Katrina Blame

Nick Gillespie | September 6, 2005

Surely there's enough at all levels of government to go around. Here's two opposing views. On this Sunday's Meet the Press, Jefferson Parish President Aaron (*) Broussard blamed FEMA, the federal agency that has a long record of fecklessness:

[State and local officials like me were told] every single day, "The cavalry's coming," on a federal level, "The cavalry's coming, the cavalry's coming, the cavalry's coming." I have just begun to hear the hoofs of the cavalry. The cavalry's still not here yet, but I've begun to hear the hoofs, and we're almost a week out.

Let me give you just three quick examples. We had Wal-Mart deliver three trucks of water, trailer trucks of water. FEMA turned them back. They said we didn't need them. This was a week ago. FEMA--we had 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel on a Coast Guard vessel docked in my parish. The Coast Guard said, "Come get the fuel right away." When we got there with our trucks, they got a word. "FEMA says don't give you the fuel." Yesterday--yesterday--FEMA comes in and cuts all of our emergency communication lines. They cut them without notice. Our sheriff, Harry Lee, goes back in, he reconnects the line. He posts armed guards on our line and says, "No one is getting near these lines." Sheriff Harry Lee said that if America--American government would have responded like Wal-Mart has responded, we wouldn't be in this crisis.

Whole transcript here.

Meanwhile, over at the Wall Street Journal, Bob Williams, a former state legislator whose district was flattened by the eruption of Mt. St. Helens 25 years ago, says it's mostly on Lousiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin:

The actions and inactions of Gov. Blanco and Mayor Nagin are a national disgrace due to their failure to implement the previously established evacuation plans of the state and city. Gov. Blanco and Mayor Nagin cannot claim that they were surprised by the extent of the damage and the need to evacuate so many people. Detailed written plans were already in place to evacuate more than a million people. The plans projected that 300,000 people would need transportation in the event of a hurricane like Katrina. If the plans had been implemented, thousands of lives would likely have been saved....

The city's evacuation plan states: "The city of New Orleans will utilize all available resources to quickly and safely evacuate threatened areas." But even though the city has enough school and transit buses to evacuate 12,000 citizens per fleet run, the mayor did not use them. To compound the problem, the buses were not moved to high ground and were flooded. The plan also states that "special arrangements will be made to evacuate persons unable to transport themselves or who require specific lifesaving assistance. Additional personnel will be recruited to assist in evacuation procedures as needed." This was not done....

The federal government does not have the authority to intervene in a state emergency without the request of a governor. President Bush declared an emergency prior to Katrina hitting New Orleans, so the only action needed for federal assistance was for Gov. Blanco to request the specific type of assistance she needed. She failed to send a timely request for specific aid....

Unlike the governors of New York, Oklahoma and California in past disasters, Gov. Blanco failed to take charge of the situation and ensure that the state emergency operation facility was in constant contact with Mayor Nagin and FEMA. It is likely that thousands of people died because of the failure of Gov. Blanco to implement the state plan, which mentions the possible need to evacuate up to one million people.

More here (not certain link will work for non-subscribers).

Update: Corrected Aaron Broussard's name.

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|9.6.05 @ 1:34PM|#

Nick

You write, "FEMA, the federal agency that has a long record of fecklessness." Surely you mean a federal agency, because it is not the only one, no?

|9.6.05 @ 1:40PM|#

And back over at NRO, Rich Lowry's getting at the real culprit, out-of-wedlock births:

http://www.nationalreview.com/lowry/lowry200509021731.asp

In many senses, however, poverty is indeed dangerous. The root of it, more than anything else, is the breakdown of the family. Roughly 60 percent of births in New Orleans are out of wedlock. If people are stripped of the most basic social support - the two-parent family - they will be more vulnerable in countless ways, especially, one assumes, in moments of crisis like that that has befallen New Orleans. If the tableaux of suffering in the city prompts meaningful soul-searching, perhaps there can be a grand right-left bargain that includes greater attention to out-of-wedlock births from the Left in exchange for the Right's support for more urban spending (anything is worth addressing the problem of fatherlessness).

So you get that? The right will increase government spending and the left will pay more attention to fatherlessness, and there will be no more misery upon the land.

Let's hear it for the "grand left-right bargain"!

|9.6.05 @ 1:42PM|#

You're right. The link won't work for those of us too cheap to subscribe to the WSJ. We have to save our pennies to subscribe to Reason instead. :-)

|9.6.05 @ 1:45PM|#

I'm going to disagree with both of them, because they're both right! Hopefully the deaths of thousands of people will shine a little light onto where our spending priorities are and government waste. It's too bad people have to die for there to be accountability (though even then that's not always the case), but I'll take what I can get from this cluster-fuck.

|9.6.05 @ 1:48PM|#

That's Aaron Broussard.

