There's plenty of blame to go around but one name that pops into my head that often gets overlooked is Katrina. Class 4/5 hurricanes kill people and break things, nothing can prevent that short of abandoning the coast lines. All the madness that followed is the rule and not the exception when dealing with government bureacracies. Anyone who expected different is in fetters.
The government cannot protect you and chances are it wont even try very hard.

As I sit displaced in Houston, contemplating my shattered home in Biloxi, I find it bleak testimony to the American public's ability to focus that so much ink, and so many keystrokes, are being wasted on the neglible-return "blame-game." Far too many people, with far too much time on their hands––coupled with a veneer of materialistic invincibility––are engaging in the academic game of accessing blame when human beings across the NORTHERN GULF COAST––NOT JUST NEW ORLEANS––are still living in shelters and facing the daunting task of rebuilding their homes, communities, and economies. Meanwhile, as the outside world has its interest piqued by yet another fast-degrading item dragged through the 24/7 news cycle, pudits and news gawkers treat our tragedy as another set of divisive talking points. This is a shame! My home town looks like Hiroshima, its history wiped out in a single stroke. A hurricane did this . . . not a slow-moving bureaucracy!

"This is a shame! My home town looks like Hiroshima, its history wiped out in a single stroke. A hurricane did this . . . not a slow-moving bureaucracy! "

Obviously the storm damage that biloxi suffered was caused by wind, not govt failure. But the presence of thousands of people in horrible conditions at the convention center in New Orleans, days after the levee breach, was NOT the result of the hurricane alone.

I agree this is not the time to assign blame - let the agencies involved focus on their work, which is far from complete.

But afterwards, an investigation seems warranted.

He says there was no evacuation drill, but there was a drill last year for a hypothetical "Hurricane Pam", a Category 3 storm hitting New Orleans and topping (but not breaching) the levees.

Estimates of the death toll from this hypothetical situation were in the range of 25,000 to 100,000 - compare with the much lower figures, so far, from the much worse Katrina.

I am having trouble reaching blogspot urls. I get a timed out message.

Could be blogspot. Could be a bad router table at my ISP. Could be something else.

Could you post the answer in the comment Joe?

Mark S.:

"As I sit displaced in Houston"

Welcome to Texas. In the words of an old schoolmate, "That's right, you're not from Texas, but Texas wants you anyway." If you're a beer drinker, try some St. Arnold's while you're here. The Amber, the Elissa IPA, and the Summer Pils are particularly recommended. Other culinary and cultural details available on request. Enjoy your visit, and feel welcome to stay.

M. Simon...

Sure, just for you. But with enough text here so it doesn't show in the sidebar.

His answer is: "Major General Bennett C. Landreneau, who is also the head of Louisiana's Department of Homeland Security."

DJ Drummond makes a very good case - both in terms of responsibilities and observations of what happened/ didn't happen when and what changed.

Meanwhile, now that things have changed, there's lots to do in order to help....

I'll add that if judicious analysis shows this guy as a key failure point, some of that help can involve putting real pressure on, if he begins to take on a broader role again. I'm pleased the Coast Guard is leading (they were just about the only governmental agency at any level who really performed excellently), and their Rear Admiral plus Gen. Honore (aka. "John Wayne Dude" - Ray Nagin) inspire real confidence. They should remain in charge as long as possible.

The blame game seems to focus almost entirely on emergency actions, steps taken or not taken under time constraints and imperfect information. Much more blame should lie in the area of disaster prevention and preparation. DJ Drummond gives a nod to problems with planning, but defers to a future piece. I'll wait.

But something's been botherming me today about diaster protection. Only about 40 percent of properties in New Orleans have flood insurance. The Federal Flood Disaster Protection Act of 1973 requires federally-regulated lenders to determine if real estate to be used to secure a loan is located in a Special Flood Hazard Area (SFHA) and if so, requires flood insurance if available. From what I can tell on FEMA's website most of New Orleans is in a SFHA, including areas that did not flood.

What happened? Here we have a 30 year-old law that, if it worked, was clearly intended to use the mortgage and insurance industry to spread the costs and risks of flood in New Orleans. Do an inordinate number of people in N.O. own their homes outright or seek financing from a non-federally regulated lender? Do the lenders aggressively help borrowers obtain flood certificates that exempt them from flood insurance? Is flood insurance simply not available?

Sorry for the sideways rant. If anybody understands this, I would appreciate it.

