New Orleans' vulnerability to hurricanes after Hurricane Katrina

New Orleans is a city still ill-Equipped to face future storms.

From the federal, state, and local government to the geography of New Orleans and its unstable levees, Hurricane Katrina on August 29, 2005 was a disaster in more ways than just the physical damage. It is possible that if another category 3+ storm strikes that city, the damage and loss could be just as great as it was four years ago.

Katrina

In order to understand the magnitude of what might happen in the future, it is imperative that we understand the level of disaster Hurricane Katrina wrought on New Orleans, southeast Louisiana, and the state of Mississippi.

On Wednesday, August 24, 2005, a tropical storm rising in the Caribbean was named Katrina. On Thursday, August 25, a day later, the tropical storm grew to the size of a hurricane. Later that day, Katrina made the shore of the east coast of Florida killing four people and leaving about 1,000,000 Floridians without power.

On Saturday, August 27, Katrina grew to a category 3 hurricane in the middle of the night. The path of the hurricane switched and was projected to hit New Orleans. On Sunday, August 28, Katrina was upgraded to a category 4 hurricane during the night, with winds that exceeded 145 mph. That morning Katrina grew to a category 5, which is the most catastrophic of all hurricanes. On Monday, August 29, 2005 Katrina made landfall in Mississippi and Louisiana where levees were breached and the city began to flood.

The city of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast had been warned two days earlier that the deadly storm had them in its crosshairs.

Despite the warning, 1,500 people died and more than 500 people are still missing. Four thousand people had to be rescued by the Coast Guard and others immediately after the storm. Twenty-six thousand people were sheltered in the Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Center.

Thousands of others found their own way to high ground and safety. About 1000 people per hour were evacuated from the city as soon as the airport became operational.

Within two days of the storm 80% of the city flooded with water up to 15-20 feet deep. Several levees broke, including the Industrial Canal, the London Avenue Canal floodwall, and the 17th Street Canal.

It took three days for Federal Emergency Management Director Michael Brown to realize that people had been evacuated to the Convention Center. He was forced to resign his position two weeks later. And, it was three days after the storm hit that the first "real" federal government response was felt or heard.

The best estimates of property damage ring in at about $75 billion. As of late 2008, 327,000 of 500,000 residents had returned to the city. A recent poll taken in New Orleans indicates that almost 33% of current residents are planning on leaving the city by late 2010.

The Levees -- Before Katrina

Often blamed, and rightfully so, for the flooding of over 80% of the city, the levee system failed. New Orleans is surrounded by three bodies of water: The Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi River, and huge Lake Pontchartrain. The city has thrived about six feet below the level of the Gulf, ever since Jean Baptiste La Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, founded it in 1718 as the capital of Louisiana and as a fortress to control the wealth of the North American interior.

Little known is that fact that the Mississippi actually flows perched on a ridge above most of the city and 10-15 feet above sea level. Much of modern New Orleans is built on muck, with no solid bedrock until a depth of seventy feet is reached below the surface. Finally, New Orleans is built on land that is gradually, in some cases even rapidly, sinking.

The levee system that protects New Orleans is essential during normal times, and critical during tropical storms or hurricanes of 3+ magnitude. The bowl-like shape of New Orleans prevents water from draining away, as broken levees continue to allow water to flow into city streets. No one was sure how long it would take to pump out floodwaters once the levees were repaired. "It was fully recognized by officials [before Katrina] that we had Category Three [hurricane] level of protection," said Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, chief of engineers for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been building levees along the Mississippi River

since the late 1800s. The artificial, re-enforced soil embankments are designed to curb periodic and destructive floods. But determining the level of protection needed vs. what Congress and the public are willing to pay for isn't often easy. Acceptable risks must be weighed, including the statistical likelihood of catastrophic events and the possible consequences if they do occur, according to U.S. Army Corps of Engineers officials.

All of the public priorities having to do with safety have to be assessed against the price of protecting against a natural disaster. All of the environmental factors are argued, and every involved and interested party from both government and private sectors weighs in. After all is said and done, congress and their funding levels for that particular budget are the determining factor in how high the embankments in New Orleans, or anywhere else, will reach and what amount of risk is acceptable.

However, other sources state that it indeed was the fault of the Corps of Engineers who bungled the job at the levees, and that the Corps managed to wreak havoc on the wetlands that act as a natural defense for the city.

According to a report by Michael Grunwald of Time-CNN, "Before Katrina, the Corps was spending more in Louisiana than in any other state, but much of it was going to wasteful and destructive pork instead of protection for New Orleans.

