Levee warning was not heeded
At a time like this, many feel an instinctive wish to rise above politics. With bodies still emerging from the wreckage left by Hurricane Katrina, partisan bickering ought to be the last thing on anybody’s mind.
For more than a generation, pretty much all we’ve heard from Republican (and some Democratic) politicians in Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and elsewhere is how the federal government was the source of all domestic ills. Grover Norquist, the Washington political operative widely credited with devising the GOP’s winning strategy, famously stated that he didn’t want to abolish the national government, but shrink it “down to the size where you could drown it in a bathtub.”
Although he spared us that unfortunate metaphor, under Norquist’s guidance the Republican National Committee actually e-mailed party activists on Sept. 1 urging the abolition of the so-called “death tax” preventing America’s multi-millionaire inheritors from pocketing every dime of daddy’s money. Great timing, right?
That was the same day President Bush ended his five-week vacation with a hastily arranged visit to scenes of devastation on the Gulf Coast, during which, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported, rescue helicopters were grounded for hours to protect his safety.
By Monday, Sept. 5, the usual anonymous “senior Bush official” in the White House confided to The Washington Post that the almost unimaginable failures of the Bush administration to act in the wake of catastrophic flooding in New Orleans were actually the fault of local Democrats.
Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, the newspaper reported, had failed to declare a state of emergency empowering the federal government to take over. Newsweek obligingly added that Blanco “seemed uncertain and sluggish, hesitant to declare martial law or a state of emergency, which would have opened the door to more Pentagon help.”
In fact, history records that Gov. Blanco declared a state of emergency on Friday, Aug. 26 with Hurricane Katrina still two days from landfall, a Category 5 storm with 175 mph winds. (The Post printed a bland retraction.) Indeed, whether Bush knew it, his office declared a federal state of emergency on Saturday, Aug. 27.
That morning, the normally dry National Weather Service briefing warned that: “Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks … perhaps longer … All wood-framed, low-rising apartment buildings will be destroyed … Power outages will last for weeks … Water shortages will make human suffering incredible by modern standards.”
And still the president played golf and strummed a guitar, the Pentagon did little or nothing, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) dithered.
On the morning of his first visit to the Gulf Coast, Bush told ABC’s Diane Sawyer, “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.”
In reality, the New Orleans disaster was perhaps the most widely forecast in American history. A FEMA report written before 9/11 said the three likeliest U.S. catastrophes were a terrorist attack in New York, a San Francisco earthquake, and a hurricane hitting New Orleans. For years, the New Orleans Times-Picayune and other local media have published veritable encyclopedias of expert warnings that a Category 4 or 5 storm would cause a calamity of Biblical proportion.
Nobody knows if Hurricane Katrina would have breached New Orleans’ levees had experts been heeded. But if there’s a lesson here, it’s this: Facts and ideas do matter. Choosing feckless leaders who advertise their mistrust of government and disdain for science, and who habitually reward loyalty over competence can have appalling consequences when things go wrong.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].