Reflecting on Drummond's choice of villian: He makes a good point, but. The "Unnatural Disaster" of the hurricane has many aspects, one of the most salient being the traits of NOLA and Louisiana state political culture: incompetence, graft, cronyism, corruption, race politics, and political correctness.

Who benefits from Katrina? Not Nagin or Blanco; they got unlucky when it roared in on their watch*. Any steps they might have initiated to address these issues would have shown benefits years down the road, but not in 2005. What mattered this summer were the steps taken and not taken by the past years' crops of politicians. The gold and silver medals have to go to former Mayor Marc Morial and former Governor Edwin Edwards, respectively. Maybe Gov. Foster (1996-2004) gets bronze. Given his history and current esteemed position, seeing Morial's copious tears and enthusiastic finger-pointing on "Meet the Press" was even more offensive than the Kathleen Blanco Show, if such a thing is possible.

PD Shaw,

You raise a telling point, not sideways at all. Though I don't have any background, and expect no illuminating context from my national-stature local paper or the Talking Head Nitwits that grace my telescreen. One more reason to urge the Pulitzer committee to issue no prizes for Katrina coverage.

"Any steps they might have initiated to address these issues would have shown benefits years down the road, but not in 2005."

That is simply not the case. As far as infastructure work, yeh you have a point. But it is devastatingly clear that the actual evacuation procedures and policies were either ignored or not trained for. The school bus fiasco case in point. The looting fiasco as well. The truth is that both the mayor and governor basically threw their hands up the minute the trouble started and expected someone further up the chain of command to save the day. Imagine if Guilliani spent 9/11 screaming for Pitaki, and Pitaki screaming for Bush. Thats basically what happened, no-one assumed positive control and damn the bureacratic torpedos. Like I said before, that isnt an unlikely outcome. We dont tend to put our most efficient and productive citizens in government except by good fortune.

Mark Buehner #11:

I wrote in #10, "Any steps they might have initiated to address these issues would have shown benefits years down the road, but not in 2005."

Your comment expands and corrects what I said; thanks. I meant that most of the high-payoff risk-reduction and emergency-response-systems programs that should have implemented take years to come to fruition. This is even true of disaster planning. If a written plan is to be effective, it has to go through cycles of being presented to participants, then getting revised, and then being practiced, and then revised again.

And when the event occurs, you have to implement the plan, rather than letting it sit in an underwater filing cabinet.

New Orleans, the surrounding parishes, and the state had plans. They didn't have an adequately-operational disaster-planning infrastructure, although the cock-ups in the dry runs and the tepid drill exercises (e.g. "Pam")showed its flaws.

If Nagin and Blanco had made hurricane contingencies a priority on taking office in 2004, the response to Katrina would doubtlessly have been much better. It still wouldn't have been anywhere near good. Years of neglect (etc.) aren't reversed in a matter of months.

An article contrasting Florida's hurricane response systems with those of LA and MS in this Palm Beach Post article.

PD Shaw:
From the article you link:

But only 85,000 residential and commercial policies have been sold in Orleans parish, in which the city is located, by the NFIP, according to latest figures — while the U.S. census lists about 213,000 housing units in the city in 2002.

The question here will turn on the definition of "housing unit". If an apartment building or condo association with say 5 units counts as 5 units in the census (as opposed to one), it could be covered by one flood policy. I suspect that is the case. I doubt very seriously that Reuters thought that through.

Do the lenders aggressively help borrowers obtain flood certificates that exempt them from flood insurance?

Lenders don't typically get the certificates, the title company usually does. And a copy goes to FEMA. This would run counter to the lender's interests, anyway; if you get flooded and have no insurance, you're much more likely to just walk away from the property and take the credit hit. The lender might have some recourse, but you'd have to ask a La. resident for that.

Today, I'm leaning toward the New Orleans levy board.

Here's something interesting. I was going to respond to Mark's comment on the bus incident by referencing New Orlean's Comprehensive Hurricane Plan but "access denied." I had access a few hours ago, but no more.

Anyway, the point I was going to make is that New Orleans did not have a true plan to use the buses. The "plan" doesn't indicate who will drive the buses, how the drivers will be contacted, where passengers will be gathered, what criteria will be used to identify passengers, what safety precautions to be used to avoid placing buses in traffic jams in the path of huricanes, etc. It was a plan to plan.

You can't start thinking about these things with 48 hours to landfall.

