Katrina's assault on New Orleans.

In mid-August 2005, a small tropical disturbance (a migratory cluster of powerful thunderstorms) formed over the Atlantic Ocean east of the Lesser Antilles. At the start, there was nothing much to distinguish it from three other such disturbances then hovering over the south Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico. Even after it strengthened over the Bahamas and was christened Hurricane Katrina, it remained an unremarkable storm, a Category 1 on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale, with sustained winds of only 129 kilometers per hour (kph). Katrina struck the Florida coast between Miami and Fort Lauderdale on Thursday, August 25, causing 11 deaths but relatively minor damage.

But after traversing the Florida peninsula and entering the Gulf, Hurricane Katrina underwent a startling transformation. Over land, the storm had weakened to tropical storm strength. But Katrina soon moved over the Gulf loop current, a flow of warm water that acts as a heating element for hurricanes. In the space of a few hours on August 26, Katrina bulked up into a Category 3 hurricane. By Saturday, it had grown into a giant Category 5 storm, with top winds a furious 269 kph. Its clouds covered most of the Gulf of Mexico.

Hurricane Katrina was poised to become one of the biggest natural disasters, and the single costliest one, in American history--and to deliver a profound shock to the nation's sense of security. Katrina's storm surge wave devastated the Mississippi Gulf coast and nearly destroyed an entire city, New Orleans. When it was over, at least 1,836 people were dead and 237,000 homes were wrecked. One estimate put total damage at $150 billion.

But Katrina was much more than a natural event; human hands played a role in the damage and in the storm's equally disastrous aftermath. Katrina exposed deep institutional flaws in the nation's emergency response, supposedly upgraded following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. It easily overwhelmed the federal levee system, built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, that protected New Orleans and its nearby suburbs; investigations showed afterward the system was considerably weaker than the Corps had claimed and that serious engineering errors had been made in its construction. Katrina also dealt a serious blow to the standing of President George W. Bush, who had staked his presidency on his ability to protect the citizenry, yet seemed unable to muster a robust response to the storm.

Approach

Category 5 storms are relatively rare. But in the weeks before Katrina's appearance, the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season had turned exceptionally busy and violent--possibly, some atmospheric scientists concluded, because of higher sea surface temperatures linked to global warming (see "Black Water Rising," p. 26). Six weeks earlier, Hurricane Dennis had become the first Category 4 storm in history to appear before August, striking Mexico before making its final landfall on the Florida panhandle on July 10. Dennis was followed quickly by Hurricane Emily, which became a ferocious Category 5 storm and thrashed the Mexican coast in late July. Additional powerful storms followed, and forecasters were forced to revise their predictions for the rest of the season, doubling the number of storms anticipated.

On August 26, as Katrina gained size and strength in the Gulf of Mexico, National Hurricane Center forecasters watched in alarm as their computer models shifted its projected course steadily westward: it started over the Florida panhandle, moved across Alabama and Mississippi, then finally settled, like a bullseye, on New Orleans.

Of all the places a hurricane might strike in the United States, New Orleans was the single most vulnerable spot. The city was built on the Mississippi River delta, where the low-lying topography offered few obstacles to storm surges, the huge hurricane-driven domes of water that can flood vast areas when a storm moves ashore. New Orleans' Corps of Engineers-built system of hurricane levees was complex and extensive, but could only repel storm surges from relatively weak hurricanes--most Category 1 storms and some, but not all, Category 2 and 3 storms. Scientists, emergency managers, and elected officials had known for years that if a Category 4 or 5 storm hit New Orleans head-on, the city could be destroyed as the surge wave overtopped levees and flooded inhabited areas. Perversely, the levees and floodwalls built to protect the city and its suburbs would contain the water that flowed over them, creating giant lakes where neighborhoods once had been.

As Hurricane Katrina tracked toward New Orleans on Saturday, emergency response agencies kicked into high gear. The governors of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama asked President Bush to declare their coastal counties disaster areas even before Katrina struck, an unusual move intended to get federal agencies moving more aggressively to position food, water, and emergency supplies close to potential disaster zones. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) began staffing its emergency operations center round the clock and moving medical, search and rescue, and emergency management teams into position.

