Star Tribune Editorial: Unprepared/Woeful planning for Katrina

Star Tribune

The epic of human misery that is unfolding in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast should give all Americans pause -- first to do what they can to alleviate that misery through the Salvation Army, American Red Cross and other nonprofits, and second to ponder whether we have learned the essential lessons of Sept. 11, 2001.

Hurricane Katrina was not New Orleans' worst nightmare; the storm veered eastward and spared the city a frontal assault; Katrina reserved that for Gulfport and Biloxi, Miss. New Orleans today should be wounded but not mortally. Its people should be discomforted and distraught, but not dead or still at dire risk. Scientists at Louisiana State University say their computer models now suggest as many as 80,000 people may have perished. Pray that number turns out high by a factor of 100.

But whatever the final toll, the wrenching misery and trauma confronting the people of New Orleans is much greater than it should be -- as it is, in fact, for tens of thousands of people along the strip of Mississippi that was most brutally assaulted by the storm. The immediate goal must be to ease that suffering. The second goal must be to understand how we came to this sorry situation.

How, for example, do you evacuate smoothly 80 percent of a major metropolitan center by car -- and provide no formal assistance or avenue of escape for the 20 percent who haven't the means to do it on their own?

How do you justify cutting $250 million in scheduled spending for crucial pump and levee work in the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project (SELA), authorized by Congress in 1995? Editor and Publisher magazine reports that even "as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside," after 2003 "the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle." Why? Editor and Publisher says both the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the New Orleans Times-Picayune blame "spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts."

How, after 9/11, do you explain the lack of proper equipment in New Orleans to deal with a breaching of the levees? They are to New Orleans what the World Trade Center was to New York. Yet police officials were forced to appeal for private boats to aid in rescuing the stranded. No rescue boats -- in Louisiana. What is that about?

How do you explain the almost total lack of coordination among federal, state and local officials both in Louisiana and Mississippi? No one appeared in charge. "Too many cooks in the kitchen," New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin complained bitterly.

How do you explain a plan that put 25,000 people in a stifling, dank Superdome with little water and inoperable toilets? How do you further explain gathering many of them outside for bus trips to the Astrodome in Houston and then leaving them without adequate food and water?

No one can justify the violence, thuggery and looting of nonessential goods that has turned New Orleans into a scene reminiscent of a Mad Max movie. But where were the contingency plans for providing adequate law enforcement and National Guard personnel in a timely manner?

The people remaining in New Orleans are mostly black and poor, and they were utterly abandoned. Rather than residents of a major city in a fabulously wealthy nation, they resembled tsunami survivors stranded on a remote Indonesian island.

And they are only the most visible to feel the effects. The storm, the lack of preparedness for it and the lack of a timely, coordinated and effective response to it have helped put the American economy at greater risk of a recession that seems looming on the horizon. Almost everyone will feel the pinch if that recession indeed develops.

But in a broader sense, what does New Orleans say about preparedness for a terrorist attack in, for example, Seattle, Los Angeles or San Francisco? How, four years after 9/11, is it possible that federal, state and local governments could be so woefully unprepared to deal in a coordinated fashion with a catastrophe that, while natural in origin, mimicked many of the effects of another massive assault by terrorists? Are Americans safer?

The people of New Orleans certainly weren't. Please do what you can -- with money, with needed goods, with volunteer hours, to help them out. They are in desperate need.