Phil Smith:

You make some good points and my own off-the-cuff analysis from the FEMA website has been that older, higher-elevation areas of New Orleans have higher housing densities than the flood hazard areas.

But I'm not sure that we can rely completely on the lender's self-interest. Its not in the lender's interest to use a high appraisal to support a mortgage, but its been known to happen. I can think of more sinister possibilities, but my novice impression of the law I cited is that there are lenders that are not federally (perhaps state S&Ls?) and one of the unintended consequences of the law was to promote such institutions in areas where flood insurance is expensive. The other unintended consequence might be to mislead people into believing that if they are not required to get flood insurance, then they do not need flood insurance.

Nobody has found a better candidate yet, and I'll filibuster a bit too like Joe did above for awhile to push it out, no better candidate than Governor Blanco. Nagin is runner up.

Whew, Robin steps to the rescue.

Nobody has found a better candidate yet, and I'll filibuster a bit too like Joe did above for awhile to push it out, no better candidate than Governor Blanco. Nagin is runner up.

Thank goodness she has decided that no responsibility -- none! -- should go any higher than the local or state authorities. Cool!

Hey, though, just a question. Who built the levees? Who maintained them? Who determined the budgets for said maintenance?

Who was Governor Blanco trying to call for the first few days (hint: somebody who actually called Governor Barbour), but Blanco couldn't reach?

Who decided to cut the levee maintenance budget? Why doesn't that matter? Who hired incompetent cronies to oversee our national emergency response?

Gosh, thanks to Robin, now I know that the dog what ain't barkin' is nothin' to worry about.

Stickler, odd how you provide these rhetorical questions to which you seem to not know the answers: the levees were maintained by local levee boards which were as corrupt as Louisiana politics usually are. The budgets were not really cut, that's a long debunked myth.

The President had to call Blanco and Nagin to get them to order a mandatory evacuation which they botched. It was the Louisiana state government that blocked supplies to the Superdome and when the President presented options to Gov. Blanco during his visit, Nagin tells us that Blanco said it would take her 24 hours to make a decision.

As far as incompetent cronies to oversee "our national emergency response", no one has yet demonstrated anything incompetent about the Federal response. But everything Blanco and Nagin did was done incompetently - from planning a joke of an evacuation to then botching even that poor evacuation plan to losing track of their own transportation assets.

The problem w/ assessing blame hinges on how you reocgnize the problem. I argue the problem was twofold. First, poor planning and preparations lead to a number of people unable to leave New Orleans(there were people whom were tourist whom did not get out of town and they had financial assets) in the face of a category 4/5 hurricane. Two, once the hurricane passed over, the response to the breaks in the levees on the 17th canal, the Industrial canal and the overflow from Lake Pochantrain into the cities overwhelmed everyone because there was no power, no communications, one road open in the Lower Ninth Ward and contingous St Bernhards Parish(I-10).

Robin,
You remind me of those Japanese soldiers left behind on Pacific islands, fighting WWII after everyone else has given up.
If you still believe "no one has yet demonstrated anything incompetent about the Federal response" then you should read How Bush Blew It from Newsweek. I know you will manage to "debunk" it somehow, but evidence of Federal incompetence is everywhere, even the Bush administration no longer pretends that the response was "acceptable" or that "Brownie" is doing a "heckuva job".Some excerpts from the article "The one federal agency that is supposed to handle disasters—FEMA—was dysfunctional. On Wednesday morning, Senator Landrieu was standing outside the chaotic Superdome and asked to borrow a FEMA official's phone to call her office in Washington. "It didn't work," she told NEWSWEEK. "I thought to myself, 'This isn't going to be pretty'." Once a kind of petty-cash drawer for congressmen to quickly hand out aid after floods and storms, FEMA had improved in the 1990s in the Clinton administration. But it became a victim of the Iron Law of Unintended Consequences. After 9/11 raised the profile of disaster response, FEMA was folded into the sprawling Department of Homeland Security and effectively weakened. FEMA's boss, Bush's close friend Joe Allbaugh, quit when he lost his cabinet seat. (Now a consultant, Allbaugh was down on the Gulf Coast last week looking for contracts for his private clients.) Allbaugh replaced himself with his college buddy Mike Brown, whose last private-sector job (omitted from his official resume) had been supervising horse-show judges for the International Arabian Horse Association. After praising Brown ("Brownie, you're doing a heck of job"), Bush last week removed him from honchoing the Katrina relief operation. He was replaced by Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad Allen. The Coast Guard was one agency that performed well, rescuing thousands.
Bad news rarely flows up in bureaucracies. For most of those first few days, Bush was hearing what a good job the Feds were doing. Bush likes "metrics," numbers to measure performance, so the bureaucrats gave him reassuring statistics. At a press availability on Wednesday, Bush duly rattled them off: there were 400 trucks transporting 5.4 million meals and 13.4 million liters of water along with 3.4 million pounds of ice. Yet it was obvious to anyone watching TV that New Orleans had turned into a Third World hellhole.

