How Did This Happen?

By Amanda Ripley

Hindsight is 20/20. But once in a rare while, foresight is too. For years, researchers have described exactly what would happen if a megahurricane hit New Orleans and the surrounding Gulf region. They predicted that the city levees would not hold. Their elaborate computer models showed that tens of thousands would be left behind. They described rooftop rescues, 80% of New Orleans underwater and "toxic gumbo" purling through the streets. If experts had prophesied a terrorist attack with that kind of accuracy, they would be under suspicion for treason.

How, then, did we get here? How did the richest country on earth end up watching children cry for food in putrid encampments on the evening news? How did reporters reach crowds of the desperate in places where police, troops and emergency responders had not yet been--three days after the storm?

Deconstructing Katrina will take years. But it is already clear that the blame can be well distributed, from the White House to emergency-management officials at federal, state and local levels, all the way down to the cops who abandoned their posts in New Orleans. "The system broke," says Susan Cutter, director of the Hazards Research Lab at the University of South Carolina. "A system that cannot airlift water and food to a community that's desperate for it is a system that is broken."

Close up, the reasons are infuriating. New Orleans officials were supremely unprepared; that was never a secret among people in the disaster business. Meanwhile, throughout the state and Federal governments, much money and willpower had shifted to fighting terrorism, a major risk and vital effort but much less of a sure thing than natural disasters. Because of tax cuts and budget pressures at all levels, many emergency-response capabilities--once the envy of the world--have slipped. If Hurricane Katrina turns out to be the biggest disaster in U.S. history to date, it will also be the least surprising.

The larger lesson may be more humbling: after all the post-9/11 vows, are we still not well enough armed for the next big one? Humans are not very good at understanding risk, and in this country, they perform worst when it costs a lot to prevent or prepare for a disaster--especially when the people who would otherwise suffer the most are poor.

Katrina was a big, vicious storm, it must be said. But Katrina was not the worst-case scenario. Katrina was a test.

BEFORE THE STORM

Hurricanes kill people because we refuse to settle out of their way. Nowhere was that more apparent than in New Orleans, built in a bowl between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain. "It was a fool's paradise," says Stephen Leatherman, who has studied hurricanes for 30 years and runs the Hurricane Research Center at Florida International University in Miami.

Once the city was there, nestled into what was essentially a lake bed, no one expected New Orleans to move someplace safe. But there were other options. Governments could have built stronger, higher levees and shored up the disintegrating coastline. As it was, the levees, overseen by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, were designed to handle storms as strong as Category 3, even though experts warned that worse storms were inevitable. "The Corps has been pushing for years for Category 5 protection," says retired Lieut. General Robert Flowers, past head of the Corps. "Decisions have been made to accept more risk."

Doing more would have been expensive--in the billions, most likely. But certainly less costly than the Katrina recovery will turn out to be. Preventive work, however, would have had to start in the 1990s. That's how long the improvements would have taken. In 1996, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project to upgrade levees and drainage and pumping stations along the Mississippi River. But Congress and successive Administrations were never willing to fund the project fully. Under George W. Bush, the shortfall was acute: from 2001 to 2005, the Corps asked for almost $496 million, according to figures supplied by the office of Louisiana's Democratic Senator, Mary Landrieu. The Administration cut the requests back to $166.5 million. Congress eventually approved $249.5 million, but that was still half of what the Corps wanted. The Corps' other major effort to shore up New Orleans, the Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection Project, was also underfunded: as of this spring, seven of its contracts were delayed because of lack of money, according to a May 23 Corps report.

Yet would it have mattered if the Corps had got all the money it asked for? Lieut. General Carl Strock, commander of the Corps, insists it would not have. The system might have been able to drain the floodwaters more quickly, but the big breach occurred in a levee that had recently been strengthened. "We were just caught by a storm of an intensity that exceeded the design of the project we have in place," Strock says. In other words, the levees worked just fine; it was the storm that screwed things up by being so powerful.

Even if we accept that logic, it's not yet clear whether Strock is right. Since the storm center passed to the east of New Orleans, congressional investigators are not convinced that the part of Katrina that swept through the city was in fact a design-trumping Category 4. It's possible that the levees just did not work the way they were supposed to. It's not even certain that the water overtopped the levees, as the Corps claims. Congressional investigators, experts and even some Corps officers tell TIME that the failure might have been caused by leaks in the barriers. "The storm surge was only about 10 to 12 feet, according to our modeling, so overtopping was not the culprit," says Leatherman. If the levees failed because they overflowed, that means the storm was just too fierce. If there were leaks, however, that might mean the levees had been poorly constructed or maintained.