Wauering Response

To all eyes, it appeared the bureaucratic gears were meshed and efficiently whirring away. But all was not well. After the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was created in the wake of 9/11, FEMA had effectively gotten lost in the shuffle. It was one of 22 agencies incorporated into the giant new department. As the nation's lead responder in a disaster, FEMA's principal function was to work with state and local governments to orchestrate the actions of all federal agencies, delivering aid to the right places. But that unusual arrangement depended on a strong FEMA able to exercise clout across the federal bureaucracy. With DHS focused on terrorism, FEMA was marginalized. Its emergency response grant program was turned over to another agency. Its emergency response teams were reduced in size and their frequent training was stopped. Agency director Michael D. Brown was bumped down the federal totem pole. Under President Bill Clinton, the post had been a cabinet-level position; under Bush the FEMA director was a deputy secretary. Though enthusiastic about the job, Brown himself had only limited disaster management experience; he was an old friend of Bush's first FEMA director Joe Allbaugh, and the president had appointed him to a FEMA job after he had been forced out of his post as commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association.

Trouble was also brewing in New Orleans. Mayor C. Ray Nagin had been elected as a reformer in 2002 and had made some progress cleaning up the notoriously corrupt city government. But he had paid little attention to one of his most difficult challenges: hurricane evacuations. Given the storm surge danger to all of south Louisiana, the city and surrounding parishes had devised elaborate evacuation plans. But roughly 100,000 people--a group that included overlapping populations of poor, elderly people, and African-Americans--had no transportation out of New Orleans. Getting them out was not simply a logistical problem but a question of social policy: some of the people in question had rarely, if ever, left the city, and it wasn't easy to persuade them to go. The city had dithered for years over how to get them out, and as of the start of the 2005 hurricane season, Colonel Terry Ebbert, the head of the New Orleans Office of Homeland Security, had pulled the plug on negotiations with local agencies to get buses and drivers, figuring that the talks were hopelessly stalled.

As Hurricane Katrina approached, Louisiana activated its evacuation plans, turning Interstate 10 into a one-way street heading out of the city. Facing the prospect of a major catastrophe, state and FEMA officials began asking Nagin to order a mandatory evacuation. New Orleans evacuations had always been voluntary, based on the idea there was little the city could do to force people to leave on short notice, so such an order would be unprecedented. Even if unenforceable, it was the most urgent message the city could send to its residents. But Nagin held back. Among other things, he was concerned about the legal implications. If hotels and other businesses were forced to shut down, and it turned out to be for naught (storms often veered off at the last minute), they might sue the city.

Nagin wavered on the question for the rest of Saturday, August 27, even as the region-wide evacuation got under way. Early that evening, National Hurricane Center director Max Mayfield and Nagin spoke by telephone. Mayfield delivered the bad news: in all likelihood, the huge storm would strike the city. It wasn't a sure thing, but it was as sure as Mayfield had ever been in his 33-year career. Nagin listened somberly to Mayfield's plea, then decided he would proceed with the mandatory evacuation. He announced it the following morning. For those who remained behind, the Louisiana Superdome would be opened--with minimal food, water, or police protection available. Judged against past results, the New Orleans evacuation was a spectacular success: more than 80 percent of the regional population departed, a higher number than ever before. But nearly 100,000 stayed.

Landfall

During the early morning hours of August 29 (Monday), Katrina's storm surge enveloped the southernmost reaches of the Delta, flooding dozens of small fishing towns. As Katrina moved north, its counterclockwise, easterly winds pushed storm surge water across New Orleans' eastern flank, an area nearly open to the Gulf of Mexico. Besides the levees, only a large lagoon-like lake, some disappearing marshes, and the slivers of eroding barrier islands stood between neighborhoods and the sea. This area also contained another key weakness: two canals--the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet and the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway--acted as conduits for the rising storm surge water to flow past the outer levees and directly into the heart of the city. These joined and flowed into the Industrial Canal, a third waterway through city neighborhoods that connected the Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain--the latter also, unfortunately, open to the Gulf. The Canal was soon taking on floodwater from the two other channels and from the lake.

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Around 4:30 a.m., witnesses reported seeing water in neighborhoods on either side of the Industrial Canal, coming through cracks and breaches in floodwalls. A short while later, floodwater began flowing over the outermost hurricane levees protecting St. Bernard Parish, the low-lying suburb immediately to the southeast of New Orleans. The water eroded the earthen walls and began washing away large sections.

