Katrina More Than A Natural Disaster

Joe Bell

Hurricane Katrina ravaged a large portion of the Gulf Coast, shattering lives and delivering a blow that will cost billions of dollars to recover from. In the storm’s wake the herd of liberal politicians have thundered forward demanding, in grating tones, to know why the Bush Administration did not respond faster.

Frankly, there are questions the Administration must address. On September 8 the Washington Post reported five of the eight top Federal Emergency Management Agency officials “came to their posts with virtually no experience in handling disasters and now lead an agency whose ranks of seasoned crisis managers have thinned dramatically since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.”

In good times it does not matter who leads a disaster agency. Anyone can steer a ship in good weather. But disaster agencies are not created for good times. When catastrophe strikes experience is not only convenient, it is imperative. Political patronage appointments to key positions is terrible policy.

For those looking to assign blame, there is plenty to go around. Former Washington state legislator Bob Williams reminded those who care to know that local and state officials, not the federal government, shoulder the main duty for responding to an emergency.

Writing for the Wall Street Journal OpinionJournal, Williams said responsibility “belongs to local and state officials who are charged by law with the management of crucial first response to disasters. First response should be carried out by local and state emergency personnel under the supervision of the state governor and his emergency operations center.”

(Let us remember they are the ones who would first respond to a terrorist attack.)

Williams, who represented the district that was most affected by the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980, said there were plans in place to evacuate more than 1 million people in the region that was hit by Katrina.

The system did not work and the fault does not lie with any one level of government or with any one political party. In the coming months solemn, self-righteous politicians will launch questions across tables littered with bottled water and reams of paper. They will grill the gaggle of officials who will be expected to answer their self-indulgent questions. The result will be a Katrina Commission report, similar no doubt in length to “The 9/11 Report.”

However, the most important question surfaces where the 9/11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina intersect. Everyone knew Katrina was coming. America knew where and when it was going to strike, yet the system could not respond. After the storm wrestled the region to the ground chaos and violence broke out among the population. If America cannot react effectively to an anticipated disaster, how will it respond to a terrorist attack that will explode without warning?

The Gulf Coast knew such a disaster was possible. From June 23 to 27, 2002, the New Orleans Times Picayune wrote a series about the impact of a major hurricane hitting the Gulf. It chronicled, years before Katrina, the consequences of such a storm.

The newspaper warned, “The combination of sinking land and rising seas has put the Mississippi River delta as much as 3 feet lower relative to sea level than it was a century ago and the process continues. …Storms that once would not have had much impact can now be devastating events and flooding penetrates to places where it rarely occurred before.”

It also said, “Coastal erosion has shaved barrier islands into slivers and turned marshland into open water, opening the way for hurricane winds and flooding to move inland.”

In one of the most chilling passages, the newspaper said, “The line of splintered planks, trash and seaweed scattered along the slope of New Orleans’ lakefront levees … in late September 1998 marked more than just the wake of Hurricane Georges. It measured the slender margin separating the city from mass destruction. The debris … showed that Georges, a category 2 storm that only grazed New Orleans, had pushed waves to within a foot of the top of the levees. A stronger storm on a slightly different course … could have realized emergency officials’ worst-case scenario: hundreds of billions of gallons of lake water pouring over the levees into an area averaging 5 feet below sea level with no natural means of drainage.”

The newspaper predicted the results: “Hundreds of thousands would be left homeless, and it would take months to dry out the area and begin to make it livable. But there wouldn’t be much for residents to come home to.”

That describes the aftermath of Katrina.

The newspaper reported Louisiana emergency officials had lobbied FEMA for years to study how they could best respond to New Orleans’ vulnerability. Exposing both state and local shortcomings the paper reported the city’s building code requires houses to be constructed to endure 100 mph winds, meaning a Category 2 hurricane could severely damage if not demolish most homes.

Despite years of warning a system was not in place to handle Katrina.

With respect to a terrorist attack Katrina gives concern that a WMD assault on a U.S. city would plunge the nation into pandemonium the likes of which would make the Gulf collapse seem tame by comparison.

Recall that in October and November 2001 less than half a dozen people in America died from an anthrax attack, yet that event caused about 30,000 people to receive preventive vaccinations, people were terrified and Washington spent millions of dollars on antibiotics. To this day it is unknown whether the event was a test for a future assault. America was unprepared for even a small WMD attack. The anthrax incident coupled with the aftereffects of Katrina make the lessons of the June 2001 exercise known as Dark Winter all the more crucial.

Dark Winter simulated a smallpox attack on America. It began with outbreaks in three states and concluded with smallpox cases in 25 states and more than a dozen other nations. The attack caused a breakdown of the U.S. economy, civil chaos, the collapse of civil institutions and the death of hundreds of thousands.

For years America has lived in a state of denial. To a large extent that remains the national address. Neither the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center nor subsequent attacks against facilities overseas convinced America that it was in a state of war. Today America’s borders remain porous and many containers entering U.S. ports are not inspected. The attitude that allows people to shrug off warnings about natural disasters is similar to that which allows them to shrug off man-made threats: Complacency.

America has been repeatedly warned that there is danger in the world and it can strike at any given moment. If the best we can do is blame the other party, hold hearings for the benefit of a television audience and then enact the easy-to-do parts of a commission report, then future cataclysms will be frequent and deadly and the bodies floating in flood waters are messengers of what lies ahead.

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Joseph Bell has hosted a radio talk show and is a former editorial writer/columnist for several Connecticut newspapers. A former liberal Democrat, Bell has not been on the conservative side of the aisle for very long. He voted for Clinton/Gore in 1992. Abandoning the convictions that he had held and defended through adolescence and into adulthood was not easy. Sincere soul-searching and a commitment to distinguish fact from fiction compelled him to accept that liberal ideology was bankrupt.

jbellopedresponse@hotmail.com