Yet Another Article on Hurricane Katrina And What Went Wrong

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Written by Washington Post staff writers so you should take that to mean whatever that means to you that care about that sort of thing.

EDIT: Put this behind an LJ-CUT for those folks that use the web to read this stuff. I don't so I forget about such things.
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The Steady Buildup to a City's Chaos
Confusion Reigned At Every Level Of Government

By Susan B. Glasser and Michael Grunwald
Washington Post Staff Writers

Walter Maestri had dreaded this call for a decade, ever since he took
over emergency management for Jefferson Parish, a marshy collection of
suburbs around New Orleans. It was Friday night, Aug. 26, and his
friend Max Mayfield was on the line. Mayfield is the head of the
National Hurricane Center, and he wasn't calling to chat.

"Walter," Mayfield said, "get ready."

"What do you mean?" Maestri asked, though he already knew the answer.

Hurricane Katrina had barreled into the Gulf of Mexico, and Mayfield's
latest forecast had it smashing into New Orleans as a Category 4 or 5
storm Monday morning. Maestri already had 10,000 body bags in his
parish, in case he ever got a call like this.

"This could be the one," Mayfield told him.

Maestri heard himself gasp: "Oh, my God."

In July 2004, Maestri had participated in an exercise called Hurricane
Pam, a simulation of a Category 3 storm drowning New Orleans.
Emergency planners had concluded that a real Pam would create a flood
of unimaginable proportions, killing tens of thousands of people,
wiping out hundreds of thousands of homes, shutting down southeast
Louisiana for months.

The practice run for a New Orleans apocalypse had been commissioned by
the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the federal government's
designated disaster shop. But the funding ran out and the doomsday
scenario became just another prescient -- but buried -- government
report. Now, practice was over.

And Pam's lessons had not been learned.


As the floodwaters recede and the dead are counted, what went wrong
during a terrible week that would render a modern American metropolis
of nearly half a million people uninhabitable and set off the largest
exodus of people since the Civil War, is starting to become clear.
Federal, state and local officials failed to heed forecasts of
disaster from hurricane experts. Evacuation plans, never practical,
were scrapped entirely for New Orleans's poorest and least able. And
once floodwaters rose, as had been long predicted, the rescue teams,
medical personnel and emergency power necessary to fight back were
nowhere to be found.

Compounding the natural catastrophe was a man-made one: the inability
of the federal, state and local governments to work together in the
face of a disaster long foretold.

In many cases, resources that were available were not used, whether
Amtrak trains that could have taken evacuees to safety before the
storm or the U.S. military's 82nd Airborne division, which spent days
on standby waiting for orders that never came. Communications were so
impossible the Army Corps of Engineers was unable to inform the rest
of the government for crucial hours that levees in New Orleans had
been breached.

The massive rescue effort that resulted was a fugue of improvisation,
by fleets of small boats that set sail off highway underpasses and
angry airport directors and daredevil helicopter pilots. Tens of
thousands were saved as the city swamped; they were plucked from
rooftops and bused, eventually, out of the disaster zone.

But it was an infuriating time of challenge when government seemed
unable to meet its basic compact with its citizens. After the Sept.
11, 2001, terrorist attacks, an entirely new Department of Homeland
Security had been created, charged with doing better the next time,
whether the crisis was another terrorist attack or not. Its new plan
for safeguarding the nation, unveiled just this year, clearly spelled
out the need to take charge in assisting state and local governments
sure to be "overwhelmed" by a cataclysmic event.

Instead, confusion reigned at every level of officialdom, according to
dozens of interviews with participants in Louisiana, Mississippi and
Washington. "No one had access. . . . No one had communication. . . .
Nobody knew where the people were," recalled Secretary of Health and
Human Services Mike Leavitt, whose department did not declare the Gulf
Coast a public health emergency until two days after the storm.

Despite pleas by Bush administration officials to refrain from "the
blame game," mutual recriminations among officeholders began even
before New Orleans's trapped residents had been rescued. The White
House secretly debated federalizing authority in a city under the
control of a Democratic mayor and governor, and critics in both
parties assailed FEMA and raised questions about President Bush.

That Friday, as Maestri prepared for the Big One, he had known that
his region's survival would depend on the federal response. After
Hurricane Pam, FEMA officials had concluded that local authorities
might be on their own for 48 or even 60 hours after a real storm, but
they had assured Maestri that the cavalry would swoop in after that,
and take care of the region's needs.

