On August 29, 2006, Hurricane Katrina reached the Louisiana coast and caused several levee breaks around New Orleans. New Orleans and the surrounding areas were subsequently flooded, along with the Mississippi and Alabama coasts, which were directly hit by the hurricane. The levee breaks allowed for Katrina to become the most destructive and costliest hurricane in United States history with roughly $75 billion in damages, and the 1,604 fatalities it caused is second only to the 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane. But the controversy surrounding the hurricane goes beyond the damages, and into the politics preventing and rescuing New Orleans from a hurricane.1
When the city of New Orleans was built next to Lake Pontchartrain, it was built on ground above sea level. But because frequent flooding of the nearby Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain, the city’s development was pushed down further and further into a bowl below sea level between the lake and river. Levees were built over time, but only enough to protect the city from lake flooding caused by a category 3 hurricane at most.2 Now, the Mississippi River Delta, which protected the city from the coast, is eroding away and opening up the chance for disaster day by day. The situation was so bad in 2001 that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) ranked it as one of the nations most catastrophic disasters next to an earthquake in San Francisco and, interestingly enough, a terrorist attack in New York City.3 In 1968, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed a plan for new and improved levee’s surrounding New Orleans to protect the city from category 4 and 5 hurricanes. Congress turned down that plan and every decade since the Corps has proposed a plan and been turned down. In 1998, Louisiana State University simulated category 4 and 5 storms coming from the Gulf that would nearly destroy New Orleans completely, prompting the state to propose a $14 billion plan to repair the state wetlands so they would be able to absorb flood waters easier.4 A category 4 or 5 storm could cause more than 25,000 deaths, emergency officials predicted which would make it the deadliest disaster in U.S. history, with many more fatalities than the San Francisco earthquake, the great Chicago fire, and the 9/11 attacks combined. The Red Cross estimated 25,000 to 100,000 would drown if a major hurricane hit the city unprepared. Ivor van Heerden, director of Louisiana State University's Center for the Study of Public Health Impacts of Hurricanes thought about 300,000 of the area's 1.2 million people wouldn’t evacuate and many of those would be the elderly, disabled, homeless, and/or carless. About one-fourth of the nation's oil and natural-gas production was in New Orleans, as well as one-third of the nation’s seafood catch. Last but certainly not least, thousands of miles of oil and gas pipelines stretched through the Louisiana wetlands. The New Orleans region was also home to the nation's largest port complex, shipping 16 percent of the nation’s cargo. If New Orleans was taken out by Hurricane, experts projected that it would cause a ripple effect all over the world.5 Al Naomi, senior project manager for the Corps of Engineers, in regard to preparing for a hurricane, was quoted saying, "…We've got to start. To do nothing is tantamount to negligence." According to him, it could take 20 years and at least $1 billion to raise the levees high enough and build floodgates at the mouth of Lake Pontchartrain.6
Despite all the hard scientific proof given by the scientific and engineering experts, Pres. Bush and his administration still denied the appropriate funding needed to prepare the levees for a serious storm. In early 2005, the state of Louisiana went to Congress for federally funded money to work on the Louisiana coastline for hurricane protection. They were allotted $540 million over four years, which was a small sum next to the $14 billion it would cost to repair, let alone upgrade. Next to that, the Bush administration decided to cut southeast Louisiana’s chief hurricane protection project to $10.4 million, a sixth of what they needed.7 The majority of the federal budget at that time was devoted to the war in Iraq and turf battles between the Corps, local and state politicians, and Congress further kept all of the proposed plans from passing in Congress. What Bush did instead, in one of his speeches following the New Orleans disaster, was state that no one could have predicted such a calamity.8
The economic ripple effect across the world because of Hurricane Katrina was just like what the experts predicted. In one area of Georgia less than a day after Katrina hit the Louisiana Coast, gas prices were $5.87 per gallon. In Britain, gas prices were at roughly $7 per gallon. Exxon Mobil Corp., ConocoPhillips and Chevron Corp. were forced to close their oil operations in the Gulf because of hurricane problems. Tourism, as expected, just about ceased to exist on the Gulf Coasts of Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas with places like casinos destroyed. 9 The only economic division that didn’t really take a hit was the agricultural, where only corn, soybeans and cotton were affected minorly.10 The poor in New Orleans were the worst hit and now the most affected by the poor levee system in New Orleans. The poorest of the poor lived above sea level, but right next to the mouth of Lake Pontchartrain. These people lost their homes, most of which where one story shacks, and without insurance, will have the hardest journey back to normality.11
Not only was the New Orleans hurricane preparedness unsatisfactory and deadly, but the lack of organization and faults in the local leadership fueled the chaos even more after Katrina hit. On the 29th, when Katrina hit New Orleans, both Vice President Cheney and Pres. Bush were vacationing and it wasn’t until a week later that the President went to New Orleans. New Orleans Mayor Ralph Nagin and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco were in a mess to restore order to the city with barely a police force and at the same time connect with Washington with few of the emergency satellite phones working.12 The day the flooding began, Nagin and Blanco didn’t know what to do, and Bush and the other federal officials didn’t know how extensive the damage was. FEMA and the Louisiana state school buses took way too long to reach the Superdome, and when they did, Nagin failed to order the most needy on first, causing a free for all chaos at the Superdome. Although Blanco managed to call in 70,000 troops ranging from the 82nd Airborne to National Guardsmen, it took over a week for the troops to actually get into the disaster area.13 Besides the local leadership crisis, Bush had to fire Mike Brown, an under-qualified former horse show judge supervisor, from his head position in FEMA and find the life saving Coast Guard Vice Admiral Thad Allen.14 Well after recovery had begun, it was still clear that the federal government was still looking for a plan to get money back into the hands of New Orleans evacuees. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced that 200,000 debit cards with $2,000 on each would be handed out to evacuees, but because of bureaucratic confusion, he had to cancel that program two days later.15
Despite all of the confusion and unorganization, FEMA and the Bush Administration have since come up with some great, strong ideas to make up for their costly mistakes before and directly after the Hurricane. FEMA housing grants may give up to $26,000 to evacuees to buy or rent homes anywhere they want in the country.16 The White House has also come up with the idea for a “czar” of sorts to manage the recovery on the Gulf Coast, a person who would oversee FEMA, and all of the local government in terms of rebuilding and then possibly the plan for revamping the levee systems.17
Hurricane Katrina was so detrimental to the United States because of a lack of funding for levee systems in New Orleans, an issue that dates back to 1968. Although passing a levee plan no more than 4 years ago wouldn’t have gotten farther than the first couple of steps, every little bit would have helped prevent flooding in New Orleans. The high moral standards that our country supposedly holds should have prompted us to not appoint people to jobs because of association like Mike Brown or Jim Bernhard, the Louisiana Democratic Chair whose company the Shaw Group was given the $100 million reconstruction job.18 Our high moral standards should have prompted us to spend money on something that could save 300,000 lives and a large part of our economy rather than spend it on a war. But our high moral standards also should prompt us to do what we can to save what’s left, build it back up, and look forward.