Read Online Katrina: After the Flood by Gary Rivlin - Free Book Online
Authors: Gary Rivlin
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when Allbaugh, a longtime friend, hired Brown as FEMA’s general counsel, then elevated him to deputy director. At the time of Katrina, FEMA’s top three appointees had worked as political operatives for the president. Five of FEMA’s top eight officials had negligible disaster-management experience, the Washington Post found, and nine of the agency’s ten regional chiefs were either serving as an acting director or filling two jobs at once.
Yet one didn’t need to be an expert in disasters to know that a Category 5 storm aimed at New Orleans had the potential to overwhelm first responders. When shortly after its creation the new Department of Homeland Security drew up a list of the fifteen worst disasters that could confront the country, the detonation of a nuclear device made the list, as did a biological attack. But so, too, did a tropical storm making adirect hit on New Orleans. Even a hurricane of moderate strength, study after study showed, could cause more loss of life and property in this low-lying coastal city surrounded by water than even a major earthquake on the West Coast. “When I have a nightmare,” said Eric Tolbert, who served as FEMA’s disaster-response chief until leaving the agency several months prior to Katrina, “it’s a hurricane in New Orleans.”
Yet the country was waging a pair of expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, creating pressure to shrink the size of government. Not only FEMA but the US Army Corps of Engineers, which had built and maintained New Orleans’s flood-protection system, were feeling the financial squeeze. In 2004, the Corps said it needed at least $22.5 million to shore up the levees in the New Orleans metro area. The Bush administration budgeted $4 million for New Orleans and compromised with Congress on a final outlay of $5.5 million. Yet somehow the government found $14 million to dredge a man-made canal known mainly by its local nickname, MR. GO (Mississippi River Gulf Outlet). For years coastal experts had been calling on the federal government to close down this underused and fragile seventy-six-mile waterway that the Army Corps of Engineers had so arrogantly built forty years earlier to save ships from the twists and turns of the Mississippi through southern Louisiana. Critics called MR. GO a “hurricane highway” that could amplify the storm surge—exactly what happened during Katrina. The water from MR. GO caused severe flooding in the eastern half of New Orleans and also St. Bernard Parish to the south and east.
Brown was not the complete incompetent he was made out to be in media accounts. He could be smug and arrogant, but he was also bureaucratically adept and could be tenacious, especially when fighting his superiors on behalf of the agency under his charge. He even managed to pry a few million dollars from his tightfisted bosses to run a series of war-games-like exercises so they were better prepared for natural disasters. The first of these was Hurricane Pam, a hypothetical storm that planners imagined hitting New Orleans.
Pam should have been the lucky break that saved FEMA’s reputation post-Katrina. Its designers imagined a powerful, slow-moving Category 3 storm—Katrina. The city’s flood-protection system was rated as strong enough to withstand a Category 3 storm, but computersimulations paid for by FEMA showed that the levees would breach with catastrophic consequences: as much as 90 percent of the city would flood even in a Category 3 storm, and an estimated fifty thousand would seek shelter in the Superdome or another refuge of last resort.
Incredibly, Hurricane Katrina had not only been imagined in July 2004, thirteen months before the storm actually hit, but the hundreds of government employees FEMA brought together in New Orleans for the exercise had practiced their response. They imagined everything from the number of boats they would need to conduct search-and-rescue to the truckloads of bottled water needed to hydrate the
Yet one didn’t need to be an expert in disasters to know that a Category 5 storm aimed at New Orleans had the potential to overwhelm first responders. When shortly after its creation the new Department of Homeland Security drew up a list of the fifteen worst disasters that could confront the country, the detonation of a nuclear device made the list, as did a biological attack. But so, too, did a tropical storm making adirect hit on New Orleans. Even a hurricane of moderate strength, study after study showed, could cause more loss of life and property in this low-lying coastal city surrounded by water than even a major earthquake on the West Coast. “When I have a nightmare,” said Eric Tolbert, who served as FEMA’s disaster-response chief until leaving the agency several months prior to Katrina, “it’s a hurricane in New Orleans.”
Yet the country was waging a pair of expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, creating pressure to shrink the size of government. Not only FEMA but the US Army Corps of Engineers, which had built and maintained New Orleans’s flood-protection system, were feeling the financial squeeze. In 2004, the Corps said it needed at least $22.5 million to shore up the levees in the New Orleans metro area. The Bush administration budgeted $4 million for New Orleans and compromised with Congress on a final outlay of $5.5 million. Yet somehow the government found $14 million to dredge a man-made canal known mainly by its local nickname, MR. GO (Mississippi River Gulf Outlet). For years coastal experts had been calling on the federal government to close down this underused and fragile seventy-six-mile waterway that the Army Corps of Engineers had so arrogantly built forty years earlier to save ships from the twists and turns of the Mississippi through southern Louisiana. Critics called MR. GO a “hurricane highway” that could amplify the storm surge—exactly what happened during Katrina. The water from MR. GO caused severe flooding in the eastern half of New Orleans and also St. Bernard Parish to the south and east.
Brown was not the complete incompetent he was made out to be in media accounts. He could be smug and arrogant, but he was also bureaucratically adept and could be tenacious, especially when fighting his superiors on behalf of the agency under his charge. He even managed to pry a few million dollars from his tightfisted bosses to run a series of war-games-like exercises so they were better prepared for natural disasters. The first of these was Hurricane Pam, a hypothetical storm that planners imagined hitting New Orleans.
Pam should have been the lucky break that saved FEMA’s reputation post-Katrina. Its designers imagined a powerful, slow-moving Category 3 storm—Katrina. The city’s flood-protection system was rated as strong enough to withstand a Category 3 storm, but computersimulations paid for by FEMA showed that the levees would breach with catastrophic consequences: as much as 90 percent of the city would flood even in a Category 3 storm, and an estimated fifty thousand would seek shelter in the Superdome or another refuge of last resort.
Incredibly, Hurricane Katrina had not only been imagined in July 2004, thirteen months before the storm actually hit, but the hundreds of government employees FEMA brought together in New Orleans for the exercise had practiced their response. They imagined everything from the number of boats they would need to conduct search-and-rescue to the truckloads of bottled water needed to hydrate the
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