Grunwald goes on to say that a series of investigations after Katrina attacked the Corps and Lt. Gen. Strock for slapdash and careless engineering including building flimsy floodwalls in water-soaked soil based on badly flawed analysis. "By the time Strock resigned and admitted the Corps' 'catastrophic failure' eight months after the storm," says Grunwald, "the U.S. had moved on." Grunwald concludes that, "The most important thing to remember about the drowning of New Orleans is that it wasn't a natural disaster. It was a man-made disaster, created by lousy engineering, misplaced priorities and pork-barrel politics."

If we compare Grunwald's report to others, including the official Report of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, we find many similarities.

The Senate Committee report states that "the building of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet and the combined Gulf Intercoastal Waterway channel [by the Corps] resulted in substantial environmental damage including significant loss of wetlands which had once formed a natural barrier against hurricanes threatening New Orleans from the east."

It also dinged the Army Corps of Engineers for "creating a connection between Lake Borgne and Lake Pontchartrain that allowed much greater surge from Borgne to flow into both the city and Lake Pontchartrain. These channels also increased the speed and flow of the Katrina surge into the East and Ninth Ward/St. Bernard Parish, increasing the destructive force against adjacent levees and contributing to their failure."

A close look at the Senate Committee's report shows at least eight different findings of mismanagement concerning the levees alone. Many of these problems center around confusion of who was in charge of the levee and floodwall system. The New Orleans Levee District, The Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development, The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers,

plus additional local, state and national groups were all held responsible for the failure of the system during Katrina.

But the Senate Committee report was much more specific than mismanagement concerning the levee system. It is worthy of quoting the report as to why, specifically, the levees failed:

"In designing constructing and maintaining the hurricane-protection system,

the Corps did not adequately address: (a) the effects of local and regional subsidence of land upon with the protection system was built; and (b) then-

current information about the threat posed by storm surges and hurricanes in the region."

"For several years, the Corps has inaccurately represented to state and local officials and to the public the level of protection that the hurricane system provided. The Corps claimed the system protected against a fast-moving

Category 3 storm even though: (a) there was no adequate study or documentation to support this claim; and (b) information known to or provided to the Corps demonstrated that the claim was not accurate."

And the Levees Now

So, what does all that matter regarding the city's preparedness for the next big storm? Certainly, it's all been remedied.

CBS News, on April 24, 2009 reported that, "Levees under construction by the Army Corps of Engineers [around New Orleans] aren't being built to a high-enough flood protection standard, according to a report by the National Academy of Engineering and the National Research Council."

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is currently at work in the city on a project to increase the height of the levees and construct floodgates, at a cost of over $12 billion. This work will be able to protect from a "100-year" storm as they are called -- dangerous but not severe -- with a 1-in-100 chance of hitting in any given year. It is estimated it will take two more years to finish.

"For heavily-populated urban areas, where the failure of protective structures would be catastrophic -- such as New Orleans -- this standard is inadequate," the report said.

This independent group urges that the city should have either 500-year or possibly even 1,000-year levees and floodwalls. They insist that the same kind of engineering standards utilized in earthquake zones should be used in New Orleans.

And there is more. Because of this future vulnerability to flooding, the panel asks that the city consider not allowing the population to reside in those areas vulnerable to the flooding. They especially target those areas of New Orleans that are below sea-level which is about 49%

of the city. The point made by the report is that New Orleans is a unique situation, and living there means some risk. Good decisions about where to rebuild should be made.

However -- and here's the future -- Mayor Ray Nagin and others of the local government have stated that the government should not dictate where people can live. As a result, the city, according to Maggie Merrill, Nagin's director of policy, meets with the Army Corps of Engineers regularly, and the city itself is "trying to rebuild its facilities higher and stronger."

This is not good news since the Army Corps of Engineers estimates that the 350 miles of levees and breastworks protecting the city might take, according to their estimates, 20-25 years to complete to upgrade to Category Four or Five storm status.

Martin McCann, a civil and environmental engineering professor at Stanford University in California, warns that even that long-term planning may not account for changes to the risk equation. "As further development goes on behind levees, over decades you need to revisit the question and say, are those levees providing us the protection that we wanted?" he said. "The answer is probably no, because the exposure is probably greater. The number of people and the [amount of] valuable property [behind the levees] is greater."

Many of the same coastal scientists and engineers who sounded alarms about the vulnerability of New Orleans long before Katrina are warning that the Army Corps is poised to repeat its mistakes -- and extend them along the entire Louisiana coast. If you liked Katrina, they say, you'll love what's coming next.

