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.
Officials are only now uncovering the depth of ineptitude displayed at the Homeland Security Operations Center, responsible for issuing twice-daily situation reports to the White House and top department leaders. Brinkley describes NBC cameraman Tony Zumbado wading through a "barbaric, medieval" scene at the Convention Center on Wednesday morning, but the HSOC situation reports didn't mention the place until Friday. "We ... were confusing the Superdome with the Convention Center," says Matthew Broderick. He has since resigned as HSOC chief.
Out of touch. Similar troubles resulted in delayed response on the day of landfall when the HSOC, in the words of the Senate, "ignored, disregarded, or simply failed to attain" credible reports on already broken levees. At about 1 p.m., the Coast Guard reported a levee break. At 1:14 p.m., that was echoed by a DHS security adviser. The National Weather Service pinpointed two breaches at 4 p.m.: "17th Street at Canal Boulevard," their report read, "... breach extends several 100 [ sic] meters in length." None of this made the 5 p.m. situation report, which was the last report DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff got on the day of landfall. Three dire HSOC "spot reports" that night didn't reach him because he does not use E-mail.
He wasn't the only one out of touch. Katrina downed more than 1,000 of the Gulf Coast region's 7,000 cellphone towers and left almost 3 million homes without telephone service; remote parishes like Plaquemines weren't heard from for three weeks. The state and federal agencies that fished more than 45,000 people out of the waters of New Orleans couldn't communicate, so some areas were checked twice, others skipped completely. Officials clamored for troops via so many channels that, Townsend writes, "neither the Louisiana National Guard nor the [active duty military] had a good sense of where each other's forces were located or what they were doing."
Throughout the ordeal, nobody seemed to understand the battle plan. Hurricane Katrina was the first major test of the National Response Plan, a blueprint for emergency response that Vice President Dick Cheney's office described as "a very detailed, acronym-heavy document ... not easily accessible to the first-time user." DHS and the Department of Justice tangled over which agency was in charge of sending backup to the New Orleans Police Department--under the plan, both were--and, as a result, didn't deploy meaningful numbers of federal law enforcement officers until four days after landfall. The congressional reports call into question whether Chertoff understood the plan: He declared former FEMA Director Mike Brown his top official on the ground, but Brown hadn't taken a necessary course to make him eligible for that position.
Besides the bureaucratic foul-ups, there was a basic infrastructure crisis. The Army Corps and the Orleans Levee District--a local group--couldn't explain to the Senate which of their agencies was in charge of maintenance for various chunks of the levee system. Design flaws highlighted by the Berkeley-led engineering team seem to indicate that long-standing claims that the New Orleans levees could withstand a Category 3 storm were, as the Senate puts it, "at best a rough estimate, at worst, simply inaccurate." More troubling, the levee district paid to license a casino and run an airport and dished out $2.4 million to renovate a Mardi Gras statue near Lake Pontchartrain but made "[no] efforts ... to obtain equipment to improve its inspection regime," according to the Senate. They couldn't take deep soil samples, so they most likely didn't realize that weak layers of jellied soil and bits of seashells spelled doom for the levees.
To avoid a repeat of history this season, FEMA and DHS have to make major changes, and in some ways, they already have. "A lot of the focus ... this year," says Jack Harrald, an outside adviser to FEMA with George Washington University, "is on making sure the correct info is getting to the president and pushing around all the food and water people could ever desire." A new operations center that will replace the HSOC will get streaming-video updates from first-in FEMA teams at the disaster site. Factory outposts with FEMA supplies will be stocked with enough food and water to sustain 1 million people for a week. And DHS officials have met with all 50 states and the 75 largest urban areas to evaluate evacuation plans for before and after a storm. "We're not waiting," says David Paulison, acting chief of FEMA, "for states to ask for help."
The real thing. They're also ramping up their dress rehearsals--but with mixed results. By June 1, DHS will have conducted four massive regional hurricane drills. And the White House has held at least two cabinet-level exercises involving Category 4 or 5 hurricanes slamming into the Crescent City. (At one such administration drill it was necessary to have what a senior official dubbed "a quick little class" on the National Response Plan.) And as part of a two-day exercise using live actors in Louisiana last week, officials in East Baton Rouge Parish called off the evacuation of the state's largest FEMA trailer park--population 1,500--because of confusion over who's responsible for federal trailers.
If all that sounds daunting, imagine the real thing. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted last week that four to six major hurricanes--Category 3 or higher--could strike the United States this year. The more than 100,000 trailers and temporary homes across the Gulf Coast have to be evacuated for even a tropical storm; by NOAA estimates, that means residents will move 13 to 16 times. And, "we're dangerously behind in first-responder communications," says Rep. Dave Reichert, a sponsor of FEMA reform. Pentagon officials say they've put together giant packages of cellphones, satellite-phone terminals, and laptops that can be shuttled to first responders left without any line to the outside world.
FEMA and the Army Corps, though, won't meet some of their pre-hurricane season goals. FEMA leaders vowed to fill 95 percent of their 2,500 permanent positions by June 1 but will hit only the 85-percent mark. The Army Corps won't have three floodgates installed that can be used to take pressure off New Orleans levees. DHS has also yet to define the "extraordinary circumstances" in which it would allow the Pentagon to assume command of a major response effort; sorting that out, some experts say, was the most crucial recommendation in Townsend's report.
Add to that a Congress ready to rip into FEMA. Sens. Susan Collins and Joe Lieberman, the Republican and Democrat behind the massive Senate report, want to create a beefed-up, renamed FEMA with authority over homeland security grants and guarantees that its discretionary budget cannot be raided by DHS. Rep. Tom Davis, head of the House's Katrina committee, would rather pull FEMA out of DHS altogether, something that wouldn't happen until next hurricane season. "You can trust me," says Davis, who normally doesn't head a DHS oversight committee, "because I don't have a dog in this fight." Too bad almost 10 million residents in the Gulf Coast still very much do.
This story appears in the June 5, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.