Hard to keep it straight who's pointing at who, eh cher?

Well, don't worry, because President Bush has promised to personally lead the investigation into what went wrong. I'm sure HE'LL get to the bottom of everything. I myself have promised to help him using the insights I gained from my search for Nicole's real killers.

|9.6.05 @ 1:49PM|#

That link was supposed to go here

|9.6.05 @ 1:50PM|#

Ooh, ooh, ooh! I know the answer!

Is it "all of the above"?

|9.6.05 @ 1:51PM|#

Come on, bureaucrats, there's plenty of me to go around...

|9.6.05 @ 1:53PM|#

Am I the only one who was appalled by Broussard's performance Sunday morning?

|9.6.05 @ 1:56PM|#

State of Louisiana Disaster manual:

Step 1 - Call feds.

Shannon Love|9.6.05 @ 1:56PM|#

I am betting we will find that the failures at FEMA result from over-centralization and an institutional desire to plan and control everything from the top down. Far from disorganized or incompetent in the way people normally think of such traits, we will find FEMA to be over-organized and detailed obsessed. Of course, in a highly chaotic situation were speed is essential such an attitude is literally lethal.

I think FEMA needs to be organized more like the contemporary battlefield military with many, small, highly autonomous units heavily coordinated by a shared data network. In this model, FEMA agents would move into a disaster zone like a hoard of mice, fixing smaller problems as they found them and using the net to coalesce around big problems. Such a model would also make it easier to integrate private help quickly into the response.

Historically, FEMA has been your classic big government failure but it seems that many think the solution is to make it even bigger and more centralized. I predict this approach will fail.

|9.6.05 @ 2:02PM|#

"special arrangements will be made to evacuate persons unable to transport themselves or who require specific lifesaving assistance. Additional personnel will be recruited to assist in evacuation procedures as needed."

Translation from bureaucracy-speak to English: "we don't really know what we're going to do, but we'll come up with something if/when the time comes".

Warren|9.6.05 @ 2:02PM|#

You can't be too critical of Louisiana politics for me. If anything, highlighting their incompetence on disaster management, distracts form their incompetence on everything else. But what's with FEMA undermining independent relief efforts? Are these allegations true? WTF huh? I mean seriously WTF?

|9.6.05 @ 2:03PM|#

R C Dean|9.6.05 @ 2:12PM|#

I think a lot of what happened in NO is a good example of moral hazard, with the locals relying on federal "insurance", and thus not doing the prudent thing themselves.

They didn't fix/upgrade their levees out of their own pockets, because they figured if the waited long enough, the feds would pick up the bill.

They didn't do a lot of things necessary to preserve order because, at a subconscious level anyway, they knew the National Guard would show up.

They had jack in the way of disaster response materiel, because Uncle Sugar will do all that.

|9.6.05 @ 2:12PM|#

To figure out what is FEMA's fault, we probably need to look outside New Orleans. Clearly there are failures there, and they seem like they are directly tied to FEMA.

In New Orleans, the biggest problem was that so many people weren't evacuated (that's a local responsibility) and the lack of police or national guard (local and state).

Meyer: The shoring up the levees argument is so five days ago. Some (or all) of the levees that failed were actually upgraded already. Plus any new work wouldn't have been completed yet. Plus the design still probably couldn't handle an intense hurricane.

R C Dean|9.6.05 @ 2:13PM|#

Meyer - you beg the question of why NO and LA didn't upgrade their own damn levees to meet a Category 5 storm.

RustedChef|9.6.05 @ 2:14PM|#

"State of Louisiana Disaster manual:

Step 1 - Call feds."

Step 2 - Cry and call feds again

Brady Westwater|9.6.05 @ 2:17PM|#

Nick,

The story not being told yet is how the media knew Ray Nagin was lying to the people before the storm and knew he was not doing what needed to be done - and yet never said a word.

See below:

http://lacowboy.blogspot.com/2005/09/hurricane-katrina-blogger-brendan-loy.html

|9.6.05 @ 2:17PM|#

We can argue about who is most responsible for the aftermath, but the whole disaster would have been avoided if the federal government had finished shoring up the levees. The diversion of resources away from this project is where the real blame should fall.

What rot.

No levee was going to save New Orleans if Katrina had hit it head-on as a Cat 5 storm, as was originally predicted. The only rational thing to do under those circumstances was clear everyone out of the city, by whatever means were at hand, and come back afterwards, alive, to pick up the pieces.