The denial and the frustration finally collided aboard Air Force One on Friday. As the president's plane sat on the tarmac at New Orleans airport, a confrontation occurred that was described by one participant as "as blunt as you can get without the Secret Service getting involved." Governor Blanco was there, along with various congressmen and senators and Mayor Nagin (who took advantage of the opportunity to take a shower aboard the plane). One by one, the lawmakers listed their grievances as Bush listened. Rep. Bobby Jindal, whose district encompasses New Orleans, told of a sheriff who had called FEMA for assistance. According to Jindal, the sheriff was told to e-mail his request, "and the guy was sitting in a district underwater and with no electricity," Jindal said, incredulously. "How does that make any sense?" Jindal later told NEWSWEEK that "almost everybody" around the conference table had a similar story about how the federal response "just wasn't working." With each tale, "the president just shook his head, as if he couldn't believe what he was hearing," says Jindal, a conservative Republican and Bush appointee who lost a close race to Blanco. Repeatedly, the president turned to his aides and said, "Fix it."
According to Sen. David Vitter, a Republican ally of Bush's, the meeting came to a head when Mayor Nagin blew up during a fraught discussion of "who's in charge?" Nagin slammed his hand down on the table and told Bush, "We just need to cut through this and do what it takes to have a more-controlled command structure. If that means federalizing it, let's do it."

Or maybe you should read Sick and Abandoned from the NY Time, some excerpts "It was the stuff of nightmares. Poisonous water moccasins were swimming in the filthy water of the flooded first floor, and snipers, rats and even a 12-foot alligator were roaming the treacherous area just outside the hospital's doors.

Skip to next paragraph

More Columns by Bob Herbert "To me, it was like being in hell," said Carl Warner, the chief engineer for Methodist Hospital in the hard-hit eastern part of New Orleans. "There were bodies floating in the water outside the building, and our staffers had to swim through that water to get fuel for the generator."

The patients and staff at Methodist could have been evacuated before Hurricane Katrina hit. But instead they were condemned to several days of fear and agony by bad decision-making in Louisiana and the chaotic ineptitude of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Some of the patients died.

Incredibly, when the out-of-state corporate owners of the hospital responded to the flooding by sending emergency relief supplies, they were confiscated at the airport by FEMA and sent elsewhere."...
"Everybody's suffering would have been eased if the emergency relief effort mounted by the hospital's owner, Universal Health Services in King of Prussia, Pa., had not been interfered with by FEMA. Company officials sent desperately needed water, food, diesel fuel to power the hospital's generators and helicopters to ferry in the supplies and evacuate the most vulnerable individuals.

Bruce Gilbert, Universal's general counsel, told me yesterday, "Those supplies were in fact taken from us by FEMA, and we were unable to get them to the hospital. We then determined that it would be better to send our supplies, food and water to Lafayette [130 miles from New Orleans] and have our helicopters fly them from Lafayette to the hospital."

Significant relief began to reach the hospital on Thursday, and by Friday evening everyone had been removed from the ruined premises. They had endured the agonies of the damned, and for all practical purposes had been abandoned by government at all levels.

When you consider that the Methodist Hospital experience was just one small part of the New Orleans catastrophe, you get a sense of the size of the societal failure that we allowed to happen."

Of course I acknowledge the failures at state and local levels, I am just disagreeing with the unbeleiveable assertion that Federal response was "incompetence free". I thought conservatives recognized the shortcomings of government, so how could a conservative argue that any massive Federal bureaucracy has no incompetence?

Tom,
Amusing that you didn't address anything I actually wrote.

Actually I think your metaphor works better on yourself. The Newsweek article is replete with claims of problems but never really lists anything significant - just vague complaints. It is really poor journalism at best and a Democratic whitewash at worst. We've already learned that Jefferson Parish' Broussard is an overacting liar. Anytime we approach any concrete failure, it turns out to be a state or local responsibility.

