Not Again
A battered Gulf coast and a storm season for the ages
Hurricane watchers--and this year, who isn't one?--like baseball fans, have a couple of things in common: They're crazy for statistics and nuts about history. As Katrina's evil twin, Rita, made landfall on the Gulf Coast this past weekend, the metrics for the two hurricanes were decidedly different. Both Category 5 killers as they lurched monsterlike north toward the coast, both lost a bit of strength as they approached land but still packed a wallop virtually unmatched in history, Rita clocking in earlier in the week as the third most powerful hurricane on record, Katrina, at the peak of its strength, at No. 5. Only twice before, in 1960 and 1961, have there been two Category 5 blows recorded in the same hurricane season, making Rita and Katrina the meteorological equivalent of, say, the 1927 Yankees. But more than the meteorological, climatological, and other data points the specialists will be pondering over years from now, this year's extraordinary hurricane season may be most remembered for another kind of impact, or series of impacts.
The most immediate was in the lessons-learned department. Skewered for their sluggish response to Katrina, officials from the White House, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency all went to great lengths to demonstrate their readiness for Rita. Early last week, after his Marine One helicopter landed on the deck of the USS Iwo Jima, President Bush headed straight toward one of the ship's mess halls, where he took his seat beside Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and listened intently to the National Hurricane Center's projections for Rita. The president, still smarting over comparisons between his take-charge response to the 9/11 attacks and his desultory reaction to Katrina, made sure he was on top of the action when Rita hit, bunkered in at the Pentagon's Northern Command headquarters facility in Colorado Springs, Colo., his key aides and cabinet officers poised to jump as soon as the storm gave them a chance.
"Worst disaster season." The difference was like night and day. Coast Guard officials had small-boat rescuers moving from New Orleans to Houston. The Texas National Guard yanked 1,300 of its soldiers out of Louisiana, and 4,000 more military personnel stationed in the state were made available for immediate deployment in Texas. FEMA, having been so beaten up after Katrina, had its game face on for Rita. Long before the hurricane made land, agency officials had dispatched more than 100 semi-tractor trailers filled with ice, food, water, and generators to San Antonio and Fort Worth. They also had some 400 people in 18 urban search-and-rescue and mobile medical assistance teams fanned out across the state--more than they had in place for the entire Gulf Coast region in advance of Katrina. Still, the agency was taking no chances. A top FEMA official circulated a memo, obtained by U.S. News : "FEMA is facing the worst disaster season in its history."
There were other kinds of lessons learned, too. While Rita was still far out in the Gulf, the sun smiling over a placid Galveston Bay, Texans even many miles inland from the coast were streaming north. The traffic jams, in 100-degree heat, were horrific, to be sure. But by the time Rita came ashore, there was virtually no one there to greet the storm, the indelible images of New Orleans, St. Bernard Parish, and Gulfport, Miss., having amply delivered their message: Stay behind--and pay the price.
For every lesson learned, however, there seemed to be three more questions without answers. Operators of refineries and natural gas facilities in Rita's path had wisely battened down, well in advance of Rita's arrival. The break in production alone, never mind a knockout punch, will put further pressure on gasoline and heating-oil prices, stretch an infrastructure that had already been operating at close to capacity, and have untold consequences on the nation's economy (Page 26). Other unknowns include the near- and long-term impact on shipping on the Mississippi River, the nation's economic lifeline, vital to farmers and agribusinesses in the upper Midwest and carmakers in Detroit. The impact on fragile marshlands along the Gulf Coast, now contaminated by thousands of barrels of oil and other petrochemicals, also remains to be examined. And, heartbreakingly, so does the future of New Orleans. Still digging out and drying out after Katrina, the Crescent City took a hard glancing blow from Rita, as its outer bands dumped still more rain, reflooding some portions of the city that had already begun mopping up and raising water levels in others, like the devastated Lower Ninth Ward.
Rebuilding the Big Easy. About New Orleans, there are many more questions than answers. "We don't have consensus on how to rebuild," says Louisiana State Sen. Derrick Shepherd. That lack of consensus and fears of the brokering that has come to be associated with New Orleans politics were in painful relief after a meeting between New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and local business leaders earlier this month in Dallas. Many of the city's black leaders, who heard about the meeting after the fact, felt shut out. "It wasn't a very diverse crowd," says Shepherd, who attended the meeting and is African-American. The leaders offered the mayor "money, workers, computer systems to sit down and formulate his plan" for putting the city back together, says Shepherd, who added that it was a positive meeting in which musician Wynton Marsalis phoned in to speak about the need to preserve the city's cultural heritage. The meeting fueled criticism that the mayor is beholden to white business leaders who supported the candidacy of the former cable executive. "If you seriously want to have a meeting about rebuilding," says Diana Bajoie, a Louisiana state senator, "you can't have it without black leadership." When the mayor said he planned to appoint a rebuilding commission that would be half black and half white, critics including Bajoie responded that the panel wouldn't mirror the racial makeup of the city, which is about 70 percent black. Leaders, too, remain divided about what to do with areas of the city like the Ninth Ward--predominantly poor and black. Suggestions to turn some low-lying neighborhoods back into wetlands that would offer greater natural protection from storm surges have been met with charges that the city leadership is simply trying to discourage the poor--and black--from returning to their neighborhoods. Last week, Nagin said that he initially sees the city losing 250,000 people, half of its population. "The ones we lose," says Jim Thorns, president of the New Orleans Black Economic Development Council, "will be the ones without the economic means to come back to New Orleans."
Who pays? Still, larger questions loomed, with deep political and philosophical implications. Residents along the Gulf Coast applauded Washington's forward-looking approach to Rita, but in its eagerness to make amends for Katrina and embark on a spending spree that could ultimately exceed $200 billion, the White House has so far failed to provide either context or rationale. How will the nation pay for it all? Bigger deficits? Higher taxes? Both? And what kind of precedent, if any, is the administration setting? Clearly, many Americans agree with the president's earlier statement about Katrina, that some calamities are simply too big for state and local officials to be expected to handle alone. But how big is too big? When does Washington step in, and when does it stay on the sidelines? Are taxpayers across the nation going to be expected to open their wallets for every wildfire in the West, flood in the East, and tornado in the Plains states?
Such questions will be addressed in good time, no doubt. But for now, hurricane season has another two months to run, and historically about a quarter of major storms happen during October. Whatever happens, stormwise, this one's already in the record books. In the off-season, baseball buffs jaw long into the night about monster home runs and wicked strikeouts. It's called the "hot stove" league, kids learning at the knees of their elders as the timeless wisdom is dispensed around the hearth. If there's a parallel in the world of violent weather, and surely there must be, they'll be talking about the hurricane season of aught-five for decades to come.
With Angie C. Marek and Betsy Querna
This story appears in the October 3, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.