Katrina: After the Flood

by Gary Rivlin

  “We understand that the mayor has not been saying very favorable things about the president for the last twenty-four hours,” Grant said.

  Of course. Forman’s boss’s rant was on the radio the day before. “It’s not personal. It’s been terrible.”

  “That’s exactly why I’m calling. The president realizes he may not have gotten accurate information this week and wants to hear directly from the mayor.” On the fifth day of the still-unfolding disaster, George W. Bush was coming to New Orleans to see the devastation for himself. Could the mayor meet the president at the airport that afternoon?

  GEORGE BUSH WAS IN Crawford, Texas, nearing the end of a monthlong stay at his ranch, when Katrina slammed the Gulf Coast. The vice president, Dick Cheney, was fly-fishing and the president’s chief of staff, Andrew Card, was on vacation with his family in Maine. Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, had ordered every FEMA employee must be on the job, whether or not he or she had a planned vacation, but that sense of urgency was apparently not shared by his bosses.

  On Sunday—when the highways out of New Orleans were thick with people trying to escape the storm—Bush logged on to the daily videoconference FEMA initiates when preparing for a potential disaster. Normally, only state and local emergency response officials listen in, but this time the guest list included, in addition to the president, Michael Brown and also Brown’s boss, Michael Chertoff, head of the Department of Homeland Security. “I don’t have any good news,” Dr. Max Mayfield, the director of the National Hurricane Center, began. He compared Katrina to Hurricane Andrew, the 1992 colossus that destroyed or damaged more than 125,000 homes in southern Florida and killed at least twenty-six people. “Right now, this is a Category Five hurricane,” Mayfield said of Katrina, “very similar to Hurricane Andrew in the maximum intensity.” But the ominous difference, he added, was that “this hurricane is much larger than Andrew ever was.” The president spoke near the end of the call: “I want to assure the folks at the state level that we are fully prepared to not only help you during the storm, but we will move in whatever resources and assets we have at our disposal after the storm to help you deal with the loss of property.” Hearing how that might sound, he added, “And we pray for no loss of life, of course.”

  Bush kept to his regular schedule on Monday. The White House talking points that week called for the president to focus on immigration reform and the new Medicare prescription-drug benefit, scheduled to go into effect that January. In the morning, the president flew to Arizona, where his first task was political. August 29 was John McCain’s sixty-ninth birthday, and Bush arrived with a cake. There on the tarmac, in the 110-degree heat, the president posed with his former political rival before the two politicians went their own ways. The president’s motorcade drove to the Pueblo El Mirage RV & Golf Resort, where Bush touted his drug plan in front of an invitation-only audience of around four hundred. He spoke at length about the war in Iraq but offered only a few words about Katrina. It was more of the same after a quick flight to Southern California. The president spoke about Medicare at a senior center that afternoon and again that evening in a town-hall-style meeting in the town of Rancho Cucamonga in San Bernardino County. Only at this last stop did he address the images people were seeing on TV all day.

  “For those of you who are concerned about whether or not we’re prepared to help, don’t be,” he said. “We’re in place.” The president and the first lady spent the night in the Hotel del Coronado, where Bush was scheduled to give a speech the next morning.

  In New Orleans, Marty Bahamonde was not feeling nearly as confident as the president. FEMA had sent Bahamonde, a regional external affairs director in its Boston office, to New Orleans ahead of the storm. Bahamonde was planning to ride out the hurricane in a hotel near the airport, but at 4:00 a.m. on Sunday someone had knocked on his door to tell him that he had two hours to vacate the premises. Bahamonde phoned the emergency operations center in Jefferson Parish, but when no one there answered, he called the one in New Orleans. He jumped when Ray Nagin’s people invited him to ride out the storm inside City Hall. On Sunday night, he watched the head of the city’s emergency operations order his people to scavenge every last roll of toilet paper they could find and get it to the Superdome as soon as they could. What else hadn’t they thought of? he asked himself.