Instead, Nagin dithered about whether the evacuation order should be given, and when it was, whether it should be mandatory or just a suggestion. Then he suggested that everyone go to the Superdome, which just barely missed suffering a catastrophic structural failure that could well have killed everyone sheltering there.

Levees will hold back ordinary storms and even extraordinary floods, but saying that the feds are to blame for the levees not being strong enough to hold back a hurricane that, even excluding New Orleans, has caused damage of epic proportions is simply not reasonable.

|9.6.05 @ 2:25PM|#

Great article by Bob Williams in the WSJ. It is not the federal government's responsibility to assist with natural disasters in non-federal areas. Read the Constitution. It's a local or state issue. Pre-New Deal, Congress would probably refuse to appropriate funds to New Orleans and other cities affected by a hurricane. They would've debated the constitutionality of such a measure. No debate with this Congress.

With regards to the media blaming Bush, I'm not surprised. I bet if New Orleans had a Republican mayor and Louisiana had a Republican governor, and if Kerry were President, the media would blame the mayor and the governor.

|9.6.05 @ 2:45PM|#

"Meyer - you beg the question of why NO and LA didn't upgrade their own damn levees to meet a Category 5 storm"

Well, ask this question first - if they had ponied up that money, would the ACE have let them do their own repairs? And then ask, what exactly are the residents paying 40% of their paychecks to the federal government for if not to protect their lives and property?

Once again, the Dept of Homeland Security provides the best examples of why civil and economic liberty provide MORE security, not less. The more you trust the federal government to protect you from any risk, the more likely you'll be bending over and taking "protection" from the Feds right up until the time when they fail to protect you. Then they'll blame you for not protecting yourself.

Shannon Love|9.6.05 @ 2:52PM|#

RC Dean,

I think you nailed it with the moral hazard observation. It really explains the complete and long standing paralyses of the state and local authorities.

|9.6.05 @ 2:56PM|#

Lars,

We'll likely never know about the reasonableness of a levee surviving a Cat 5 storm in New Orleans because the Corps of Engineers feasibility study was zeroed out in the 2005 fiscal year federal budget.

|9.6.05 @ 2:57PM|#

AJTall -

What about the 2004 National Response Plan?

http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/9/4/171811/1974

(courtesy of andrewsullivan.com)

I won't argue that state and local government could not have done more, but it strikes me that the federal government had already mandated developing a more centralized method of handling catastrophes.

|9.6.05 @ 2:59PM|#

>Jefferson Parish President Aaron
Umm. What exactly is a "parish president"?

>She failed to send a timely request for specific aid...
Or, at least, it wasn't filed in triplicate. So sad.

|9.6.05 @ 3:00PM|#

Welcome to all of the never-before-seen commenters making exactly the case the White House has adopted as its political strategy!

Anyways, that's some nice weasel-wording Bob Williams gets into with "specific" this and "specific" that, but here's the letter Blanco sent the day before the storm.

http://gov.louisiana.gov/Disaster%20Relief%20Request.pdf

Nagging Questions Dep't|9.6.05 @ 3:10PM|#

With regards to the media blaming Bush, I'm not surprised. I bet if New Orleans had a Republican mayor and Louisiana had a Republican governor, and if Kerry were President, the media would blame the mayor and the governor.

Unless Kerry had ignored (your reading of) the Constitution and made at least a decent attempt at evac, pre-levees breaking. Then these threads would read drastically differently and you would probably not be posting here to complain, AJT, in tacit acceptance of Kerry's triumphant refugee convoy.

Wow, it's easy to make up alternative realities if you try!

|9.6.05 @ 3:14PM|#

J B Allen,

There is some seriously funny shit in the comments of that link you posted. I loved the one about needing to investigate the fact that none of the damaged rigs belonged to any of Bushes friends. Maybe Bush is God. Or the one about trying to kill off the antiwar agitators in New Orleans.

Shannon Love|9.6.05 @ 3:18PM|#

Joe,

Its funny because pro-Bush sites are linking to the same document to demonstrate how unprepared and out of touch Blanco is.

Specifically, her funding request came in for criticism.

Coordination: $0
Technical and advisory assistance: $0
Debris removal: $30,000,000
Emergency Protective measures: $25,000,000
Individuals and Household Program: $75,000,000
Distribution of emergency supplies: $0
Other: $0

Funny how people see the opposite things in the same documents.

|9.6.05 @ 3:20PM|#

Is Louisiana the only state that believes that "2004 National Response Plan" means that when a natural disaster hits the feds will be there to fix everything immediately?

