Canal Street during Hurricane Katrina, August 29, 2005.
Posted 9/14/05
By Kevin Whitelaw
As Hurricane Katrina barreled through Florida and turned northwest toward Louisiana, state and local officials revved up their preparations. A timeline of events begins four days before the storm struck the state:
As the day starts, Hurricane Katrina is still just off the Florida coast, and the Louisiana National Guard has its contingency plan, codenamed "Minuteman," in place. It still looks like it will make landfall much further to the east. Louisiana emergency management officials are completing a long-scheduled meeting with emergency managers from the various parishes, where they had been discussing coordination with state and federal agencies in disasters. At this point, Katrina is still a tropical storm.
But that all starts to change on Thursday afternoon.
"I knew I had a problem when the National Hurricane Center called me personally," says Larry Ingargiola, the emergency manager for St. Bernard Parish, a low-lying area that neighbors New Orleans. "I knew it was bad."
Walter Maestri, the emergency manager for Jefferson Parish, which also borders New Orleans, also gets a call at 4 p.m. from his old friend Max Mayfield at the National Hurricane Center. Mayfield tells him that the models he trusts the most suggest it will hit the Gulf Coast the hardest but still be very serious for New Orleans. Within an hour, the parish's senior staff is meeting to sketch out a plan. As the next two days unfolded, the news only gets worse.
"It became increasingly clear that this was going to be the storm we never wanted to see," says Maestri. He begins to study models that predict massive storm surges from a storm like this one, as high as 20 feet. This would put the city deep underwater.
FRIDAY, August 26
At 4 p.m., the latest update from the National Hurricane Center comes into the state's Emergency Operations Center (EOC) in Baton Rouge, suggesting that New Orleans will be directly in the storm's path.
Governor Kathleen Blanco declares a state of emergency, with the National Guard placed on full alert. Earlier that afternoon, the state had activated its Crisis Action Team at Level 3, bringing in a collection of senior leaders from all the affected departments with the power to make split-second decisions about the state'sresources. They begin monitoring the storm's progress around the clock.
Officials hold a conference call with parish leaders throughout southeastern Louisiana to discuss contingencies. Still, it looks like the storm will spare the state the worst.
"We all went to bed feeling kind of good because it looked like the storm was curling towards Florida," says Mark Smith, spokesman for the state's emergency preparedness office. Dr. Fred Serise, the state's secretary of the Department of Health and Hospitals, is at a department-wide planning meeting, sketching out priorities for the rest of the year. If the storm hits, he will be responsible for setting up special-needs shelters for patients requiring medicalattention.
At the end of the day, he learns that the EOC has been activated.