  Bahamonde was in the emergency operations center on Monday at around 10:30 a.m. when the city learned of a major breach in a floodwall along the Seventeenth Street Canal. Using his BlackBerry, Bahamonde texted the news to his colleagues. Two hours later, the agency’s deputy director of public affairs was circulating an e-mail reporting the breach. “Water flow bad into New Orleans,” she wrote, adding Bahamonde’s estimate that parts of the city were under eleven feet of water. All day, the city’s emergency operations center was receiving reports of more failures in the area’s storm-protection system. Late Monday afternoon, Bahamonde insisted room be made for him on a Coast Guard helicopter so he could assess the damage. From his vantage point in the air, he estimated that 75 percent of New Orleans was underwater. By 7:00 p.m. he was on the phone with Michael Brown, who promised to immediately phone the White House. Back at the city’s emergency operations center, Bahamonde ran into Ray Nagin, where he told the mayor that most of his city was underwater. “Nagin was stunned,” Bahamonde said. “He had this vacant expression as he listened to me that said everything.” Bahamonde slept that night under a desk in City Hall. He used a rolled-up shirt as a pillow.

  Brown was already in Baton Rouge when he briefed the president by videoconference early on Tuesday morning. The vice president was on the call, as were other top officials. “What’s the situation?” Bush began. “Bad,” Brown responded. “This was the Big One.” Brown confessed it was more than FEMA could handle and raised the idea of sending troops to New Orleans. Speaking from his vacation home in Wyoming, Cheney assured Brown that they would reach out to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. After that call ended, a Black Hawk helicopter flew Brown to New Orleans for a quick tour of the disaster zone, along with Governor Kathleen Blanco and Louisiana’s two US senators, Mary Landrieu and David Vitter. They landed on a helicopter pad atop a parking structure adjacent to the Superdome. Bahamonde pulled Brown aside to speak privately. “It’s critical, sir, especially here at the Superdome,” Bahamonde warned his boss. Barely twenty-four hours after the city started filling up with water, they were already out of food and low on water. Medical personnel were overwhelmed.

  The president kept to his schedule on Tuesday. It was the sixtieth anniversary of the Japanese surrender in World War II, and Bush was at the North Island Naval Air Station in San Diego to talk about the war in Iraq. The president compared the fight in Iraq with the struggle to repel the German fascists and Japanese imperialists. “The terrorists of our century are making the same mistake that the followers of other totalitarian ideologies made in the last century,” Bush said. After his speech, the country singer Mark Wills gave the president a guitar stamped with the presidential seal and Bush pretended to strum a few chords. It made for an odd juxtaposition, the historian Douglas Brinkley wrote in The Great Deluge, this “photograph of Bush playing air guitar while Americans were seeing agony in pictures from the Gulf Coast.” The president stopped at the Naval Medical Center in Balboa Park, where he awarded a Purple Heart to a wounded corpsman and met with another two dozen soldiers injured in Iraq. Bush slept that night in Crawford and the next day flew home to the White House, several days earlier than planned.

  The last massive hurricane to hit New Orleans was Betsy in 1965. A Category 4 storm, Betsy flooded parts of the city and caused widespread power outages. The next night, President Lyndon Johnson showed up at a shelter, stood on a crate, and, with people shining flashlights on his face, promised to help the city any way he could. Forty years later, another president from Texas demonstrated his concern for those swept up in a disaster by ordering Air Force One to detour over New Orleans an
d dip below the cloud canopy so he could see the damage for himself. A White House photographer snapped pictures as Bush stared out the airplane window. Even Karl Rove, the president’s top political adviser, would dub the photo op a “big mistake.”

  A few hours after landing in Washington that Wednesday, Bush addressed the nation. For the past forty-eight hours, the viewing public had heard about little else except the government’s lack of a response to the human suffering they could see on television. But rather than offer a mea culpa, the president boasted of all the federal government was doing to help. In the Rose Garden, standing flanked by members of his cabinet, he recited statistics: four hundred trucks had been used to deliver 5.4 million meals and 13.4 million liters of water to the stricken area. The New York Times editorial page described this halfhearted, stilted address as “one of the worst speeches of his life.” Before going to bed on Wednesday night, Bush spoke to Nagin for the first time. “We’re trying to come and see you real soon,” the president assured him. “Everything is going to be all right.”