I'm going to check with my city and state leaders. If they think like Louisiana, I'm screwed.

joe is right! You keep on lookin' at Blanco & Nagin, and whatever you do pay no attetion to that man behind the curtain, that's where the culpability really lies.

Also, Blanco still hasn't offered to federalize the National Guard. And yet, somehow, National Guardsmen under federal command are patrolling the streets of New Orleans. Which clearly cannot be possible.

|9.6.05 @ 3:38PM|#

Joe, in terms of preventing a substantial number of the fatalities that have occurred, what happened the day prior to the hurricane coming ashore matters hardly at all. The ONLY effective measure, I repeat, ONLY effective relief measure for a storm such as this is to have people in a different place than where the storm comes ashore. That's it. Even if the levees had been able to withstand a category 5 storm, if Katrina had not jogged to the east at the last moment, thousands of casualties would have been suffered from people trying to ride it out in old wooden buildings undergoing Katrina's most intense winds.

24 hours before the storm, the chance of there being a quickly implemented action to remove a large percentage of those who decided to not evacuate, or lacked the means, approximated zero. This had to be planned well in advance, and the City of New orleans efforts this past summer amounted to having a DVD produced which informed people that they were on their own when it came to evacuating. If you have reason to believe that the political actor with primary responsibility to see that New Orleans can evacuate in the face of a hurricane is the President of the United States, well I guess you're entitled to your opinion, but you are horrbily mistaken. In fact, if the result of this catatrophe is that people ignore their local and state governments even more than they do now, because they think the Great White Father in Washington can ensure that a bus is sent over to to the local nursing home, as the hurricanes bear down, then the catastrophes are going to be worse in the future.

Finally, to whomever commented on the President of Jefferson Parrish making the remarks he visited upon the nation, I agree. To have the President of Jefferson Parrish expressing rage at Washington D.C. because a nursing home in Jefferson Parrish didn't have their occupants evacuated as a category 5 storm approached made me sick. If he wants another idiot, as he also has been quoted as saying, he only needs to look in the mirror.

|9.6.05 @ 3:45PM|#

"The ONLY effective measure, I repeat, ONLY effective relief measure for a storm such as this is to have people in a different place than where the storm comes ashore."

Would you care to revisit that? I suspect people in the Convention Center could think of some ways effective relief could have provided post-storm.

Disaster relief operations have been implemented, and have saved thousands upon thousands of lives, during every major catastrophe in my lifetime.

If you want someone to blame for the fact that the locals believed there would be effective federal disaster response, maybe you should blame the people who promised it and didn't deliver.

|9.6.05 @ 4:28PM|#

Shannon & joe,

It's interesting that the letter was dated August 28; Shannon has posted on other threads that it is reasonable to expect a 72-hour lag time between the formal request for federal disaster services and the actual arrival of said services.

Katrina was predicted to eventually hit the NO-Mobile area days before the storm actually hit the east coast of Florida. So why wasn't the formal request for services made sooner? Anyone know of similar documentation from the governors of Mississippi and Alabama?

|9.6.05 @ 4:32PM|#

Joe, perhaps my definition of "effective response" differs from yours. In my world, any response to a storm which can be observed with satellites, and given a fairly high possibility of striking New Orleans a couple days ahead of time, which leaves 20% of the population below sea level, without having even made an attempt to give an opportunity of evacuation to those without cars, is by definition an ineffective response. To actually prevent a substantial percentage of the fatalities which have occurred, one MUST get a higher percentage of the population out of the city. What happened on Tuesday, Monday, or even Sunday, in terms of actually having a large percentage of the people now dead be instead alive, pales in signifigance, compared to what needs to be done by Saturday. An 80% evacuation rate is by definition an ineffective response to this situation, if one really wishes to drive down the fatality rate signifigantly, and nothing that happens afterwords will change that. People have to get out. Period.

|9.6.05 @ 4:42PM|#

Sheriff Harry Lee said that if America--American government would have responded like Wal-Mart has responded, we wouldn't be in this crisis.

So if the government would respond as well as the private sector, things would have been much better? Now who argues against privatizing aid and resuce?

|9.6.05 @ 4:44PM|#

State of Louisiana Disaster manual: Step 1 - Call feds.

But withhold requests and details so that you can bitch later.

M. Simon|9.6.05 @ 7:15PM|#

State of Louisiana Disaster manual:

Step 1 - Feds suggest - give us a call

Step 2 - Wait 24 hours

Step 3 - Call feds

Step 4 - Cry and call feds again

Step 5 - Blame feds for not showing up sooner

M. Simon|9.6.05 @ 9:12PM|#

What I want to know is why the FEDs are not building levees around every costal city to protect them from catastrophic floods from a meteor strike?

