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Katrina warnings Do We Have to Draw Them a Picture?By Rick Horowitz It's a photograph, projected onto a long white wall in a conference room in Baton Rouge. The man doing the projecting is Prof. Ivor van Heerden, deputy director of Louisiana State University's Hurricane Center. It's a photograph we haven't seen before, taken from a helicopter on August 29, 2005 -- the day Katrina came ashore. Part of the levee is missing. So why didn't people know? We're in Baton Rouge, a dozen or so members of the National Conference of Editorial Writers; it's our first stop on a recent visit to the Gulf Coast, trying to get a handle on the "what" and the "why" of all that destruction, not to mention the "now what?" As we meet, the news hasn't yet broken about the FEMA videotapes and the early warnings that were sounded, to the president and others, about the enormous danger Katrina might be bringing with her. Still, there's this photograph. However dire the advance warnings might have been, however seriously they might have been taken (or not), there's this photograph taken in New Orleans by a FEMA photographer on that Monday, early in the storm -- and a piece of levee hundreds of feet long is no longer where it's supposed to be. There are words on the long white wall, accompanying the photograph. "17th Street Canal," they say. "Note displaced levee section in middle of the breach, which moved 35 feet." We note. We gasp. Levees are supposed to stand up to storms, not retreat almost a dozen yards when the water comes. "A catastrophic structural failure of the levee system," van Heerden calls it. And here -- here at the 17th Street Canal -- is where it might have started, where New Orleans' inner defenses might first have given way. So why didn't people know? Instead of spending that Monday night breathing sighs of relief that New Orleans had supposedly dodged the bullet, why didn't the people who mattered know hours sooner than they did that New Orleans hadn't dodged the bullet at all? That while the hurricane's downpour might not have flooded the city directly, the levee breaches were doing precisely that? Why didn't they know? "That's the question we've asked," van Heerden replies. "Why didn't the word get out?" As that Monday wore on, he concedes, communications between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, between New Orleans and anywhere, became virtually non-existent. But the breakdown wasn't immediate, he says, and it wasn't total; there was still some functioning land-line service, and some working cell phones. There were ways. And if they knew, why didn't they react? We're sitting in Baton Rouge with the benefit of nearly six months of hindsight; we're trying to give officials the benefit of the doubt. Is it possible, we ask van Heerden, that the people in charge might have seen the same photograph we're looking at, or at least heard about it, by Monday afternoon, and concluded, reasonably, that they still had time to respond? That the danger wasn't immediate? That the water from a single breach of the 17th Street Canal wouldn't rise all that quickly? Van Heerden says no. The 17th Street Canal was hardly the city's most vulnerable point. If the levee had given way there, it wouldn't be the only one. They knew -- or they should have known -- about the photograph by Monday afternoon. Yet until Tuesday morning, people in high positions were somehow still thinking they had things under control. That reports of levee breaches were "unconfirmed." Why didn't they know? How much confirmation did they need? Van Heerden doesn't have an answer. "The state told FEMA. FEMA told Brown. Brown told the White House..." He pauses. "And it didn't get anywhere." We're back from the Gulf Coast now, our disaster tour completed, and we're watching the president on the evening news. The FEMA videotapes are about to be made public, and the president is still defending his administration's response to the storm. "Here's the problem that happened in Katrina," he's telling Elizabeth Vargas. "There was no 'situational awareness,' and that means we weren't getting good, solid information from people who were on the ground." How about from people who were in the air? Posted 3/2/06. Peek
around walls with fresh commentary from syndicated columnist Rick Horowitz.
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Rick Horowitz
