To The Rescue
After a sluggish response, A rush to help and rebuild
It didn't look like America, the exodus of stunned refugees wading through turbid, waist-high water, carrying only what mattered most: sick relatives, bundled babies, storm-soaked family Bibles. It looked like another country, the kind of place where armed bandits outnumber police and desperate families search garbage dumpsters for food. A place where the poorest of the poor die in the heat, their corpses ignored on the side of the road.
Across the Gulf Coast, lifelong residents who thought they had seen it all were left with nothing in the wake of a storm that has caused what may well be the worst natural disaster ever to hit the United States. Katrina's lethal one-two punch of 145-mile-per-hour winds and a 25-foot storm surge left 90,000 square miles of heartbreak, devastation, and unhinged lives, as rich and poor alike scrounged for food and water, searched for loved ones in rivers of foul, tea-colored water, and wondered, Why on earth was help so slow in coming? "A national disgrace," Terry Ebbert, New Orleans's homeland-security director, said of Washington's emergency-relief efforts.
The challenges of delivering help and restoring order were without precedent. Experts placed the price tag on the havoc caused by Katrina's wrath at $30 billion, but for now, that can be only an educated guess. What can be said for sure is that Katrina uprooted more Americans than the Civil War, the Dust Bowl storms of the 1930s, or the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Reaching for a more recent comparison, a weary, crestfallen A. J. Holloway, the mayor of Biloxi, Miss., which saw its own share of despair and heartbreak, said: "This is our tsunami."
Early in the week, the nation had breathed a sigh of relief for its beloved Crescent City--Bourbon Street was dry, and Katrina seemed like just another dodge-the-bullet story as revelers roamed the rain-smeared streets, go-cups in hand. By nightfall after landfall, it looked as if the Bananas Foster would be flaming merrily at Commander's Palace once again. But after the levees broke the next day and the bathtub-shaped Big Easy began filling up with the brackish waters of Lake Pontchartrain, a complicated network of pumps failed and 80 percent of the city was soon under water, creating what public health officials warned could soon become a breeding ground for West Nile virus, dysentery, and a host of other potentially lethal diseases.
"Help us." In what officials say is the largest domestic military relief effort in the nation's history, the Pentagon sent aircraft, rescue crews, and teams of Navy SEAL s to help out. Coast Guard divers descended from hovering helicopters, smashing though roofs with axes, sweeping the sick from makeshift rafts, and spiriting away those most in need of aid.
But for far too many, for the first few days, relief remained elusive. Kids climbed on a roof holding a sign that read simply, "Help us." Bands of looters, some deadly, some merely desperate, roamed the streets. At week's end, the floodwaters covered slightly less than half the city, but police and National Guard units were still keeping a wary eye on looters and gun-toting residents while trying to restore order amid reports of beatings, rapes, and shootings. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin issued a "desperate SOS," pleading for more of everything--food and water, relief help, buses to evacuate the sick and elderly--anything that could help jump-start what inevitably will be a slow and tortuous return to something like normal.
But that won't be anytime soon. Like the eerie satellite images of a week earlier that showed Katrina bearing down on the Big Easy, the eye of the refugee crisis was in New Orleans, but the wider storm is now radiating out across the region, with cities as far away as Houston, Baton Rouge, and even little Starkville in northeastern Mississippi, overwhelmed by the steady stream of the homeless and jobless. If it's true that Katrina made little effort to discriminate between rich and poor, it is also true that it was mostly the poor--and in New Orleans, mostly poor blacks--who either could not or would not flee and so suffered the brunt of the storm's wrath. Mayor Nagin in New Orleans guessed that it would take as long as three months before many residents could return home. Over the state line in shattered Gulfport, a visibly moved Gov. Haley Barbour, widely credited with managing the crisis skillfully and aggressively, suggested Mississippians would be feeling the effects of Katrina for years to come.
Blame--and pain. The repercussions are already being felt far beyond Katrina's actual reach. As the Third World images of death and devastation reeled across the nation's TV screens last week, there was an almost palpable sense of anger at the sluggish and, in some places, seemingly nonexistent government response to the crisis. "We are extremely pleased with the response of every element of the federal government" to Katrina, said Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, in charge of coordinating Washington's plan. Reacting to the growing chorus of criticism the same day, Chertoff's deputy, Michael Brown, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, fumed: "I think everyone in the country needs to take a big collective breath." President Bush, who pledged a first installment of $10.5 billion in aid, on top of the $100 million already pouring in from around the country and the world, was having none of it. On Friday morning before he flew off to inspect the region firsthand, the president told reporters at the White House that the government's response so far had been "not acceptable."
His poll numbers at an all-time low, Bush is not unmindful of the political peril implicit in his handling of the disaster. In truth, however, while the response from Washington may have been sluggish at first, the crisis was decades in the making. The decision to build levees resistant only to storms up to Category 3 was made decades earlier, and there had been no lack of warning about the consequences of failure to remedy the situation. Then there was the matter of local responsibility. Mayor Nagin railed at Washington, but as Katrina lurched ever closer to landfall, no plans were made for either wholesale evacuation or an enhanced police presence.
There is, doubtless, plenty of blame to go around--and plenty of pain will spread far past the Gulf. Beyond politics, there are the obvious health risks to be faced in the storm's aftermath. Then there's the long shadow Katrina now casts over the nation's uncertain economy, particularly as a result of the damage done to oil and gas facilities across the Gulf. There is, too, one final penumbra over the arc of ruin that now radiates out from "the city that care forgot." If you check the calendar, hurricane season is just half over.
How You Can Help.
For a list of charities helping victims of Hurricane Katrina:
www.usnews.com/hurricanehelp
Continuing Coverage. For daily news updates and analyses from U.S. News writers:
www.usnews.com/katrina
With Angie C. Marek and Silla Brush
This story appears in the September 12, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.