  Bush didn’t help his cause when, during an appearance on ABC’s Good Morning America, he said, “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.” No statement seemed a more transparent statement on how poorly the president had been briefed. Even Karl Rove felt obliged to contradict that claim in his 2010 memoir, titled Courage and Consequence. “Computer models,” Rove wrote, “had long anticipated a horrific disaster if a Katrina-like storm ever hit the city.”

  “WHERE THE HELL IS the cavalry?” Kate Hale, the emergency-management director in Dade County, Florida, asked during a 1992 press conference three days after Hurricane Andrew. “For God’s sake, where are they?” Congressional hearings were held, followed by a report condemning FEMA as a kind of “turkey farm” for political donors and bureaucrats past their sell-by date. Jimmy Carter had created FEMA in 1979 through executive order. Barely a decade later, no shortage of voices inside and outside government were calling for its abolition.

  James Lee Witt, Bill Clinton’s choice to head the agency, saved FEMA. At first his appointment seemed more of the same: a friend of the president dating back to when they were children. The son of an Arkansas sharecropper who had never finished high school, Witt’s background proved easy fodder for partisans seeking to stir trouble for the new president. But Witt also had a résumé that distinguished him from every past FEMA chief: having served as director of the Arkansas office of emergency services for nearly half of Clinton’s twelve-year tenure as governor, Witt was the first director of FEMA to have actual emergency-management experience.

  Witt’s first priority after taking over the agency was to spend less time on “continuity of government” plans for after a nuclear attack and other doomsday scenarios and focus instead on what he called “real-life disasters” such as floods and tornadoes. He put his people through customer-service training and pushed them to help locals with emergency preparedness. Witt championed the idea of prepositioning supplies and first responders so they were closer to where they would be needed after a disaster, and he convinced Clinton to raise the FEMA director to cabinet level. “I’ve got to pay the administration a compliment,” George W. Bush said to Vice President Al Gore during one of the 2000 presidential debates. “James Lee Witt of FEMA has done a really good job.” Witt was that rare public servant who had champions among both Democrats and Republicans.

  Bush’s first FEMA director was Joe Allbaugh, a party operative who had moved to Texas in 1994 to work on Bush’s first gubernatorial campaign. Allbaugh served as Governor Bush’s chief of staff until resigning to become the campaign manager of his 2000 presidential run. A grateful president-elect asked Allbaugh, the son of an Oklahoma wheat farmer, if a job as agriculture secretary interested him, but he said he would prefer to be head of FEMA. That way, he said, he could at least occasionally play hero on the public stage. “You’re not always in the limelight,” he said, “but when you are, it’s for all the marbles.” Although Allbaugh had no disaster-management experience, the Senate confirmed his appointment, 91–0.

  Incompetence hurt the Bush administration after Katrina, but so, too, did ideology. The Bush administration slashed FEMA’s budget under Allbaugh, who pulled the plug on Witt innovations such as Project Impact, which helped communities become more disaster-resistant. Following the September 11 attacks, money grew even tighter as Allbaugh revived some of the doomsday-preparedness projects that Witt had shut down. FEMA would lose more of its clout when in 2003 it was merged into the new Department of Homeland Security the Bush administration created after the terrorist attacks. Allbaugh objected to the change, arguing that the move would rob FEMA of both independence and bureaucratic clout. He tendered his resignation soon after losing that fight. In his place, the president nominated Allbaugh’s number two, Michael Brown—the man Bush famously referred to as Brownie.

  Like Allbaugh, Brown had no disaster-management experience prior to arriving in Washington. He had been an Oklahoma-based lawyer who worked for the International Arabian Horse Association when Allbaugh, a longtime friend, hired Brown as FEMA’s general counsel, then elevated him to deputy director. At the time of Katrina, FEMA’s top three appointees had worked as political operatives for the president. Five of FEMA’s top eight officials had negligible disaster-management experience, the Washington Post found, and nine of the agency’s ten regional chiefs were either serving as an acting director or filling two jobs at once.