At 6:10 a.m., Hurricane Katrina's eye made landfall in Buras, about 80 kilometers southeast of New Orleans. Fortunately for the city, the storm had encountered a cool spot in the Gulf, and was now a significantly weaker Category 3 storm, with maximum winds of less than 209 kph. But its surge wave was still that of a more powerful storm, and levees continued to give way. First, floodwalls protecting eastern New Orleans, a suburb north of St. Bernard, were overtopped, and many collapsed. Floodwater began inundating huge areas. Then water began overflowing the Industrial Canal's walls as well and they began breaching in multiple spots. At about 7:45, a breach unleashed a huge wave into New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward, a low-lying, impoverished neighborhood to the east, and into areas on the canal's west side (see map, p. 11).

Across dozens of neighborhoods, people watched as water suddenly started running through the streets, then rose up beneath their homes, sometimes in a matter of minutes. For most, there was no time to escape and no escape route to be had. Caught by surprise, hundreds drowned. Thousands more rushed to their attics and climbed onto rooftops in the driving rain and wind. By mid-morning, almost half of New Orleans, along with all of St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes to the south, had flooded.

Much of the central part of the city was still dry, and it appeared the worst was over. But earlier that morning, in the 17th Street and London Avenue canals, concrete-and-steel floodwalls in two drainage channels open to Lake Pontchartrain had suddenly broken in three places. Floodwaters rose more slowly over a wider area, this time coursing into affluent neighborhoods near the lakefront. A levee or floodwall's structural integrity cannot be guaranteed once water starts flowing over its top, but in this case floodwater never reached the top; the walls collapsed anyway. The flood from the collapsed drainage canal walls spread gradually throughout the day and into the night, reaching farther and farther south into the city's central core, claiming street after street. By the next morning, it had filled most of the city's central bowl, stopping only about a kilometer and a half from the river, the city's traditional high ground. About 80 percent of the city was under water. In some places it was only knee-deep; in others, more than six meters deep, up over the rafters of homes.

Katrina's eye passed about 15 kilometers east of New Orleans, then headed back out over the Gulf, its strength barely diminished. It struck for the third and last time near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, near the Louisiana border. To its east, the storm surge wave from Katrina's powerful northwest quadrant rose up much higher against the harder, more elevated coastline than it had in New Orleans, reaching a height of eight meters. It devastated the Mississippi coast, washing away thousands of homes, buildings, cars, and businesses within minutes. Fully 90 percent of the beachfront structures in the Biloxi-Gulfport area were destroyed. Floating casinos were carried hundreds of meters. The storm surge penetrated as far as 10 kilometers inland, twice as far along rivers and other inlets. Alabama and the Florida panhandle also suffered significant flood, wind, and tornado damage, as well as 238 deaths.

The hurricane had also hammered offshore oil facilities and onshore refineries (see "Katrina's National Security Impacts," p. 23). In advance of Katrina, the industry had pulled workers off 615 platforms (15 percent of the total of 4,000 Gulf-wide), and offshore ports had also been shut down. In Louisiana, Valero's St. Charles refinery took on a meter of water and was offline for two weeks. When oil prices spiked to $70 per barrel at mid-week--and gasoline prices rose as well--President Bush announced he would loan oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to calm the markets.

Failures to Communicate

As the winds died down Monday afternoon, government agencies at all levels threw their response plans into gear. Then, just as quickly, the wheels started coming off.

The 17th Street canal breach was confirmed by a group of firefighters at about 10:50 a.m. They videotaped it and radioed the city's Emergency Operations Center (EOC) at the Hyatt Regency Hotel near the Superdome. The city relayed the information to the state EOC in Baton Rouge, where Governor Kathleen Blanco and FEMA chief Michael Brown were stationed. But amid the flow of reports of overtopped and collapsing levees, drownings, and stranded victims, this single, crucial piece of information got lost. One problem was failing communications: as flood waters rose, telephone wires, cell phone towers, and communications systems were snuffed out one by one. Reports of the initial wave of flooding were widely disseminated, but the second, slower-moving wave occurred during a worsening communications blackout.

