Warnings were loud and clear - but still city drowned
By Giles Whittell
09/08/05 "The Times" -- -- IF THERE is a smoking gun in the Gulf Coast wreckage, it is the hurricane warning issued by the New Orleans office of the US National Weather Service soon after 10am on August 28, the eve of Katrina’s arrival.
“Devastating damage expected,” the warning stated. “Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks . . . All gabled roofs will fail . . . All wood-framed low rising apartment buildings will be destroyed . . . Power outages will last for weeks . . . Water shortages will make human suffering incredible by modern standards . . . Trees will be snapped or uprooted. Only the heartiest will remain standing.”
Another forecast, issued six hours later by the National Hurricane Centre in Florida, said that the levees in New Orleans could be “overtopped”, and predicted the precise depth of flooding that would result.
A day later the city drowned. Hundreds, if not thousands, have died in the chaos. Some casualties were inevitable but many were not, and this much is clear about those in authority who might have minimised the losses: they had been warned.
Of all the warnings issued on Katrina, the National Weather Service bulletin of the August 28 was uniquely detailed and strongly worded. Why? “Because the people down here are somewhat complacent,” Leonard Bucklin, a veteran forecaster at the service’s New Orleans office, told The Times.
“There are those who have survived previous storms and think ‘I lived through that and I can live through this’. We were trying to tell them that this was bigger, slower moving and with greater winds even than Hurricane Betsy in 1965.”
Mr Bucklin was on duty that morning. He would not take credit for the warning but called it “a pretty good product” — a product distributed without delay to Louisiana’s state and parish emergency preparedness offices, the Governor’s office and the media. “They all have access to this data,” he said.
It is hard not to conclude that the complacency which Mr Bucklin attributes to individuals also paralysed government agencies on at least five levels, whose initial responses to the worst natural disaster in US history have been shown to be late, inadequate and hopelessly confused.
Tragedy, at times, has descended into farce. As looters arrived to haunt the French Quarter, up to 200 New Orleans emergency personnel turned in their badges to help their families. As the city ran dry of drinking water, lorry- loads of it were turned back by police. On Tuesday, when 180 evacuees boarded a plane to Charleston, South Carolina, they were mistakenly flown to Charleston, West Virginia.
With hindsight, it is clear that the seeds of what one Republican senator called yesterday the “woeful” government response were sown with shoddy planning. Despite decades of lobbying by local politicians and media for stronger levees, those that ruptured on the night of August 29 had been built by the Army Corps of Engineers to withstand only a Category 3 hurricane. Katrina was a Category 4.
Despite calls since the September 11 attacks for a comprehensive new evacuation plan for New Orleans, the one in place last week had last been updated in 2000, according to the Louisiana Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.
The vaguely worded plan stated that “the primary means of hurricane evacuation will be personal vehicles” even though an estimated 100,000 residents did not own their own cars. It was also implemented by Ray Nagin, the Mayor, too late for buses to reach those without cars, or to prepare the Superdome to receive them.
By the time he did, on August 28, it was clear from the National Hurricane Centre’s flood warnings that federal assistance would be needed swiftly and on a huge scale. Yet it took four days to materialise, largely because of the inertia of the Federal Emergency Management Administration (Fema).
Fema, an umbrella for 14 federal agencies that form part of the giant new Department of Homeland Security, is a key link in the chain of command from President Bush and the US military to local “first responders”. It has also proved to be the weakest link. It has been starved of funds and denied direct access to the President since September 11, and is led by a former head of the Arabian Horse Association.
As the blame game got into its stride on Tuesday, White House officials reminded reporters that Mr Bush, at the request of Louisiana’s Governor Kathleen Blanco, declared a state of emergency for the Gulf Coast area as early as August 27. This should have hastened the delivery of federal aid but the President has no power to force such aid on a state that has not requested it.
Meanwhile, General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, claimed that the military had been “pushing” offers of help days before the hurricane hit, and Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, insisted: “The Department of Defence is not a first responder. You need to be invited.”
