By Eric Lipton, Christopher Drew, Scott Shane and David Rohde
New York Times News Service
09-11-2005
The governor of Louisiana was 'blistering mad.' It was the third night after Hurricane Katrina drowned New Orleans, and Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco needed buses to rescue thousands of people from the fetid Superdome and convention center. But only a fraction of the 500 vehicles promised by federal authorities had arrived.
Blanco burst into the state’s emergency center in Baton Rouge. "Does anybody in this building know anything about buses?" she recalled crying out.
They were an obvious linchpin for evacuating a city where nearly 100,000 people had no cars. Yet the federal, state and local officials who had failed to round up buses in advance were now in a frantic hunt. It would be two more days before they found enough buses to empty the shelters.
An initial examination of the storm’s aftermath demonstrates the extent to which the federal government failed to fulfill the pledge it made after the Sept. 11 attacks to face domestic threats as a unified, seamless force.
Instead, the crisis in New Orleans deepened because of a virtual standoff between hesitant federal officials and besieged local and state authorities, interviews with dozens of officials show.
Federal Emergency Management Agency officials expected the state and city to direct their own efforts and ask for help as needed.
Leaders in Louisiana and New Orleans, though, were so overwhelmed by the scale of the storm that they were not only unable to manage the crisis, but they were not exactly sure what they needed.
FEMA appears to have underestimated the storm, despite a warning from the National Hurricane Center that it would cause "human suffering incredible by modern standards." The agency dispatched only seven of its 28 urban search and rescue teams to the area before the storm hit and sent no workers at all into New Orleans until after Katrina passed on Aug. 29, a Monday.
On Tuesday, a FEMA official who had just flown over the ravaged city by helicopter seemed to have trouble conveying to his bosses the degree of destruction, according to a New Orleans city councilwoman.
"He got on the phone to Washington, and I heard him say, ‘You’ve got to understand how serious this is, and this is not what they’re telling me, this is what I saw myself," Cynthia Hedge-Morrell, recalled.
The Louisiana National Guard, already stretched by the deployment of more than 3,000 troops to Iraq, was hampered when its New Orleans barracks flooded. It lost 20 vehicles that could have carried soldiers through the watery streets and had to abandon its most advanced communications equipment.
Partly because of the shortage of troops, violence raged inside the New Orleans Convention Center, which interviews show was even worse than previously described. Police SWAT team members found themselves plunging into the darkness, guided by the muzzle flashes of thugs’ handguns, said Capt. Jeffrey Winn.
Shortly after the storm hit, by midafternoon on Aug. 29, New Orleans seemed to have been spared the worst of the storm. But when widespread flooding hit, serious weaknesses in the machinery of emergency services were exposed.
Focus on terrorism
Michael D. Brown, FEMA director, whom President Bush had publicly praised a week earlier for doing "a heck of a job," was pushed aside on Friday, replaced by a take-charge admiral.
Questions had been raised about FEMA, which had been swallowed by the Department of Homeland Security, established after 9/11. Its critics complained that it focused too much on terrorism, hurting preparations for natural disasters, and that it had become politicized.
Brown is a lawyer who came to the agency with political connections but little emergency management experience.
The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents FEMA employees, had written to Congress in June 2004, complaining, "Seasoned staff members are being pushed aside to make room for inexperienced novices and contractors."
In 2002, Joe M. Allbaugh, then FEMA director, said: "Catastrophic disasters are best defined in that they totally outstrip local and state resources, which is why the federal government needs to play a role."
Federal officials vowed to work with local authorities to improve the hurricane response, but the plan for Louisiana was not finished when Katrina hit.
State officials said the plan did not yet address transportation or crime control. Terry Ebbert, director of homeland security for New Orleans since 2003, said he never spoke with FEMA about the state disaster blueprint. New Orleans had its own plan, which pointed out that about 100,000 people did not have transportation to evacuate, but few details were offered to shelter them.
As Hurricane Katrina bore down on New Orleans, Mayor C. Ray Nagin largely followed the city plan, eventually ordering the city’s first-ever mandatory evacuation. Although 80 percent left, as many as 100,000 people remained.
Ebbert decided to make the Superdome the city’s lone shelter, assuming the city would have to shelter people in the arena for only about 48 hours, until the storm passed or the federal government came and rescued people.
As early as Friday, Aug. 26, as Katrina moved across the Gulf of Mexico, officials in the watch center at FEMA headquarters in Washington discussed the need for buses.
Someone said, "We should be getting buses and getting people out of there," recalled Leo V. Bosner, an emergency management specialist with 26 years at FEMA and president of an employees’ union. Others nodded in agreement, he said.
"We could all see it coming, like a guided missile," Bosner said of the storm. "We, as staff members at the agency, felt helpless. We knew that major steps needed to be taken fast, but, for whatever reasons, they were not taken."
When the water rose, the state began scrambling to find buses. Officials pleaded with various parishes across the state for school buses. But by Tuesday, Aug. 30, as news reports of looting and violence appeared, officials began resisting.
