Hurricane Katrina was the costliest and one of the deadliest hurricanes in American history. It was the eleventh named storm, fifth hurricane, third major hurricane and second Category 5 hurricane of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season, and was the sixth strongest Atlantic hurricane ever recorded. Katrina formed over the Bahamas on August 23, 2005, and crossed southern Florida as a moderate Category 1 hurricane before strenthening rapidly in the Gulf of Mexico and becoming, at that time, the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Gulf.
The storm weakened considerably before making ist second landfall as a Category 3 storm on the morning of August 29 in southeat Louisiana (Knabb, Rhome, and Brown, 1). It is possible that Katrina was the largest hurricane of its strength to approach the United States in recorded history; its sheer size caused devastation over 100 miles from the center. The storm surge caused major or catastrophic damage along the coastlines of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, including the cities of Mobile, Alabama, Biloxi and Gulfport, Mississippi, and Slidell, Louisiana.Levees separating Lake Pontchartain from New Orleans, Louisiana were breached by the surge, ultimately flooding roughly 80% of the city and many areas of neighboring parishes.
Severe wind damage was reported well inland. According to Boston. com, Katrina is estimated to be responsible for $105 billion (2005 US Dollars) in damages, making it the costliest hurricane in U. S. history. As of March 20, 2006, the confirmed death toll stood at 1,604, mainly from Louisiana (1,293) and Mississippi (238), making it the deadliest U.
S. hurricane since the 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane.The aftermath Some disaster recovery response to Katrina began before the storm, with Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) preparations that ranged from logistical supply deployments to a mortuary team with refrigerated trucks. A network of volunteers began rendering assistance to local residents and residents emerging from New Orleans and surrounding Parishes as soon as the storm made landfall, and has continued for more than six months after the storm.In accordance with federal law, President George W. Bush directed Secretary Michael Chertoff of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to coordinate the Federal response.
Chertoff designated Michael D. Brown, head of FEMA, as the primary federal official to lead the deployment and coordination of all federal response resources and forces in the Gulf Coast region. However, the President and Secretary Chertoff have come under harsh criticism for their lack of planning and coordination. Eight days later, CNN reported that Brown was recalled to Washington and Coast Guard Vice Admiral Thad W.
Allen replaced him as chief of hurricane relief operations.Three days after the recall, another newspaper reported that Michael D. Brown resigned as director of FEMA in spite of having received praise from President George W. Bush.
Later, leaked video footage and transcripts of top-level briefings during the week before the storm indicate that federal officials did inform Bush and Chertoff of the danger of levee breaches. Chertoff, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, decided to take over the federal, state, and local operations officially on August 30, 2005, going forward by citing the National Response Plan.The National Response Plan states that, "when responding to a catastrophic incident, the federal government should start emergency operations even in the absence of clear assessment of the situation. " "A detailed and credible common operating picture may not be achievable for 24 to 48 hours (or longer) after the incident," the NRP's "Catastrophic Annex" states.
"As a result, response activities must begin without the benefit of a detailed or complete situation and critical needs assessment. "On September 2, Washington Post reported that Congress had authorized $10. 5 billion in aid for victims. A few days later, on September 7, another $51.
8 billion in aid was approved, bringing the total to $62. 3 billion. Additionally, President Bush enlisted the help of former presidents Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush to raise additional voluntary contributions, much as they did after the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. Many U.
S. states have offered to shelter refugees displaced by the storm, including places as far away as Oregon and California.The majority of the refugees were taken to Texas, with over 230,000 people taking shelter in Houston by September 5, 2005. As Texas shelters became filled to capacity, it became a waypoint for the other refugees still leaving the area of crisis. From Texas, thousands of refugees have been dispersed to other states. Two weeks after the storm, over half of the States were involved in providing shelter for refugees.
By four weeks after the storm, refugees had been registered in all 50 states and in 18,700 zip codes - half of the nation's residential postal zones.Most refugees had stayed within 250 miles, but 240,000 households went to Houston and other cities over 250 miles away and another 60,000 households went over 750 miles away. CNN reported that approximately 58,000 National Guard personnel were also activated to deal with the storm's aftermath, with troops coming from all 50 states. Could Katrina have been prevented? Reviewing the deficient preparations, sluggish response and fumbled relief that marred the local, state and federal response, experts say bad decisions defined official efforts before and after Katrina struck.Criticism of government response to Hurricane Katrina primarily consisted of condemnations of lack of preparations, mismanagement, and lack of leadership in the relief effort in response to Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, especifically in the delayed response to the flooding of New Orleans. For instance, just as it revealed the levee system’s deficiencies, Katrina’s rage exposed weak links in the government’s response to natural disasters, reaching all the way up the chain of command.
Years before the storm hit, officials and scientists were imagining not whether, but how, disaster would ultimately descend on New Orleans.Experts had long predicted that if a severe hurricane hit the city, a flood surge would tear through the delicate levee system, engulf whole neighborhoods, and kill thousands. Now that the doomsday scenario has made landfall, say critics, the full weight of official neglect is finally coming to bear: from an insufficient water infrastructure, to inadequate evacuation and shelter provisions, to a tragic lack of foresight in environmental policies – Katrina set in motion a cascade of logistical failures that had loomed for generations.Within days of Katrina's August 29, 2005 landfall, public debate arose about local, state and federal governments' role in the preparations for and response to the storm. Criticism was prompted largely by televised images of visibly shaken and frustrated political leaders, and of residents who remained in New Orleans without water, food or shelter; and the deaths of several citizens of thirst, exhaustion, and violence days after the storm itself had passed. Others have alleged that race, class, and other factors perhaps even deliberately contributed to preventing help by others while delaying its own response.