Throughout Monday, conflicting reports about the extent of the flooding filtered up through the ranks of FEMA and DHS, with no clear picture emerging. At 2 p.m., The Times-Picayune reported the breach on its website, and later that afternoon Marty Bahamonde, a FEMA employee Brown had stationed in the Superdome, took a helicopter flight over the city, saw the breach, and confirmed that most of the city was under water. But that night, at the Homeland Security Operations Center (HSOC) in Washington--a high-tech information clearinghouse created to process information and guide the national response to a catastrophe--director Matthew Broderick assumed that much of the city had been spared. He later told a Senate panel that he had drawn that conclusion after seeing television images of people partying in the French Quarter (which had not flooded). The HSOC did not acknowledge the importance of Bahamonde's report until early Tuesday, almost a day after the breach.

Fortunately, that confusion did not hamper the initial rescue operations, which got under way Monday afternoon, led by the Coast Guard and Louisiana's Wildlife and Fisheries Department. The Coast Guard deployed helicopters with trained rescue crews, and along with state workers, the National Guard, firefighters, police, and many private citizens, launched small boats on hundreds of rescue sorties from high ground out into the flood zone. The rescuers followed the outlines of a plan developed during a 2004 exercise dubbed Hurricane Pam, which was designed to craft a response to a catastrophic hurricane strike on New Orleans. In the exercise, participants concluded that people rescued from immediate danger should be dropped at designated points of high ground around the city and transported out later; that would allow rescuers to concentrate on saving lives rather than traveling long distances to transport people to safety. This worked well, as far as it went; in the day following the storm, tens of thousands were rescued. However, Hurricane Pam participants had not addressed the next important issue: how to then move all those rescued people out of the city. That became the central problem that stymied emergency managers for the rest of the week: figuring out how to mount a second evacuation of a flooded New Orleans, with limited routes in and out of the city and no ready source of buses or other transportation.

About 20,000 people were in the Superdome, and the number continued to rise Monday afternoon as people fleeing flooded areas headed toward the one place of guaranteed shelter. As the week wore on, big crowds formed at several locations: an Interstate 10 cloverleaf west of New Orleans, a port facility in the St. Bernard Parish town of Chalmette, Louis Armstrong International Airport, along levees, and, beginning Tuesday, at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, a vast structure along the riverfront that was opened on the city's orders. FEMA managed to keep the Dome supplied with food and water--barely--and its Disaster Medical Assistance Teams arrived early Tuesday and set up a field hospital nearby. Other areas, such as the cloverleaf, were given emergency supplies. But the Convention Center remained off the bureaucratic map, with no food, no medical attention, and no security, even as the crowd swelled beyond 15,000 on Wednesday.

The city of New Orleans had some buses, but few drivers. On Monday afternoon, Governor Blanco asked FEMA chief Brown for buses; he told her that he had 500 available that could be brought in on short notice. In fact, he did not. The federal Department of Transportation (DOT) did have a contract with a transportation company to provide buses and other vehicles and drivers, but, for reasons still unclear, FEMA did not relay Blanco's request to DOT until Wednesday morning at 1:45 a.m., almost 36 hours after it had been made. That evening, Blanco talked with President Bush. "I need everything you've got," she told him.

Ignorance and Bliss

The federal emergency apparatus created after 9/11, called the National Response Plan (NRP), was virtually untested. Even more alarming, top officials seemed unfamiliar with it. Under the law, any time the president makes a disaster declaration, as Bush had even before Katrina struck, the NRP goes into effect and the disaster becomes an "Incident of National Significance." There was also a provision in the NRP called the Catastrophic Incident Annex, reserved for the most severe disasters. When invoked, it instructed federal agencies to move resources into a disaster zone on their own initiative, without waiting for requests from state and local officials.

But as Katrina's waters rose, DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff seemed curiously disengaged. On Monday, he monitored the disaster from his Washington office, but left things in FEMA's hands. On Tuesday morning, after being made aware of the extent of the flooding, he flew to Atlanta to meet with Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt on preparations for the avian flu. Chertoff did not invoke the Catastrophic Incident Annex, and it wasn't until Tuesday he formally declared Katrina an Incident of National Significance--an action of uncertain import, as legally the disaster already qualified. Chertoff was also unaware of the crowd at the Convention Center until a National Public Radio interviewer informed him of it Thursday afternoon; Brown, who resented the DHS bureaucratic authority over FEMA, had not informed him. (Brown had finally arranged for food and water to be delivered there that day.)

