The New New Deal: Learning the Lessons of Katrina
Page 4: Hurricane Katrina Timeline

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7/24/05 – As Hurricane season 2005 unfolds, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reports on preparations for a potential evacuation, should a major hurricane hit the city and breach the levees, causing a devastating flood. Local officials, well aware that there were 100-200,000 impoverished citizens in their city who do not have cars, or even the money for a bus ticket out of town, arrange to distribute DVDs in local churches to inform the poorest of the poor that they should not expect help of any kind in the event of a disaster.

“City, state and federal emergency officials are preparing to give the poorest of New Orleans' poor a historically blunt message: In the event of a major hurricane, you're on your own."

‘Their message will be distributed on hundreds of DVDs across the city. The DVDs' basic get-out-of-town message applies to all audiences, but it is especially targeted to scores of churches and other groups heavily concentrated in Central City and other vulnerable, low-income neighborhoods,’ said the Rev. Marshall Truehill, head of Total Community Action.”

‘The primary message is that each person is primarily responsible for themselves, for their own family and friends,’ Truehill said. Times Picayune.

8/26/05 Thursday – Hurricane Katrina hits Florida; 3 dead, 1 million in dark. From CNN.com

8/26/05 Friday -- Hurricane Katrina is predicted make a "big shift" to the west on its way across the Gulf of Mexico and is expected to reach dangerous Category 4 intensity before making landfall Monday afternoon in Mississippi or Louisiana, the National Hurricane Center said Friday. CNN.com

8/27/05 Saturday – Hurricane Katrina builds to Category 4 with winds of 145 mph, expected to be Category 5 as it approaches New Orleans. Computer model runs conducted by a team of Louisiana State University scientists indicate that even if Katrina had winds of only 115 mph, levees protecting Kenner, Metairie and New Orleans on the east bank will be overtopped by a 10- to 12-foot storm surge, topped by waves at least half that high, in some locations along Lake Ponchartrain. From The Times Picayune

8/28/05 Sunday -- "We are facing the storm that most of us have feared," New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said as he issued an unprecedented mandatory evacuation order for the city known as "The Big Easy." From CNN.com. Hundreds of thousands of New Orleanians evacuate the city, seeking shelter in Baton Rouge, Texas, and elsewhere. From CNN 

8/29/05 Monday – Hurricane Katrina makes landfill just East of Grand Isle Louisiana, 6:30 am ET. Two levees on canals leading to Lake Ponchartrain fail in the hours after the hurricane hits New Orleans, flooding the city with up to 18 feet of water. Katrina rips much of the roof off the Superdome, where thousands of New Orleans residents, too poor or too slow to evacuate in time, have taken shelter from the storm. Los Angeles Times.

Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown fiddles while New Orleans drowns. “The government's disaster chief waited until hours after Hurricane Katrina had already struck the Gulf Coast before asking his boss to dispatch 1,000 Homeland Security workers to support rescuers in the region - and gave them two days to arrive, according to internal documents. . . Brown said that among duties of these employees was to ‘convey a positive image'’ about the government's response for victims. . .Brown proposed sending 1,000 Homeland Security Department employees within 48 hours and 2,000 within seven days. . . The same day Brown also urged local fire and rescue departments outside Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi not to send trucks or emergency workers into disaster areas without an explicit request for help from state or local governments. Brown said it was vital to coordinate fire and rescue efforts.” The Guardian.

8/30-31 Tuesday, Wednesday – Lake Ponchartrain continues to rise in the aftermath of Katrina’s passage, the pump system designed to help protect New Orleans fails, and the water level throughout the flooded city continues to rise, while thousands huddle in the Superdome and the Convention Center. Reports of looting appear in the news media. The European Space Agency, with accompanying satellite photos.

9/1 Thursday -- "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees," President George W. Bush told Diane Sawyer on Good Morning America.

