The Katrina Blame Game

"This is not a time for finger-pointing or playing politics," - White House spokesman Scott McClellan. Sept 1 2005.

"Louisiana did not reach out to a multi-state mutual aid compact for assistance until Wednesday, three state and federal officials said. As of Saturday, Blanco still had not declared a state of emergency, the senior Bush official said." Washington Post, Sept 4 2005.

"A Sept. 4 article on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina incorrectly said that Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D) had not declared a state of emergency. She declared an emergency on Aug. 26." Washington Post, Sept 4 2005.

Contrary to the statements of the White House spokesman, the White House is playing the blame game. They are trying to deflect the blame onto anyone but themselves. In the spirit of that, I want to examine where the blame should go.

Ray Nagin, Mayor of New Orleans since 2002. Republican until literally days before the 2002 election, Nagin switched his affiliation to the Democratic Party to gain a better chance at winning in heavily Democrat New Orleans. New Orleans was a city of roughly 480,000 people and the poorest metropolitan area in the entire country with a poverty rate close to 30%. Additionally it is known as historically one of the most corrupt cities in the United States, and one of Nagin's first acts as mayor was to go after the city Taxicab Bureau and the Utilities Department (ironically, the same department that manages the pumping stations that kept New Orleans dry).

On August 27, Mayor Nagin ordered a voluntary evacuation. When Katrina increased to a cat 4 hurricane the following day he changed that to a mandatory evacuation. Unfortunately, the city's ability to actually deal with such an order was poor. Fortunately, the governor had already declared a state of emergency.

Kathleen Blanco, Governor of New Orleans since 2004. Had worked heavily on tourism as Lt Governor, and the major issue of the day was trying to keep the Saints in New Orleans, and their requests to renovate the Superdome at state expense. Declared a state of emergency asking for any aid on August 26, three days before Katrina made landfall in Louisiana, 15 miles east of New Orleans.

No help came.

While much can be made of the fact that New Orleans was remiss in its disaster planning, and many would like to lay the blame for that at the feet of Mayor Nagin, he has been mayor for a bit over two years, and maybe he could have been better prepared. Others are trying to lay the blame at the feet of Governor Blanco who has been in office less than two years.

If anyone has seen how state government works, they would see a number of things. First, every state and municipality has dozens of issues fighting for dollars and attention. Second, federal aid sent to states has decreased in the last five years, while at the same time federal demands OF states, has increased dramatically, especially when it comes to Medicaid and Medicare expenses. The current administration paid for it's tax cut (if you can call it paying for it) by cutting the payouts for especially those programs. Louisiana, being a pretty poor state, has had their costs go up, but because they are a poor state, has not had their revenue go up because the people there don't have the money for the state to bring in via taxes.

You are looking at a poor city and a poor state, being blamed for not acting on the danger of the levees.

This is unacceptable. The federal government under the Bush administration has foisted costs they used to assume, off on smaller level governments, and because of geographic disparities, some of those states are more able to deal with that than others. In this case, the state was not in a position to deal with those and everything else. While Nagin and Blanco are not faultless, they did what they were supposed to when presented with a situation they could not handle, they asked for help.

Mike Brown, prior to Katrina, was already an embattled head of FEMA. He had been pushed out as head of the International Arabian Horse Association after a series of lawsuits over failure to train judging staff of the organization. At the end of his tenure, the IAHA was so broke it folded and was absorbed by the Arabian Horse Registry of America.

His resignation at FEMA was called for after FEMA sent out $30 million dollars in relief funds to non-victims of Hurricane Frances. It was again called for after it was found that some of his damage inspectors had past records for robbery and embezzlement. And now, we have Katrina.

On August 26th, the governor of Louisiana declared a state of emergency asking for help. On August 27th and 28th, the mayor of New Orleans did the same. FEMA did not show up at all until the 1st, and was not doing anything that could be called of use until the following day, while at the same time stymieing the efforts of others in the area, such as Slidell mayor Ben Morris (as seen in an interview on WWL New Orleans TV).

FEMA had in fact "war gamed" what would happen to New Orleans in the event of a cat 4/5 storm in 2001 and knew full well what the results would be, and what happened was exactly what they had predicted.

When what happens is what you had predicted, wouldn't it make sense to pull the plans made in the intervening four years out of a drawer to see what they said? But unfortunately it seems there was no plan. An event that they had warned four years earlier was one of the three most likely disaster scenarios in the country, that FEMA had modeled to see what would happen, they had no plan for.

The ONLY job for FEMA is to be prepared to move into action in the event of a catastrophe. That happened. They didn't move.

Are the mayor and governor blameless? No, they might have been able to do more. It is time, however, to hang the scapegoat for this out to dry and remove Mike Brown. While the ultimate responsibility may not be his alone, FEMA failed utterly in its only job, and is now trying to do recovery when it should have been doing mitigation before this even hit. The death toll from this storm may be the worst disaster in the nation's history. Had FEMA been doing its job and laid plans for something they knew would, not could, would happen, then it is likely that as bad as the storm was, it would have been clean up instead of search and burial.