Sept. 9, 2005 – Just months before Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, Harold Schoeffler hiked along the levees that supposedly protected communities in Southern Louisiana from potential floods, and he saw that the aging structures dipped by as much as ten feet in some parts. To the Gulf Coast businessman and conservationist, the sinking barrier – neglected for decades by the Army Corps of Engineers and other government authorities – foreshadowed the catastrophe destined for another part of the coast.
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- Feds Ignored Catastrophe Predictions, Diverted Funds (Sep 1, 2005)
- FEMA Planned to Leave New Orleans Poor Behind (Sep 4, 2005)
- Experts, Katrina Survivors Lament Unimaginative Disaster Planning (Sep 16, 2005)
"A chain is only as strong as the weakest link," Schoeffler said. "Well, the levee is only as high as its lowest point."
Just as it revealed the levee system’s deficiencies, Katrina’s rage exposed weak links in the government’s response to natural disasters, reaching all the way up the chain of command.
Years before the storm hit, officials and scientists were imagining not whether, but how, disaster would ultimately descend on New Orleans. Experts had long predicted that if a severe hurricane hit the city, a flood surge would tear through the delicate levee system, engulf whole neighborhoods, and kill thousands.
Now that the doomsday scenario has made landfall, say critics, the full weight of official neglect is finally coming to bear: from an insufficient water infrastructure, to inadequate evacuation and shelter provisions, to a tragic lack of foresight in environmental policies – Katrina set in motion a cascade of logistical failures that had loomed for generations.
The Corps has pointed out that the array of levees was not even built to withstand waters surging from a hurricane of Katrina’s magnitude.
"It’s really no surprise that no one got a grip on all this," said Claire Rubin, a disaster response expert with the George Washington University Institute for Crisis, Disaster and Risk Management. She observed, "In terms of the capability for dealing with large-scale natural hazards … we have less capability than we did prior to 9/11."
Threat Festered Beneath Surface
The ease with which Katrina’s floodwaters tore through the New Orleans levee configuration has prompted many to question the adequacy of the nation’s public works infrastructures.
Since 2001, Congress has cumulatively allotted $250 million to Louisiana for flood mitigation projects – only half of the roughly $500 million requested by the state, but about 50 percent more than what Bush originally proposed.
Funding shortfalls in the 2005 and 2006 budget plans have stymied levee and flood control projects run by the Army Corps of Engineers, the country’s primary public works agency, forcing it to stop issuing new contracts for construction on some of the city’s hurricane protection structures.
But according to the Corps, even if fully funded, the current projects would not have prevented the three levee breakages that ushered in the deluge. Corps spokesperson Candy Walters told The NewStandard, "None of the projects that were on the books, or any of the repair work that we were doing, had any impact on the levees that were breached."
But chaos, not coordination, mired the government’s relief effort in the critical days following Katrina’s landfall.
Moreover, the Corps has pointed out that the array of levees was not even built to withstand waters surging from a hurricane of Katrina’s magnitude.
Evidence that the levees were inadequate by design has led critics to probe deeper problems leading up to the disaster.
Hugh Kaufman, a policy analyst and investigator with the Environmental Protection Agency, said that throughout the Gulf Coast region, "rather than beefing up, over the last four or five years, the protections for that area, they were diminished substantially… for the Iraq War, tax cuts for the upper brackets, etc."
According to studies conducted in 2001 and 2002 for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), rising sea levels and erosion of coastal land has steadily pushed places like New Orleans further into the path of storms and hurricanes. The research, carried out by the environmental institute Heinz Center, showed that the Gulf Coast states had the fastest rates of erosion in the country, with coastlines narrowing by six feet on average each year.
Simultaneously, wetlands habitats – the natural buffer against storm surges – have been eaten away by rising sea levels, oil exploitation and construction along the Mississippi River and Gulf Coast.
According to Melissa Samet, senior director of Water Resources with the environmental advocacy group American Rivers, while stronger natural barriers might not have fully absorbed Katrina’s impact, "if the wetlands had been there, the city would have been in better shape today."
Samet pointed out that much of the depletion of Louisiana’s wetlands "can be traced very directly to" construction of the levees themselves, part of a patchwork of environmentally disruptive infrastructure projects.
“No one in their right mind would create shelters with 30,000 people in them.” -- Claire Rubin
Brenda Ekwurzel, a climate change specialist with the environmental think tank Union of Concerned Scientists, told TNS that "it’s difficult to solve one problem and not necessarily create another" when attempting to control flooding in the region; making the coastline inhabitable by humans paradoxically makes it more vulnerable to disasters.
"We settled a region that was in balance," she said. "We created a situation that made it out of balance. And unfortunately, all those forces add up to create a natural-plus-manmade disaster."
