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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....

thedrifter
09-11-05, 06:08 AM
''The response to Hurricane Katrina must be well coordinated between federal, state, and local officials, to most effectively protect life and property," Brown said.

The US Fire Administration, which is part of FEMA, also asked that fire and emergency services personnel stay put. ''It is critical," said the US fire administrator, R. David Paulison, ''that fire and emergency departments across the country remain in their jurisdictions until such time as the affected states request assistance."

Among the reasons: State officials had to request the units first, under ''mutual aid agreements." This was among a series of bureaucratic hurdles and government red tape that would bedevil the rescue efforts for days.

It was not until a day later -- after another levee broke overnight that Monday -- that Brown activated the National Response Plan allowing him to fully mobilize the government's resources.

Trapped in the SuperdomeOn the ground in New Orleans, little changed even after the federal government put its plan in motion. People who did not evacuate were still in need of food and water. Many were trapped inside the Superdome, which by Tuesday was surrounded by water, and they were growing more desperate by the hour.

This should have come as no surprise. In the past, the plan to house hurricane evacuees in the Superdome had not worked well. In 1998, when Hurricane Georges, a powerful Category 2 storm, took aim on New Orleans, 14,000 people sought refuge in the dome.

But it was not exactly the ''godsend" that Marc Morial, the mayor at the time, said it was. Fights broke out. Few people brought food or water, even though they had been instructed to do so. There was looting and vandalism.

And there was, said the dome's general manager, Doug Thornton, a reason for it all: The dome had not been meant to be a shelter, not for that many people, and not for that long.

Indeed, the city's Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan called for buses to evacuate citizens out of the city, not to leave them behind.

But again, just last year, city officials opened the cavernous stadium to residents who could not, or would not, evacuate before Hurricane Ivan. The crowds this time were smaller -- only about 1,000 people -- but they were not any more prepared than those who had stayed at the dome in 1998. Few had food or water. They were fortunate when Ivan turned east just before landfall, missing New Orleans almost entirely.

But in escaping Ivan's wrath, few lessons seemed to have been learned about the dangers of placing people in a building that the Rev. Jesse Jackson would come to call ''a floating tombstone" after Katrina.

In the hours before the hurricane slammed into New Orleans, the mayor's office asked those headed to the dome to bring the following: medication, diapers, batteries, sleeping bags, enough food and water for three days, and, finally, ''patience and a positive attitude."

Once again, however, the supplies that people had brought ran short. And soon thereafter -- as water filled the streets around the dome, the power failed inside, and the crowds swelled to some 30,000 people -- whatever patience folks once had turned to anger.

By then, on the streets of New Orleans, looters were targeting stores -- everything from supermarkets and pharmacies to Brooks Brothers and pawn shops.

For some, it was an act of survival. For others, it was opportunism. As the crowds of hurricane survivors continued to grow in the city -- first in the dome and then outside the city's sprawling convention center -- many people headed out at first light, seeking provisions for the day. And while police tried to stop it, they had problems of their own.

They, too, lacked provisions. They, too, were trapped by water in their attics, in their homes, and at police headquarters. Major Jim Treadway monitored the flood all night Monday into Tuesday, watching it rise in the basement, swallowing evidence and files as it went, and then reporting its progress to his boss, Deputy Chief Steve Nicholas.

Nicholas was shocked. Despite all indications, the flood had taken him and other officers by surprise.

''Not once was anyone saying, 'You're going to have 20 feet of water,' " Nicholas said, referring to conversations officials had had before the storm.

Now, early on Tuesday, with the water still rising, the police all but abandoned headquarters, sought refuge on an overpass, and waited, like everyone else, to be picked up.

Nicholas, who was among those waiting, said they had no choice; lives were at stake. But instead of seeing the military in the streets, he found chaos. Telephones were down. Police radios impaired. And people were beginning to wonder: Where was the National Guard?

A plea to the presidentArriving at her office on Sunday morning, two days after she declared a state of emergency and a day before the hurricane's landfall, Louisiana's governor, Kathleen Blanco, had her staff write a letter to President Bush.

''Based on predictions we have received from the National Weather Service and other sources, I have determined that [Hurricane Katrina] will be of such severity and magnitude that effective response will be beyond the capabilities of the state and the affected local governments and that supplementary federal assistance will be necessary," she told the president in a three-page memo on the letterhead of the State of Louisiana Military Department.

