Katrina: After the Flood (7 page)

Bush didn’t help his cause when, during an appearance on ABC’s
Good Morning America
, he said, “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.” No statement seemed a more transparent statement on how poorly the president had been briefed. Even Karl Rove felt obliged to contradict that claim in his 2010 memoir, titled
Courage and Consequence
. “Computer models,” Rove wrote, “had long anticipated a horrific disaster if a Katrina-like storm ever hit the city.”

“WHERE THE HELL IS
the cavalry?” Kate Hale, the emergency-management director in Dade County, Florida, asked during a 1992 press conference three days after Hurricane Andrew. “For God’s sake, where are they?” Congressional hearings were held, followed by a report condemning FEMA as a kind of “turkey farm” for political donors and bureaucrats past their sell-by date. Jimmy Carter had created FEMA in 1979 through executive order. Barely a decade later, no shortage of voices inside and outside government were calling for its abolition.

James Lee Witt, Bill Clinton’s choice to head the agency, saved FEMA. At first his appointment seemed more of the same: a friend of the president dating back to when they were children. The son of an Arkansas sharecropper who had never finished high school, Witt’s background proved easy fodder for partisans seeking to stir trouble for the new president. But Witt also had a résumé that distinguished him from every past FEMA chief: having served as director of the Arkansas office of emergency services for nearly half of Clinton’s twelve-year tenure as governor, Witt was the first director of FEMA to have actual emergency-management experience.

Witt’s first priority after taking over the agency was to spend less time on “continuity of government” plans for after a nuclear attack and other doomsday scenarios and focus instead on what he called “real-life disasters” such as floods and tornadoes. He put his people through customer-service training and pushed them to help locals with emergency preparedness. Witt championed the idea of prepositioning supplies and first responders so they were closer to where they would be needed after a disaster, and he convinced Clinton to raise the FEMA director to cabinet level. “I’ve got to pay the administration a compliment,” George W. Bush said to Vice President Al Gore during one of the 2000 presidential debates. “James Lee Witt of FEMA has done a really good job.” Witt was that rare public servant who had champions among both Democrats and Republicans.

Bush’s first FEMA director was Joe Allbaugh, a party operative who had moved to Texas in 1994 to work on Bush’s first gubernatorial
campaign. Allbaugh served as Governor Bush’s chief of staff until resigning to become the campaign manager of his 2000 presidential run. A grateful president-elect asked Allbaugh, the son of an Oklahoma wheat farmer, if a job as agriculture secretary interested him, but he said he would prefer to be head of FEMA. That way, he said, he could at least occasionally play hero on the public stage. “You’re not always in the limelight,” he said, “but when you are, it’s for all the marbles.” Although Allbaugh had no disaster-management experience, the Senate confirmed his appointment, 91–0.

Incompetence hurt the Bush administration after Katrina, but so, too, did ideology. The Bush administration slashed FEMA’s budget under Allbaugh, who pulled the plug on Witt innovations such as Project Impact, which helped communities become more disaster-resistant. Following the September 11 attacks, money grew even tighter as Allbaugh revived some of the doomsday-preparedness projects that Witt had shut down. FEMA would lose more of its clout when in 2003 it was merged into the new Department of Homeland Security the Bush administration created after the terrorist attacks. Allbaugh objected to the change, arguing that the move would rob FEMA of both independence and bureaucratic clout. He tendered his resignation soon after losing that fight. In his place, the president nominated Allbaugh’s number two, Michael Brown—the man Bush famously referred to as Brownie.

Like Allbaugh, Brown had no disaster-management experience prior to arriving in Washington. He had been an Oklahoma-based lawyer who worked for the International Arabian Horse Association 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 a
direct 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 computer
simulations 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 survivors. The government was supposed to spend a few hundred thousand dollars more on follow-up discussions and meetings, but most of those slated for the first half of 2005 were scrapped due to a lack of funds. The government spent around $800,000 on the Hurricane Pam simulation but left the project unfinished. Brown blamed his boss, Michael Chertoff, the federal judge whom Bush had named to run Homeland Security at the start of 2005, and other top administration officials for cutting off the money.

Some presidential historians argue that the Bush presidency died in New Orleans that week. If so, ego is, in part, to blame. The FEMA directorship was no longer a cabinet-level position with direct access to the president and his top people, but Brown, claiming he didn’t want to waste precious time going through proper channels, contacted the White House directly in those first hours after the levees broke. By Tuesday night, Michael Chertoff had had enough. Brown was on a military plane heading back to Baton Rouge when the Homeland Security secretary reached his insubordinate underling. He grounded Brown, ordering him not to leave Baton Rouge. As Brown told the story to Chris Cooper and Robert Block, the authors of
Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security
, when he pointed out that he was supposed to meet Mississippi governor Haley Barbour on the Gulf Coast, Chertoff said, “I don’t give a shit,” and hung up. After that, Brownie ran the rescue operations from his hotel room.

