'Understanding Katrina
Everyone knew it was coming. So why couldn't disaster have been avoided?
By noon Monday, it was clear there was trouble. It was at the levee along the industrial canal that separates New Orleans from St. Bernard Parish to the east. The breach was obvious and, for the moment, irreparable. On Tuesday morning, there were two more gaps, both along a floodwall of the city's 17th Street Canal. It was the beginning of the end, just a matter of time. The waters rushed in.
At the worst moment of the worst week in New Orleans's history, the water downtown was 20 feet deep. How could it have happened? The city's levees, many decades old, had been built to withstand only a Category 3 storm. Katrina was a 4. A high 4. The local authorities knew that. But they had no comprehensive plan to evacuate people from even the lowest parts of a city whose virtually every corner lies below sea level. Nor were there plans for an enhanced police presence on the streets after Katrina struck. In Washington, too, there was a curious lassitude, both as the massive storm bore down on the Gulf Coast and in the immediate aftermath of the levees failing. At week's end, an obviously stricken President Bush said: "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."
But why not? The potential failure of the city's 350-mile levee system had been studied for years. The extensive network was built to keep floodwaters out, but it can also lock them in when the levees are breached or "overtopped" by surging water on the other side. This is what old New Orleans hands refer to as "flooding the bowl." And it's the very reason the Red Cross listed a direct hurricane hit on New Orleans as the nation's most deadly natural-disaster threat a few years ago. Everyone, it seemed, knew the risks. Scientists at Louisiana State University had warned that even a Category 3 storm could dump up to 27 feet of water in some neighborhoods. "Everybody knew this was coming," says Walter Maestri, director of emergency preparedness for Jefferson Parish (a parish is akin to a county), which borders downtown New Orleans. "But we all hoped it wouldn't be in our lifetime." John Harrald, codirector of the Institute for Crisis, Disaster, and Risk Management at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., agrees. "To paraphrase the 9/11 commission," he said, "we are seeing a failure of imagination."
Shared blame. The failure, however, was not on everyone's part. For years, officials in the New Orleans district office of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which built and administers the levee network, pushed to raise the protection level from Category 3 to Category 5. "We have the ability to protect this city [from Category 4 and 5 storms] for a 2-to-3-billion-dollar investment," Al Naomi, a senior project manager for the corps, told U.S. News in June. "It's not rocket science; its concrete and steel." Environmental groups, meanwhile, lobbied for more than a decade to restore southeastern Louisiana's vanishing wetlands, which once provided New Orleans with a robust, natural hurricane buffer. They got nowhere.
The Corps of Engineers went to great lengths last week to point out that the specific levee walls breached in Katrina's aftermath recently passed inspection and were not slated for upgrades, and that they were designed to withstand only Category 3 storms. But the corps's New Orleans district has also faced recent budget cuts that Naomi called "drastic" earlier this year. Decreases in funding for hurricane protection began four years ago and have come fast and furious since then. This year, representatives from Louisiana asked for $27.1 million for hurricane protection, saw the request slashed by the White House, but managed to nudge it back up to nearly $6 million. "With tax cuts and terrorism on everyone's radar," shrugs a Capitol Hill staff aide, "the interest just wasn't there." Last spring, the Army Corps's Naomi told U.S. News that funding to raise levee walls had been cut by up to 75 percent, compared with five years ago--despite the fact that levees in some areas had sunk by a foot or more, through a process known as "subsidence," rendering them inadequate to protect the city's neighborhoods even from Category 3 storms. "Funds have been cut to the point that [walls] that need to be raised can't be," Naomi said, "because we don't have the federal dollars."
Self-help. Some southeastern Louisiana parishes had resorted to raising their own taxes to shore up the sinking levees. "After 9/11, our budget was squeezed," says Windell Curole, executive director of South Lafourche Levee District, who recently won support for a tax measure aimed at levee-raising. In Jefferson Parrish, district officials worked to raise levee walls to 15 feet before federal funding dried up a decade ago, leaving them around 12.5 feet high. Naomi's proposal to raise the levees to provide Category 5 protection, outlined in a slide-show presentation he created that includes slides like "Benefits of category 5 Protection: Loss of Life Prevented; Makes evacuation manageable," is still awaiting federal funding--for a feasibility study. That alone would take years. Naomi says the Category 5 upgrade work would have needed to be started more than a decade ago in order to have been completed before Katrina.
Post-Katrina, the issue of funding may have become moot. "Now people are going to say, 'Why do we need more studies?' " says Roy Dokka, professor of civil and environmental engineering at LSU. "Why not just raise the levees?" In its defense, the cash-strapped Army Corps points out that a $37 million project to strengthen flood protection along New Orleans's West Bank was one of just two federal flood-prevention programs it operates that received full federal funding this year.
While New Orleans would have probably had a better chance of surviving Katrina with higher levees, it's also the leveeing of the Mississippi River--begun by the Army Corps in the 1930s--that has destroyed the wetlands and barrier islands that once provided the city with significant storm protection. Levees prevent the Mississippi from depositing the silt necessary to maintain southeast Louisiana's wetlands; since the 1950s, scientists estimate that Louisiana has lost an area the size of Rhode Island. Ivor van Heerden, director of LSU's Center for the Study of Public Health Impacts of Hurricanes, says that every mile and a half of wetlands stands to lower a storm surge--the wind-fueled spike in water level likely responsible for last week's levee breaches--by a foot or so. "The loss of these areas has been recognized as a growing problem for the last 20 years and almost nothing has been done about it beyond conducting feasibility studies," says Timothy Kusky, author of a textbook called Geological Hazards.