I call it gross negligence.

The threat is obvious and yet nothing is done.

I blame Bush.

Shannon Love|9.6.05 @ 9:33PM|#

Russ D,

Actually, the clock starts ticking when the disaster arrives not when the paperwork is signed. Katrinia hit NO at 8am Monday and had passed by 12pm. That would be the earliest the clock could start. Realistically, the storm was moving over the positions where the relief workers were waiting so the city was still cut off for 4-6 more hours at a minimum. So significant federal aid would have reached the city on schedule sometime late Wednesday which is in fact when it began to arrive. Some aid arrived on Tuesday. Federally directed rescue via coast guard and the navy started almost immediately.

I really doubt FEMA handled this disaster with speed and efficiency. It never has in the past. But it does appear that the federal response was on schedule according to existing expectations and plans.

Shannon Love|9.6.05 @ 9:35PM|#

joe,

Pay no attention to the plans, expectations, org charts or delineations of responsibility.

Just keep playing with the monkey.

New Lexicon Dep't|9.7.05 @ 9:36AM|#

Actually, the clock starts ticking when the disaster arrives not when the paperwork is signed. Katrinia hit NO at 8am Monday and had passed by 12pm. That would be the earliest the clock could start.

Pre-emption. That is what you do when there is an ominous threat. Didn't the lectures of autumn 2002 teach you anything?

|9.7.05 @ 11:34AM|#

Shannon Love - You've said the smartest things about this disaster that I've read. You're actually thinking about the problem and offering intelligent analysis.

SL's greatest hits:

"I am betting we will find that the failures at FEMA result from over-centralization and an institutional desire to plan and control everything from the top down... in a highly chaotic situation were speed is essential such an attitude is literally lethal." That bit of analysis is worth it's weight in gold!

"I think FEMA needs to be organized more like the contemporary battlefield military with many, small, highly autonomous units heavily coordinated by a shared data network." Exactly the right answer! Wish I'd thought of it... It's the sort of organizational model that should be applied to any disaster response outfit.

"Historically, FEMA has been your classic big government failure but it seems that many think the solution is to make it even bigger and more centralized. I predict this approach will fail." Not gonna take that bet, me! (Channeling my inner Cajun...) But seriously, the bureucratic answer is ALWAYS to do even more of what hasn't worked in the past. I can't even begin to offer suggestions on how that particular paradigm gets demolished, but it certainly needs to be!

"Its funny because pro-Bush sites are linking to the same document to demonstrate how unprepared and out of touch Blanco is. Specifically, her funding request came in for criticism.
Coordination: $0
Technical and advisory assistance: $0
Debris removal: $30,000,000
Emergency Protective measures: $25,000,000
Individuals and Household Program: $75,000,000
Distribution of emergency supplies: $0
Other: $0"

It's amazing how some folks on this board frequently cite documents that refute the points they are trying to make, while repeatedly putting the same points and same documentation forward as tho repetition will transmute utter BS into the golden reality of their choice. In his defense, tho, joe is (usually!) far and away one of the least of those types.

RC Dean's got a pretty good analysis of how the locals have come to expect the solution to come from the top, and I think that the cost of their inaction/dependence is now horrifically obvious. Kind of like surrendering your self-reliance for trusting "the kindness of strangers" can get you buried in a shallow grave even outside of disaster areas...

|9.14.05 @ 12:29PM|#

Just a little mea culpa here. I grew up in New Orleans (actually, across the river), and I've gotta concede that we've always been WAY too cocky about hurricanes. Whenever one comes along, we just tape up the windows and lay in some bread and batteries for the radio. There's a lot of noise, some streets flood, a few houses get messed up, and two-three days later everything's back to normal.

Also, has anybody else noticed that all the recent hurricanes in several years kept missing the city? We'd get this big, scary media buildup; the storm would head straight in, and then at the very last minute it would always swerve a bit and roll ashore away from the city.

Well, Katrina did that too, but this time it was big enough and mean enough that even a glancing blow was enough to devastate the city. However, I'm positive that lots of people were never going to evacuate regardless of the Mayor's order or whether buses were available. The weather folks had cried wolf several times too often, and if residents speak honestly I'm sure they'll admit they believed this would be another false alarm too. The difference is, this time there WAS a wolf, and when the fangs came out it was too late to do anything.

|10.2.09 @ 12:21PM|#

um what role does bush play in this whole blame game, writing a paper

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