Chasing Phantoms: Reality, Imagination, and Homeland Security Since 9/11

FOUR: HURRICANE KATRINA, UNSEEN DANGERS, AND THE ALL-HAZARDS POLICY

55 four HURRICANEKATRINA,UNSEENDANGERS, ANDTHEALL-HAZARDSPOLICY It may seem perverse to connect the flooding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 with unseen dangers. The hurricane was all too visible , shown on millions of television sets in the garish colors of weather radar while it was well out to sea. The events in New Orleans itself seem remote from the domain of unseen dangers. The proximate cause of the devastation was less the hurricane itself than the failure of the levees that protected those portions of the city below sea level. The human suffering came to be seen as a consequence less of the levee breaks than of the ineptitude of those charged with aiding victims. Only later did it become clear that in addition to the failures of rescuers, the levees themselves broke because they had been improperly designed and constructed. Had they been correctly built, they would easily have withstood Katrina. Whether one focuses upon the failings of rescuers or engineers, however, the New Orleans calamity looks less like a natural and more like an anthropogenic disaster, and an unintentional one at that. Hence it would seem to fall clearly outside the confines of this book. However, if we look at the failures of those charged with aiding actual and potential victims and track those failures back through national policy decisions made years before Katrina, it turns out that what happened in New Orleans flowed from assumptions about unseen dangers. Those assumptions were woven into the fabric of New Orleans decisionmaking in complex ways, easily overlooked in a superficial narrative of events. Such a narrative might more easily emphasize the role of Michael 56 Hurricane Katrina and the All-Hazards Policy Brown, then director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Without wishing to exculpate Brown, whose failures were numerous , there is merit to his claim that he was made a scapegoat.1 For the failures were less individual failures than they were systemic failures. To grasp the manner in which systemic failures grew out of earlier policy choices, we must move backward through the following stages: from the role of Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, to the National Response Plan (NRP) put in place by his predecessor, to the presidential directive that called the National Response Plan into being, and, finally, to the “allhazards ” policy to which the presidential directive sought to give effect. The Role of Secretary Chertoff and the National Response Plan We know a good deal about Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff ’s actions during the period of Hurricane Katrina, not only because of subsequent Senate and House hearings but because transcripts are available of video conferences held on the critical days of August 28 and 29, 2005. These conferences linked all relevant federal, state, and local officials. The hurricane passed into the Gulf of Mexico on the 26th. By the 27th, Mayor Ray Nagin had declared a state of emergency in New Orleans and issued a voluntary evacuation order. The order became mandatory the following day. By that time, lines had begun to form at the Superdome where there were already 10,000 people inside. The levees broke on the 29th, the day Katrina made landfall, although the hurricane came ashore east of the city. By August 30th, much of New Orleans was under water, and there was widespread looting. Any regular CNN viewer would have had a clearer picture of developments on the ground than someone listening to the reports of the conferees. With the exception of the weather briefing given by Max Mayfield, then director of the National Hurricane Center, the conferences consisted largely of descriptions of developments within the reporting bureaucracies , not all of them accurate. The conferences were dominated by Michael Brown of FEMA. In both video conferences, Secretary Chertoff appeared only briefly, near the end, when he delivered perfunctory remarks, in which he thanked the participants and asked whether there was anything further that he could do.2 These comments might be dismissed as the platitudes expected of a senior official speaking to line officers were it not for the matter of the NRP. Hurricane Katrina and the All-Hazards Policy 57 The National Response Plan was a creation of Chertoff’s predecessor as secretary, Tom Ridge, issued in December 2004. Although the drafters envisioned phased implementation over periods of 60–120 days—that is, extending into the spring of 2005—implementation could...