Three Years After Hurricane Katrina
Have FEMA and the Army Corp of Engineers Learned Anything & Changed?
Jul 17, 2008
On August 23rd 2005, the deadliest storm in 77 years formed off the Bahamas and when it dissipated, over the Eastern Great Lakes on August 30th, it changed the face of the southern USA forever. Katrina was not just a destructive hurricane - the name itself has become synonymous with governmental incompetence, indifference and failure. As the third anniversary of the storm approaches we ask: have the governmental agencies involved corrected their inefficiencies and ineptitude?
Failures
In a September 21, 2005 Washington Post article by Michael Grunwald and Susan B. Glasser, Ivor van Heerden, the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center deputy director said, “The real scandal of Katrina is the ‘catastrophic structural failure’ of barriers that should have handled the hurricane with relative ease.”
After the storm many speculated that the breaches were caused by poor design, faulty construction or some combination. “I don't know if it's bad construction or bad design….”, said former representative Bob Livingston in the Post article.
But has it changed? On May 21st 2008 MSNBC quoted Bob Bea, a civil engineer at the University of California at Berkeley: “It [reconstruction of the New Orleans levees] is all based on a 30-year-old defunct model of thinking….They repaired the wall by driving interlocking sheets of steel 60 feet into the ground, compared with about 17 feet before the storm; [but they still] leak."
Delays and Attitude
Not all of the problems surrounding the storm centered on levee failures. The Federal Emergency Management Agency received an abundance of criticism for its indifference, slow response, incompetence and absolute managerial failure. Approaching the third anniversary of the storm, Leslie Eaton of the New York Times reported in Feb 2008, “FEMA [only] recently admitted dangerous formaldehyde exists in the trailers given to victims."
Immanuel Wallerstein from the State University of New York at Binghamton wrote in Katrina: The Politics of Incompetence and Decline: “Ten days after the crisis began, the government seemed to get its act together….It is the direct result of how the Bush regime operates - poor judgment and active indifference to anything that isn't high on their list of priorities.”
Incompetence
David Bernstein of the Boston Phoenix stated that the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security reported, prior to Katrina, that FEMA could not track “essential commodities, such as ice and water, needed by disaster victims,” and was hindered “from providing the appropriate number and combination of people and supplies to meet the level of need.”
However, the problem was far deeper. Cronyism, paranoia, jealousy and laze-fare politics controlled the government agencies. The Houston Chronicle, the New Orleans Times-Picayune and National Geographic Magazine each predicted the problem of a hurricane in New Orleans many years before Katrina. But early in the crisis President Bush cried: “…how could anyone have predicted that the levees would be breached and 80% of the city of New Orleans flooded?”
Professor Wallerstein states: “the Bush style is that…his appointees were deeply suspicious of the…experienced bureaucrats in the government agencies. They ignored them, they intimidated them [and] they overruled them regularly….”
Conclusions
Michael Brown was removed from his directorship long ago; however, the Bush culture still appears to permeate throughout both agencies. This spring the levees failed, once again, along the Mississippi River causing severe flooding on the watch of the Corp of Engineers.
- USACE – MSNBC quoted the AP, “…the corps found evidence that canal water is seeping through the joints in the sheet metal [in New Orleans]….” MSNBC continued: “John Schmertmann, a retired University of Florida professor…agreed…that the corps ‘may still be embedding some of these not-properly-considered factors, so the new walls may not do what the corps expects’.”
- FEMA – Congress mandated the reorganization of the agency in 2006; however, its response to the floods of 2008 suggests the problems continue. According to a June 2008 CNN report by David Mattingly entitled “Insurance not required, FEMA told flooded town” the “experts” miscalculated the chances of a catastrophic flood - again.
 |
 |
