The Biggest Breach of All
Trying to make sense of the chaos from New Orleans, my finger began pointing first at the Mayor for being no Giuliani, then at the Governor for being less than ringing in her denunciation of looting, and finally at the Bush Administration for both gutting FEMA and denying needed funding for the flood-control system in the Mississippi delta.
Although according to this account, Mayor Nagin has shown a steely calm on the ground and the federal government finally has come around to take control of the disaster, it seems that the logistical chaos in post-flood New Orleans has its roots in an over-optimistic -- and perhaps negligent -- attitude toward the risks involved. The Wall Street Journal's tick-tock of what went wrong (and their subscription firewall) makes it worth quoting in full:
Despite decades of repeated warnings about a breach of levees or failure of drainage systems that protect New Orleans from the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, local and federal officials now concede there weren't sufficient preparations for dealing with a catastrophe of this scale. Guidelines for coordination of emergency operations between state, federal and local agencies were also incomplete.
What kind of warnings were there? I'm sure they were just some stuffy academic articles that no one read. Well, actually:
Local officials and government engineers have long known the risks faced by the city. A publicly funded study begun in 2002 concluded that a slow-moving Category 3 hurricane would flood "the bowl of New Orleans north of the Mississippi River, locally known as the East Bank." Katrina hit New Orleans as a stronger Category 4 storm, and the East Bank is an area of the city that has sustained major damage. That study also identified at least 110,000 people who would need assistance in being evacuated, including the elderly and those with medical problems.
Three years ago, an article in Civil Engineering magazine indicated that the region was ill-prepared and that the original levee system was based on "rudimentary storm modeling that, it is now realized, might underestimate the threat of a potential hurricane."
Then, there was the active hurricane season of last year. That should have jolted the federal government into action, right?
After last summer's deadly hurricane season, Army Corps engineers compiled a list of about $18 billion in projects needed to shore up Louisiana's levees and other flood defenses. But this June, the Army Corps' New Orleans district heard from Washington that under a House proposal it could expect its annual budget to fall by as much as 20 percent in 2006, to $272 million from $343 million. The Senate in July proposed slightly increasing the funding for the New Orleans district, and a compromise measure between the two chambers was supposed to be worked out in September.
The feds held back the money. State, local, and federal officials failed to adequately plan and drill a devastating scenario that had a decent chance of happening. As Todd Gitlin argues, a long hard analysis must be done of the engineering and political failures. And months from now a full accounting must be made -- by Louisianians and by people across the country.
This is just Bush in inaction. Somehow a man who disappeared on September 11, 2001 after his nation was attacked did it again when nature devastated is country.
We all now know that Bush was warned about Bin Laden and what did he do, when went on vacation. What happened when we were attacked? He went on a strange journey the cause of which Ari Fleischer lied about. A lie for which he was never called to account.
On September 11, 2001 I watched live as the World Trade Center Towers came crashing town. My then 6 year old daughter was in school and neither my wife nor I could get her and she could not get home. Where was my president? Nowhere to be seen.
First Karen Hughes appeared in the White House and seemed in command. The Rudy Guiliani redeemed his entire mayoralty. He stood up and seemed not to be the Mayor but the Presdient. It made one not care where Bush was.
This time, however competent the Mayor of New Orleans is being or concerned the Governors of the affected states they are not taking charge. That was left for the President of the United States. Apparently Bush knows that too so he is turning to Bill Clinton and his father.
September 1, 2005 7:57 AM | Reply | Permalink
We need to make an in depth analysis of why the New Orleans levees weren't improved Ken. Many tough questions need to be asked and people need to be made to answer. But even before we do that we need to look at similar public safety projects which are suffering from the same political ineptitude as the levee project was. The only thing that would make the tradegy in New Orleans worse is to let this happen again in another major US city...
September 1, 2005 8:00 AM | Reply | Permalink
Its a side issue here, since I think your major points are the big ones, but why do you start with the Governor for not denoucing the looters in strong enough terms?