The day before, the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel had published a story by former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal highlighting a 2001 Federal Emergency Management Agency report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters to hit the United States, and pointing out that by 2003 federal funding for flood control projects begun after a flood killed six people in southern Louisiana in 1995 was all but halted – diverted to pay for the Iraq war. In 2004, the Bush administration cut funding requested by the New Orleans district of the US Army Corps of Engineers for restraining the waters of Lake Ponchartrain by 80 per cent.

A squad of 300 National Guard troops landed in New Orleans fresh from Iraq, with authorization to shoot and kill "hoodlums", Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco said.

Food and water and medical supplies have not arrived at the Superdome or the Convention Center where thousands wait in the dark for relief, without sanitation, police protection, food, or water. Although the City of New Orleans designated the Superdome as a storm shelter, it had done nothing to stockpile necessities for refugees in that location. No estimate of the dead in New Orleans has been released by any officials, local, state or national. SpaceWar.com/Agence France Presse.

Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown tells CNN that impoverished New Orleans residents who did not flee the city in advance of Katrina’s landfall bear the responsibility for the devastation the storm visited on them and their families.

"I think the death toll may go into the thousands and, unfortunately, that's going to be attributable a lot to people who did not heed the advance warnings," Brown told CNN.

This is in keeping with the city of New Orleans official policy that poor people are on their own in the event of a disaster (see July 24 log entry), and consistent with the neo-Darwinian ultra-conservative ideology of “survival of the economically fittest” that has ruled in Washington, D.C. since the advent of Reaganomics.

“I'm telling you, nobody thought this was going to happen like this,” Bill Clinton told CNN’s Suzanne Malveaux, defending his new friends, the Bush family, while on tour with George H.W. Bush, in response to Malveaux’s questions concerning George W. Bush’s slow response to the New Orleans tragedy. “But what happened here is they escaped -- New Orleans escaped Katrina. But it brought all the water up the Mississippi River and all in the Pontchartrain, and then when it started running and that levee broke, they had problems they never could have foreseen. And so I just think that we need to recognize right now there's a confident effort under way. People are doing the best they can. And I just don't think it's the time to worry about that. We need to keep people alive and get them back to life -- normal life.” The Situation Room.

9/2 Friday – Three tons of food ready for delivery by air to refugees in St. Bernard Parish and on Algiers Point sat on the Crescent City Connection bridge Friday afternoon as air traffic was halted because of President Bush’s visit to New Orleans, officials said.

The provisions, secured by U.S. Rep. Charlie Melancon, D-Napoleonville, and state Agriculture Commissioner Bob Odom, baked in the afternoon sun as Bush surveyed damage across southeast Louisiana five days after Katrina made landfall as a Category 4 storm, said Melancon’s chief of staff, Casey O’Shea.

“We had arrangements to airlift food by helicopter to these folks, and now the food is sitting in trucks because they won’t let helicopters fly,” O’Shea said Friday afternoon. The Times-Picayune.

"There was a striking discrepancy between the CNN International reporton the Bush visit to the New Orleans disaster zone, yesterday, andreports of the same event by German TV.

ZDF News reported that the president's visit was a completely staged event. Their crew witnessed how the open air food distribution point Bush visited in front of the cameras was torn down immediately after the president and the herd of 'news people' had left and that others which were allegedly being set up were abandoned at the same time.

The people in the area were once again left to fend for themselves,said ZDF." Blah3.com.

“On the fifth day after Hurricane Katrina struck, National Guard troops finally managed to get themselves into downtown New Orleans,” reports Jim Ridgeway, Washington correspondent for The Village Voice . . Although the government could have flown in the medical equipment and doctors to staff existing or makeshift hospitals, it didn’t move. Only at midday today ,did the AP report, “Rescuers finally made it into Charity Hospital, the largest public hospital and trauma center in the city, where gunshots prevented efforts on Thursday to evacuate more than 220 patients. ‘We moved all of the babies out of Charity this morning,’ said Keith Simon, spokesman for Acadian Ambulance Service Inc.”