"Like a fool, I believed them," Maestri said last week.

Friday, Aug. 26

'Why aren't we treating this as a bigger emergency?'

At 5 a.m., Hurricane Katrina entered the Gulf of Mexico with the
Louisiana coastline in its sights. In Elmwood, La., dozens of federal,
state and local disaster officials were meeting to discuss storm
response, but their topic was Tropical Storm Cindy, which had come
ashore on July 5. While leaders of Louisiana's Office of Homeland
Security and the National Guard tracked Katrina with a handheld
device, local emergency managers learned how they could submit claims
for Cindy's relatively modest damage.

"Shouldn't we just apply for Katrina money now?" quipped Jim Baker,
operations superintendent for the East Jefferson Levee District.

As the storm track hooked toward New Orleans, the disaster officials
began passing the handheld device around the room. It was becoming
clear that Katrina was no joking matter. But it was already getting
late to be getting serious.

After the Hurricane Pam drill, disaster planners had concluded that
evacuating New Orleans could take as long as 72 hours before a storm's
landfall. By midday Friday, it was 66 hours before Katrina would end
up hitting, and the threat was just starting to sink in. "With this
storm, people should have evacuated no later than Friday," said a
senior official in a neighboring state. "Anything after that was very
risky."

In Washington, the cumbersome machinery of catastrophe began to crank
up.

At the Department of Homeland Security, the 180,000-employee
bureaucracy created after the Sept. 11 attacks, that meant convening
the Interagency Incident Management Group. About 20 federal agencies
had seats at the table, from the State Department to the Veterans
Affairs Department.

FEMA was still the lead disaster agency, as it had been since 1979,
but was now just a piece of DHS. Instead of Cabinet-level status and a
direct line to the president, its director -- Michael D. Brown, a
lawyer and former Arabian horse association official -- was an
undersecretary. Funding had been cut over the past four years for
FEMA's disaster-relief mission, and experienced personnel had left in
droves. While experts who closely tracked FEMA had publicly fretted
about the agency's reduced status, their warnings had not received
widespread public attention.

By Friday, FEMA's emergency headquarters for Katrina was already
running; technically, the agency was at level one, its highest level
of alert.

But as the headquarters staff came in, there was a strange sense of
inaction, as if "nobody's turning the key to start the engine," said
one team leader, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. For his
group, Friday was a day to sit around wondering, "Why aren't we
treating this as a bigger emergency? Why aren't we doing anything?"

That evening, shortly before Max Mayfield made his call to Walter
Maestri, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D) declared a state
of emergency.

Saturday, Aug. 27

'This is not a test: This is the real deal.'

By morning, Katrina was already a Category 3 hurricane, and Mayfield
was predicting it could make landfall near New Orleans as an even
deadlier Category 4. On FEMA's daily noon videoconference, he looked
around the U-shaped conference table in Washington and saw a lot of
newcomers to the disaster world among the agency's political
appointees. But he knew many of the professionals listening in from
the Gulf states had been through his hurricane prep course. They knew
this was no drill.

"The emergency guys, they know what a Cat 4 is," Mayfield recalled.
And this had the potential to be a Category 5, only the fourth in U.S.
history. "This one is different," Mayfield told the videoconference.
"It's strong, but it's also much, much larger."

When talk turned to New Orleans, Mayfield mentioned the possibility of
water overwhelming the levees; his center soon forecast a storm surge
as high as 25 feet, far above the 17-foot clearance for most of the
city's storm protection. "Clearly on Saturday, we knew it was going to
be the Big One," recalled Jack Colley, Texas's veteran disaster man.
"We were very convinced this was going to be a very catastrophic
event."

The challenge was to get people out of harm's way. All day long,
Louisiana officials announced voluntary evacuations, and Blanco
implemented a "contra-flow" traffic plan to help as coastal residents
reach higher grounds. Maestri said there was no point in ordering
mandatory evacuations, because there was no way to force people to
abandon their homes. "I can't go door to door," he explained. In
Mississippi, Gov. Haley Barbour (R) told his wife he was worried about
hurricane fatigue; after a series of false alarms along the Gulf
Coast, the evacuation routine was starting to get old.

