ON THE previous three anniversaries of Sept. 11, 2001, we claimed to honor the victims through a mix of memory, resolve and a commitment to make sure that this never happened again. But now, four years after that day that we thought marked the greatest catastrophe of our generation, another tragedy has proven that this country is still all but incapable of protecting its citizens from and responding to disasters.
Our pledge of "never again" has proven to be a hollow one.
This year we continue to wave flags and claim to honor those who lost their lives on Sept. 11, but in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina it is clear that we have paid them the greatest dishonor imaginable: We allowed them to die in vain.
One of the most frustrating aspects of the entire catastrophe is that unlike the planes that seemingly came out of nowhere on Sept. 11, Katrina practically announced it was coming. People had known for years that southern Louisiana and especially New Orleans were vulnerable to hurricanes and the flooding they might bring because of sinking land and chronic coastal erosion. In June 2002, the New Orleans Times-Picayune ran a series called "Washing Away," which reported among other admonishments that the Army Corps of Engineers said that the levees would probably hold in the event of a category 3 storm (Katrina was a category 4 when it made landfall), but it was tough to tell because they hadn't revised their estimates since 1960. A New York Times article from later that summer quotes the American Red Cross saying that a category 4 or 5 storm would be estimated to cause "100,000 deaths... Property loss estimates run as high as $150 billion." The article also prophetically mentions the "thorny issue of the 100,000 residents without cars" who would need to be evacuated. It says that while some progress has been made to solve these problems, it's been difficult to squeeze any help out of Washington, where "disaster dollars are being earmarked for homeland security."
But doesn't responding to domestic disasters fall under the heading of homeland security? The Bush administration certainly seemed to think so when it folded the Federal Emergency Management Agency into the monolithic Department of Homeland Security. Engineered by White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card in 2002, the DHS was designed to provide "one-stop shopping" for state and local officials who needed to gather information quickly without being stalled by the usual red tape. It's now clear that not only has FEMA gotten lost in the "bureaucratic shuffle," as Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., once called it, but that the agency has suffered greatly from being staffed with inexperienced partisan hacks rather than qualified professionals. Michael Brown, the now former head of FEMA whose experience consisted mainly of (poorly) managing a horse-breeding complex and campaigning for Bush, was only one incompetent politico among many in an agency where five of eight of the top officials "came to their posts with virtually no experience in handling disasters," The Washington Post reported last week.
But this goes far beyond any one agency. It seems that no one in a position of power in either Louisiana or Washington had any real strategy for coping with a worst-case scenario, and whatever strategies they had quickly fell apart. Back in 2000, Louisiana officials created a "State Emergency Operations Plan," which contained highly detailed procedures for evacuating the greater New Orleans area. According to Slate magazine, however, the plan has barely been looked at since and was almost completely ignored throughout the crisis. The DHS's planning for this type of disaster seems even more inept. In July 2004, 70 officials from 18 agencies within the DHS met and produced a manual entitled "Planning Scenarios Created for Use in National, Federal, State, and Local Homeland Security Preparedness Activities." One of the scenarios detailed in the manual is a major hurricane, but it reads like something they pulled out of an encyclopedia article on hurricanes. What's scary is that the other chapters on terror attacks are just as unhelpful.
On Wednesday, the former members of the 9/11 Commission released a supplementary report that slammed the federal government for failing to enact recommended reforms that would have saved lives and greatly improved the overall response to Katrina, especially when local officials were overwhelmed and unable to communicate with each other and the federal government. Republican Thomas H. Kean, the former New Jersey governor who headed the commission, summed up the sentiments of the commission and the nation: "What makes you mad is that it's the same things we saw on 9/11. Whoever is responsible for acting in these places hasn't acted. Are they going to do it now? What else has to happen for people to act?"
A.J. Kornblith's column appears Fridays in the Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at akornblith@cavalierdaily.com.
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