thedrifter
09-11-05, 06:07 AM
Chronology of errors: how a disaster spread
By Keith O'Brien and Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent and Globe Staff | September 11, 2005
NEW ORLEANS -- Late on Aug. 27, less than 36 hours before Hurricane Katrina crashed into the Gulf Coast, New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin's home phone rang. It was Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center in Florida.
Katrina was a ''worst-case" pattern, Mayfield warned. A mandatory evacuation of New Orleans was necessary.
Mayfield's advisory was in an official timeline of events compiled by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees the National Hurricane Center.
Thousands of residents were streaming north by then, alarmed by the increasingly dire predictions on the Weather Channel and on the local news. But it was not until 11 a.m. on Sunday, Aug. 28, almost 12 hours after Mayfield's call, that Nagin ordered the evacuation.
The order would send buses to pick up people at designated locations and would take them to shelters, including the Superdome.
Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., that Sunday morning, Michael Chertoff, the US secretary of homeland security, and Michael D. Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, were receiving electronic briefings from the National Weather Service on the possibility of a levee break in the city. Despite the catastrophic implications, it would take more than a day for Brown to move to bring FEMA personnel into the region.
Every forecast from the National Hurricane Center, beginning 56 hours before the storm struck, had predicted that the hurricane would come ashore at Category 4 intensity or greater and that it would then pass over or near New Orleans and the Louisiana-Mississippi border.
Air Force ''hurricane hunter" planes, flying from Florida and into the eye of the storm, were clocking wind speeds of 145 miles per hour, then 150, then 160.
But from the critical hours before the hurricane made landfall to the desperate days after Katrina sent floodwaters surging into the streets of New Orleans, government officials at every level -- local, state, and federal -- had misjudged, miscommunicated, and underestimated both the power of the storm and the seriousness of its aftermath.
Their decisions, or in some cases failure to decide anything at all, left tens of thousands imperiled. And now, from city hall to Capitol Hill, people are calling for inquiries into what went wrong.
''There's a lot we don't know yet, but certainly we have a lot to learn from Katrina," said Richard Falkenrath, deputy homeland security adviser to President Bush until last year. ''The mobilization started too late. It should have been sooner."
The calm before the stormJasmine Haralson remembered a closed-door briefing at City Hall on the Saturday before the storm hit.
Nagin was there, as were Police Superintendent Eddie Compass, the city's department heads, and several City Council members. But the atmosphere was calm, routine. Haralson, chief of staff for a New Orleans city councilman, Jay Batt, was not worried.
She had lived through storms before. Hurricanes, many had come to believe, do not hit New Orleans; they veer at the last moment. New Orleans, some said, was protected by God.
At police headquarters a short drive up Tulane Avenue, police officers also doubted the coming fury of Katrina, even as news reports were warning that this storm was the city's worst nightmare.
The general feeling, said Deputy Chief Steve Nicholas of the New Orleans Police Department, was that the 1,600-officer force could handle Katrina just as it had dealt with countless other storms over the years. They had been prepared to lose some radio communication, he said, but not for days on end; they had expected some flooding, but not a deluge.
The department had just four skiffs at its disposal: two at headquarters, one in eastern New Orleans, another across the Mississippi River in Algiers.
This, it was believed, would be enough. It had been in the past. And if it was not -- if the increasingly panicked news reports were right, and this was the deadly hurricane that people had been predicting all these years -- city officials expected that federal and state officials had their back, that troops had been mobilized somewhere north of the Crescent City, supplies waiting. But that was only an assumption.
It was not that the people of New Orleans were oblivious to the danger.
For years, they had been told to have evacuation routes planned, bottled water and canned goods on hand, and axes stashed in the attic.
But just as New Englanders would expect to find snowplows and salt trucks rumbling down streets during a blizzard, New Orleans residents had probably expected help to arrive quickly if the city got hit by the Big One.
''I expected State Police," said Batt, who was elected to the City Council almost four years ago. ''I expected the National Guard. I expected the Marines. I expected federal support, bringing in Black Hawk helicopters, basically locking down parts of the city in turmoil. What I didn't expect was total anarchy."
It will probably take years to sort out what happened after Katrina. Some things may never be known; some of the missing may never be found. But what is clear two weeks later is that emergency managers were not prepared to handle what may have been one of the most predicted catastrophes in American history.
Even after the scale of the calamity was clear, with the levees breached and the waters rising in New Orleans on that Monday, it took two more days -- until Wednesday, Aug. 31 -- for National Guard troops to arrive to aid the desperate and the dying in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida.
Haralson's great-grandmother had seen it coming. Before she died last year at the age of 102, Sylvia Johnson used to tell Haralson that the big storm was inevitable and that it would prove, once and for all, that New Orleans was a doomed city, sitting in an easily-flooded bowl scooped out of Lake Pontchartrain.
Haralson said she thought about her great-grandmother as she walked the city streets on Monday evening, surveying the wind damage to downtown hotels and to her office at City Hall.
The rain had let up.
The flood was about to come.
The levees were failing.