  Yet one didn’t need to be an expert in disasters to know that a Category 5 storm aimed at New Orleans had the potential to overwhelm first responders. When shortly after its creation the new Department of Homeland Security drew up a list of the fifteen worst disasters that could confront the country, the detonation of a nuclear device made the list, as did a biological attack. But so, too, did a tropical storm making a direct hit on New Orleans. Even a hurricane of moderate strength, study after study showed, could cause more loss of life and property in this low-lying coastal city surrounded by water than even a major earthquake on the West Coast. “When I have a nightmare,” said Eric Tolbert, who served as FEMA’s disaster-response chief until leaving the agency several months prior to Katrina, “it’s a hurricane in New Orleans.”

  Yet the country was waging a pair of expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, creating pressure to shrink the size of government. Not only FEMA but the US Army Corps of Engineers, which had built and maintained New Orleans’s flood-protection system, were feeling the financial squeeze. In 2004, the Corps said it needed at least $22.5 million to shore up the levees in the New Orleans metro area. The Bush administration budgeted $4 million for New Orleans and compromised with Congress on a final outlay of $5.5 million. Yet somehow the government found $14 million to dredge a man-made canal known mainly by its local nickname, MR. GO (Mississippi River Gulf Outlet). For years coastal experts had been calling on the federal government to close down this underused and fragile seventy-six-mile waterway that the Army Corps of Engineers had so arrogantly built forty years earlier to save ships from the twists and turns of the Mississippi through southern Louisiana. Critics called MR. GO a “hurricane highway” that could amplify the storm surge—exactly what happened during Katrina. The water from MR. GO caused severe flooding in the eastern half of New Orleans and also St. Bernard Parish to the south and east.

  Brown was not the complete incompetent he was made out to be in media accounts. He could be smug and arrogant, but he was also bureaucratically adept and could be tenacious, especially when fighting his superiors on behalf of the agency under his charge. He even managed to pry a few million dollars from his tightfisted bosses to run a series of war-games-like exercises so they were better prepared for natural disasters. The first of these was Hurricane Pam, a hypothetical storm that planners imagined hitting New Orleans.

  Pam should have been the lucky break that saved FEMA’s reputation post-Katrina. Its designers imagined a powerful, slow-moving Category 3 storm—Katrina. The city�
�s flood-protection system was rated as strong enough to withstand a Category 3 storm, but computer simulations paid for by FEMA showed that the levees would breach with catastrophic consequences: as much as 90 percent of the city would flood even in a Category 3 storm, and an estimated fifty thousand would seek shelter in the Superdome or another refuge of last resort.

  Incredibly, Hurricane Katrina had not only been imagined in July 2004, thirteen months before the storm actually hit, but the hundreds of government employees FEMA brought together in New Orleans for the exercise had practiced their response. They imagined everything from the number of boats they would need to conduct search-and-rescue to the truckloads of bottled water needed to hydrate the survivors. The government was supposed to spend a few hundred thousand dollars more on follow-up discussions and meetings, but most of those slated for the first half of 2005 were scrapped due to a lack of funds. The government spent around $800,000 on the Hurricane Pam simulation but left the project unfinished. Brown blamed his boss, Michael Chertoff, the federal judge whom Bush had named to run Homeland Security at the start of 2005, and other top administration officials for cutting off the money.

  Some presidential historians argue that the Bush presidency died in New Orleans that week. If so, ego is, in part, to blame. The FEMA directorship was no longer a cabinet-level position with direct access to the president and his top people, but Brown, claiming he didn’t want to waste precious time going through proper channels, contacted the White House directly in those first hours after the levees broke. By Tuesday night, Michael Chertoff had had enough. Brown was on a military plane heading back to Baton Rouge when the Homeland Security secretary reached his insubordinate underling. He grounded Brown, ordering him not to leave Baton Rouge. As Brown told the story to Chris Cooper and Robert Block, the authors of Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security, when he pointed out that he was supposed to meet Mississippi governor Haley Barbour on the Gulf Coast, Chertoff said, “I don’t give a shit,” and hung up. After that, Brownie ran the rescue operations from his hotel room.