Lots of Blame, But It's No Game
Rebuilding after Katrina will take time and money, but it won't be enough unless the nation finds out what went wrong--and fixes it
It was a crisis that wasn't just foreseeable--it was foreseen. As more than a million displaced Americans began their search for new homes last week, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency put in its order of 25,000 body bags for the state of Louisiana, public officials and private citizens alike struggled with heartache, disgust, and the question that, unlike the toxic waters of the Big Easy, simply won't go away: Who screwed up?
The president's spinners dubbed it the blame game, but given the loss of life, the staggering incompetence at nearly every level of government, and the increasingly dire economic implications for the nation, much more than the usual political one-upmanship is in the offing. If the result of all the government missteps, pratfalls, and plain missed opportunities to mitigate the scope of the disaster on the nation's Gulf Coast weren't so gut-wrenchingly sad, the awful Katrina aftermath might have had a modestly comedic silver lining, a kind of star-crossed tableau in which Mack Sennett meets Casey Stengel, the legendary manager of the legendarily awful New York Mets who once famously asked, "Can't anyone here play this game?" But there was nothing funny about President Bush's old friend "Brownie," Michael Brown, the head of the FEMA, the bulk of whose prior experience for the job was in enforcing judging standards in Arabian horse contests and pursuing one breeder for allegedly liposuctioning fat out of a gray mare's behind, in violation of club rules. Nor was there much to chuckle about in the fact that even with Brown pulled off the Katrina clean-up effort and sent packing back to Washington, three of his deputies in the agency have virtually no prior experience in handling disasters. In Louisiana, among city and state officials, the lack of competence, the litany of boneheaded decision making, and pure, unrefined ineptitude was, if anything, worse. Katrina may have been a once-in-a-century hurricane, but the witches' brew of bureaucratic incompetence it exposed resulted in almost the perfect storm. "Take whatever idiot they have at the top of whatever agency and give me a better idiot," pleaded Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard, who burst into tears on NBC's Meet the Press after describing the death by drowning of a colleague's mother in a nearby nursing home. "Give me a caring idiot. Give me a sensitive idiot. Just don't give me the same idiot."
Of idiocy, in the aftermath of Katrina, there was a surfeit. The 200 New Orleans school buses--enough to have evacuated 13,000 people--sitting underwater and unusable in a downtown parking lot might have served as the most telling emblem of all the incompetence, but there were dozens of other, equally outrageous candidates. And the list, incredibly, seems to just keep getting longer. New information arrives almost daily, for instance, about the toxic nature of the sludge left behind, and no one knows for sure how many people may be infected with what kinds of diseases as a result of contamination or what the long-term health implications might be.
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