Emergency Management Exposes Weakest Links
To critical observers, the televised images of stranded, overwhelmingly poor and black refugees of New Orleans suggested imbalances not only in nature, but in political priorities as well.
Watchdog groups and policy analysts view the governmental response to the disaster as an accumulation of missteps. Immediately after the White House declared emergency on August 27, FEMA issued restrictions on emergency help, barring first responders and humanitarian relief workers from entering New Orleans without explicit government authorization. FEMA chief Michael D. Brown asserted that the response "must be well-coordinated between federal, state and local officials."
But chaos, not coordination, mired the government’s relief effort in the critical days following Katrina’s landfall. On August 31, FEMA announced that while all 28 of its Urban Search and Rescue teams were "activated," only 18 were actually working on-site; the remainder were not fully deployed until September 2.
By that time, FEMA also announced that it had sent "convoys of food, water and ice which [were] arriving hourly in impacted areas." But that same day, TV news outlets broadcasted raw images from the city’s main convention center – where rescuers had sent and delivered thousands of evacuees – showing a mass of weary bodies, trapped under military surveillance with no relief in sight.
“It’s the rotten underbelly of America that gets revealed in something like this.” -- Richard Walker
Although it serves as the major military force in typical disaster situations, the National Guard began its response to the hurricane with a trickle. Louisiana officials had to coordinate the state’s Guard units with a shortage of about 3,000 troops, who were deployed in Iraq at the time with their equipment, including storm relief necessities.
It was not until August 31 that the Pentagon sent its initial deployment of 10,000 troops to the stricken areas. There are currently over 65,000 military personnel assisting with the effort, according to the Defense Department.
Generally, as Bush administration officials have been quick to point out, local and state governments respond first to a major emergency, and federal government resources are later summoned to supplement or take over relief efforts. But Rubin said that neglect marred each step of the response process. "Every level of government and every major organization seems to have been somewhat deficient," she said.
Louisiana’s emergency response protocol anticipated that if a storm like Katrina hit, the catastrophe "could overwhelm normally available shelter resources," and that "manpower and equipment of the political subdivisions [would] be exhausted and outside support will be needed."
The contingency plan assumed that "many evacuees will seek shelter with relatives, friends or in motels/hotels in host areas and not use public shelters." The rest, stated the report, could be accommodated by "last-resort refuges."
But things looked different once Katrina knocked the plan off paper and into a grim reality. By August 31, news outlets were reporting that of the city’s 485,000 residents, anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 had not yet evacuated, and tens of thousands were streaming into the increasingly chaotic makeshift shelters, the New Orleans Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Center.
"No one in their right mind would create shelters with 30,000 people in them," Rubin noted. With no established system for providing food and other basic necessities, she explained, "It’s pretty obvious… in a matter of three or four days, you’re going to have some very desperate behavior."
Some who have rebuked the government’s response to Katrina say it demonstrated not just a breakdown of operational capabilities, but a fundamental failure of public institutions to serve the poor and weak in their time of greatest need.
"It’s the rotten underbelly of America that gets revealed in something like this," said Richard Walker, professor of economic geography at the University of California-Berkeley. The uneven impacts of the disaster response failures, he said, show that "the poor, the unemployed, are outside circuits of care" in American society.
From 9/11 to "Judgment Day"
The political impact of Katrina may have marked a breaking point for the bureaucracy responsible for guiding emergency response on the state and federal levels. Since FEMA’s controversial fusion with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the Agency’s staff has diminished by roughly ten percent to fewer than 5,000 positions. Meanwhile, funding patterns suggest that counter-terrorism efforts have skewed FEMA’s focus away from environmental hazards and toward man-made ones.
For fiscal year 2006, the Bush administration proposed to decrease homeland security funding for local and state emergency preparedness training, from approximately $195 million in 2005 to $83 million, while increasing spending on anti-terrorism law enforcement by about $14 million.
Interviews with state and local first-responder agencies conducted by the Government Accountability Office earlier this year revealed that the local sense of priorities often diverged from the federal agenda. Some reported that "they were much more likely to face the threat of hurricanes, floods or wildland fires than an attack by terrorists," and many expressed concern that the emphasis on terrorism limited their capacity to respond to other kinds of emergencies.
This year, FEMA moved to further limit disaster response spending by imposing caps and other restrictions on its Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, which appropriates disaster recovery money toward the prevention of future catastrophes.
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Jim Schwab, a senior research associate with the think tank American Planning Association, said that the depth of the Katrina disaster was a measure of not just logistical incompetence, but years of deferred accountability. As the storm brewed in the distance, and policymakers weighed competing agendas, he said, "There was a reluctance to … swallow hard and say, you know, we’ve got to do this, because judgment day is coming. Judgment day came first."