But the slow pace and reports of desperation and violence at the Superdome led to the governor’s frustrated appeal in the state emergency center on Wednesday night.
Symbols of despair
The confluence of these planning failures and the levee breaks helped turn the Superdome and the Convention Center into deathtraps and symbols of the city’s despair.
Two-thirds of the 24,000 people huddled inside the Superdome were women, children or elderly, and many were infirm, said Lonnie C. Swain, an assistant police superintendent overseeing the 90 policemen who patrolled the facility with 300 troops from the Louisiana National Guard. And it didn’t take long for the stench of human waste to drive many people outside.
Swain said the Guard supplied water and food — two military rations a day. But despair mounted once people began lining up on Wednesday for buses expected early the next day, only to find them mysteriously delayed.
By Friday, the food and the water had run out. Violence also broke out.
By the time the last buses arrived on Saturday, he said, some children were so dehydrated that Guardsmen had to carry them out, and several adults died while walking to the buses. State officials said Saturday that a total of 10 people died in the Superdome.
At the Convention Center, the violence was much more pervasive.
"The only way I can describe it is as a completely lawless situation," said Winn, head of the police SWAT team.
Those entering the Superdome were searched for weapons. At the Convention Center — which took in a volatile mix of poor residents, well-to-do hotel guests and hospital workers and patients — there was no time for similar precautions. Gunfire became so routine that large SWAT teams had to storm the place nearly every night.
Winn said armed groups of 15 to 25 men terrorized the others, stealing cash and jewelry. He said policemen patrolling the center told him that a number of women had been dragged off by groups of men and gang-raped — and that murders were occurring.
Winn said the armed groups even sealed the police out of two of the center’s six halls, forcing the SWAT team to retake the territory.
One night, Winn said, the police department even came close to abandoning the convention halls — and giving up on the 15,000 there. He said a captain in charge of the regular police was preparing to evacuate the regular police by helicopter when 100 Guardsmen rushed over to help restore order.
Before the last people were evacuated that Saturday, several bodies were dumped near a door, and two or three babies died of dehydration. State officials said that 24 people died either inside or just outside the convention center.
The state officials said they did not have any information about how many of those deaths were homicides. Winn said that when his team made a final sweep of the building last Monday, it found three bodies, including one with stab wounds.
Winn said four of his men quit amid the horror. Other police officials said that nearly 10 regular officers at the Superdome and 15 to 20 at the Convention Center also quit, along with several hundred others across the city.
Winn said, most were "busting their asses" and hung in heroically. Of the terror and lawlessness, he added, "I just didn’t expect for it to explode the way it did."
As the city become paralyzed, so did the response by government. The fractured division of responsibility — Blanco controlled state agencies and the National Guard, Nagin directed city workers and Brown, the head of FEMA, served as the point man for the federal government — meant no one person was in charge.
People watching on television saw the often-haggard governor, the voluble mayor and the usually upbeat FEMA chief appear at competing daily press briefings and interviews.
The power-sharing arrangement was by design, and as the days wore on, it would prove disastrous.
"Our typical role is to work with the state in support of local and state agencies," said David Passey, a FEMA spokesman.
That meant the agency most experienced in dealing with disasters and with access to the greatest resources followed, rather than led.
Stuck in Atlanta
The heart-rending pictures broadcast from the Gulf Coast drew offers of every possible kind of help. But FEMA found itself accused repeatedly of putting bureaucratic niceties ahead of getting aid to those who desperately needed it.
Hundreds of firefighters who responded to a nationwide call for help in the disaster were held by the federal agency in Atlanta for days of training on community relations and sexual harassment before being sent to the devastated areas.
William D. Vines, a former mayor of Fort Smith, Ark., helped deliver food and water to areas hit by the hurricane. But he said FEMA halted two trailer trucks carrying thousands of bottles of water to Camp Beauregard, near Alexandria, La., a staging area for the distribution of supplies.
"FEMA would not let the trucks unload," Vines said in an interview. "The drivers were stuck for several days on the side of the road about 10 miles from Camp Beauregard."
Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., who interceded on behalf of Vines, said, "All our congressional offices have had difficulty contacting FEMA. Governors’ offices have had difficulty contacting FEMA." When Arkansas repeatedly offered to send buses and planes to evacuate people displaced by flooding: "They were told they could not go. I don’t really know why."
On Aug. 31, Sheriff Edmund M. Sexton, Sr., Tuscaloosa County Sheriff and president of the National Sheriffs’ Association, sent out an alert urging members to pitch in.
"Folks were held up two, three days while they were working on the paperwork," he said.
Some sheriffs refused to wait. In Wayne County, Mich., which includes Detroit, Sheriff Warren C. Evans got a call from Sexton on Sept.1.
The next day, he led a convoy of six tractor-trailers, three rental trucks and 33 deputies.
"I could look at CNN and see people dying, and I couldn’t in good conscience wait for a coordinated response," Evans said. He dropped off food, water and medical supplies, and by Sept. 3, the Michigan team was conducting search and rescue missions. "We lost thousands of lives that could have been saved."
AI
