Learning the Hard Lessons of Katrina
Why things were even worse than you ever knew
Two of the floodwalls that breached in New Orleans just hours after Hurricane Katrina had one thing in common: The Army Corps of Engineers didn't inspect them in 2005. The yearly inspection, a grip and grin where the corps dressed in full Army garb and sampled powdered beignets, was conducted via motorcade with occasional stops here and there. At least 100 miles was usually covered in about four hours. According to a Senate panel, the inspection team skipped the floodwalls along the 17th Street and London Avenue canals because they were "inaccessible by car."
This is just the latest piece of evidence connected with the government's botched response to the most devastating natural disaster in U.S. history. Earlier disclosures of official missteps were often greeted by the predictable political finger-pointing, but much of the information released over the past few weeks bears the hallmarks of real scholarship--from scientists, government officials, and bestselling historians--offering significant new detail on what went wrong, and why. What already promises to be a very active hurricane season starts this week, and the good news is that politicians and top government officials aren't taking the lessons lightly. Still, whether all the necessary fixes have been made--or whether they ever will be--is an open question.
The new government reports are staggering. The most exhaustive is a dense, 749-page policy paper by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Its title: Hurricane Katrina: A Nation Still Unprepared. A mostly Republican House Select Committee has also weighed in with its own report, as has White House homeland security adviser Frances Townsend and the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general. Add to that a new book by historian Douglas Brinkley (The Great Deluge) and a 500-page opus on the levees from a board of civil engineers led by the University of California-Berkeley.
One thing everyone agrees on is, as the House committee writes, that "this crisis was not only predictable, it was predicted." The Homeland Security Department's inspector general revealed that in 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency "categorized a major hurricane striking New Orleans as among the three most likely catastrophic disaster events to occur within the United States." Just a month before Katrina struck, federal and state officials learned that New Orleans didn't have the buses needed to evacuate the roughly 100,000 people unable to leave the city on their own. "We put no plans in place," says Johnny Bradberry, the state official responsible for procuring bus contracts, "to do any of this."
The same could be said for FEMA. Two days before Katrina made landfall, agency officials began reviewing resumes for truck drivers. So it was hardly surprising, as Senate investigators found, that in the days before Katrina hit, FEMA added "relatively few" supplies to emergency stockpiles near the disaster zone. Mississippi had just 10 to 20 percent of what it had requested. "System appears broken ... will now attempt to get products in alternative ways," William Carwile, the top FEMA official there, wrote his superiors three days after landfall.
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