But local officials got the word out that this was no ordinary storm,
and residents took them seriously, streaming out of town in the
contra-flow lanes. Hurricane Pam's leaders had predicted a 65 percent
evacuation rate, but Maestri reported 70 percent in Jefferson Parish,
thanks in part to a church buddy program that provided rides for as
many as 25,000 residents, and St. Bernard Parish reported 90 percent.
"We had some hard-headed sons of bitches who wouldn't leave, but we
made sure everyone knew this was the one," said emergency manager
Larry Ingargiola.

Nearly a month into his five-week vacation near Crawford, Tex., the
president first mentioned the storm in a meeting with aides that
afternoon. It's possible, he told senior adviser Dan Bartlett, that he
would have to scrap a planned event the following Thursday to talk
about identity theft, and would add a trip to the Gulf Coast instead.
When Blanco asked Bush to declare a federal emergency in Louisiana
that day, Bush readily agreed.

The president was told the evacuation was proceeding as planned for
New Orleans, according to a senior White House official, and that
11,000 National Guard troops would end up in a position to respond.
But Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, chief of the Guard, said there were only
about 5,100 members on duty in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama
before landfall.

At 1:30 p.m. on Saturday, Mayor Ray Nagin and Blanco held a news
conference to urge New Orleans residents to make arrangements to
evacuate. "This is not a test," the mayor said. "This is the real
deal."

Nagin said that by daybreak, he might have to order the first
mandatory evacuation in New Orleans history, although his staff was
still checking whether that would pose liability problems for the
city. Nagin did not tell everyone to leave immediately, because the
regional plan called for the suburbs to empty out first, but he did
urge residents in particularly low-lying areas to "start moving --
right now, as a matter of fact." He said the Superdome would be open
as a shelter of last resort, but essentially he told tourists stranded
in the Big Easy that they were out of luck.

"The only thing I can say to them is I hope they have a hotel room,
and it's a least on the third floor and up," Nagin said.
"Unfortunately, unless they can rent a car to get out of town, which I
doubt they can at this point, they're probably in the position of
riding the storm out."

In fact, while the last regularly scheduled train out of town had left
a few hours earlier, Amtrak had decided to run a "dead-head" train
that evening to move equipment out of the city. It was headed for high
ground in Macomb, Miss., and it had room for several hundred
passengers. "We offered the city the opportunity to take evacuees out
of harm's way," said Amtrak spokesman Cliff Black. "The city
declined."

So the ghost train left New Orleans at 8:30 p.m., with no passengers
on board.

That night, Mayfield picked up his phone again, to make sure Govs.
Blanco and Barbour understood the potential for disaster. "I wanted to
be able to go to sleep that night," he said. He told Barbour that
Katrina had the potential to be a "Camille-like storm," referring to
the August 1969 hurricane with 200-mph winds, and warned Blanco that
this one would be a "big, big deal." Blanco was still unsure that
Nagin fully understood, and urged Mayfield to call him personally.

"I told him, 'This is going to be a defining moment for a lot of
people,' " Mayfield recalled.

Sunday, Aug. 28

'We sat here for five days waiting. Nothing!'

"We're facing the storm most of us have feared," Nagin told an
early-morning news conference, the governor at his side. Katrina was
now a Category 5 hurricane, set to make landfall overnight.

Minutes earlier, Blanco had been pulled out to take a call from the
president, pressed into service by FEMA's Brown to urge a mandatory
evacuation. Blanco told him that's just what the mayor would order.

Nagin also announced that the city had set up 10 refuges of last
resort, and promised that public buses would pick up stragglers in a
dozen locations to take them to the Superdome and other shelters.

But he never mentioned the numbers that had haunted experts for years,
the estimated 100,000 city residents without their own transportation.
And he never mentioned that the state's comprehensive disaster plan,
written in 2000 and posted on a state Web site, called for buses to
take people out of the city once the governor declared a state of
emergency.

In reality, Nagin's advisers never intended to follow that plan -- and
knew many residents would stay behind. "We always knew we did not have
the means to evacuate the city," said Terry Ebbert, the sharp-tongued
city director of emergency management.

At 10 a.m., in case there were still any doubters, the National
Weather Service issued a hurricane warning with apocalyptic
predictions: "Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks,
perhaps longer . . . At least one-half of well-constructed homes will
have roof and wall failure. . . . Water shortages will make human
suffering incredible by modern standards."