There are quite a number of geologists, geographers, and engineers who agree with the assessment that New Orleans cannot just be rebuilt on "old" ground. They recommend a number of measures such as relocating part of the city to higher ground, limiting where people can rebuild their homes, moving the outer-edge "sprawl" that exists so that the cypress swamp can regenerate itself as a buffer zone for the city, or increasing taxes of some sort to pay for the natural disaster that is sure to follow.

Communication

"The shriek of Katrina's 140 mph winds and rat-a-tat-tat of its driving, torrential rain left in its tumultuous wake a coast silenced by vast devastation. Darkness ruled not just night but day, as the electric grid crash darkened shelters and the lights of fiber-optic cable went off in an instant. Cell towers fell, broadcast stations were yanked off the air, and the voices of a great city fell silent. The city, and parts of the Gulf Coast as well, simply dropped off the globally networked web of voice, data and video communications that define societal participation in the Information Age."

The loss of communications was massive and unprecedented. The FCC eventually added up what the real communication losses were in the path of Hurricane Katrina. Three million customer lines, over one thousand cell sites (towers), and 37 or 41 radio stations lost in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama due to the wrath of Katrina. More than 30% of all cell sites were lost. Fortunately, satellite carriers were able to provide first responders with video and audio communication.

Again, we're looking at the foresight and planning that would indicate to us that this country has learned its lesson and is ready for the next big natural disaster. And what is disappointing was that they had the same type of massive communication failures, though on a much smaller scale, during the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and those communication difficulties were well-known by federal, state and local governments. New Orleans had communication problems during their FEMA exercise a few months before -- but it happened again.

Actually, this is mostly the fault of the local and state level of government. The question is why, once they had identified that satellite phone systems might be the only reliable form of communication, didn't local/state governments purchase the satellite phones? A few hundred of these phones, which any state can afford at about $1,000 each, would have resolved most of the problems experienced with communication and, as a result, coordination of efforts during and after Hurricane Katrina.

As a matter of fact, New Orleans did have quite a few of the satellite phones, in a box, in Mayor Ray Nagin's office. He complained that none of them worked. Later it was determined that the phones and the system were fine, but neither Mayor Nagin, nor anyone else had been trained to use them properly!

Will they in time for the next storm?

The White House report on Katrina said this: "The complete devastation of the communications infrastructure left responders without a reliable network to use for coordinating emergency response operations." No. Not quite true, if lessons had been learned from previous experience. There was a network, but no one planned to have the proper equipment and know how to use it.

The Roles of Different Levels of Government

During a normal emergency, the responsibility for response starts at the lowest level of government -- in this case the city of New Orleans. It is then the city's responsibility to request help from the state and the state from the federal government. However, in the case of a massive natural disaster such as Katrina, the lines are blurred since the magnitude of emergency, by definition, exceeds the local and state level capability to handle it. Therefore, the federal government would be expected to step in more quickly and with greater support. That should have been the case with Hurricane Katrina.

There is no question that all levels of government from the President of the U.S. down to New Orleans' Mayor Ray Nagin, dropped the ball. Despite all the warnings and the knowledge of the potential for great damage, no one seemed to realize the magnitude of the impending disaster -- the Dept. Of Homeland Security, FEMA, and Governor Blanco of Louisiana included.

The federal and Louisiana state governments had been much involved in the same FEMA disaster exercise that New Orleans had participated in a few months before Katrina. Though, once again, there were significant lessons learned from the exercise, the draft plans to correct the problems was not complete by the time Katrina hit. However, the knowledge of the lessons learned was or should have been applied when the hurricane struck Louisiana and Mississippi.

Contrary to widely spread rumors, the governors of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama did request emergency declarations prior to Katrina hitting the coast, and President Bush had granted those requests.

But however vigorous these preparations, ineffective leadership, poor advance planning and an unwillingness to devote sufficient resources to emergency management over the long-term doomed them to fail when Katrina struck. Again, lessons learned ignored.

Post-Katrina Evacuation

Over 20,000 people "living in four levels of hell." That's the way one survivor described the interior of the Superdome after Katrina. All of the urinals and toilets were overflowing, reeking of all sorts of foul odors, and unusable. Two bottles of drinking water a day for each adult. No running water at all could be found; there was none to be found anywhere in the city. Those who had a cot used them to fence off their little corner of the stadium floor. People having sex in the third level skyboxes; and somehow a small "speak-easy" got started somewhere in the stands with beer flowing for the drunks. Families hovered with their children in 100+ degree heat and dark because, of course, no electricity meant no lights and no cooling. Sometimes there was enough military meals-ready-to-eat -- but sometimes not. Many spent almost a week living like animals in those conditions while the city, state and federal government haggled over finding buses to evacuate them.

