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.
Disaster-relief work is a necessarily messy, seat-of-the-pants business, but even two weeks after the storm, the post-Katrina effort seemed wanting, and FEMA, once again, seemed to draw most of the finger-pointing. Last week, the agency directed dozens of medics to a hangar in Charleston, S.C., to meet 180 evacuees, but the flight was actually on its way to Charleston, W.Va. It was the second time in six hours FEMA officials mixed up the two cities. In Houston, Judge Robert Eckels, director of Harris County's Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, told U.S. News , "We're frustrated with the speed at which FEMA is bringing up its systems." Registering evacuees, the judge said, was taking too long. "They told us they could process 50 people an hour--we've got 20,000 people, and at that speed, to process 1,000 of them is a 10-hour day," he said. "Instead of 50 computers, they're going to need 5,000 spread out around this city. FEMA is going to have to ramp up."
For all the continued problems, however, there were, too, as Vice President Dick Cheney pointed out during his brief tour of the region, many instances of selflessness, generosity, and even heroism, as neighbor helped neighbor, coast guardsmen and national guardsmen rescued the elderly and infirm from broken rooftops and stifling attics, and a nation literally opened its homes to the Gulf Coast residents who no longer had any. Average Americans set benchmarks for ingenuity and generosity, filling trucks with donated T-shirts, toasters, shoes, and socks, then driving overnight from hundreds of miles away. They came from Florida, New York, and Maine, saying, simply, it was the right thing to do, or that it was payback for the times when the country pulled together to help them. And they gave. Some $500 million and counting, nearly double the amount that poured in from around the nation in the 10 days following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The bureaucrats, too, having failed so miserably early on, finally seemed to be getting their collective act together. Sort of. Besides the $52 billion aid package approved by Congress, help of virtually all kinds was pouring into the storm-racked region, though even at week's end, many evacuees were still complaining of a confused and often frustratingly disorganized relief effort. Evacuees were often not even told where they were headed. "Many of the people who arrived in Raleigh thought they were going to San Antonio," Barry Porter, executive director for the American Red Cross in Raleigh, N.C., told U.S. News . On his way to Phoenix, Steven Phillips of the Bywater section of New Orleans was told that "we could be going to New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, Utah, or Georgia, and they'd tell the plane in the air."
The price tag for Katrina, of course, is going to be huge, easily more than $100 billion, the "burn rate" of federal dollars already at some $2 billion a day. Then there are the long-term costs. Katrina is expected to cost the country 400,000 jobs and knock a full percentage point off America's gross domestic product. While President Bush has promised to reimburse state and local officials, Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin estimated that the cost for every 10,000 evacuees the city takes in will be in excess of $1 million for housing, rent subsidies, and public transport. Meanwhile, she said, that doesn't include the cost of police, healthcare, or public schools. But from California to Maine, offers for jobs keep pouring in for the displaced, and states keep on welcoming them--1,000 in Oregon, 700 in North Carolina.
There are months and years of work ahead, but it's still not too early for lawmakers to begin examining what went wrong and why. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee and House Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois said the House and Senate plan to create a bipartisan committee made up of senior members to review what went wrong and report its findings to Congress no later than mid-February of next year. But that plan already appears to be off to a bad start, with Democrats noting that the announcement by Frist and Hastert was made without the presence of any Democrats. Democrats want an independent commission similar to the panel that investigated the 9/11 attacks and are threatening to boycott the hearings.
There are certainly plenty of questions. Did state officials seek federal aid quickly enough? Who put up the roadblocks that prevented help from getting to those who needed it? When was the Pentagon asked to dispatch troops? Why the delay? An angry Susan Collins, the Maine Republican who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, fumed: "Governments at all levels failed."
That was the sort of charge often leveled by troubadour Woody Guthrie, a champion of the poor Americans left homeless by the 1930s Dust Bowl storms. Guthrie didn't like the word refugee (though "Dust Bowl Refugees" is among his more popular songs). He thought it seemed elitist, and besides that, he added, "There are different kinds of refugees. There are people who are forced to take refuge under a railroad bridge because they ain't got no place to go, and there are those who take refuge in public office." Those Gulf Coast residents whose lives have been turned inside out by Katrina may eventually see their lives put back together. But for those in public office who failed their fellow Americans so signally--for them, there'll be a reckoning.
With Judd Slivka, Danielle Knight, Ilana Ozernoy and Julian E. Barnes
This story appears in the September 19, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.