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.
As the deterioration of conditions in New Orleans grew more catastrophic with each passing day last week, FEMA and its parent, the Department of Homeland Security, came under fire for their management of the rescue effort. "This is a national disgrace," said Terry Ebbert, head of New Orleans's emergency operations, as he surveyed the chaotic scene at the Superdome.
Others echoed those sentiments. "Calling this one a botched response is generous," says George Haddow, deputy chief of staff for FEMA during the Clinton administration. Jane Bullock, a former FEMA chief of staff and 22-year agency veteran, says the current federal effort demonstrates a weakened FEMA in a post-9/11 world. The agency was merged into Homeland Security in 2003, a move that critics say sparked an exodus of career professionals who feared they'd be marginalized. There was also criticism late last week that FEMA chief Michael Brown and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff lacked long-term experience in disaster preparedness.
Federal officials offered a vigorous defense. A FEMA press release said aggressive federal efforts had saved 4,500 lives and provided assistance to 30,000 hurricane victims. Russ Knocke, press secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, called Chertoff an "extraordinarily brilliant and capable man" and said FEMA "has done an amazing job over the last two years."
But among those who seemed miffed was President Bush. On Friday, as the president prepared to leave Washington for a tour of the Gulf Coast, he, too, expressed frustration at the response effort, saying "the results are not acceptable."
The fallout from Katrina won't end anytime soon. Hundreds of thousands of greater New Orleans residents are likely to be left homeless for six months or more. "We really don't have a lot of planning experience with dealing with this many displaced people for a really extended amount of time," says GWU's Harrald. "Where are you going to build temporary housing? What do you do with a city that's uninhabitable?" For now, those questions will have to wait, as the rescue effort is focused on getting tens of thousands of hungry people out of the city--alive.
A Coastal City Exposed
Behind the stories of breached levees and evacuations is the underlying problem of coastal erosion. Loss of wetlands and barrier islands, which have shielded coastal communities over the past century, has left New Orleans and nearby towns vulnerable to severe storms.
SATELLITE IMAGE OF KATRINA--NOAA
[MAP LABELS]
TEXAS
LOUISIANA
MISSISSIPPI
ALABAMA
FLORIDA
ARKANSAS
GEORGIA
San Antonio, Texas - Evacuees received
Houston, Texas - Evacuees received
Baton Rouge, Louisiana - Evacuees received
New Orleans, Louisiana
Memphis, Tennessee - Evacuees received
Jackson, Mississippi
Waveland, Mississippi
Biloxi, Mississippi
Pascagoula, Mississippi
Mobile, Alabama
Mississippi River
Red River
Gulf of Mexico
Katrina's area of hurricane-force winds.
Average population per square mile: 300+ [darkest color], 160-299.9, 83-159.9, 40-82.9, 10-39.9, 0-9.9 [lightest color]
FEMA disaster areas
[Inset labels] Lost wetlands (1937-200); New Orleans; Mississippi River; Lake Pontchartrain
WETLANDS REDUCTION
Louisiana's department of natural resources estimates that since the 1930s 1,900 square miles of wetlands have been lost. As the barrier islands break down, the previously sheltered wetlands deteriorate, bearing the full brunt of gulf waves, storm surges, and currents.
STORM BUFFER
For every mile of continuous wetland, the height of storm surges can be reduced by three 3 to eight 8 inches. Losing wetland acreage removes this dampening effect that has protected New Orleans and nearby coastal communities in the past.
DISINTEGRATING COAST
There are several factors that contribute to the loss of barrier islands and wetlands.
LEVEES
1. Without a levee, a flooding river carries silt over its banks and gradually replenishes coastal wetlands and barrier islands.
2. Levees, designed to protect low-lying communities from flooding, also cut off this natural flow of sediment, forcing it away from the wetlands.
3. With no way to replenish, the coastal barriers have difficulty recovering from damage attributable to other factors:
HURRICANES AND OTHER STORMS
NATURAL LAND SETTLING AND SINKING
CRISS-CROSS CANALS CUT FOR NAVIGATION AND OIL AND GAS TRANSPORTATION AND DRILLING.
[labels]
Wetlands; Silt; River
Developed flood plain; Levee; Degraded wetlands; Silt; Storm surges; Disintegrating barrier islands
Barrier-island decay also allows salt water to seep into freshwater systems, killing off wetlands plants, further accelerating erosion.
[labels]
Storm surge; Wetlands
[Photo]
A canal levee is breached in New Orleans between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain.
[Photo label] Breach
[Photo credit] ORBIMAGE/AP
Sources: Census Bureau, Center for the Study of Public Health Impacts of Hurricanes, Louisiana State University; Louisiana Department of Natural Resources; NOAA, USGS, FEMA, United States Army Corps of Engineers
Stephen Rountree and Rob Cady-- USN&WR
With Angie C. Marek, Silla Brush and Alex Kingsbury
This story appears in the September 12, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.