'Understanding Katrina
Everyone knew it was coming. So why couldn't disaster have been avoided?
It's not for lack of trying. In the mid-1990s, a few years after Florida launched its campaign to rescue the Everglades, Louisiana's congressional delegation began fighting for the region's wetlands. But the lawmakers failed to persuade Congress to authorize money--other than a small annual appropriation called the Breaux Amendment, named for recently retired Sen. John Breaux--until this year, when Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu marked the opening of hurricane season by standing in the French Quarter with a giant blue tarp strung up 18 feet high, where she predicted water would rise in the event a hurricane hit, partly because of wetlands elimination. While the House of Representatives' version of the recent energy bill would have provided long-term help--$350 million over the next 10 years and $1 billion yearly starting in 2016--the Senate balked after Democrats and the White House resisted transferring some of the royalties from oil drilling off Louisiana's coast back to the state. What finally emerged from Congress provided Louisiana with $540 million for coastal restoration over the next four years. But advocates call it a short-term band-aid for a $14 billion problem.
Getting out. With no immediate plans for large-scale marshlands restoration or levee-raising, New Orleans officials say they had focused hurricane preparation efforts on evacuating as many citizens as possible. After residents fleeing last fall's Hurricane Ivan got stuck for up to 10 hours on the 90-mile car trip to Baton Rouge, the state police instituted a "contra flow" plan for Katrina that reversed inbound lanes on highways that feed the city, greatly expediting the evacuation.
But, partly because New Orleans is home to a large poor population--more than 20 percent of its 480,000 residents live below the poverty line, according to a 2003 U.S. Census report--100,000 households report having no car. And though free busing was provided to the city's famed Superdome, itself evacuated late last week, there appears to have been no attempt to provide public transportation out of town for the poor. In an interview before Katrina struck, New Orleans Director of Emergency Preparedness Joseph Matthews told U.S. News that plans to use buses or Amtrak trains to get people out of town were in their infancy. "Our official policy is that everybody should take it upon themselves to find their own means of evacuation," he said. "As far as evacuating 50,000 or 100,000 people, we don't have the resources."
In July 2004, a table-top exercise cosponsored by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Louisiana officials simulated a slow-moving Category 3 storm called Hurricane Pam striking New Orleans, with 10 to 20 feet of flooding and 1.1 million people being displaced for at least a year. In the simulation, "40,000 people died and 100,000 were injured, so it could have been a lot worse," says Maestri, the Jefferson Parish emergency management director. According to news reports, FEMA hired a private firm to develop recommendations from the drill but hasn't yet publicly released them. Some participants say the drill was meant only as a starting point for developing a comprehensive plan to respond to a hurricane in New Orleans.
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