But the request did not include what the residents of the Gulf Coast would need most in the coming days: food, water, transportation to higher ground, and thousands of National Guard troops to ferry life-saving supplies and medical personnel and to restore order.

Instead, she sought access to several federal assistance programs focusing almost solely on the economic recovery that would be required in the aftermath of the storm. She asked for disaster unemployment assistance, crisis counseling, and Small Business Administration loans for the survivors -- all critical assistance, but far from the cavalry that would be needed in the immediate aftermath of the storm.

There were obstacles to amassing that sort of force. Almost 40 percent of Louisiana's National Guard is on active duty in Iraq; this left the governor with only 4,000 members to muster over the weekend, and a total of 5,700 by Monday.

Aware of this problem, other governors, including New Mexico's Bill Richardson, offered to help. On Sunday afternoon, Richardson called Blanco offering his own state militia, and Blanco readily accepted.

That did not solve the problem.

Because of legal guidelines, Richardson could not send a single soldier until approval came from Washington, specifically the National Guard Bureau. Washington, meanwhile, could not give such approval without a formal request from Blanco.

That request was made Tuesday, after New Orleans was almost completely under water. It would be two more days, until late Thursday, before that authority would come from Washington. And by then, almost four days had passed since Katrina hit the coast. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, were dead.

Bureaucratic glitches slowed progress from the beginning. On Sunday, the day before the storm, the Louisiana National Guard asked FEMA for 700 buses to evacuate people. It received only 100.

continued....

thedrifter
09-11-05, 06:08 AM
Even after the federal government stepped in, there were still more snags. The mutual aid agreements among states did not allow out-of-state National Guard units to perform law enforcement duties. Blanco had to grant additional authority for that.

Other units would not deploy until their superiors received assurances that Washington would pay for their deployment with federal disaster funds.

Falkenrath, the former Department of Homeland Security official, said that even had there been thousands more National Guard troops in place before the storm, the nature of the disaster -- particularly the high flood waters -- would have seriously hampered any rescue efforts. Recalling Hurricane Andrew in 1992, he said, ''you could still get in."

But even in the worst of times after Katrina made landfall near New Orleans, there were routes into the city, wide swaths of empty highway. People with boats -- just regular folks in most cases -- were launching skiffs and saving lives, while the federal government was still navigating paperwork.

It finally got to Mayor Nagin. In an emotional interview on WWL radio that Thursday, the mayor, who stayed in the city through Katrina and its aftermath, angrily declared, ''I am ****ed."

''They don't have a clue what's going on down here," he said.

By Friday, 58,000 National Guard troops were on duty along the Gulf Coast, as well as 17,000 members of the active-duty Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines -- the largest domestic military deployment since the Civil War.

But for many, it came too late.

''Who should expect a little town in Louisiana with 400,000 people, one-third of the town living below the poverty level, 100,000 people using public transportation every day, limited healthcare -- who should expect them to lead in a national disaster?" asked the City Council president, Oliver Thomas. ''That's ludicrous."

A premature sigh of reliefThomas, who rode out the storm at City Hall, initially celebrated after he visited his district Monday night. For the most part, it was dry. The city had been spared yet again, many believed.

But as water breached the levees in Orleans Parish and St. Bernard Parish, just down the river, celebration turned to panic. Flood waters were rising and armed thugs were roaming the city. The biggest problem, however, may have been communication. People remaining in New Orleans, including first-responders, were cut off from the world and sometimes even from one another, entering what state Attorney General Charles Foti called ''a black hole."

Nicholas, the deputy police chief, said people almost had to see others face to face to talk to them.

For many, including the top leaders of St. Bernard Parish 8 miles downriver from New Orleans, even that was not possible. They were stranded at the parish offices, watching the water rise outside, then sloshing through it as it came rushing in through the doors. State Representative Nita Hutter, a lifelong resident of St. Bernard, said officials, including the parish president, scrambled upstairs to the second floor. Outside, the water was devouring entire homes, including Hutter's. Inside, there was panic.

''It was chaotic," she said. ''We were trying to save records, parish records. We were trying to get them frantically from the first floor."

But then, as the water continued to rise, they began fearing for their lives. It was not what Hutter had expected when she chose to ride out the storm. Only 36 hours earlier, on Saturday afternoon, she had joined other state lawmakers in a conference call with Blanco, and hung up the telephone confident that the levees would hold and that the state had a plan.

''We all just imagined there was this great plan," she said, ''and it would be implemented."