Not long after that forecast, Bush joined the daily FEMA
videoconference from his Texas ranch, as a series of briefers sketched
out scenarios of destruction. "We were expecting something awful,"
recalled Maj. Gen. Don T. Riley of the Army Corps.

Many state officials on the call feared there simply wouldn't be
enough help to go around once the storm cleared, and peppered FEMA
with questions about resources. "We were concerned about making sure
there were enough commodities to cover all three states, water, ice,
MREs," recalled Bruce Baughman, Alabama's top emergency adviser.

At that point, FEMA had already stockpiled for immediate distribution
2.7 million liters of water, 1.3 million meals ready to eat and 17
million pounds of ice, a Department of Homeland Security official
said. But Louisiana received a relatively small portion of the
supplies; for example, Alabama got more than five times as much water
for distribution. "It was what they would move for a normal hurricane
-- business as usual versus a superstorm," concluded Mark Ghilarducci,
a former FEMA official now working as a consultant for Blanco.

By late Sunday, as millions of people in the Gulf region sought a safe
place to hunker down, hundreds of shelter beds upstate lay empty. "We
could have taken a lot more," said Joe Becker, senior vice president
for preparedness and response at the Red Cross. "The problem was
transportation." The New Orleans plan for public buses that would take
people upstate was never implemented, and while many residents did
manage to get out of town -- about 80 percent, the mayor said -- tens
of thousands did not.

"Once a mandatory evacuation was ordered, those buses should have been
leaving those parishes with those people on them," said Chip Johnson,
chief of emergency operations in Avoyelles Parish, who helped put
together the plan. In Avoyelles alone, there was room for at least 200
or 300 more on Sunday night before the storm, and more shelters could
have opened if necessary. "I don't know why that didn't happen."

At the Superdome, city officials reckoned that 9,000 people had
arrived by evening to ride out the storm. FEMA had sent seven trailers
full of food and water -- enough, it estimated, to supply two days of
food for as many as 22,000 people and three days of water for 30,000.
Ebbert said he knew conditions in the Superdome would be "horrible,"
but Hurricane Pam had predicted a massive federal response within two
days, and Ebbert said the city's plan was to "hang in there for 48
hours and wait for the cavalry."

Around midnight, at the last of the day's many conference calls, local
officials ticked off their final requests for FEMA and the state.
Maestri specifically asked for medical units, mortuary units, ice,
water, power and National Guard troops.

"We laid it all out," he recalled. "And then we sat here for five days
waiting. Nothing!"

Monday, Aug. 29

'We need everything you've got.'

Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana around 6 a.m. Central
time, and within an hour, New Orleans Mayor Nagin was hearing reports
of water breaking through his city's levees. At 8:14 a.m., the
National Weather Service reported a levee breach along the Industrial
Canal, and warned that the Ninth Ward was likely to experience
extremely severe flooding. A protective floodwall along Lake
Pontchartrain had given way as well, which meant that billions of
gallons of water were draining into the city.

This was the worst of the worst-case scenarios. New Orleans is a soup
bowl of a city, most of it well below sea level; everyone knew a
serious crevasse could fill it with 20 feet of water. Even the gloomy
Hurricane Pam drill had optimistically assumed the levees would hold,
but they were designed to withstand only a Category 3 storm, and
Katrina created at least five breaches at three locations. Now the
waters were rising.

And nobody in charge seemed to know it.

On Saturday, according to Army Corps homeland security chief Ed
Hecker, the corps had warned FEMA that Katrina would probably send
water over the levees, and quite possibly breach them. On Sunday, the
Army Corps's Riley had told the FEMA videoconference that a plan was
in place to repair levee damage once the storm passed.

But now the power was out, roads were unnavigable, and communication
was practically nonexistent; even Nagin's aides had to "loot" an
Office Depot for equipment to install Internet phone service. Maj.
Gen. Bennett C. Landreneau, the top National Guard official in
Louisiana, found his New Orleans barracks under 20 feet of water;
vehicles were washed out, and troops had to take refuge upstairs.