Brown was the designated face of FEMA’s stunted response to Katrina, but plenty of people deserved blame. First on that list might be a former marine general named Matthew Broderick, who ran Homeland Security’s operations center during Katrina. Broderick’s job was to
synthesize the snippets of intelligence the government was receiving and keep Chertoff and top people in the White House up-to-date. Broderick had Bahamonde’s report of a major levee breach Monday morning and his firsthand observations from a Coast Guard helicopter by that evening. At 1:15 p.m. on Monday, the Coast Guard sent out an e-mail reporting on a levee breach that caused at least eight feet of flooding in the Ninth Ward. As Broderick drove to work from his Virginia home on Tuesday morning, radio reports declared New Orleans a flooded city. Yet not until later in the afternoon on Tuesday did he send out a bulletin confirming that most of the city was underwater. Asked to explain the delay, he cited a television report he had glimpsed Monday evening on a TV in the agency’s break room. On the screen, people were being interviewed inside a French Quarter bar. How bad could it be, Broderick thought, if people were drinking and carrying on in the center of town?

Broderick and his people never seemed to catch up. Their Wednesday intelligence report told of the twelve thousand to fifteen thousand people stranded at the Superdome when the true number was closer to twenty-five thousand. That same report also failed to note that, in an act of desperation, the city had opened its Convention Center as a second refuge of last resort, despite a lack of provisions there. On Wednesday morning, the Louisiana state police were estimating that another twenty-five thousand were inside the Convention Center. Yet not until Thursday did Broderick’s intelligence report even mention it. “Actually, I have not heard a report of thousands of people in the Convention Center who don’t have food and water,” Chertoff said during an appearance Thursday night on NPR, though by that time the cable stations were doing stand-ups in front of the building. Talking to Ted Koppel later that night, Brown estimated that around five thousand people were in the Convention Center. In the first several days after Katrina, the average cable news viewer seemed to know more about the catastrophe than the people running the show from Washington.

“THIS IS GOING TO
get real ugly real fast,” FEMA’s Marty Bahamonde wrote in a text message he sent to his bosses the Sunday night before Katrina even reached New Orleans. They had been expecting fifteen
trucks loaded with bottled water but only five arrived. They had also received 320,000 fewer MRE (“meals ready to eat,” which the military uses on the battlefield) than requested. After the Pam exercises, FEMA had promised to pre-stage four hundred buses and eight hundred drivers just outside the storm zone to be ready to cart people out of the city. For days, everyone from Governor Blanco down was yelling for buses, but the answer was always the same: tomorrow. “Even if the FEMA buses had come on Wednesday, George Bush would have looked like a hero,” Kathleen Blanco said. The promised buses wouldn’t start arriving en masse until Friday morning.

“We need to get people out of here,” Blanco told Brown when the two were in New Orleans on Tuesday morning. “We need buses.” Nagin also stressed the need for buses when he met Brown that same morning. At Bahamonde’s suggestion, the mayor had arrived with a list. “Be as specific as possible to help FEMA do its job,” Bahamonde had coached the mayor and his people. Maybe it’s only an apocryphal story meant to underscore the government’s ineptitude, but one well-traveled report had Brown or one of his people misplacing the mayor’s list after receiving it Tuesday morning.

“Sir, the situation [in the Superdome] is past critical,” Bahamonde wrote to Brown on Wednesday morning. Yet once grounded in Baton Rouge, Brown seemed focused more on ensuring that he still looked to be in charge than on managing his team. “In this crisis and on TV, you need to look more hard working,” a handler wrote to Brown in an e-mail that eventually would be made public. “ROLL UP THE SLEEVES!” When Brown’s press secretary asked people via e-mail to leave her boss alone for a couple of hours so he could enjoy a proper meal before an appearance on MSNBC, Bahamonde had had enough of the e-mail string he was reading. “Tell her,” Bahamonde pecked out on his BlackBerry, “that I just ate an MRE and crapped in the hallway with 30,000 other close friends so I understand her concern about busy restaurants.”

Hundreds of New Orleans police officers went AWOL in those first few days after the flooding. By midweek, Eddie Compass, the chief of police, announced that his people would no longer help in the rescue efforts because he didn’t believe he had enough of a force to maintain order in dry parts of town. Blanco requested that troops be sent to New Orleans, as did
Nagin and Michael Brown. The White House at first indicated that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was unavailable (he was spotted sitting in the owner’s box at a San Diego Padres baseball game Tuesday night). Days of delays followed as lawyers inside the White House argued over lines of authority and paperwork rather than ordering the military to the region and sorting out the legal technicalities later. By Thursday—three days after the levees broke—the police were running out of ammunition, and Chief Compass, a friend of Nagin’s since childhood, breathlessly told the mayor a story about how he was nearly taken hostage inside the Convention Center. “People are shooting at officers there,” Compass said, “but we can’t shoot back because we don’t want to hit innocent people.” The chief “was clearly shaken up,” Nagin concluded, but he didn’t know what to tell his old friend except to suggest that he get some rest. Turning to longtime aide Terry Davis, Nagin said, “This thing looks like it could blow. It’ll take a miracle for us to hold it together.”