The federal government's planning and response, under President Bush's leadership, initially faced the harshest criticism. Subsequently, criticism from politicians, activists, pundits and journalists of all stripes has been directed at the local, state and federal governments. President Bush has also faced criticism from across the political spectrum, for his personal performance before and after the disaster, over possible effects his policies of the previous four years may have had on emergency preparedness, and as the leader of an administration seen by many to have failed in this situation.The devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina has raised other, more general public policy issues about emergency management, environmental policy, poverty, and unemployment. The discussion of both the immediate response and of the broader public policy issues may affect elections and legislation enacted at various levels of government.
The ease with which Katrina’s floodwaters tore through the New Orleans levee configuration has also prompted many to question the adequacy of the nation’s public works infrastructures.Since 2001, Congress has cumulatively allotted $250 million to Louisiana for flood mitigation projects – only half of the roughly $500 million requested by the state, but about 50 percent more than what Bush originally proposed. Funding shortfalls in the 2005 and 2006 budget plans have stymied levee and flood control projects run by the Army Corps of Engineers, the country’s primary public works agency, forcing it to stop issuing new contracts for construction on some of the city’s hurricane protection structures.But according to the Corps, even if fully funded, the current projects would not have prevented the three levee breakages that ushered in the deluge. Corps spokesperson Candy Walters told The NewStandard, "None of the projects that were on the books, or any of the repair work that we were doing, had any impact on the levees that were breached.
" Moreover, the Corps has pointed out that the array of levees was not even built to withstand waters surging from a hurricane of Katrina’s magnitude.Evidence that the levees were inadequate by design has led critics to probe deeper problems leading up to the disaster. Hugh Kaufman, a policy analyst and investigator with the Environmental Protection Agency, said that throughout the Gulf Coast region, "rather than beefing up, over the last four or five years, the protections for that area, they were diminished substantially… for the Iraq War, tax cuts for the upper brackets, etc. "According to studies conducted in 2001 and 2002 for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), rising sea levels and erosion of coastal land has steadily pushed places like New Orleans further into the path of storms and hurricanes. The research, carried out by the environmental institute Heinz Center, showed that the Gulf Coast states had the fastest rates of erosion in the country, with coastlines narrowing by six feet on average each year.Simultaneously, wetlands habitats – the natural buffer against storm surges – have been eaten away by rising sea levels, oil exploitation and construction along the Mississippi River and Gulf Coast.
According to Melissa Samet, senior director of Water Resources with the environmental advocacy group American Rivers, while stronger natural barriers might not have fully absorbed Katrina’s impact, "if the wetlands had been there, the city would have been in better shape today. "Samet pointed out that much of the depletion of Louisiana’s wetlands "can be traced very directly to" construction of the levees themselves, part of a patchwork of environmentally disruptive infrastructure projects. Following the allegations surrounding the tragedy, a House Select Committee issued a report on its investigations into the government’s preparations and response to Hurricane Katrina, months after it hit the United States. Around the same time, the Senate Homeland Security Committee was also doing its own investigation on the tragedy.
The 520-page report by the House committee contains a wealth of information on different aspects of the government’s lack of preparations and inadequate response. It would be well worth a serious examination as a partial exposition of the responsibility of Bush administration and other government officials in compounding the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, which destroyed most of the city of New Orleans and other parts of the Gulf Coast.The focus in both the House report and the Senate investigations has been on the incompetence of certain administration officials, particularly the former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Michael Brown, and DHS secretary Chertoff. The central lesson that the House report seeks to draw is that “Katrina was a failure of initiative. It was a failure of leadership.
” The report cites several examples of this failed leadership, including the absence of preparatory measures taken before the hurricane hit, even though the “crisis was not only predictable, it was predicted.”It states that “critical elements of the National Response Plan were executed late, ineffectively, or not at all” and that many of the problems created by the hurricane were not anticipated. Communications were hindered, medical personnel and supplies were not deployed, evacuations were delayed for days, housing plans were “haphazard and inadequate. ” According to the report, the blame for this state of affairs lies largely with certain officials who lacked “initiative.”In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the report states, the US was “again confronted with the vast divide between policy creation and policy implementation .
.. between theory and practice. ” In other words, what is at issue is the failure of the government to carry through on plans that had been drawn up, implementing the policies established as part of the “war on terrorism. ” The Senate investigations have proceeded along the same lines.
The Homeland Security Committee has heard testimony from a number of officials, including Brown and Chertoff.Brown’s main line of defense against charges of incompetence has been that he had in fact informed top administration officials early on about the magnitude of the disaster, and that he has been used as the scapegoat for wider governmental failures. On Wednesday, Chertoff responded to criticisms from senators by claiming that he had delegated responsibility to Brown who, he was given to understand, had everything under control. Taken together, the Senate testimony reveals a government in which no one much cared about what was going on in New Orleans, in which no one felt they had a particular responsibility for dealing with the crisis.Looking closely at the hearings, both the report and the Senate investigations are designed ultimately as whitewashes, obscuring the most essential questions raised by the hurricane – this according to the world socialist website in its analysis of the tragedy. There has, for example, been no examination of the role of social inequality and the consequences of decades of right-wing policies, as a result of which the maintenance of social infrastructure, such as the New Orleans levee system, has been ignored.
The House report, written by a committee composed entirely of Republicans, begins with a reference to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s statements about the inherent inefficiencies of “bureaucratic” as opposed to “entrepreneurial” government. This is a clear signal that there will be no proposals for increased spending on social programs or planning as a response to the conditions of poverty and infrastructural decay revealed by the hurricane.