The federal disaster response plan hinges on transportation and
communication, but National Guard officials in Louisiana and
Mississippi had no contingency plan if they were disrupted; they had
only one satellite phone for the entire Mississippi coast, because the
others were in Iraq. The New Orleans police managed to notify the
corps that the 17th Street floodwall near Lake Pontchartrain had
busted, and Col. Richard Wagenaar, the top corps official in New
Orleans, tried to drive to the site to check it out. But he couldn't
get through because of high water, trees and other obstacles on the
road.

In St. Bernard Parish, a hardscrabble industrial zone just outside New
Orleans, emergency manager Ingargiola realized that his entire
community was marooned. He did not even have contact with his own
emergency shelter, so he didn't know its roof had blown off. But local
officials immediately launched rescue efforts with boats they had
prepared in advance. They figured help was on the way.

At 11 a.m., ABC News reported that some New Orleans levees had been
breached, and a few other outlets broadcast similarly sketchy reports
that day. But most of the early coverage suggested that New Orleans
had dodged a bullet as Katrina's strongest gusts had passed east of
the city. Wagenaar finally confirmed the levee breaches during an
overflight that evening, but his agency's first post-Katrina news
release boasted about the performance of its infrastructure: "The fact
that Katrina didn't cause more damage is a testament to the structural
integrity of the hurricane levee protection system."

At the White House, one official recalled, "there was a general sigh
of relief." On a trip to Arizona, the president shared a birthday cake
with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who was turning 69. During a speech
about the Medicare drug plan, Bush noted that he had just spoken to
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff -- about immigration.

The federal interagency team seemed to recognize the urgency of the
crisis at a meeting that morning, discussing the potential for six
months of flooding in New Orleans, and a preliminary Department of
Energy conclusion that as many as 2,000 of 6,500 oil and gas platforms
in the Gulf could be affected. But before noon, FEMA's Brown sent a
remarkably mild memo to Chertoff, politely requesting 1,000 employees
to be ready to head south "within 48 hours." Brown's memo suggested
that recruits bring mosquito repellent, sunscreen and cash, because
"ATMs may not be working."

"Thank you for your consideration in helping us meet our
responsibilities in this near catastrophic event," Brown concluded.

At the U.S. military's Northern Command, officers had been watching
the storm since early in the week and had started sending Army brigade
commanders and their staffs to the three affected Gulf states by
Thursday. "We were all watching the evacuation," Maj. Gen. Richard
Rowe, Northcom's top operations officer, recalled. "We knew that it
would be among the worst storms ever to hit the United States." But on
Monday, the only request the U.S. military received from FEMA was for
a half-dozen helicopters.

As water poured into the city, as many as 20,000 more residents poured
into the Superdome. "People started coming out of the woodwork,"
Ebbert said. The stadium was hot and fetid, and tempers were flaring.
Ebbert said he told FEMA that night that the city would need buses to
evacuate 30,000 people. "It just took a long time," he said.

State officials managed to get 60 boats to New Orleans for
search-and-rescue operations by Monday night. By daybreak Tuesday, the
state would have an additional 150 boats on the hunt. "We were very
convinced that this thing was going to be a catastrophic event," said
Bennett Landreneau, who was coordinating the state's rescue
operations.

Around 6 p.m., as Governor Blanco was about to hold a news conference
in Baton Rouge to discuss the damage, Blanco's communications director
whispered that the president was on the line. The governor returned to
a windowless office in her situation room and pleaded with the
president for assistance.

"We need your help," she said. "We need everything you've got."

Tuesday, Aug. 30

'I've got a sewage problem that's going to be a medical disaster.'

Over the weekend, Texas emergency chief Jack Colley had continued to
fret that the forecasts would turn out wrong and Katrina would pummel
his state. "Don't worry," the hurricane center's Mayfield had assured
him, "Texas is going to sit this one out." But now, it turned out, the
storm was coming to Texas in another form. At 2:45 a.m., Louisiana's
secretary of state for social services woke up Colley at home.

"Can you accept 25,000 people?" she asked.

Colley thought of his state's designated refuge: the Astrodome. Yes,
he said. By 6 a.m., Colley's team was preparing to send Texas state
troopers to escort the fleet of buses they had been assured would come
soon. But they didn't know how many buses, or when, "and there were no
answers that anyone could provide," said Steve McCraw, the homeland
security adviser to Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R). Blanco ordered the
Superdome evacuated, but Col. Jeff Smith, Louisiana's emergency
preparedness chief, grew frustrated at FEMA's inability to send buses
to move people out. "We'd call and say: 'Where are the buses?' " he
recalled, shaking his head. "They have a tracking system and they'd
say: 'We sent 349.' But we didn't see them."