First of all, its not clear that "looting" is such a pressing concern, other than to the cable tv networks that need some drama and some bad guys; people who have been abandoned by their leaders taking food and water from abandoned stores does not strike me as the place to begin to assign blame.
HAte to say it, but whether or not the Gov. denounces looters with sufficient force is the sort of fake "personal responsibility" issue that cable tv news and political consultants thrive on. No downside and it distracts from the real issue. Notice that Bush was quick to condemn looters today; did that help the situation at all, other than give Bush another free pass from a media that should be asking how the hell he could not only let but almost will this tragedy to happen through his indifference and incompetence.
September 1, 2005 8:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'll go a step farther and question why Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco did not address the looting problem sooner. I hate to defend any of them but some (how many I don't know) of those looters were just trying to get food and water for survival. But what is left of the people in New Orleans in descending into armed, chaotic lawlessness.
But in the big picture it isn't a pressing concern. Saving the people should be top priority. And for anybody to focus on anything else is ireesponsible. Apparently Cable TV needs to fill air time.
And if the looting is the president's top concern it reinfoces for me how truly clueless he really is...
September 1, 2005 9:14 AM | Reply | Permalink
We must understand that the people remaining in New Orleans have been put in a desperate survival situation. There is no effective police presence. The efforts at getting food, water and medicine into the city seem to be slow and sputtering. And the efforts at getting people out are equally inefficient. Planning and provision for high-and-dry emergency shelter seems to have been woefully lacking. Communications are down, so there must be a tremendous amount of confusion, disorientation and fear as crazy rumors of all kinds spread by word of mouth.
So people are doing what they have to to survive. They are stealing food and water, camping supplies, fuel, fishing poles, dry clothing. And they are stealing other valuable items that they can trade for the essentials. Some may be stealing weapons to take advantage of the situation, but most are probably stealing weapons simply to protect themselves from other people who, in their desperation, may try to steal their food, water and valuable.
So it is all well and good for the dim-witted President to go on about "zero tolerance" for law-breaking, and for dry and well-stuffed media folks in New York to fume about looters. But for the people who are stuck like rats in a sinking city, the conventional pieties are hollow at a time like this.
September 1, 2005 9:50 AM | Reply | Permalink
The picture that is emerging of lackadaisical planning for a largely predictable catastrophe is disheartening--if not entirely unexpected.
It seems that while engineers did their best to warn everyone, the "system" in Louisiana and in the US happily paid little attention, and (given what we know about Louisiana politics), no doubt much of the money and planning (city, state, and federal) that was dedicated to a potential hurricane was spent inefficiently in ways designed to benefit various insiders. The Bush administration's pullback from the plan that Congress and Clinton got going in 1995 probably hurt, but one suspects the problem has deeper roots.
One example of the kind of planning that (to a layman) appears simply incomprehensible. We all know that the New Orleans basin is kept dry, 24/7/365, by pumping, and that the risk of flooding after storms (not just hurricanes) was obvious. Yet the LA Times reports today:
QUOTE:"The pumps, which the corps will repair when it can, are a key part of the sophisticated drainage system that is supposed to keep the city dry. But they run on electricity, which is out in the city, and the pump stations' emergency power supplies may also need repair."
Admittedly I'm not an engineer, and the details are sketchy here. But if I read this correctly, the pumping system runs primarily on regularly network electicity. There's no reason that the pumps shouldn't draw on the net in regular times, of course: but can it really be true that they didn't have their own internal power supplies, with plenty of fuel in storm-safe form? Even an idiot can see that the time when the pumps' operation will be MOST important is during and after a major storm or flood, especially one that bursts some levees. And it doesn't take even a BS in Engineering to think that a major storm or flood might just possibly cut off the electricity network!