Whatever happened, the neglect of the levees was part of a larger trend after 9/11. "We put natural hazards on the back burner," says Dennis Mileti, a veteran disaster researcher who for 10 years ran the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder. "We diverted our attention to terrorism. I'm not saying that shift was bad. We had no plans in place for terrorism. But the laws of nature were not repealed on Sept. 11."

In October 2001, a House Science Committee held a panel discussion called Weatherproofing the U.S.: Are We Prepared for Severe Storms? "As horrible as the events of Sept. 11 were, hurricanes can be as damaging or worse," Christopher Landsea, a top federal hurricane researcher told the panel that day. "We should expect strong hurricane activity for the next 20, 30, maybe 40 years." Unfortunately, many members were not there to hear it. They were at the Pentagon for a 9/11 memorial service.

Soon afterward, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was demoted, subsumed by the new Department of Homeland Security. That was a mistake, says William Massey, who spent 24 years as FEMA's hurricane-program manager for the southeast U.S. before retiring last year. "The emphasis on terrorism has really hurt FEMA's efforts." When Ivor van Heerden, deputy director of the Louisiana State University (L.S.U.) Hurricane Center, suggested a year ago that the agency stockpile tents for when houses blow down, "this woman from FEMA said, 'Americans don't live in tents,'" van Heerden recalls. "I said to her, people will kiss your shoes for a tent in the end." It was also worrying that the new head, Michael Brown, would report not to the President but to Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff. Like Chertoff, Brown, a Colorado attorney, had no emergency-management experience.

Hurricane Katrina got its name on Thursday, Aug. 25, as it formed in the Bahamas, and by the time it reached Category 3 strength, it was obvious that the storm was a major threat. "Ladies and gentlemen, this is not a test. This is the real deal," New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin said at a news conference ordering city residents to evacuate on Saturday. "Board up your homes, make sure you have enough medicine, make sure the car has enough gas. Treat this one differently because it is pointed towards New Orleans." At FEMA's urging, on the same day, the President declared an emergency in the state of Louisiana, allowing water, food and ice to be stockpiled at bases around the state. The system appeared to be working.

But, as is the case with every hurricane, not everybody would be leaving. In truth, few U.S. cities have good plans for taking out the sick, the elderly and those without cars of their own. The situation in New Orleans, though, was particularly dire. Officials knew that the least mobile residents lived in the most flood-prone part of town. But they had no solution. "When I asked that question, I got a lot of unsure looks," says Brian Wolshon, an engineer with the L.S.U. team who helped design the evacuation plans with state police and transportation officials.

As Katrina gained strength, researchers at L.S.U.'s Center for the Study of Public Health Impacts of Hurricanes ran the numbers through their storm-surge models. Around 7 p.m. Saturday, on the giant screen looming over the Emergency Operations Center in Baton Rouge, they posted the sum of all fears: New Orleans would go under. Everyone knew what that meant: a major water rescue of untold thousands. The next morning, with the storm less than 24 hours away, the team talked to federal health officials about the potential for disease from the rising waters. At midday Sunday, according to TIME's Cathy Booth Thomas, the L.S.U. team informed a roomful of disaster officialsfrom FEMA and the Red Cross to the military and National Guardthat they were looking at a "significant event" with waves washing over the levees in central New Orleans. By 8 p.m. Monday, the first bad news came into the Operations Center. Staff from a nursing home reported that water had been rising at the rate of one foot an hourthe first sign that the levees might have given way.

AFTER THE STORM

The first 72 hours after a disaster is the "golden" period. That is when victims should start receiving food, water, ice and medication. "If you are not visible within 72 hours, you will have chaos," says Joe Myers, who was Florida's emergency director from 1993 to 2001. That was a lesson from Hurricane Andrew, when there was looting in parts of Miami-Dade County for at least a month after the storm. "Every minute counts. Every second counts," says Mayor Joseph Riley, who led Charleston, S.C., through Hurricane Hugo in 1989.

But in New Orleans, where officials initially thought they had been spared the worst, the hesitation seemed to start locally and then infect the chain of command all the way to Washington. Some New Orleans police officers turned in their badges, unwilling to work in the lawless city. On Tuesday, when parts of the city were already under 20 feet of water, the Pentagon deployed five ships to the Gulf--four from Norfolk, Va., four days away. On Friday, 6,500 National Guard finally arrived to help restore order.