What is truly astonishing about your misrepresentations, Tom, is that you refer to the meeting in Air Force One and never ever refer to the fact that Nagin himself tells us of Blanco's inability to make any decisions in that meeting. You list a claim that FEMA redirected resources ( without bothering to find out where those supplies went ) but you don't even deal with the fact that Louisiana state officials blocked the Red Cross and Salvation Army from putting food and water into the Superdome.

The bottom line is that the Federal government wasn't responsible for the failure of Louisiana state and local government to evacuate New Orleans, wasn't responsible for their failure to control the lawless anarchy that hindered rescue and levee repair, and wasn't responsible for the blockage of supplies to the Superdome.

Tom, your hydrophobic attempts to blame the Bush administration for anything and everything are old. Come out of the Phillipine jungle, Tom.

As in my earlier comments, I clearly acknowledge that Blanco and Nagin bear serious responsibility for their failures.
I do not blame the Bush administration for "anything and everything" since blame is clearly shared at many levels.
Any objective observer must admit that there were shortcomings and incompetence at the Federal level also.
Why else is "Brownie" gone?
Any realistic investigation will document many failures at the Federal level. I am curious if the rear-guard "blame defection squad" will continue its' efforts even after a GOP dominated commision documents the problems?
Funding cuts for levees and flood protection are well-documented and never "debunked". It is unlikely that rescinding the funding cuts would have prevented much flooding in Katrina, but the budget cuts are in the public record."Budget Cuts Delayed Levee Work":http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20050901/pl_nm/weather_katrina_funding_dc

Please explain this one:
http://www.hattiesburgamerican.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050911/NEWS05/509110304

Funding priorities are set at the state and local level.

• New Orleans found the billions of dollars to build and continually expand the Morial Convention Center, which employed 30,000 directly or indirectly.

• Funds for levies were diverted to various urban renewal projects.

• And just before the hurricane, the city renewed its interest in filling in part of Lake Ponchatrain to build a new Lakefront airport. Yes, the mayor wanted to further reduce Lake Ponchatrain's holding capacity.

Tom, try to read the stuff being claiming it back you up, Tom, you'll look a bit less silly.

Stickler claimed that the levee maintenance budgets were cut. The article you point to refers not to maintenance budgets but new construction budgets and tells us that a project dating back to 1965 hadn't even been started and that the cuts made in the Bush administration budget were for projects that would not complete for years. The article you point to also says that the new construction projects were unrelated to the levee breaches.

So we see that in fact the claims are debunked by the very article you cite to rebut me.

You really are not very good at this, Tom.

Fortunately, Bush is not stonewalling like you are, but is admitting problems with the Federal response and attempting to fix them.
More power to him and anyone else ready to face reality and try to improve the situation at all levels. From his speech last night
"I also want to know all the facts about the government response to Hurricane Katrina. The storm involved a massive flood, a major supply and security operation, and an evacuation order affecting more than a million people. It was not a normal hurricane and the normal disaster relief system was not equal to it. Many of the men and women of the Coast Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the United States military, the National Guard, Homeland Security and state and local governments performed skillfully under the worst conditions. Yet the system, at every level of government, was not well coordinated and was overwhelmed in the first few days. It is now clear that a challenge on this scale requires greater federal authority and a broader role for the armed forces, the institution of our government most capable of massive logistical operations on a moment's notice.

Four years after the frightening experience of September 11th, Americans have every right to expect a more effective response in a time of emergency. When the federal government fails to meet such an obligation, I, as President, am responsible for the problem, and for the solution. So I have ordered every Cabinet secretary to participate in a comprehensive review of the government response to the hurricane. This government will learn the lessons of Hurricane Katrina. We are going to review every action and make necessary changes, so that we are better prepared for any challenge of nature, or act of evil men, that could threaten our people. "

The President's mia culpa for "government response" does not change my view that the greatest culpability lies in the area of disaster prevention and planning, not what happened in the hours before the hurricane hit or the days after. When the hurricane destroyed the infrastructure and the levies broke, the number of lives lost was going to be in the hundreds or thousands regardless of government response.

So like Bush's appology for Yalta and Clinton's appology for the slave trade, good politics, but morally accurate? I think not.

If anyone is interested in my flood insurance question (#9), I believe I have the answer. Federal law only requires that the lender's interest be insured from flood, there is no obligation for the property owner to insure its equity. Thus, if I buy a house in a special flood hazard area with a 20% downpayment, a federally regulated lender will only require me to obtain flood insurance covering 80% of the value of the property.