New Orleans: What Went Wrong?

By George E. CurryNNPA Columnist Undoubtedly, there will be official examinations of why the government – local, state and federal – performed so poorly in aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In the meantime, the New York Times and the Washington Post last Sunday published exhaustive accounts of the debacle, showing that as bad as we thought things had gone, they were far worse. Katrina was only the fourth Category 5 hurricane in the nation’s history. Last July, FEMA conducted a mock exercise in Louisiana for a Category 3 storm, called Pam. Even a weaker Category 3 storm would create damage of epic proportion, planners projected. The Washington Post reported, “Emergency planners had concluded that a real Pam would create a flood of unimaginable proportions, killing tens of thousands of people, wiping out hundreds of thousands of homes, shutting down southeast Louisiana for months.” The Post observed, “The practice run for a New Orleans apocalypse had been commissioned by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the federal government’s designated disaster shop. But the funding ran out and the doomsday scenario became just another prescient – but buried – government report.” According to the New York Times, “FEMA appears to have underestimated the storm, despite an extraordinary warning from the National Hurricane Center that it could cause ‘human suffering incredible by modern standards.’ The agency dispatched only 7 of its 28 urban search and rescue teams to the area before the storm hit and sent no workers at all into New Orleans until after the hurricane passed on Monday, Aug. 29.” The Times account of the disaster captured the government chaos. “Federal Emergency Management Agency officials expected the state and city to direct their own efforts and ask for help as needed,” the Times wrote. “Leaders in New Orleans, though, were so overwhelmed by the scale of the storm that they were not only unable to manage the crisis, but they were not always exactly sure what they needed. While local officials assumed that Washington would provided rapid and considerable aid, federal officials, weighing legalities and logistics, proceeded at a deliberate pace.” The Washington Post put it more bluntly. “Compounding the natural catastrophe was a man-made one: the inability of the federal state and local governments to work together in the face of a disaster long foretold. “In many cases, resources that were available were not used, whether Amtrak trains that could have taken evacuees to safety before the storm or the U.S. military’s 82nd Airborne division, which spent days on standby waiting for orders that never came. Communications were so impossible that the Army Corps of Engineers was unable to inform the rest of the government for crucial hours that the levees in New Orleans had been breached.” According to the Post, “Despite pleas by Bush administration officials to refrain from ‘the blame game,’ mutual recriminations among officeholders began even before New Orleans’ trapped residents had been rescued. The White House secretly debated federalizing authority in a city under the control of a Democratic mayor and governor, and critics in both parties assailed FEMA and raised questions about President Bush.” The department of Health and Human Services did not declare the Gulf Coast a public health emergency until two days after the storm. The bureaucratic bungling didn’t stop there, according to the Washington Post. “…While the last regularly scheduled train out of town had left a few hours earlier, Amtrak had decided to run a ‘dead-head’ train that evening to move equipment out of the city. It was headed for high ground in Macomb, Miss., and it had room for several hundred passengers. ‘We offered the city the opportunity to take evacuees out of harm’s way,’ said Amtrak spokesman Cliff Black. “‘The city declined.'” The Times recounted, “William D. Vines, the former mayor of Fort Smith, Ark., helped deliver food and water to areas hit by the hurricane. But he said FEMA halted two trailer trucks carrying thousands of bottles of water to Camp Beauregard, near Alexandria, La., a staging area for the distribution of supplies. “‘FEMA would not let the trucks unload,’ Mr. Vines said in an interview. ‘The drivers were stuck for several days on the side of the road about 10 miles from Camp Beauregard. FEMA said we had to have a ‘tasker number.’ What in the world is a tasker number? I have no idea. It’s just paperwork, and it’s ridiculous.'” Equally ridiculous was how FEMA handled skilled people eager to help. “Hundreds of firefighters, who responded to a nationwide call for help in the disaster, were held by the federal agency in Atlanta for days of training on community relations and sexual harassment before being sent on to the devastated area.” This was ridiculous and heads need to roll. George E. Curry is editor-in-chief of the NNPA News Service. He appears on National Public Radio (NPR) three times a week as part of “News and Notes with Ed Gordon.