurricane Katrina, this must be one of the worst, said Corinne Carey, researcher from Human Rights Watch. Prisoners were abandoned in their cells without food or water for days as floodwaters rose toward the ceiling. Human Rights Watch called on the U.S. Department of Justice to conduct an investigation into the conduct of the
Orleans Sheriff's Department, which runs the jail, and to establish the fate of the prisoners who had been locked in the jail. The Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, which oversaw the evacuation, and the Orleans Sheriffs Department should account for the 517 inmates who are missing from the list of people evacuated from the jail. Carey spent five days in Louisiana, conducting dozens of interviews with inmates evacuated from Orleans Parish Prison, correctional officers, state officials, lawyers and their investigators who had interviewed more than 1,000 inmates evacuated from the prison. The

sheriff of Orleans Parish, Marlin N. Gusman, did not call for help in

evacuating the prison until midnight on Monday , August 29, a state Department of Corrections and Public Safety
spokeswoman told Human Rights Watch. Other parish prisons, she said, had called for help on the previous Saturday and Sunday. The evacuation of Orleans Parish Prison was not completed until Friday, September 2. According to officers who worked at two of the jail buildings, Templeman 1 and 2, they began to evacuate prisoners from those buildings on Tuesday, August 30, when the floodwaters reached chest level inside. These prisoners were taken by boat to the Broad Street overpass bridge, and ultimately transported to correctional facilities outside New Orleans. But at Templeman III, which housed about 600 inmates, there

was no prison staff to help the prisoners. Inmates interviewed by Human Rights Watch varied about when they last remember seeing guards at the facility, but they all insisted that there were no correctional officers in the facility on Monday, August 29. A spokeswoman for the Orleans parish
sheriffs department told Human Rights Watch she did not know whether the officers at Templeman III had left the building before the evacuation. According to inmates interviewed by Human Rights Watch, they

had no food or water from the inmates' last meal over the weekend of August 27-28 until they were evacuated on Thursday, September 1. By Monday, August 29, the generators had died, leaving them without lights and sealed in without air circulation. The toilets backed up, creating an unbearable stench. They left us to die there,
Dan Bright, an Orleans Parish Prison inmate told Human Rights Watch at Rapides Parish Prison, where he was sent after the evacuation. As the water began rising on the first floor, prisoners became anxious and then desperate. Some of the inmates were able to force open their cell doors, helped by inmates held in the common area. All of them, however, remained trapped in the locked facility. The water started rising, it was getting to here, said Earrand Kelly, an inmate from Templeman III, as he pointed at his neck. We was calling down to the guys in the cells under us, talki ng to them every couple of minutes.

They were crying, they were scared.

The one that I was cool with, he was saying I'm scared. I feel like I'm

about to drown.' He was crying. Some inmates from Templeman III have said they saw bodies floating in the floodwaters as they were evacuated from the prison. A number of inmates told Human Rights Watch that they were not able to get everyone out from their cells. Inmates broke jail windows to let air in. They also set fire to blankets and shirts and hung them out of the windows to let people know they were still in the facility. Apparently at least a dozen inmates jumped out of the windows. We started to see people in T3 hangin' shirts on fire out the windows, Brooke Moss, an Orleans Parish Prison officer told Human Rights Watch. They were wavin' em. Then we saw them jumping out of the windows . . . Later on, we saw a sign, I think somebody wrote `help' on it. As of yesterday, signs reading Help Us, and One Man Down, could still be seen hanging from a window in the third floor of Templeman III. Several corrections officers told Human Rights Watch there was no evacuation plan for the prison, even though the facility had been evacuated during floods in the 1990s. It was

complete chaos, said a corrections officer with more than 30 years of service at Orleans Parish Prison. When asked what he thought happened to the inmates in Templeman III, he shook his head and said: Ain't no tellin what happened to those people. At best, the inmates were left to fend for themselves, said Carey. At worst, some may have died. Human Rights Watch was not able to speak
directly with Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin N. Gussman or the ranking official in charge of Templeman III. A spokeswoman for the sheriffs

department told Human Rights Watch that search-and-rescue teams had gone to the prison and she insisted that nobody drowned, nobody was left behind. Human Rights Watch compared an official list of all inmates held at Orleans Parish Prison immediately prior to the hurricane with the most recent list of the evacuated inmates compiled by the state Department of Corrections and Public Safety (which was entitled, All Offenders Evacuated). However, the list did not include 517 inmates from the jail, including 130 from Templeman III. Many

of the men held at jail had been arrested for offenses like criminal trespass , public drunkenness or disorderly conduct. Many had not even been brought before a judge and charged, much less been convicted.