Meanwhile, FEMA found itself unable to meet the demands of officials from across the Gulf coast, who were bombarding it with requests for relief supplies, food, water, and personnel. The huge demands and the limits of its own, outdated systems of processing requests caused multiple breakdowns and bureaucratic snafus.

From Monday afternoon, widespread looting caused problems in New Orleans. The police department's communications systems failed, some officers walked off the job, and others, lacking contact with commanders, weren't sure what to do. Meanwhile, the atmosphere of uncertainty and fear bred rampant rumors that soon made their way to the media. At the Superdome and Convention Center, rumors spread of murders, rapes, child molestation, assaults, and robberies. In fact, the crowds in both places were largely peaceful; it turned out later that only a handful of people had died, all due to natural causes, and the police could confirm no rapes or molestations. The rumors were not confined to evacuees; they spread out to the National Guard, state and FEMA officials working in New Orleans, and to the media, which portrayed New Orleans as descending into anarchy and began demanding action from the president.

As the situation deteriorated, President Bush was literally a distant figure. He had been on vacation at his Crawford, Texas, ranch as the storm approached, then was traveling in Arizona and California on Monday and Tuesday. The president's initial public statements on the disaster were rote-like recitations of support and reassurance, betraying what appeared to be a limited awareness of the scale of the damage or the desperation of the victims. On Wednesday, the president flew back to Washington. Along the way, Air Force One flew over New Orleans and along the Gulf coast, dipping down so Bush could witness the damage. But symbolically, all that came out of the effort was a photo of the president staring out the window. Inside and outside the administration, calls arose for bold action, and White House officials began studying the feasibility of "federalizing" the National Guard troops in Louisiana, i.e., taking command away from Governor Blanco and sending in U.S. troops. The utility of such a move was at best unclear: the effect would be limited, the political symbolism of overstepping a governor made some officials nervous, and Blanco fiercely resisted the idea. Nevertheless, working with the Defense Department, the White House spent two days trying to work out a federalization plan.

On Wednesday, buses dispatched by the DOT order belatedly made their way toward New Orleans. Blanco's staff had also managed to commandeer some buses. On Thursday morning, three days after Katrina flooded the city, they began evacuating the Superdome, sending people to the Astrodome in Houston and to other shelters across Texas. On Friday morning, National Guard troops took control of the Convention Center and set up food distribution centers. Those victims were evacuated the next day.

Aftermath

It took the Corps of Engineers only a few weeks, much less than expected, to pump most of the water out of the city. But most of the housing stock was severely damaged or ruined, and hundreds of thousands of displaced people had to begin picking up their lives. New Orleans was in some ways a shell of its former self; vast areas of the city and its suburbs remained mostly uninhabited for months afterward. The storm sparked a giant, forced diaspora and reshaped the economic and social profiles of the New Orleans area and the Gulf coast. According to a study by the U.S. Bureau of the Census, New Orleans had lost nearly 40 percent of its population four months after the storm; those that returned were proportionally whiter, and had higher incomes, than the city's profile before the storm. (A surge in Hispanic workers, who arrived by the thousands to work on reconstruction, was not covered by the study; it's likely that a number will settle permanently in the area.) Along the Gulf coast, the effects were different: as more valuable beachfront property was destroyed, the more affluent people departed. In Harrison, Hancock, and Jackson counties in Mississippi, white residents fell from 78 percent to 69 percent of the population, and the black proportion ticked upward by a similar margin.

Katrina sparked investigations by U.S. House and Senate committees that found multiple systems failures. The Senate panel recommended abolishing FEMA and starting from scratch, creating a new agency within the Department of Homeland Security. But the Bush administration was disinclined to support the measure, and officials said they were contemplating no major reforms.

In March 2006, with another hurricane season approaching, the Corps of Engineers announced it would spend billions to restore the levee system to its prior level of protection. It also conducted an extensive investigation of the levee failures, joining several other teams of forensic engineers trying to ascertain what had gone wrong. On June 1, the Corps announced its results in an unprecedented mea culpa. It said the levees had been "a system in name only"--a sloppy assemblage of parts that did not match--and accepted responsibility for the failures, acknowledging that human error had played a major role in the flooding of New Orleans.

John McQuaid is a Katrina Media Fellow with the Open Society Institute and the co-author, with Mark Schleifstein, of Path of Destruction: The Devastation of New Orleans and the Coming Age of Superstorms.