TPG edit to add a link: Stop Blaming Me for Hurricane Katrina
Prior to Katrina making landfall, I asked then-National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield to forcefully explain on a secure video conference call with Blanco and Nagin the catastrophe they were potentially facing if they failed to evacuate at least two or three days prior to landfall. When that didn’t work, I called President Bush at the ranch and implored him to call Mayor Nagin and encourage him to evacuate his city. The president called; the mayor dallied.
Nagin finally asked people to evacuate on Sunday morning for a storm that hit his city sometime after midnight that night. By that point, Amtrak had left the city with rail cars sans passengers. Airlines had evacuated Louis Armstrong International Airport with planes sans travelers. And school buses sat in their lots, soon to be flooded and ruined. The mayor’s incompetence cost lives.
While I was urging people to leave New Orleans, Mayor Nagin announced a “shelter of last resort,” the New Orleans Superdome. In other words, despite calls to evacuate, if you choose not to evacuate, or are now unable to evacuate because you lack transportation, run to the Superdome.
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If you watch a video subsequently leaked to the media, you hear me exclaiming to the mayor and governor that the Superdome should not be a shelter of last resort. Our engineering reports had predicted the Superdome would not withstand a Category 3 hurricane, and at the time, Katrina was rated a Category 5. Those reports were proven correct when the roof was ripped out, the stadium was surrounded by 8 to 12 feet of water and the power went out.
The power struggle had started about a week earlier when I instructed Northcom to move a hospital ship to New Orleans. Upon learning of the ship’s deployment to New Orleans, then U.S. Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi called in the middle of the night, screaming that the ship should instead be used in his state. I explained that Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour had not requested use of the ship, and that we had a priority need for the ship in Louisiana.
Lott impugned my character over the telephone, but I refused to budge. A U.S. senator interfering in ongoing operations for purely political reasons was unacceptable. But Lott went over my head and persuaded Chertoff to change the destination of the hospital ship to Mississippi. Northcom was so confused by this that I received an email making certain that that was the proper decision.
Even though that was not the decision I’d made, I had been overruled by a secretary unfamiliar with ground operations and who was making a decision purely on the basis that a U.S. senator had requested the ship go to his state. Chertoff sealed my fate at that moment. Though I was ostensibly running our operations center in Baton Rouge, I was no longer in charge. Now, someone sitting at a desk in Washington was making operational decisions.
In the aftermath of Katrina, FEMA coordinated all of the helicopters, boats and amphibious craft being used to rescue thousands of victims from rooftops, buildings and highway overpasses. A detailed grid system was established to eliminate duplicative efforts, make the rescues as efficient and quick as possible and prioritize hardest hit areas. Triage was in full force.
When CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked shortly after Katrina hit to accompany one of those teams so he could record the rescue of victims, my instinctive answer was to decline the request. The rescue boats carried the minimum crew members necessary to maximize space for victims. If I let a national news figure and a cameraman on a rescue boat, that boat would have two fewer spots on it for victims in need of rescuing.
My answer—no, you can’t go.
Big mistake in hindsight.
Cooper and his cameraman rented a boat, and with total disregard or ignorance of the systematic, grid-driven rescue of victims, managed to find a house with victims yet to be rescued. As Cooper and his cameraman reported on “their” rescue, the inevitable question of where the rescuers are was asked, and the next stage of blame began. Based on that one, isolated, out-of-context rescue, the narrative was set that the rescue efforts were disjointed, in disarray and uncoordinated.
Then, after President Bush’s televised praise for me, Time and its bloodhounds went to work. Not long after the Bush news briefing, one of my press assistants approached me and asked if I had a copy of my résumé. Apparently Time was working on a story that I had “lied” on it. Knowing that I hadn’t, I blew off the request. Time ran with the story regardless.
The magazine claimed in an article published on Sept. 8 that I had lied about previous work experience, that I had lied about job titles; It even claimed that I had not been an adjunct professor of law despite the law school’s rebuttal of that claim. Sources Time quoted later complained about their words being taken out of context. Former colleagues of mine and the dean of the law school provided affidavits during the congressional investigations, completely refuting the allegations.
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When I speak to various groups about crisis management, I always use the résumé story as an example of why you should never ignore a media request the way I did. Had I taken the time to understand what Time was attempting to do I could have called all of my previous coworkers and employers and perhaps staved off the outright lying of Time. But I was too busy coordinating the response to one of the largest natural disasters in our nation’s history. And I paid the price for that.
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News outlets around the country picked up the story, ran with the false narrative and lies, and suddenly the claim was that I not only lacked experience for the job, I had lied about that experience.
The defamatory Time article accomplished its mission—a few hours after it was published, I was recalled to Washington, relieved of my responsibilities as the “principal federal official” in response to Katrina. Politics did what it does best—it found the target, the scapegoat. And in so doing, it gave the White House the opportunity to cut ties. Three days later I chose to resign.
But after the creation of DHS in 2003, the focus shifted from an all-hazards approach to a focus on terrorism. Money for grants, training and equipment suddenly had to somehow help combat terrorism—and thus the partnership between federal and local agencies began to break down. Grant dollars were moved out of FEMA into the Department of Justice Office of Preparedness grants, thus moving the focus away from all hazards to one of law enforcement. Naturally, state and local governments followed the money, and the marriage between FEMA and state agencies was undermined by the pursuit of terrorism dollars.
I wrote Secretary Ridge in 2003 and warned him that this shift of grant money out of FEMA would ultimately result in FEMA’s failure. And it did. Terrorism became the focus, as did law enforcement. Partnership faded away. You can’t blame state governments; they were simply chasing the money.
Why anyone would want to enter this world--especially someone who is more of an introverted get-stuff-done type than an extrovert skilled in the media and influence games--is absolutely beyond me.
