By noon Monday, it was clear there was trouble. It was at the levee along the industrial canal that separates New Orleans from St. Bernard Parish to the east. The breach was obvious and, for the momen, irreparable. On Tuesday morning, there were two more gaps, both along the floodwall of the city's 17th St Canal. It was the beginning of the end, just a matter of time. The waters rushed in.
At the worst moment of the worst week in New Orleans' history, the water downtoun was 20 feet deep. How could it have happened? The city's levees, many decades old, had been built to withstand only a Category 3 storm. Katrin was a 4. A high 4. The local authorities knew that. But they had no comprehensive plan to evacuate the people from even the lowest parts of the city whose virtually every corner lies below sea level. Nor were there plans for an enhanced police presence on the streets after Katrina struck. In Washington too, there was a curious lassitude, both as the massive storm bore down on the Gulf Coast and in the immediate aftermath of the levees failing. At week's end, an obviously stricken President Bush said: "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."
But why not? The potential failure of the city's 350-mile levee system has been studied for years. The extensive network was builit to keep floodwaters out, but it can also lock them in when the levees are breeched or "overtopped" by surging water on the other side. This is what old New Orleans hands refer to as "flooding the bowl." And it's the very reason the Red Cross listed a direct hurricane hit on New Orleans as the nation's most deadly natural-disaster threat a few years ago. Everyone, it seemed, knew the risks. Scientists at the Louisiana State University had warned that even a Category 3 storm could dump up to 27 feet of water in some neighborhoods. "Everybody knew this was coming." says Walter Maestri, director of emergency preparedness for Jefferson Parish (a parish is akin to a county), which borders downtown New Orleans. "But we all hoped it wouldn't be in our lifetime." John Harrald, codirector of the Institute for Crisis, Disaster, and Risk Management at the George Washington University in Washington DC, agrees. "To paraphrase the 9/11 commission," he said, "we are seeing a failure of imagination."
Shared Blame. The failure, however was not on everyone's part. For years, officials in the New Orleans district office of the US Army Corps of Engineers, which built and administers the levee network, pushed to raise the protection level from Category 3 to Category 5. "We have the ability to protect this city [from Category 4 and 5 storms] for a 2 to 3 billion dollar investment," Al Naomi, a senior project manager for the corps, told US New in June. "It's not rocket science; its concrete and steel." Environmental groups, meanwhile, lobbied for more than a decade to restore southeastern Louisiana's vanishing wetlands, which once provided New Orleans with a robust, natural hurricane buffer. They got nowhere.
The Corps of Engineers went to great lengths last week to point out that the specific levee walls breached in Katrina's aftermath recently passed inspection and were not slated for upgrades, and that they were designed to withstand only Category 3 storms. But the corp's New Orleans district has also faced recent budget cuts that Naomi call "drastic" earlier this year. Decreases in funding for hurricane protection began four years ago and have come fast and furious since then. This year, representatives from Louisiana asked for $27.1 million for hurricane protection, saw the request slashed by the White House, but managed to nudge it back up to nearly $6 million. "With tax cuts and terrorism on everyone's radar," shrugs a Capitol Hill staff aide, "the insterest just wasn't there." Last spring, the Army Corps' Naomi told US News that the funding to raise the levee walls had been cut by up to 75 percent, compared with five years ago -- despite the fact that the levees in some areas had sunk by a foot or more, through a process known as "subsidence," renders them inadequate to protect the city's neighborhoods even from Category 3 staorm. "Funds have been cut to the point that [walls] that need to be raised can't be," Naomi said, "because we don't have the federal dollars."
Self-help. Some southeastern Louisiana parishes had resorted to raising their own taxes to shore up the sinking levees. "After 9/11, our budget was squeezed," says Windell Curole, executive director of South Lafourche Levee District, who recently won support for a tax measure aimed at levee-raising. In Jefferson Parish, district officials worked to raise levee walls to 15 feet before federal funding dried up a decade ago, leaving them around 12.5 feet high. Naomi's proposal to raise the levees to provide Category 5 protection, outlined in a slide-show presentation he created that includes slides like "Benefits of Category 5 Protection: Loss of Life Prevented; Makes evacuation manageble," is still awaiting federal funding -- for a feasibility study. That alone would take years. Naomi says the Category 5 upgrade work would have needed to be started more than a decade ago in order to have been completed before Katrina.
Post-Katrina, the issue of funding may have become moot. "Now people are going to say, 'Why do we need more studies?' " says Roy Dokk, professor of civil and evironmental engineering at LSU. "Why not just raise the levees?" In its defense, the cash-strapped Army Corps points out that a $37 million project to strengthen flood protection along New Orleans' West Bank was one of just two federal flood-prevention programs it operates that recieved full federal funding this year.