That invitation should have come from Fema but was not received until last Thursday. Fighting for his political life yesterday, Michael Brown, the beleaguered Fema chief, revealed that he had asked the Department of Homeland Security for authority to send 1,000 personnel to the New Orleans area within 48 hours of the hurricane hitting, and a further 2,000 within the next week. The delays were to allow for special disaster training, a spokesman said. Congressional investigators are likely to ask why that training had not already been completed.
The hapless Mr Brown and his two most senior subordinates are all political appointees with little experience of large-scale disaster management. Amid widespread calls for his dismissal, from Senator Hillary Clinton among others, some senior Republicans have come to his defence, pointing out that Fema has been weakened since being subsumed by the Department of Homeland Security, whose chief task is to defend the US against terrorism.
Michael Chertoff, the new Homeland Security Secretary, has performed little better than Mr Brown. On August 30, a day after the levees broke, both men revealed that they had no idea the city was under water. On September 1, as chaos reigned in the Superdome and at the Civic Centre, they expressed surprise at the horrifying conditions there even though graphic reports depicting them had been running on TV for two days.
In a country with three main layers of government and multiple sub-divisions within those layers, confusion is inevitable when all must work together without an agreed script. To minimise that confusion, responsibility for responding to disasters is supposed to start with those closest to them. In this case, they were among the victims. The entire echelon of first responders in New Orleans, including firefighters, police and local National Guard units, were driven from their own homes and often to despair. Two police officers committed suicide. The city government moved to Baton Rouge.
In such circumstances it should have been clear not only to Mr Brown but also to Ms Blanco that federal help was vital whatever the bureaucratic obstacles. Ms Blanco appears to have seen things differently. At a meeting on Air Force One outside Baton Rouge last Friday, Mr Bush offered her the full force of every federal relief agency including the military, he claims. Fearful of losing control of the relief effort and of being blamed later for doing so, she asked for another 24 hours to think about it. The system of checks, balances and multilayer government that was designed to protect Americans from tyranny has not merely failed to protect them from Hurricane Katrina. It has greatly increased the suffering of its victims.
At least two congressional inquiries will try to establishwhat went wrong, but one irony is already obvious: a President who stands for shrunken government has found himself presiding over far too much of it.
Copyright 2005 Times Newspapers Ltd.
Link Here
09/08/05 "The Times" -- -- IF THERE is a smoking gun in the Gulf Coast wreckage, it is the hurricane warning issued by the New Orleans office of the US National Weather Service soon after 10am on August 28, the eve of Katrina’s arrival.
“Devastating damage expected,” the warning stated. “Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks . . . All gabled roofs will fail . . . All wood-framed low rising apartment buildings will be destroyed . . . Power outages will last for weeks . . . Water shortages will make human suffering incredible by modern standards . . . Trees will be snapped or uprooted. Only the heartiest will remain standing.”
Another forecast, issued six hours later by the National Hurricane Centre in Florida, said that the levees in New Orleans could be “overtopped”, and predicted the precise depth of flooding that would result.
A day later the city drowned. Hundreds, if not thousands, have died in the chaos. Some casualties were inevitable but many were not, and this much is clear about those in authority who might have minimised the losses: they had been warned.
Of all the warnings issued on Katrina, the National Weather Service bulletin of the August 28 was uniquely detailed and strongly worded. Why? “Because the people down here are somewhat complacent,” Leonard Bucklin, a veteran forecaster at the service’s New Orleans office, told The Times.
“There are those who have survived previous storms and think ‘I lived through that and I can live through this’. We were trying to tell them that this was bigger, slower moving and with greater winds even than Hurricane Betsy in 1965.”
Mr Bucklin was on duty that morning. He would not take credit for the warning but called it “a pretty good product” — a product distributed without delay to Louisiana’s state and parish emergency preparedness offices, the Governor’s office and the media. “They all have access to this data,” he said.
It is hard not to conclude that the complacency which Mr Bucklin attributes to individuals also paralysed government agencies on at least five levels, whose initial responses to the worst natural disaster in US history have been shown to be late, inadequate and hopelessly confused.
Tragedy, at times, has descended into farce. As looters arrived to haunt the French Quarter, up to 200 New Orleans emergency personnel turned in their badges to help their families. As the city ran dry of drinking water, lorry- loads of it were turned back by police. On Tuesday, when 180 evacuees boarded a plane to Charleston, South Carolina, they were mistakenly flown to Charleston, West Virginia.