By morning, police headquarters would evacuate, a first for the department. Telephone lines would be down, and so would the main police radio system.
But before the lines went dead, before the looting and the killing and the shooting, 911 operators were still taking calls on the second floor of the Police Department, crying as they listened to pleas from New Orleanians trapped in their flooding attics.
Levees give way''I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees," President Bush said while touring the devastated Gulf Coast four days after the storm struck. ''They did appreciate a serious storm, but these levees got breached, and as a result much of New Orleans is flooded and now we're having to deal with it and we will."
While officials from Bush on down have insisted that no one had predicted that Hurricane Katrina might overwhelm the levee system surrounding New Orleans -- filling the city with a foul mixture of water and toxins -- key briefings and meetings held on the ground, in state capitals, and in the halls of Washington in the days before Katrina hit repeatedly warned authorities that the levees might not hold.
These warnings continued, in fact, right up until Katrina blasted ashore.
By that Sunday morning, the National Hurricane Center was warning officials up and down the chain of ''coastal storm surge flooding of 18 to 22 feet above normal tide levels [and] locally as high as 28 feet along with dangerous battering waves."
At 7 that night, the National Weather Service again warned that the levees may be ''overtopped" by the storm surge.
Hour by hour, the indicators got worse.
At 3 a.m. Monday, NOAA's buoy number 42040, about 50 miles east of the mouth of Mississippi River, reported waves as high as 40 feet. Two hours later, the buoy reported waves of 46 feet. Two hours after that, at 7 a.m., they reached 47 feet.
At 9 a.m. the National Hurricane Center warned that water levels in Lake Pontchartrain were rising and storm-surge flooding ''near the tops of the levees . . . is possible in the greater New Orleans area."
At about the same time, the Lower Ninth Ward levee breached, flooding the low-lying area with up to eight feet of water.
Still, those signs appeared to have little effect on authorities' sense of urgency.
Brown, the FEMA director who would bear the brunt of the criticism for his agency's performance in Katrina, arrived in the state capital of Baton Rouge at 11 a.m. He did not ask the authority to dispatch FEMA personnel to the region until five hours after the storm had passed.
In a memo to Chertoff that Monday afternoon, Brown requested that 1,000 employees be dispatched to the region. The resulting order, however, said they had two full days to report to Louisiana Homeland Security headquarters.
That did not change even after the 17th Street levee in New Orleans gave way Monday afternoon as well, flooding 20 percent of New Orleans. FEMA stuck to the book, delaying the arrival of outside help. Brown issued a statement urging federal, state, and local first-responders to remain where they were, until they could be better organized.
continued....
By Keith O'Brien and Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent and Globe Staff | September 11, 2005
NEW ORLEANS -- Late on Aug. 27, less than 36 hours before Hurricane Katrina crashed into the Gulf Coast, New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin's home phone rang. It was Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center in Florida.
Katrina was a ''worst-case" pattern, Mayfield warned. A mandatory evacuation of New Orleans was necessary.
Mayfield's advisory was in an official timeline of events compiled by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees the National Hurricane Center.
Thousands of residents were streaming north by then, alarmed by the increasingly dire predictions on the Weather Channel and on the local news. But it was not until 11 a.m. on Sunday, Aug. 28, almost 12 hours after Mayfield's call, that Nagin ordered the evacuation.
The order would send buses to pick up people at designated locations and would take them to shelters, including the Superdome.
Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., that Sunday morning, Michael Chertoff, the US secretary of homeland security, and Michael D. Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, were receiving electronic briefings from the National Weather Service on the possibility of a levee break in the city. Despite the catastrophic implications, it would take more than a day for Brown to move to bring FEMA personnel into the region.
Every forecast from the National Hurricane Center, beginning 56 hours before the storm struck, had predicted that the hurricane would come ashore at Category 4 intensity or greater and that it would then pass over or near New Orleans and the Louisiana-Mississippi border.
Air Force ''hurricane hunter" planes, flying from Florida and into the eye of the storm, were clocking wind speeds of 145 miles per hour, then 150, then 160.
But from the critical hours before the hurricane made landfall to the desperate days after Katrina sent floodwaters surging into the streets of New Orleans, government officials at every level -- local, state, and federal -- had misjudged, miscommunicated, and underestimated both the power of the storm and the seriousness of its aftermath.
Their decisions, or in some cases failure to decide anything at all, left tens of thousands imperiled. And now, from city hall to Capitol Hill, people are calling for inquiries into what went wrong.
''There's a lot we don't know yet, but certainly we have a lot to learn from Katrina," said Richard Falkenrath, deputy homeland security adviser to President Bush until last year. ''The mobilization started too late. It should have been sooner."
The calm before the stormJasmine Haralson remembered a closed-door briefing at City Hall on the Saturday before the storm hit.
Nagin was there, as were Police Superintendent Eddie Compass, the city's department heads, and several City Council members. But the atmosphere was calm, routine. Haralson, chief of staff for a New Orleans city councilman, Jay Batt, was not worried.