“This is the United States,” Ridgeway exclaims. “Rescuing babies from a natural disaster took five days!” The Village Voice.

Thousands of refugees remain huddled on rooftops and bridges screaming for help and waving articles of clothing to attract the too-infrequent helicopter overflights by rescue teams in the New Orleans metro area. San Francisco Chronicle.

“Imagine Bill Clinton were president, and he had ignored a FEMA report four years earlier predicting just this disaster, and cut funding over the last five years by 40-plus percent, and then sat on vacation and waited while the mayor and the governor pleaded for help, while people died and folks were huddling with no power and no running water, fearing for their lives,” says former Clinton aide Susan Estrich on NewsMax.com. “Do you think the Republicans would blame him? With a midterm election looming? With any number of senators potentially running for president? Especially when there is reason for blame.” NewsMax.com.

9/3 Saturday -- "That 'perfect storm' of a combination of catastrophes exceeded the foresight of the planners, and maybe anybody's foresight," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff tells reporters, referring to a situation where a strong hurricane hit New Orleans and levees also burst as a result. Chertoff calls the disaster "breathtaking in its surprise." But the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Army Corps of Engineers, The Times Picayune, and academic scientists at the University of New Orleans and at Louisiana State University all say the levees built to prevent catastrophic flooding in New Orleans were designed to withstand only Category 3 hurricanes, and they had publicly proclaimed their concern about inadequate federal funding for flood control generally and levees in particular for many years. Louisiana state officials have warned for years that a Category 4 could cause the levees to fail. Katrina was a Category 4 hurricane, and officials at local, state and federal levels all knew it was targeting New Orleans three days before the storm hit land.

See Editor & Publisher, “Did New Orleans Catastrophe Have to Happen? 'Times-Picayune' Had Repeatedly Raised Federal Spending Issues”.

“I can understand the chaos that happened after the tsunami, because they had no warning, but here there was plenty of warning. In the three days before the hurricane hit, we knew it was coming and everyone could have been evacuated,” explained Malik Rahim, recent Green Party Candidate for New Orleans City Council, in an article for the San Francisco BayView. “We have Amtrak here that could have carried everybody out of town. There were enough school buses that could have evacuated 20,000 people easily, but they just let them be flooded. My son watched 40 buses go underwater - they just wouldn't move them, afraid they'd be stolen. People who could afford to leave were so afraid someone would steal what they own that they just let it all be flooded. They could have let a family without a vehicle borrow their extra car, but instead they left it behind to be destroyed. It's not like New Orleans was caught off guard,” Malik continued. “This could have been prevented. There's military right here in New Orleans, but for three days they weren't even mobilized. You'd think this was a Third World country. I'm in the Algiers neighborhood of New Orleans, the only part that isn't flooded. The water is good. Our parks and schools could easily hold 40,000 people, and they're not using any of it. This is criminal. These people are dying for no other reason than the lack of organization.” ZNet.

World Press commentary on the New Orleans catastrophe turns ugly:
“Up until Monday, Bush was the president of the war in Iraq and 9/11. Today there are few doubts that he will also pass into history as the president who didn't know how to prevent the destruction of New Orleans and who abandoned its inhabitants to their fate for days. And the worst is yet to come.” – Spain’s El Pais

”The sea walls would not have burst in New Orleans if the funds meant for strengthening them had not been cut to help the war effort in Iraq and the war on terror... And rescue work would have been more effective if a section of National Guard from the areas affected had not been sent to Baghdad and Kabul... And would George Bush have left his holiday ranch more quickly if the disaster had not first struck the most disadvantaged populations of the black south?” -- Switzerland's Le Temps
”About 10,000 US National Guard troops were deployed [in New Orleans] and were granted the authority to fire at and kill whom they wanted, upon the pretext of restoring order. This decision is an indication of the US administration's militarist mentality, which regards killing as the only way to control even its own citizens.” -- Musib Na'imi in Iran's  Al-Vefagh
”My first reaction when television images of the survivors of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans came through the channels was that the producers must be showing the wrong clip. The images, and even the disproportionately high number of visibly impoverished blacks among the refugees, could easily have been a re-enactment of a scene from the pigeonholed African continent.” -- Ambrose Murunga in Kenya's Daily Nation
”Katrina had more than the power of the wind and water, because, now, when they have subsided, it can still reveal the emptiness of an era, one that is represented by President George W Bush more than anyone.” -- Argentina's Clarin

