Project Katrina

It would seem that years and years after Katrina hit the Washington Post is just catching on that almost nothing has been changed to ensure similar events don’t occur again:

Almost four years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has failed to clarify the responsibilities of different agencies that would respond to such disasters, according to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office.

One result is that FEMA lacks assurances that the agencies have improved preparedness since the deadly hurricane in August 2005 exposed numerous flaws in the nation’s readiness for large-scale catastrophes.

[....]

The GAO conceded that FEMA lacks authority to compel other agencies to act but said FEMA should nonetheless “instill a shared sense of responsibility and accountability on the part of all stakeholders for the successful development and implementation of the national preparedness system.”

The report noted that although the post-Katrina legislation requires FEMA to track corrective actions taken in response to training exercises, it has not done so effectively.

The story goes on to highlight that FEMA has almost no communication with other government agencies that might be called on during a disaster much less defined how improvements will be monitored.

Update: Reading the report in more detail, the GAO Report found 68 percent of the plans needed to implement a national preparedness system have not yet been completed, although 41 of the 50 policies needed to define the roles and responsibilities of those who must implement the plan have been completed.

It just makes you wonder how much one city/region can endure. New Orleans had almost 64 homicides per 100,000 people last year, even with a generous estimate of the total population. That is far higher than St. Louis, the runner-up with 47 homicides per 100,000. Even if New Orleans had jumped back to its pre-Hurricane Katrina population it would be tied for second place with Baltimore.

The Rockefeller Institute of Government released a report last week calling for drastic legislative change that would authorize a presidential appointee to take charge of the government’s response to major disasters like Hurricane Katrina.

The report, Who’s in Charge? Who Should Be? The Role of the Federal Government in Megadisasters: Based on Lessons Learned from Hurricane Katrina, suggests amending the Stafford Act so that it better serves those affected by natural disasters, creating a central body and/or governmental leader—an “Officer-in-Charge”—with the authority to make plans actionable at a federal level in order to better coordinate federal, state, and local governments’ responses. The Officer-in-Charge would report directly to the POTUS and could “enable the president and Congress to consider extraordinary national action.” I think it is safe to say this is a change that is needed sooner rather than later.

Some recent stats from the Institute for Southern Studies:

• May 1 marked the end of the Temporary Housing Program for Katrina victims, and FEMA told residents they must vacate the trailers by May 30.
• Nearly 5,000 FEMA trailers continue to provide housing to residents displaced by Hurricane Katrina.
• Some 2,800 FEMA trailers remain occupied in Louisiana, with 1,000 of those trailers located in Orleans Parish, and some 2,000 FEMA trailers remain occupied in Mississippi.
• Most FEMA trailer occupants are elderly and/or disabled persons in desperate need of effective support and case management services to stabilize their housing and well-being.
• FEMA trailer occupants are displaced homeowners and renters still struggling to rebuild their homes or secure affordable housing after Katrina and Rita. In fact, 80 percent are homeowners, and most of them told FEMA in a survey this year they want to return to their storm-damaged homes.

GQ has a devasting and power article this month about former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. While the bulk of the article focuses on Iraq, his lack of management skills, turf battles, and biblical quotes on the cover of military reports he sent to the White House, there are several small sections towards the end about Hurricane Katrina that left me speechless.

A final story of Rumsfeld’s intransigence begins on Wednesday, August 31, 2005. Two days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans—and the same day that Bush viewed the damage on a flyover from his Crawford, Texas, retreat back to Washington—a White House advance team toured the devastation in an Air Force helicopter. Noticing that their chopper was outfitted with a search-and-rescue lift, one of the advance men said to the pilot, “We’re not taking you away from grabbing people off of rooftops, are we?”

:No, sir,” said the pilot. He explained that he was from Florida’s Hurlburt Field Air Force base—roughly 200 miles from New Orleans—which contained an entire fleet of search-and-rescue helicopters. “I’m just here because you’re here,” the pilot added. “My whole unit’s sitting back at Hurlburt, wondering why we’re not being used.”

The search-and-rescue helicopters were not being used because Donald Rumsfeld had not yet approved their deployment—even though, as Lieutenant General Russ Honoré, the cigar-chomping commander of Joint Task Force Katrina, would later tell me, “that Wednesday, we needed to evacuate people. The few helicopters we had in there were busy, and we were trying to deploy more.”

You read that correctly. The military had hundreds of rescue choppers, many with airlift equipment, within range of New Orleans. But because Rumsfeld was engaged in a turf war, so it would take days before he finally sent in both the needed active duty troops (not just the Louisiana Guard) and released the much needed air support.

Even a shit all stupid George Bush began understanding something was wrong, and in the end turned on Rumsfeld:

Bush convened a meeting in the Situation Room on Friday morning. According to several who were present, the president was agitated. Turning to the man seated at his immediate left, Bush barked, “Rumsfeld, what the hell is going on there? Are you watching what’s on television? Is that the United States of America or some Third World nation I’m watching? What the hell are you doing?”

Rumsfeld replied by trotting out the ongoing National Guard deployments and suggesting that sending active-duty troops would create “unity of command” issues. Visibly impatient, Bush turned away from Rumsfeld and began to direct his inquiries at Lieutenant General Honoré on the video screen. “From then on, it was a Bush-Honoré dialogue,” remembers another participant. “The president cut Rumsfeld to pieces. I just wish it had happened earlier in the week.”