With hindsight, it is clear that the seeds of what one Republican senator called yesterday the “woeful” government response were sown with shoddy planning. Despite decades of lobbying by local politicians and media for stronger levees, those that ruptured on the night of August 29 had been built by the Army Corps of Engineers to withstand only a Category 3 hurricane. Katrina was a Category 4.
Despite calls since the September 11 attacks for a comprehensive new evacuation plan for New Orleans, the one in place last week had last been updated in 2000, according to the Louisiana Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.
The vaguely worded plan stated that “the primary means of hurricane evacuation will be personal vehicles” even though an estimated 100,000 residents did not own their own cars. It was also implemented by Ray Nagin, the Mayor, too late for buses to reach those without cars, or to prepare the Superdome to receive them.
By the time he did, on August 28, it was clear from the National Hurricane Centre’s flood warnings that federal assistance would be needed swiftly and on a huge scale. Yet it took four days to materialise, largely because of the inertia of the Federal Emergency Management Administration (Fema).
Fema, an umbrella for 14 federal agencies that form part of the giant new Department of Homeland Security, is a key link in the chain of command from President Bush and the US military to local “first responders”. It has also proved to be the weakest link. It has been starved of funds and denied direct access to the President since September 11, and is led by a former head of the Arabian Horse Association.
As the blame game got into its stride on Tuesday, White House officials reminded reporters that Mr Bush, at the request of Louisiana’s Governor Kathleen Blanco, declared a state of emergency for the Gulf Coast area as early as August 27. This should have hastened the delivery of federal aid but the President has no power to force such aid on a state that has not requested it.
Meanwhile, General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, claimed that the military had been “pushing” offers of help days before the hurricane hit, and Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, insisted: “The Department of Defence is not a first responder. You need to be invited.”
That invitation should have come from Fema but was not received until last Thursday. Fighting for his political life yesterday, Michael Brown, the beleaguered Fema chief, revealed that he had asked the Department of Homeland Security for authority to send 1,000 personnel to the New Orleans area within 48 hours of the hurricane hitting, and a further 2,000 within the next week. The delays were to allow for special disaster training, a spokesman said. Congressional investigators are likely to ask why that training had not already been completed.
The hapless Mr Brown and his two most senior subordinates are all political appointees with little experience of large-scale disaster management. Amid widespread calls for his dismissal, from Senator Hillary Clinton among others, some senior Republicans have come to his defence, pointing out that Fema has been weakened since being subsumed by the Department of Homeland Security, whose chief task is to defend the US against terrorism.
Michael Chertoff, the new Homeland Security Secretary, has performed little better than Mr Brown. On August 30, a day after the levees broke, both men revealed that they had no idea the city was under water. On September 1, as chaos reigned in the Superdome and at the Civic Centre, they expressed surprise at the horrifying conditions there even though graphic reports depicting them had been running on TV for two days.
In a country with three main layers of government and multiple sub-divisions within those layers, confusion is inevitable when all must work together without an agreed script. To minimise that confusion, responsibility for responding to disasters is supposed to start with those closest to them. In this case, they were among the victims. The entire echelon of first responders in New Orleans, including firefighters, police and local National Guard units, were driven from their own homes and often to despair. Two police officers committed suicide. The city government moved to Baton Rouge.
In such circumstances it should have been clear not only to Mr Brown but also to Ms Blanco that federal help was vital whatever the bureaucratic obstacles. Ms Blanco appears to have seen things differently. At a meeting on Air Force One outside Baton Rouge last Friday, Mr Bush offered her the full force of every federal relief agency including the military, he claims. Fearful of losing control of the relief effort and of being blamed later for doing so, she asked for another 24 hours to think about it. The system of checks, balances and multilayer government that was designed to protect Americans from tyranny has not merely failed to protect them from Hurricane Katrina. It has greatly increased the suffering of its victims.
At least two congressional inquiries will try to establishwhat went wrong, but one irony is already obvious: a President who stands for shrunken government has found himself presiding over far too much of it.
Copyright 2005 Times Newspapers Ltd.
Link Here
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