9/4 Sunday -- “The guy who runs this building I'm in, emergency management, he's responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home and every day she called him and said, ‘Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, Mama, somebody's coming to get you. Somebody's coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Thursday. Somebody's coming to get you on Friday.’ And she drowned Friday night. She drowned Friday night,” a sobbing Aaron Broussard, President of Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, which contains the bulk of the lily-white affluent New Orleans suburbs, told Tim Russert on Meet the Press. “Nobody's coming to get us. Nobody's coming to get us. The secretary has promised. Everybody's promised. They've had press conferences. I'm sick of the press conferences. For God sakes, shut up and send us somebody,” Broussard wailed. Meet the Press.

9/5 Monday -- "Almost everyone I’ve talked to says we're going to move to Houston,” proclaimed Barbara Bush, on a tour of hurricane relief centers in Houston. Then she added: "What I’m hearing which is sort of scary is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this -- this [she chuckles slightly] is working very well for them." Editor & Publisher.

The USS Bataan, equipped with six operating rooms, hundreds of hospital beds and the ability to produce 100,000 gallons of fresh water a day, has been sitting off the Gulf Coast since last Monday – without patients. The New York Times.

9/6 Tuesday -- Saying the city was "completely destroyed" and "a hazard," the New Orleans deputy police chief Warren Riley urged remaining residents Monday to get out because there was no power, drinkable water or food supply. "We advise people that this city has been destroyed. It has been completely destroyed," said Riley. Most of the streets are filled with stagnant, fetid waters streaked with iridescent oil and smelling of garbage, human waste and death. NO estimates of the number of the dead have been released by any local, state or federal agency. CNN.com.

9/7 Wednesday -- "There's a martial law declaration in place that gives us legal authority for mandatory evacuations," the superintendent of New Orleans police, P. Edwin Compass III, said at a news conference today. "We'll use the minimum amount of force necessary." 10,000 residents remain in the beleaguered city, many in dry, undamaged homes. President Bush has asked Congress to authorize a total of $61.8 billion for reconstruction efforts. To police the area, 10,000 National Guard troops and 4,000 members of the Army’s 82^nd Airborne Division are in place in the city. There are now more troops than citizens left in New Orleans, which is still 60% under water. “In the first indication of how many dead Louisiana might expect, a spokesman for the Louisiana State Department of Health Hospitals, Robert Johannessen, said today that FEMA had ordered 25,000 body bags.” The New York Times.

“Not long after some 1,000 firefighters sat down for eight hours of training, the whispering began: ‘What are we doing here?’

   As New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin pleaded on national television for firefighters - his own are exhausted after working around the clock for a week - a battalion of highly trained men and women sat idle Sunday in a muggy Sheraton Hotel conference room in Atlanta.

    Many of the firefighters, assembled from Utah and throughout the United States by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, thought they were going to be deployed as emergency workers. Firefighters say they want to brave the heat, the debris-littered roads, the poisonous cottonmouth snakes and fire ants and travel into pockets of Louisiana where many people have yet to receive emergency aid.

. . .But as specific orders began arriving to the firefighters in Atlanta, a team of 50 Monday morning quickly was ushered onto a flight headed for Louisiana. The crew's first assignment: to stand beside President Bush as he tours devastated areas." (emphasis added)

Salt Lake City Tribune.

(All Photos are Clip Art except the portrait of the author)