Just when I think I can’t read anything that will stun me about Hurricane Katrina, well I am proven wrong. Ad to think, this man ran the Department of Defense for years. It boggles the mind.

Politifact is a site run by the St. Petersburg Times. They have complied a detailed checklist of  all Barack Obama’s statements on the needs of New Orleans and the Southern Louisiana and his promises to help meet those needs, measured against what he’s actually proposed and/or done.

If the 16 promises about Katrina Obama has 15 “No Action” and one “Compromise.”

The farther we get into this administration, the clearer it becomes to me that New Orleans is now enjoying its second strat White House that just doesn’t give a shit about fixing what the Federal government broke in the first place.

The Times-Picayune recently reported the story of Earnest Hammond:

A spry 70, Hammond likes to stay busy. So he putters in his sprawling garden. Pulls mildewed drywall out of his 7th Ward house. Smashes thousands of aluminum cans he has collected, hoping they will provide the rehab money the Road Home program hasn’t.

But he worries that FEMA might tow away his trailer at any time. Technically, it is no longer his: Last month, the Federal Emergency Management Agency ordered him, by letter, to leave his “FEMA-furnished manufactured-housing unit” by this past Friday.

Like Hammond, those remaining in trailers across the region are mostly people who lived on their own before Hurricane Katrina: Eighty percent were homeowners, and most of them told FEMA in a survey this year they want to return to their storm-damaged homes.

But last week, as the deadline approached, FEMA issued conflicting messages. Some caseworkers told occupants their possessions would be put on the street if they were not out by Friday. Others told elected officials and legal advocates that FEMA would work with trailer occupants on a case-by-case basis and remove only trailers that are vacant or housing unauthorized occupants.

But officials at the top levels of FEMA in Washington, D.C., would offer no assurances. Instead, they said their hands were tied. Friday marked the end of the Temporary Housing Program for Katrina victims, including about 2,000 families in trailers and 54 more in local hotels.

In what can only be perceived as a shot across the bow of scientific and academic freedom, a noted proponent for hurricane readiness and flood protection around the Louisiana coast has been let go from that state’s largest university:

Louisiana State University (LSU) will not renew the contract of controversial hurricane scientist Ivor van Heerden, according to nola.com. Dr. van Heerden has been stripped of his title as deputy director of the LSU Hurricane Center, and will lose his job in May 2010. The Director of the LSU Hurricane Center, engineering professor Marc Levitan, resigned from that post in protest over the firing of van Heerden. LSU has given no reason why it is removing Dr. van Heerden.

The reasons couldn’t possibly be because van Heerdon was fiercely critical of the lack of planning before Katrina and the bungled relief effort afterward. The latter of which he was told put his university’s federal funding at risk during the vindictive as hell Bush administration.

I’ll just let this speak for itself:

The clock is ticking. Congress told the Army Corps of Engineers to give New Orleans what it thought it had, so-called Category 3 hurricane protection, and the Corps’ deadline is 2011. So, less than two years from the moment when the Corps again tells New Orleanians the comforting news that we’re safe, here comes confirmation that a money shortage may be inclining the Corps toward building a technologically inferior solution to the problem of getting rainwater out of the city while keeping storm surge from entering it.

The first problem is a recurring one: It rains a lot in New Orleans, and when it does, it often seems as if the sky is having a clearance sale on water. The second problem also recurs, though much less frequently: when a major hurricane is in the Gulf of Mexico, storm surge can get to Lake Ponchartrain and needs to be kept in the lake, lest it catastrophically flood the city.

This Times-Picayune story points out that not only is the Corps leaning toward the cheaper solution, which outside experts deride as technologically inferior, but, some critics allege, the Corps may be inflating the cost of the superior solution and underestimating the cost of its preferred solution—putting its fingers on the scale.

As Barack tours the nation conducting town hall meetings, it begs the question Howard Fineman asks, why isn’t New Orleans isn’t exhibit A in his argument for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan:

The vast grid of streets here in New Orleans, laid out long ago on grassy bottomland near a waterway, remains eerily devoid of houses. Modest bungalows were ripped from their moorings by the foul, murderous floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina three and a half years ago. Eventually, the storm-tossed homes were torn down and carted away. Today, cinderblock foundations dot brush-covered lots like archeological remains. Live oaks line sidewalks upon which no one walks to school, or rides a bike, or runs to the corner store.

[....]

Still, if President Obama wants a vivid place in which to dramatize American economic plight as he sells his recovery package, he should come here, to this still-struggling city, and to the Lower Ninth. The president is on the road, visiting hard-hit towns in traditionally Red States. It’s a dramatic way to sell his plan—and to remind congressional Republicans that they oppose him at their peril. Well, Louisiana is such a Red state, where Obama had hoped to win last year.

And even though New Orleans is a special case, it is a case that must not be forgotten. Indeed, in the campaign, Obama promised he’d remember. Let’s see how well he upholds that vow. And Obama should not forget that George Bush’s glaring failure of leadership in the aftermath of Katrina is a chief reason why Obama, who sought to embody calm competence and attention to detail, is president.