On Wednesday, Gregory Breerwood, operations chief for the Army Corps of Engineers, told the Wall Street Journal that none of the plans had "ever included an event of this magnitude." But Hurricane Pam, an elaborate federally sponsored simulation conducted just one year ago, had predicted an eerily similar scenario with tens of thousands of deaths. One problem, in retrospect, is that no one had wanted to believe it. "I'll be honest with you. I'm the researcher, I'm doing all the models, and sometimes I would say to myself, 'Am I Chicken Little? Could this really happen?'" says Wolshon. "Even I was in denial, and I was the one running all the numbers."

Some of the efforts made at first seemed oddly ad hoc. Two days after the storm, the Department of Health and Human Services e-mailed cruise lines to ask whether they might help with rescue and relief efforts. Industry officials had no idea where their ships would anchor, how passengers would board or where the boats would get food and potable water. It would have been a reasonable idea if it had been vetted months in advance.

Reliving a scenario earmarked for change after 9/11, officials in different agencies still couldn't communicate by radio or telephone with one another, despite generous Homeland Security grants meant to fix such problems. Others had nothing but cell phones, which predictably failed. Even the Salvation Army lost contact with 200 of its volunteers.

Meanwhile, in the strange parallel universe of Washington press conferences, federal officials regularly congratulated one another. "I think it is a source of tremendous pride to me to work with people who have pulled off this really exceptional response," Chertoff said Thursday. In an interview with National Public Radio, he was pressed six times about the misery of the 25,000 refugees at the Convention Center. Chertoff said he had not heard about any problems.

By Thursday night, the mayor of New Orleans had had enough and vented his spleen on a local radio station, WWL-AM. "This is ridiculous. I don't want to see anybody do any more press conferences," said Nagin. "We authorized $8 billion to go to Iraq lickety-quick. After 9/11, we gave the President unprecedented powers lickety-quick to take care of New York and other places," he said. "You mean to tell me that a place where you probably have thousands of people that have died and thousands more that are dying every day, that we can't figure out a way to authorize the resources that we need? Come on, man."

By that evening, seven helicopters from the Air Force Reserve 920th Rescue Wing out of Patrick Air Force Base, Fla., had ferried hundreds of refugees onto the runway at New Orleans Lakefront Airport, where they waited in darkness to go somewhere, anywhere. Beside them, Colonel Tim Tarchick, the wing commander, screamed into his satellite phone at someone from the Emergency Operations Center. "I've got 1,000 people who have been dropped here. We're out of food, and they're starting to get tense. We need security. It's like frickin' Baghdad here. You have to take control," he yelled, straining to be heard over the thump-thump of helicopters.

"Who's running things? Nobody, as far as I can tell," he told TIME's Brian Bennett. Early Monday morning, Tarchick had told FEMA and Northcom that he and his men were ready to go. But he wasn't ordered to deploy until Tuesday afternoon--an "unacceptable" delay, he says. In 72 hours, his men rescued some 400 people. He wonders how many more they might have saved.

Louisiana Representative Jim McCrery, chair of a powerful Ways and Means subcommittee, told TIME, "I've talked to the White House staff. I've talked to FEMA. I've talked with the Army. And, of course, I've talked with the state office of emergency preparedness. And nobody, federal or state, seems to know how to implement a decision, if we can get a decision." As in any war, the best weapons mean nothing without leadership and communication. On Friday, hours after even the President had shifted to calling the government's response "not acceptable," the No. 2 at FEMA sounded as though he had been monitoring a different hurricane. "I am actually very impressed with the mobilization of man and machine to help our friends in this unfortunate area," Patrick Rhode told TIME. "I think it's one of the most impressive search-and-rescue operations this country has ever conducted domestically." That day, members of Congress called for hearings.

--With reporting by Brian Bennett/New Orleans, Cathy Booth Thomas/Baton Rouge, Massimo Calabresi, Sally Donnelly, Mark Thompson, Karen Tumulty, Douglas Waller and Adam Zagorin/ Washington, Jeff Chu/New York and Jeanne DeQuine and Kathie Klarreich/Miami

With reporting by Brian Bennett/New Orleans, Cathy Booth Thomas/Baton Rouge, Massimo Calabresi, Sally Donnelly, MARK THOMPSON, KAREN TUMULTY, DOUGLAS WALLER, Adam Zagorin/ Washington, Jeff Chu/New York, Jeanne DeQuine, Kathie Klarreich/Miami