By 5 a.m., Bush had already been briefed about New Orleans's rising
waters, and decided that he would cut short his vacation the next day.
Later that morning, the interagency group urgently commissioned new
damage assessments, and local officials warned that the scale of the
coastal damage could be "too extensive to calculate or summarize."
Nagin declared that 80 percent of his city was underwater; after
flying over New Orleans with FEMA's Brown and witnessing the
widespread flooding, Blanco announced that "the devastation is greater
than our worst fears."

But in public, Brown and Chertoff gave no such indication of the
cataclysm, later saying they were not told until midday that the levee
breaches were irreparable and would flood the city. William Lokey,
FEMA's coordinator on the ground, declared that morning: "I don't want
to alarm everybody that New Orleans is filling up like a bowl. That is
just not happening."

That was exactly what was happening, and many state and local
officials quickly concluded that the federal bureaucracy was spinning
its wheels.

At the noon videoconference, several participants said, Louisiana's
Smith heatedly demanded federal help. Where were the buses? At first,
Smith recalled, he had asked for 450 buses, then 150 more, then an
additional 500; by the end of the day, none had arrived. The first
evacuees did not arrive at the Astrodome until 10 p.m. Wednesday -- on
a school bus commandeered by a resourceful 20-year-old.

In Jefferson Parish, Maestri sent out an urgent call that morning for
power packs in hopes of rescuing his county's faltering sewage system.
"In Pam, they had said they'd have those ready on pallets so they
could airlift them in, no problem," he later recalled. "It's 11 days
later, and I still don't have them. I've got a sewage problem that's
going to be a medical disaster like we've never seen in this country.
Where's the cavalry?"

In the drowning city, chaos erupted. Looting was widespread, sometimes
in full view of outnumbered police and often unarmed National Guard
troops. Hundreds of New Orleans police officers quit. Others performed
their duties courageously, and so did many state and federal
personnel, but for now they focused on rescue and recovery. In
general, the cavalry was nowhere to be seen, and everyone seemed to
know it.

"As systems either were not followed or broke down, people just went
to what they believed they could handle. Every man for himself," said
Ghilarducci, Blanco's adviser. "You don't use the system, you don't
use resources effectively and it breaks down."

The U.S. military command charged with domestic safekeeping was
watching wild images from New Orleans. On their own initiative, Rowe
said, Northcom staff members broached the idea of sending active-duty
ground troops. They wanted to take a force of 3,000 soldiers
designated to respond to a nuclear, chemical or biological attack,
strip out unneeded elements such as chemical decontamination teams and
send them to the Gulf Coast.

At this point, Blanco believed she had long since asked for the
maximum possible help from the federal government. But the military
was not specifically asked for its assistance. Blum began moving
National Guard forces into the area before he was asked, but they had
trouble navigating through a modern-day Atlantis.

Army Corps officials were trying to close the gaps in the levees, but
their hurried efforts to stem the flow were hampered by a lack of
supplies. They could not find 10-ton sandbags or the slings they
needed to drop the bags from helicopters; most of their personnel had
evacuated, and so had their local contractors. "We didn't expect any
breaches," Dan Hitchings of the agency's Mississippi Valley Division
later explained. "We didn't think we were going to have a wall down."
The corps tried to drop smaller sandbags into the 17th Street breach,
but they simply floated away with the current.

FEMA managed to deliver 65,000 meals to the Superdome, but by the end
of the day, water was rising so fast that the agency was unable to
unload five more truckloads of food and water. That evening, in a
belated bow to televised reality, Chertoff declared the unfolding
disaster an "incident of national significance," triggering the
government's highest level of response for the first time since the
new post-9/11 system had been designed. He did not publicly announce
the move until the next day.

Wednesday, Aug. 31

'They didn't have a full sense of what they were dealing with.'

