Questions pouring through floodgates

Local and federal officials long talked of a possible hurricane battering New Orleans, yet in the end no one was prepared

BY JOHN RILEY AND CRAIG GORDON | STAFF WRITERS

September 4, 2005

Attending disaster conferences for 15 years as a state emergency director, Joe Myers sat in on dozens of discussions of the hurricane threat in New Orleans. And every time, the Superdome was described as the centerpiece of rescue and evacuation efforts.

So last week, as he watched the Katrina catastrophe unfold, he was stunned to learn that the haven federal and local planners had counted on for more than a decade was surrounded by hip-deep floodwaters, had part of its roof blown off, and had no working power, no food and water supply chain, and no functional sanitary system.

"It amazes me that you put that in your plan without knowing what the wind and water conditions are going to be," said Myers, a former North Carolina and Florida official, last week. "If you've known for 15 years, you've got to prepare that building. You've got to have a life support system."

The descent of the Superdome from haven to a fetid, crime-infested hellhole by the time mass evacuations began Thursday was emblematic of what appeared to many to be a government failure of epic proportions last week, leaving experts and ordinary citizens alike puzzled and infuriated.

Despite years of preparation and anticipation, government at all levels couldn't get levee breaches repaired; couldn't get basics like food, water and medicine to thousands of desperate citizens; couldn't get them out of New Orleans and couldn't provide the troops to make the streets safe for them to stay.

A host of factors

What went wrong? The devastating and unique nature of the disaster, by all accounts, played the primary role, depriving New Orleans in a matter of hours of transportation, communications, power, water and sanitation. The scope of the failure in New Orleans has focused attention on other factors as well - from bad planning and funding priorities favoring war and terrorism over natural disasters, to bureaucratic confusion and paralysis. In the end, a government that predicted a catastrophic strike days before Katrina hit was incapable of preparing for it to actually happen.

"It appears the government was essentially caught flat-footed, and that's truly troubling, because this could well have been a terrorist attack," said Clark Kent Ervin, the former inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security. ". . . It's clear now we are woefully unprepared for a cataclysmic event of this kind."

Ironically, just a year ago, the government's chief disaster response agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), paid for a mock exercise - dubbed Hurricane Pam - that tested federal, state and local readiness for a "model" storm that would spill over New Orleans' levees, destroy buildings and cause flooding that trapped 300,000 residents.

In a news release, FEMA said it had made "great progress" in preparedness. "Over the next 60 days," said agency head Michael Brown, who worked for the International Arabian Horse Association and had no disaster response experience before joining FEMA in 2001, "we will polish the action plans developed during the ... exercise."

Where were the fixes?

The performance last week, spearheaded at the federal level by Brown, left many disaster experts wondering why the 2004 exercise didn't reveal the problems - such as an inability to repair levee breaches quickly, the inadequacy of the Superdome, and a total breakdown of the communications infrastructure - that occurred after Katrina, or why the problems it did reveal didn't get solved.

"That's why they have exercises," said Myers, who now runs a disaster-consulting firm in Tallahassee. "You can't just put it on the carpet. You've got to deal with it."

FEMA has not released the results of the Pam exercises, but officials last week said test-runs can do only so much.

"The set of circumstances that we found ourselves in has been extremely unique," said Patrick Rhode, FEMA's acting deputy director, "and perhaps things spoken to within a table-top exercise, when you look at this is real life, they can be somewhat more stark." And Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff yesterday called Katrina an "ultra-catastrophe" that was unforeseeable.

But experts disagreed. "Most of what occurred is not new, and most professional emergency managers would have anticipated it," said Georgia State University disaster expert William Waugh.

Indeed, instead of not foreseeing problems, officials involved in the Pam exercises have decided that there were some problems they simply couldn't solve, rather than trying to address them, and part of the plan would be that lots of deaths were probably unavoidable.

Avoiding the hopeless

A FEMA spokesman said at the time that the exercise tested response to a Category 3 hurricane - rather than a higher-level Category 4 storm like Katrina - because they didn't want planners to face a hopeless scenario. He predicted that even the lower-level storm would cause lots of casualties. And a top Louisiana emergency official told The Associated Press that part of the plan was for people to be "on their own for several days in a situation like this."

That mindset was the logical extension of a hurricane protection system of levees and drainage canals built decades ago to protect only against a Category 3 storm, that was never upgraded even after near misses like Category 5 Hurricane Camille in 1969. Army Corps of Engineers officials in New Orleans regularly warned that the system would be overwhelmed in a bigger storm, but the political will never materialized for an upgrade that would cost billions.