By Monday, not so sure of that anymore, Hutter said she began using her dying cellular phone to call US Senator Mary L. Landrieu and the governor. She said she spoke directly to the governor Monday night and again was assured that help was on the way.

''We were told we'd have boats the next morning," she said.

''That never happened Tuesday. That never happened Wednesday. That never happened again on Thursday."

She called her sister in Kansas City and told her she was going to die there.

A failure to communicateThen, all communication stopped.

For days, Donna Phister did not hear from Hutter. And no matter whom she called -- her congressman, her senator, even the governor of Louisiana -- Phister could not get any information on her missing sister.

She was worried sick, and she was not alone. All around the country, hurricane victims were desperate to find one another, homeless and wandering, from one friend's house to another, from shelter to shelter. And Louisiana residents were not the only ones waiting for aid.

In Mississippi, where Katrina wiped out both waterfront mansions and flimsy trailers, leaving the landscape littered and ruined, entire towns, such as Pass Christian, were isolated for days.

But a few survivors did not wait for politicians or paperwork. In New Orleans, Wayne Galle, a Wal-Mart manager, was saving his mother's neighbors in Gentilly, going house to house in stolen boats. He slept in a school for a couple of days after the storm, watching a crowd of 180 people become more than 500. Others, police officers mostly, did not sleep at all.

Amid all the chaos and confusion among would-be rescuers, however, at least one federal agency had planned ahead.

On the Sunday before Katrina hit, Jayhawk rescue helicopters from Coast Guard Air Station Cape Cod took off, hugging the coast, on a hopscotch to the hurricane zone. Coast Guard commanders were not waiting to implement their disaster response plan. Jayhawks from locations along the Eastern Seaboard arrived in the gulf just behind the storm, well before the bulk of the National Guard, the Pentagon's Northern Command, or the Department of Homeland Security, the new agency created after Sept. 11 to oversee FEMA, the Coast Guard, and dozens of other agencies.

Indeed, while state, local, and other federal officials appeared not to fully comprehend the magnitude of the disaster at hand, the Coast Guard acted with the urgency the crisis demanded.

Admiral Robert Duncan, head of the Eighth District in New Orleans, dispersed cutters, helicopters, and other vessels ahead of the storm. He also requested additional forces from the commander of the Coast Guard's Eastern Area, in Norfolk, Va., which is responsible for everything east of the Mississippi, according to Coast Guard officials.

''We don't have to get approval to execute," said Richard J. Dein, a retired Coast Guard commander and a search-and-rescue specialist. ''The Coast Guard is organized by geography. All of those districts act autonomously. They each have a command and control center. What you had was a ready response network."

Lives were saved -- some 1,200, the Coast Guard estimated -- before FEMA's Brown arrived in Baton Rouge after the storm. Haralson, Councilman Jay Batt's chief of staff, got out early Tuesday, too, in a convoy, racing toward Baton Rouge. By then she was constantly in tears, she said, realizing the power of this storm. Lakeview, a quiet, upper-middle-class neighborhood in Batt's district in New Orleans, was under water. It still is.

St. Bernard, a short drive down the interstate, was inundated as well. Hutter said she and others had to commandeer boats to get to dry land. Late in the week after Katrina hit, she received a text message from her sister in Kansas City.

''Are you alive?" the message said.

''Yes," Hutter replied.

It was Thursday. People were still dying at the Superdome and the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans. Lonnie Swain, deputy police chief in New Orleans, said the National Guard discovered 12 bodies there after the evacuees had left. More awaited them at the convention center, including the body of a child.

Once again, Swain said, the facility lacked security. ''I had 70, 80 police officers," he said. ''That's less than we have there for a ballgame." But the real problem, he said, was the buses. And as with the rescuers that had been promised to Hutter in St. Bernard, it took days for them to appear.

''The buses didn't show up for three or four days, Swain said. ''And when they did, there were 60 buses. I had 30,000 people there and 60 buses. Was I frustrated? I was beyond frustrated. FEMA didn't do what it was supposed to."

On Friday, as authorities in New Orleans suspended search-and-rescue operations and focused on gathering bodies, Brown was sent packing. He was relieved of his post in the region, replaced by a high-ranking Coast Guard official, Vice Admiral Thad W. Allen.

The recovery efforts were under new management. The questions remained.

Yvonne Abraham in Biloxi, Miss., and Kevin Cullen in New Orleans, both of the Globe staff, contributed to this report.

Ellie