She had lived through storms before. Hurricanes, many had come to believe, do not hit New Orleans; they veer at the last moment. New Orleans, some said, was protected by God.
At police headquarters a short drive up Tulane Avenue, police officers also doubted the coming fury of Katrina, even as news reports were warning that this storm was the city's worst nightmare.
The general feeling, said Deputy Chief Steve Nicholas of the New Orleans Police Department, was that the 1,600-officer force could handle Katrina just as it had dealt with countless other storms over the years. They had been prepared to lose some radio communication, he said, but not for days on end; they had expected some flooding, but not a deluge.
The department had just four skiffs at its disposal: two at headquarters, one in eastern New Orleans, another across the Mississippi River in Algiers.
This, it was believed, would be enough. It had been in the past. And if it was not -- if the increasingly panicked news reports were right, and this was the deadly hurricane that people had been predicting all these years -- city officials expected that federal and state officials had their back, that troops had been mobilized somewhere north of the Crescent City, supplies waiting. But that was only an assumption.
It was not that the people of New Orleans were oblivious to the danger.
For years, they had been told to have evacuation routes planned, bottled water and canned goods on hand, and axes stashed in the attic.
But just as New Englanders would expect to find snowplows and salt trucks rumbling down streets during a blizzard, New Orleans residents had probably expected help to arrive quickly if the city got hit by the Big One.
''I expected State Police," said Batt, who was elected to the City Council almost four years ago. ''I expected the National Guard. I expected the Marines. I expected federal support, bringing in Black Hawk helicopters, basically locking down parts of the city in turmoil. What I didn't expect was total anarchy."
It will probably take years to sort out what happened after Katrina. Some things may never be known; some of the missing may never be found. But what is clear two weeks later is that emergency managers were not prepared to handle what may have been one of the most predicted catastrophes in American history.
Even after the scale of the calamity was clear, with the levees breached and the waters rising in New Orleans on that Monday, it took two more days -- until Wednesday, Aug. 31 -- for National Guard troops to arrive to aid the desperate and the dying in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida.
Haralson's great-grandmother had seen it coming. Before she died last year at the age of 102, Sylvia Johnson used to tell Haralson that the big storm was inevitable and that it would prove, once and for all, that New Orleans was a doomed city, sitting in an easily-flooded bowl scooped out of Lake Pontchartrain.
Haralson said she thought about her great-grandmother as she walked the city streets on Monday evening, surveying the wind damage to downtown hotels and to her office at City Hall.
The rain had let up.
The flood was about to come.
The levees were failing.
By morning, police headquarters would evacuate, a first for the department. Telephone lines would be down, and so would the main police radio system.
But before the lines went dead, before the looting and the killing and the shooting, 911 operators were still taking calls on the second floor of the Police Department, crying as they listened to pleas from New Orleanians trapped in their flooding attics.
Levees give way''I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees," President Bush said while touring the devastated Gulf Coast four days after the storm struck. ''They did appreciate a serious storm, but these levees got breached, and as a result much of New Orleans is flooded and now we're having to deal with it and we will."
While officials from Bush on down have insisted that no one had predicted that Hurricane Katrina might overwhelm the levee system surrounding New Orleans -- filling the city with a foul mixture of water and toxins -- key briefings and meetings held on the ground, in state capitals, and in the halls of Washington in the days before Katrina hit repeatedly warned authorities that the levees might not hold.
These warnings continued, in fact, right up until Katrina blasted ashore.
By that Sunday morning, the National Hurricane Center was warning officials up and down the chain of ''coastal storm surge flooding of 18 to 22 feet above normal tide levels [and] locally as high as 28 feet along with dangerous battering waves."
At 7 that night, the National Weather Service again warned that the levees may be ''overtopped" by the storm surge.
Hour by hour, the indicators got worse.
At 3 a.m. Monday, NOAA's buoy number 42040, about 50 miles east of the mouth of Mississippi River, reported waves as high as 40 feet. Two hours later, the buoy reported waves of 46 feet. Two hours after that, at 7 a.m., they reached 47 feet.
At 9 a.m. the National Hurricane Center warned that water levels in Lake Pontchartrain were rising and storm-surge flooding ''near the tops of the levees . . . is possible in the greater New Orleans area."
At about the same time, the Lower Ninth Ward levee breached, flooding the low-lying area with up to eight feet of water.
Still, those signs appeared to have little effect on authorities' sense of urgency.
Brown, the FEMA director who would bear the brunt of the criticism for his agency's performance in Katrina, arrived in the state capital of Baton Rouge at 11 a.m. He did not ask the authority to dispatch FEMA personnel to the region until five hours after the storm had passed.
In a memo to Chertoff that Monday afternoon, Brown requested that 1,000 employees be dispatched to the region. The resulting order, however, said they had two full days to report to Louisiana Homeland Security headquarters.
That did not change even after the 17th Street levee in New Orleans gave way Monday afternoon as well, flooding 20 percent of New Orleans. FEMA stuck to the book, delaying the arrival of outside help. Brown issued a statement urging federal, state, and local first-responders to remain where they were, until they could be better organized.
continued....