While New Orleans would have probably had a better chance of surviving Katrina with higher levees, it's also the leveeing of the Misssissippi River -- begun by the Army Corps in the 1930's -- that had destroyed the wetlands and barrier islands that provided the city with significant storm protection. Levees prevent the Mississippi from depositing the silt necessary to maintain southeast Louisiana's wetland; since the 1950's, scientists estimate that Louisiana has lost an area the size of Rhode Island. Ivor van Heerden, director of LSU's Center for the Study of Public Health Impacts of Hurricanes, says that every mile and a half of wetlands stands to lower a storm surge ... by a foot or so. "The loss of these areas has been recognized as a growing problem for the last 20 years and almost nothing has been done about it beyond conducting feasability studies," says Timothy Kusky, author of a textbook call Geological Hazards.
It's not for lack of trying. In the mid-1990's, a few years after Florida launched its campaign to rescue the Everglades, Louisiana's congressional delegation began fighting for the region's wetlands. But the lawmakers failed to persuade Congress to authorize money -- other than a small annual appropriation ... until this year, when Sen. Mary Landrieu marked the opening of hurricane season by standing in the French Quarter with a giant blue tarp strung up 18 feet high, where she predicted water would rise in the event a hurricane hit, partly because of wetlands elimination. While the House of Representatives' verision of the recent energy bill would have provided long-term help -- $350 million over the next 10 years and $1 billion yearly starting in 2016 -- the Senate balked after Democrats and the White Houcse resisted transferring some of the royalties from oil drilling off Louisiana's coast back to the state. What finially emerged from Congress provided Louisiana with $540 million for coastal restoration over the next four years. But advocates call it a short-term band-aide for a $14 billion problem.
Getting Out. With no immediate plans for large-scale marshlands restoration or levee-raising, New Orleans officials say they had focussed hurricane preparation efforts on evacuating as many citizens as possible. After residents fleeing last falls Hurricane Ivan got stuck for up to 10 hours on the 90 mile car trip to Baton Rouge, the state police instituted a "contra flow" plan for Katrina that reverse inbound lanes on highways that feed the city, greatly expediting the evacuation.
But, partly because New Orleans is home to a large poor population -- more than 20 percent of its 480,000 residents live below the poverty line according to a 2003 US Censu report -- 100,000 households report having no car. And though free busing was provided to the city's famed Superdome, itself evacuated late last week, there appears to have been no attempt to proved public transportation out of town for the poor. In an interview before Katrina struck, New Orleans Director of Emergency Preparedness Joseph Matthews told US News that plans to use buses or Amtrak trains to get people out of town were in their infancy. "Our offical policy is that everybody should take it upon themselves to find their own means of evacuation," he said. "As far as evacuating 50,000 or 100,000 people, we don't have the resources."
In July 2004, a table-top excercise cosponsored by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Louisiana officials simulated a slow-moving storm called Hurricane Pam striking New Orleans, with 10 to 20 feet of flooding and 1.1 million people being displaced for at least a year. In the simulation, "40,000 people died and 100,000 were injured, so [Katrina] could have been a lot worse," says Maestri, the Jefferson Parish emergency management director. According to news reports, FEMA hired a private firm to develop recommendation from the drill but hasn't yet publicly released them. Some participants say the drill was meant only as a starting point for developing a comprehensive plan to resond to a hurricane in New Orleans.
As the deterioration of the conditions in New Orleans grew more catastrophic with each passing day last week, FEMA and its parent, the Department of Homeland Security, came under fire for their management of the resuce effort. "This is a national disgrace," said Terry Ebbert, head of New Orlean's emergency operations, as he surveyed the chaotic scene at the Superdone.
Others echoed those sentiments. "calling this one a botched response is generous," says George Haddow, deputy chief of staff for FEMA during the Clinton administration. Jane Bullock, a former FEMA chief of staff and 22-year agency veteran, says the current federal effort demonstrates a weakened FEMA in a post-9/11 world. The agency was merged into Homeland Security in 2003, a move that critics say sparked an exodus of career professionals who feared they'd be marginalized. There was also criticism late last week that FEMA chief Michael Brown and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff lacked long-term experience in disaster preparedness.
Federal officials offered a vigorous defense. A FEMA press release said aggressive federal efforts had saved 4,500 lives and provided assistance to 30,000 hurricane victims. Russ Knocke, press secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, called Chertoff an "extraordinary brilliant and capable man" and said FEMA "has done amazing things over the last two years."
But amongst those who seemed miffed was President Bush. On Friday, as the president prepared to leave Washington for a tour of the Gulf Coast, he too expressed frustration at the response effort, saying, "the results are not acceptable."
The fallout from Katrina won't end anytime soon. Hundreds of thousands of greater New Orleans residents are likely to be tleft homeless for six months or more. "We really don't have a lot of planning experience with dealing with this many displaced people for a really extended amount of time," says GWU's Harrald. "Where are you goihng to build temporary housing? What do you do with a city that's uninhabitable?" For now, those questions will have to wait, as the resue effort is focussed on getting tens of thousands of hungry people out of the city -- alive.