Yet, apparently, some of the stations had non-functional emergency power supplies, and the tone of the article suggests that the pumps are not at all designed for extended pumping using their own fuel. In short, they were "fair weather pumps", "Potemkin pumps", useless exactly when needed most!* (And why do I suspect that the engineers designed pumps systems that WOULD function when the power net was down...and that the emergency power part of the program was cut because of expense, or contracted to a firm that didn't actually do much work, or some other example of public-private corruption?)
[*Of course, the pumps couldn't have prevented the levee breaks themselves, or empty the city once the breaches are fixed. But now the Army Corps of Engineers is saying that it will take months to pump the city, apparently because the existing pumps are submerged and not getting power!]
September 1, 2005 9:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
The WSJ article says "Despite decades of repeated warnings ..." yet you say it's "just Bush in inaction." Not everything is all W's fault, you know. Really. When you stubbed your toe this morning, it is simply not the case that W had moved the chair out of its usual place. Really.
W contributed to the problem, perhaps more than most Presidents, but when there has been a problem for "decades," saying it's "just" W is a juvenile fantasy.
September 1, 2005 10:28 AM | Reply | Permalink
"my finger began pointing first at the Mayor for being no Giuliani, then at the Governor for being less than ringing in her denunciation of looting,"
Whaa? What in God's name does a "ringing denunciation" of looting do for anybody?
As others have pointed out already, the looting is being done by people who are TRAPPED in the city with no power, food, water, and no sign of emergency rescues and no hope of getting out any time soon. As numerous on-air reporters are saying, the people they're seeing on the streets are desperate and have moved into survival mode-- anything it takes to stay alive and keep their families alive.
Could we PLEASE stop yapping about "looting"? NO is completely out of control, people are literally dying while waiting for help on the highway and at the convention center, and Mayor Nagin is directing police to stop rescuing people and concentrate on "looters'? Sorry, but that sounds like prime Giuliani-ism to me. And I don't mean that as a compliment.
Where was Mayor Nagin when he ordered the city evacuated without, apparently, one second's thought given to how the poor and carless were going to be able to get out? Apparently, he's the mayor only of the middle class in NO, and all he's got for the poor is police protection for the only sources of food, water and diapers in the city.
Feh.
And shame on you.
September 1, 2005 12:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
Why do you think the LA governor was soft on looting? This is what I saw on the NewsHour last night:
Actually, there was a little too much Old South nobility rhetoric for my taste, but in any case her condemnation was certainly forthright. Was there some previous appearance that angered you?
September 1, 2005 12:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
Here's a link to an article entitled "Drowning New Orleans" which appeared in the October 2001 issue of Scientific American.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00060286-CB58-1315-8B5 883414B7F0000&chanID=sa006
The article vividly predicts the tragedy which President Bush claims "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."
According to the article:
"New Orleans is a disaster waiting to happen. The city lies below sea level, in a bowl bordered by levees that fend off Lake Pontchartrain to the north and the Mississippi River to the south and west. And because of a damning confluence of factors, the city is sinking further, putting it at increasing flood risk after even minor storms. . ."
"If Congress and President George W. Bush hear a unified call for action, authorizing it would seem prudent. Restoring coastal Louisiana would protect the country's seafood and shipping industries and its oil and natural-gas supply. It would also save America's largest wetlands, a bold environmental stroke. And without action, the million people outside New Orleans would have to relocate."
It seems unlikely that Scientific American is on President Bush's reading list.
September 1, 2005 1:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
The looting derives from the screwed up evacuation. Guess what -- New Orleans is a violent city. So when you order an evacuation and you know that at least one hundred thousand people are either not going to be willing or able to evacuate, you consider that you are leaving behind, undefended, a lot of weapons in a lot of stores. Hell, New Orleans set up a museum of captured guns a few years ago and the place was burgled.
So you know what you do? You ride roughshod over the second amendment and you impound the guns. Yes, you go into Walmart with the police and you take the guns and ammo away. You can give it back later.
But no ... this evacuation was seemingly an invite only Garden Section affair, and the help was supposed to not touch a thing while the important people were away.
