Disaster

On the Bob Edwards show this morning on XMPR, he interviewed Christopher Cooper and Robert Block, authors of the new book Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security. It was a fascinating interview.

In the book, Cooper and Block detailed the myriad failures, myths, and outright incompetence of the federal government's management of the preparation for and response to Katrina. The Department of Homeland Security takes the brunt of the blow, with Michael Chertoff getting eviscerated for his complete inability to understand what was going on or manage the disaster. The myth that the Bush Administration has tried to perpetrate that somehow this was a failure of local government is completely debunked - in fact, New Orleans managed a larger evacuation than any ever. Not only did more people get out, but a higher percentage were evacuated before Katrina hit than was expected. When Ernesto hits the Keys this week, they said, roughly 40% of people will evacuate. Over 80% of NO residents left before the hurricane hit.

In the months before Katrina, the people involved ran a simulation involving "Hurricane Pam", which was supposed to flood New Orleans. During that simulation, the local and state governments described what they could do, and the federal government essentially said that they could take care of everything else. When Katrina actually hit, the state and local governments did what they had planned on, for the most part. It was the federal government that failed.

Why did it fail? In short, because when DHS was established, the goal was not to deal with the recovery from a disaster, presumably from a terrorist attack, but to prevent or disrupt the attack. The assumption was made that natural disasters were something we knew how to handle, so there was no reason to worry about them. FEMA was demoted, and Michael Brown, while not an Emergency Management specialist, was thoroughly marginalized, so that when he did ask for things, he was told that unless Chertoff backed him up, nothing would happen.

What was Chertoff doing? He was assuming that it was a local problem. They had set up an internal condition that DHS wouldn't need to step in until the levees breached, so when the reports started coming in that the city was flooding, they asked "Did the levees breach?" When the responses came in that they thought so, but there was confusion, it didn't trigger a response from the feds. They got caught up in terminology - if a report came in that a levee had breached, and there really was a floodwall in that location, it was ignored. They had a definition that if a levee fell over, but half of it still stood, it wasn't breached. Chertoff was also treating the situation like an intelligence-gathering mission during a war - unless he could get multiple, independent confirmations of something, it didn't happen. As the reporters said "In a military situation, that makes sense - people could die if you make the wrong decisions. No one will die if too many supply helicopters bring water to New Orleans."

President Bush, at least in this book, got a bit of a break. He was letting his people handle it, letting them feed him information, and unless he heard something from Chertoff, there wasn't a need to do anything. Of course, that is one of his failings - he doesn't get involved, he waits for information instead of seeking it out, and he's overly loyal to incompetent cronies who know not too feed him any information that he doesn't want.

Bob Edwards asked the question that many of us asked during those horrific days - "Couldn't they just turn on the TV and see what was going on?" Apparently, no. When news coverage started coming in that there was a disaster starting to happen in the Convention Center, one of Chertoff's assistants is described (in his own words) as spending the evening making fun of the reporters for not knowing that the Convention Center was really the Superdome, and it wasn't until much, much later that he realized that the two were actually different places.

This was an abject failure of leadership. Never forget.