The alternative is mass violence through a politics of disposibility Giroux, Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department, in 12
*Henry, Hurricane Sandy in the Age of Disposability and Neoliberal Terror, http://truthout.org/opinion/item/13025-hurricane-sandy-in-the-age-of-disposability#XXXVI] The winners in the disposable society circulate close to the top of the power pyramid.... Those who can't afford to be on the move stand little chance.... Market freedom means few people have a hold on the present and that everyone is expendable. -- Zygmunt Bauman In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, shocking images of dead bodies floating in the flood waters of New Orleans appeared on national TV against a sound track of desperate cries for help by thousands of poor, black, brown, elderly and sick people. These disturbing pictures revealed a vulnerable and destitute segment of the nation's citizenry that conservatives not only refused to see as such, but had spent the better part of three decades demonizing. But the haunting images of the abandoned, desperate and vulnerable would not go away and for a moment imposed themselves on the collective conscience of Americans, demanding answers to questions that were never
asked about the existence of those populations excluded from the American dream and abandoned to their own limited resources in the midst

But that moment soon passed as the United States faced another disaster: The country plunged into an economic turmoil ushered in by finance capital and the apostles of Wall Street in 2008.1
of a major natural disaster. Consequently, an additional instance of widespread hardship and suffering soon bore down on lower-middle and working-class people who would lose their jobs, homes, health care and their dignity. Hurricane Sandy

not only failed to arouse a heightened sense of moral outrage and call for justice, it has quickly, if not seamlessly, been woven into a narrative that denied those larger economic and political forces, mechanisms and technologies by which certain populations when exposed to a natural catastrophe are rendered human waste . One reason for this case of historical amnesia and ethical indifference may lie in the emerging vicissitudes of an era eager to
accommodate rather than challenge global warming, an era in which freakish weather events have become such commonplace occurrences that they encourage the denial of planetary destruction. These days Americans are quickly fatigued by natural catastrophe. Major natural disasters and their consequences are now relegated to the airborne vocabulary of either fate or the unyielding circumstance of personal tragedy, conveniently allowing an ethically cleansed American public to ignore the sordid violence and suffering they produce for those populations caught in the grip of poverty, deprivation and hardship. It gets worse.

Catastrophes have not only been

normalized , they have been reduced to the spectacle of titillating TV. Rather than analyzed within broader social categories such as power, politics, poverty, race and class, the violence produced by natural disasters is now highly individualized, limited to human interest stories about loss and individual suffering. Questions concerning how the violence of Hurricane Sandy impacted differently those groups marginalized by race,
age, sickness and class, particularly among poor minorities, were either downplayed or ignored. To read more articles by Henry Giroux and other authors in the Public Intellectual Project, click here. Lost in both the immediacy of the recovery efforts and the public discourse in most of the mainstream media were the abandoned fates and needless suffering of residents in public-housing apartments from Red Hook to the Lower East Side, to the poorest sections of the Rockaway Peninsula and other neglected areas along the east coast of New Jersey. These are populations ravaged by poverty, unemployment and debt. Even though inequality has become one of the most significant factors making certain groups vulnerable to storms and other types of disasters, matters of power and inequality in income, wealth and geography rarely informed the mainstream media's analysis of the massive destruction and suffering caused by Sandy. 2 And yet, out of 150 countries, the

United States has the fourth highest wealth disparity.3 As Joseph Stiglitz points out, "Nowadays, these numbers show that the American dream is a myth. There is less equality of opportunity in the United States today than there is in Europe - or, indeed, in any advanced industrial country for which there are data."4 Inequality and social disparity are not simply about the concentration of wealth and income into fewer hands, they are also about the unequal use of power, the shaping of policies and the privileging of a conservative wealthy minority who have accumulated vast amounts of wealth. America is paying a high price for its shameful levels of inequality and this became particularly clear when certain populations in Manhattan received aid more quickly than others in the post-Hurricane Sandy reconstruction efforts. Not surprising, given that Manhattan, one of the epicenters of the storm's savagery, has a level of inequality that not only stands out but rivals parts of sub-Saharan Africa.5 Within this geography of massive income and wealth inequality, 20 percent of Manhattan residents made $392,022 a year on average [and] the poorest made $9,681. Yet, even though lower Manhattan was a low priority for receiving government and private relief efforts, neither its vulnerability nor the iniquitous treatment it was accorded was factored into post-Sandy media coverage.6 Sandy lay bare what many people did not want to see: a throwaway society that not only endlessly created material waste, but one all too willing to produce and dispose of what it interprets as human waste. What is clear in this case is that while some attention was focused on the first responders who lost their homes in Breezy Point and the poor elderly trapped for days in housing projects, "facing cold temperatures, food shortages," electrical failures and lack of proper medical care, these are populations whose lives are for the most part considered "unreal," occupying a space of invisibility where hardships are rarely seen or heard.7 But

more was revealed in this disaster than the painful registers of

exclusion, mass suffering and the inability of government to provide timely help to those most vulnerable and in need of aid . Hurricane Sandy also revealed the gaping and dystopian fault lines of those disasters exacerbated by human actions in a society wracked by vast differences in power, income, wealth, resources and opportunities. In this instance a natural catastrophe merged with forms of sustained moral/social neglect and a discourse of symbolic violence to reveal a set of underlying determinants, a grammar of human suffering.

Ext. k2 Disaster
CP key to disaster relief Landy 08 (Marc, iss professor of political science at Boston College, codirector of the BC Initiative for the Study of Constitutional
Democracy, and faculty chair of the BC Irish Institute., Mega-Disasters and Federalism, http://www.disasterrecoveryresources.net/PARNov2008.htm.pdf)

D isaster response and recovery put federalism to an especially dicult test because they require speed, eciency, and eective coordination. These are not the strong suits of a federal system involving three separate levels of government, each of which contains a variety of individual agencies and governing structures with interest in and responsibility for some aspect of the problem. Such diculties are greatly amplied when the disasters eects are of the unprecedented size and scope of Hurricane Katrina.