That didn't work. Gee, I wonder why? Going over what happened between the prediction that there was a hurricane of force 4 heading towards New Orleans and the actions that ensued, one finds every possible level of idiocy. Perhaps this is a reflection of the Bush culture, since we have enthroned a veritable king of idiocy, but there are certainly bad planning awards to hand out in abundance.
I can at least forgive the mayor, who is suffering along with the people he mislead (in the Convention Center, in various hospitals). Bush is unforgivable. Surely the state he defended with life and limb against the fearful Communist threat -- Alabama -- deserved at least a personal visit from the guy, by Tuesday at the latest. The man isn't even a good human being. Jesus...
September 1, 2005 1:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
Garden section? District. Excuse me, I'm a little distraught.
September 1, 2005 1:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
Methinks your post misses the point. Of course there was a lot of mistakes pre disaster that should deserve their fair share of review. They are questions of infrastructure, which have been an on-going budget cut for this Administration.
But the problem that needs to be addressed immediately is FEMA/Homeland Security's failure to respond for four days. I don't care about excuses, they are to respond and they did not. After 9/11 we went through this big campaign that there would be responders, etc. but the results we got were for shit. God knows how much money we have spent to prepare for these types of disasters and yet when it came we didn't get anything for our money. Admittedly, the City and State governments have matters that need to be reviewed, but Americans who paid taxes on the theory that the government would respond to these sort of disasters to help other Americans? Well, we were ripped off.
September 3, 2005 10:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
If I am not mistaken, NO is the first US city to be evacuated since the Civil war. The decision to evacuate a major city is BIG for reasons that should be obvious if one stops to think about them. As a resident of the Outer Banks of NC, I have some feeling for hurricane evacuations, having both evacuated and elected to stay. There is no such thing as a "mandatory" evacuation,..mandatory is just a word with no meaning. Anyone can elect not to evacuate unless martial law is declared, etc.
It take 48 hours to evacuate the Outer Banks where everyone has a vehicle...there is no other way to get around and all the tourists must drive in. At peak season, I doubt if there are more than 100,000 people here...in the off season more like 20,000. NO is a major city with nearer 500,000 people.
In the case of Katrina, it was not until late on Friday it became clear that NO was the bullseye with a likely strike time of Monday AM.
The fact that 80% of the population evacuated means that the mayor was taken very seriously and was very persuasive. Given the time frame, it would have taken a miracle of advanced planning, in place resources and execution to significantly improve this result. I doubt if we reach much more than 90% on the Outer Banks.
Comparing the performance of the NO mayor with the NY mayor does not seem to me to be appropriate.
NYC was still functioning immediatelyafter 9/11. The homes of the police and fire people and other city workers had not been destroyed. Communications functioned, if not perfectly, many times better than NO. The NO mayor had no way to communicate with his citizens. There was no electricity. If he were able to broadcast on radio or TV, no one could receive. No telephnes functioned.
The WTC, as tragic as it was with no warning, was still a much smaller and more contained disaster management problem than that faced in NO or even the Mississippi coast where the surge receded.
Had the help that should have started arriving in NO and surrounding areas no later than Tuesday actually showed up this would still be a catastrophe of enormous porportions for NO as well as the Mississippi coast. However, many lives would have been saved and much misery averted to say nothing of the image of the America in the eyes of the world as well as our citizens. Providing this help is the business of FEMA/Homeland Security as is amply demonstrated by other threads in the Cafe. They failed miserably.
September 4, 2005 7:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
Trying to make sense of the chaos from New Orleans, my finger began pointing first at the Mayor for being no Giuliani,
But Aaron Broussard obviously IS a Giuliani, and a Democrat to boot, so it's really amazing that the DNC isn't making hay of this. Hell, maybe Jimmy Carville is putting the kaibosh on it...he would obviously have to surrender the "ragin' cajun" title, no?
September 7, 2005 12:43 PM | Reply | Permalink