Dawn found a handful of buses outside the Superdome, and an estimated
23,000 people clamoring for a ride. FEMA had promised hundreds of
buses, but they were arriving, Louisiana's Smith recalled, "in a
trickle." And unbeknownst to FEMA, a new circle of hell was opening
downtown, as the New Orleans convention center filled with an
estimated 25,000 evacuees, many of them unable to get to the flooded
area around the Superdome. There was no food, no water and no feds. A
spree of robbery, looting and gunfire erupted inside as police
dispatched to the center stayed almost exclusively on the perimeter,
according to police and witnesses, outnumbered and unable to quell the
mayhem.

New Orleans as a city had all but ceased to exist. Nagin spoke of
"thousands" dead. Blanco publicly pleaded for 40,000 National Guard
troops. In a conference call with Guard officials in the region, Blum
asked if they had what they needed. They said no.

"They said that this is bigger than anything we've ever seen or
imagined," Blum recalled. "This had touched them personally. Even at
that time they didn't have a full sense of what they were dealing
with." Blum immediately arranged a videoconference with every adjutant
general around the country, and 3,000 Guard troops streamed into New
Orleans over the next 24 hours, enough to replace the entire city
police force. By Saturday, the Guard would have 30,000 troops in the
region.

Bush, winging his way back from vacation, paused to swoop low over the
prostrate city on Air Force One. Back in Washington, he convened a
stunned Cabinet.

Bush came in with a "sense of urgency in his tone" after his aerial
tour, recalled Mike Leavitt, the secretary of health and human
services. "It was, 'Has anybody thought of that, who's doing this? I
want you to do this and this and this.' " But the scale of the problem
seemed inexplicably massive, and the plans they drew up that day would
take agonizing days to carry out. Leavitt, for example, declared a
federal health emergency throughout the Gulf Coast, calling for 2,500
additional hospital beds in the region by Friday, and another 2,500 in
the 72 hours after that. "We had to scramble the jets," he said.

At the interagency coordination meetings, gargantuan new proposals
were being discussed, such as housing the estimated million-plus newly
homeless in tent cities, mobile home parks and even federalized cruise
ships. At Northcom, officials were still waiting for a call requesting
active-duty troops. The Navy dispatched three aid ships from Norfolk;
they were due to arrive Sept. 4.

But assistance that was available was often blocked. In the Gulf, not
100 miles away from New Orleans, sat the 844-foot USS Bataan, equipped
with six operating rooms and beds for 600 patients. Starting
Wednesday, Amtrak offered to run a twice-a-day shuttle for as many as
600 evacuees from a rail yard west of New Orleans to Lafayette, La.
The first run was not organized until Saturday. Officials then told
Amtrak they would not require any more trains.

Out of public view, the White House was considering an outright
federal takeover of the emergency efforts, escalating a partisan feud
with the Democratic governor as Bush aides questioned her ability to
manage the crisis. Despite days of pleading, the White House argued
that her plea for more troops had come in only at 7:21 that morning.
Amid the reports of looting and general lawlessness, the White House
instructed lawyers in the Justice Department and other agencies to
investigate invoking the Insurrection Act, last used during the 1992
Los Angeles riots.

But a fierce debate erupted, said an administration official who
participated in the meetings and who spoke on the condition of
anonymity, centering on whether Bush could order a federal takeover of
the relief effort with or without Blanco's approval. White House Chief
of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr., recalled from his Maine vacation,
broached the question with Blanco, a senior White House official said.
Later, the president called from the Oval Office to press the same
idea. Both times, Blanco balked.

But her aides said she had no reason to believe the federal government
would start rising to the occasion. They also said that the president
never asked her directly about federalizing the state's troops. "We
wouldn't have turned down federal troops," one Blanco aide said. "We
were asking for them."

Thursday, Sept. 1

'They didn't hear from me . . . and they didn't come to look.'

At 4 a.m., 550 tired, hungry, frightened evacuees from the Superdome
filed into Houston's Astrodome. Soon there would be thousands. Now,
Houston had to figure out how to absorb not 25,000 but as many as
250,000 Louisianans.

Within hours, it was clear that many of the evacuees required urgent
medical care, including 50 children from a hospital and helicopters
full of soaking-wet adults.

And while initial plans had called for sheltering the entire
evacuation at the Astrodome, "we found out that while you could put
23,000 people in the Dome, you wouldn't want to," as Harris County
Judge Robert Eckels recalled. By evening, buses were being sent
elsewhere.

