Project Katrina

Citizens for Responsibility And Ethics in Washington (CREW) just released a report that is a must read, The Best Laid Plans: The Story of How the Government Ignored Its Own Gulf Coast Hurricane Plans. According to the site:

Best Laid Plans details the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) plan to respond to a hurricane of Katrina’s magnitude and, very importantly, FEMA’s subsequent failure to implement that plan.  The full report can be found here.

Shortly after Katrina struck, on September 7, 2005, CREW sent a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), of which FEMA is a component, seeking records related to the federal government’s long-term planning for a hurricane on the Gulf Coast as well as its immediate preparations for and response to Hurricane Katrina.

The Best Laid Plans is based on the 7,500 records DHS provided in response. What we found is disturbing—and dangerous.

CREW also has a lot of other documents and reports related to Katrina, and Washington in general if you are interested in that kind of thing.

A flash back to the past. Here is an interview on NPR with author Douglas Brinkley about the process he was using to gather data for the book he would eventually publish, The Great Deluge.

It would appear that Spike Lee is going to make a sequel to When the Levees Broke.  I think that’s a great idea. We can never forget NOLA and because of Spike we won’t. I just wish the darn thing was showing on my cable systems OnDemand.

The Hurricane Digital Memory Bank is a wonderful project run by George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media and the University of New Orleans, in partnership with the Smithsonian Institutions National Museum of American History. It only takes a few seconds to add a short memory that can be saved for generations to come.