Overwhelmed, the city and state turned to FEMA and Michael Brown since they had made no plans of their own. Brown assured them 500 buses were on their way that same day. They weren't.

For the next two days, Governor Blanco repeatedly requested the buses. She had to since her own Department of Transportation and Development had made absolutely no preparation for its evacuation role under the state's emergency plan. It was not until Wednesday evening that the first buses trickled in, and not until Thursday that any quantity of them began to appear. Many thousands lived in those unspeakably horrible conditions until the weekend.

Will the same thing happen next time? During the FEMA exercise, these same transportation problems had stymied the then test evacuation of the superdome. Lessons learned? Evidently not.

Law Enforcement

Probably one of the most public and worst nightmares of the Katrina aftermath were the dozens of rumors spreading about lawlessness, riots, looting, and random shots fired by snipers and gangs at police, search & rescue helicopters, FEMA personnel, and critical suppliers of food and water.

Unfortunately, the rumors were far worse than the actual events. For every one actual incident, dozens of rumors and false announcements by public officials magnified the situation to the point that some rescue activities came to a halt until military escort could be provided.

In addition, at all levels of government, no one bothered to make a significant effort to stop the rumor mill, which added to the belief with the public that it all had to be true.

The fact was that the catastrophic damage from Katrina brought the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) temporarily to its knees as it did every other agency within the city. However, the idea that dozens of police officers were not reporting for duty, and so criminals were running amok in the city, were false. The truth was that, though some, officers could not reach their stations in a timely manner, most could and did, and worked effectively and tirelessly to both protect and rescue the citizens of New Orleans.

But, once again, despite previous warnings and the FEMA exercise in addition to extensive police emergency training, the leadership of the NOPD had not planned ahead to be able to provide its officers with food, water, and ammunition that they knew would be wiped out with a major storm. There was no unified command of the situation, and the city's Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP) offered little leadership or assistance.

And federal law-enforcement and assistance was very slow in coming -- mostly because the two departments assigned to the task under the National Rescue Plan had done no pre-storm planning. And nothing happened until well past Katrina's landfall because the two agencies couldn't decide who should be in charge of the operation. In the midst of this terrible situation, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice carried on a "turf" war over leadership of federal law enforcement in New Orleans.

Conclusion

The Report of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs reads like a National Rescue Plan nightmare.

But it would be unfair to say that nothing good happened during those days before and after the storm hit. Agencies like the U.S. Coast Guard conducted "heroic and effective search and rescue efforts" to pull hundreds, if not thousands of citizens to safety from rooftops all over the city. They could do so due to their planning and training for such as exercise and the lessons learned from the FEMA exercise. The New Orleans Police Department and Fire Department also provided massive, effective, selfless aid and assistance to their citizens while still worried about their own families and homes. Many private citizens and organizations pitched in immediately after the disaster to restore essential services and provide aid and assurance.

To quote from the Senate Report:

"These successes shared some important traits. The Coast Guard and certain private sector businesses both conducted extensive planning and training for disasters, and they put that preparation into use when disaster struck. Both moved material assets and personnel out of harm's way as the storm approached, but kept them close enough to the front lines for quick response after it passed.

Perhaps most important, both had empowered front-line leaders who were able to make decisions when they needed to be made."

The major failures of Katrina were all the levels of government that did not do what these successful organizations did. Lessons learned did not happen. Will they do better next time?

We only know what New Orleans, the state of Louisiana, and the federal government have shown us so far -- an incapability to learn from previous experience. There is no doubt that Hurricane Katrina was one of the most devastating natural disasters experienced by this country in modern history. It is understandable that, temporarily, systems might shut down under the stunning, overwhelming power of the catastrophe.

However, after Katrina struck, the pain and anguish went on far too long. And the reason that happened can be contributed to the failure of our governments, at all levels, to plan, prepare for and respond aggressively to the havoc. The failures, as the Senate Report points out "were not just conspicuous; they were pervasive."

Crying wolf? Consider California and the massive earthquake that we have all known will strike with 99% certainty within the next 29 years -- and is now 150 years overdue. Warnings issued. Plenty of experience based on hundreds of previous quakes in that state. A huge earthquake drill held just last year including citizens of the state. (Sound familiar?) The federal, state, and local governments all know that "within the next 29 years" could mean tomorrow.

"In Japan and Mexico, researchers have developed earthquake early warning systems, which can detect seismic activity and trigger a sequence of automated responses -- shutting off gas mains, conditioning the electrical grid for what's going to happen. In hospital situations, especially during surgery, there's a lot you can do. But in the United States, the outlook is even worse, since no such earthquake early warning system exists, though some preliminary research is underway. "Right now, we're just fiddling with the concepts."

Case closed.