Meanwhile, St. Bernard Parish was still marooned. Out of 28,000
structures in the parish, only 52 were undamaged, and as many as 5,000
were simply gone. Every day since the storm, Ingargiola had waited for
the federal government to bring food, water, electricity, anything.
"They didn't hear from me for four days, and they didn't come to look
for us," Ingargiola recalled. "Did they think we were okay?"

Anger was also rising at federal officials, who often seemed to be
getting in the way. At Louis Armstrong International Airport,
commercial airlines had been flying in supplies and taking out
evacuees since Monday. But on Thursday, after FEMA took over the
evacuation, aviation director Roy A. Williams complained that "we are
packed with evacuees and the planes are not being loaded and there are
gaps of two or three hours when no planes are arriving." Eventually,
he started fielding "calls from airlines saying, 'Well, we are being
told by FEMA that you don't need any planes.' And of course we need
planes. I had thousands of people on the concourses."

At the convention center, thousands had gathered by Thursday without
supplies. There were no buses and none on the way. Nagin, almost in
tears, issued a "desperate SOS."

But official Washington seemed not to be watching the televised chaos.
Bush was still insisting the storm and catastrophic flooding his own
government had foretold was a surprise. "I don't think anyone
anticipated the breach of the levees," he said.

Later, in another television interview, Brown insisted that everything
was "under control." And though the crowds had started to flock to the
convention center two days earlier, Brown said: "We learned about the
convention center today."

In private, Bush had reached a "tipping point" Thursday, a senior aide
said, when he watched images from the convention center. But the
debate inside his administration still raged over whether to
federalize the Guard and take overall control of New Orleans.

At Northcom, they were still awaiting orders. That day, Rowe said, the
planners had come up with another military option -- a logistical
force to back up the overtaxed relief effort on the ground. The idea
was to send as many as 1,500 troops each to Louisiana and Mississippi.
At Fort Bragg, N.C., the 82nd Airborne was on standby to deploy, so
was the First Cavalry Division at Fort Hood, Tex., and Marine bases on
both coasts.

Bush discussed the idea with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that
day, but still held back on deciding. The cavalry would have to wait.

Friday, Sept. 2

'The results are not acceptable.'

At 7 a.m., Bush called his generals to the White House, along with Rumsfeld and Chertoff. They discussed final terms of Bush's plan -- by nightfall, he would demand that Blanco hand over control of National Guard troops. And they hashed out the idea of sending in the active-duty military, though troops from the 82nd Airborne and 1st Cavalry would not get their orders until the next day.

Then Bush left for the stricken region.

Before boarding his helicopter, the president had a terse comment
about his government's performance. "The results are not acceptable."
But shortly after they touched down in Alabama, the president's tone
changed. He turned to Brown, the focus of much of the criticism from
state and local officials, and declared: "Brownie, you're doing a heck
of a job."

Later in the tour, Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff visited
Jefferson Parish, and told Maestri he was doing a wonderful job.
"Where are the resources?" Maestri asked.

"He said: 'It's coming, it's coming,' " Maestri recalled. "Yeah, well, Christmas is coming, too."

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

HOLEEE CRAP, man! Cut-tag that sucker! :)
That's 12 pages long even at 1920x1200.

[cookingwithgas.livejournal.com]

Interesting read, but for the sake of us all, LJ-CUT!

[dwivian]

Thanks for not cutting this -- it was too important to leave behind a tag.

True Statement

[jerseygirl1.livejournal.com]

U.S. military's 82nd Airborne division, which spent days
on standby waiting for orders that never came

Yep. My cousin is there now, but he waited IMPATIENTLY for days.

[sempereadem.livejournal.com]

Honey, I love you, but could you please put at least part of this behind a cut? It's taking up half my friends page.

[sdaemon.livejournal.com]

Very good. I especially like the final quote from Maestri.

Don't cut it. People won't read it if you don't cut it.

[sdaemon.livejournal.com]

er, won't read it if you *do* cut it...brain works, really...

[sdaemon.livejournal.com]

...or you could cut half of it while I'm still reading and writing comments...that would work too.

[vernard.livejournal.com]

People won't read it if I DO cut it. And it was out there long enough un-cut that those that want to read it will.

I have edited and cut it so as not to intrude on those folks that are using the LJ based web readers.

But I appreciate the senitment.