Everybody knewEverybody knew: New documents reveal government awareness of impending Katrina disaster

Why is it that the lyrics of Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows” comes to mind? (“Everybody knows that the dice are loaded / Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed/ Everybody knows that the boat is leaking / Everybody knows that the captain lied / Everybody got this broken feeling”) In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, President Bush, DHS secretary Michael Chertoff, and other administration officials took the airwaves to argue that the hurricane and the damage it wrought were not foreseen, and could not have been foreseen (Bush said, “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees”). Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was given the unenviable task of visiting black churches in Mississippi and Louisiana to reassure incredulous audiences that Katrina was an act of God about which nothing could be known in advance and nothing could be done. This general argument was implausible on its face, because there were dozens of studies, many of them by government agencies, describing in great detail the consequences of the neglect of the levee system, the erosion of the barrier islands, and the disappearance of the marshes south of New Orleans as a result of developments. In July 2004, for example, DHS and FEMA ran an exercise called Hurricane Pam which provided a dire prediction about the result should a Category 3 hurricane hit New Orleans. It found, among other things, that flood waters would surge over levees, create “a catastrophic mass casualty/mass evacuation” and leave drainage pumps crippled for up to six months.

We now know that the more specific argument — that the administration did not know about the timing and fury of this particular hurricane — is also untrue. Newly released documents show that DHS was warned a day before Katrina hit that the storm’s surge could breach levees and leave New Orleans flooded for weeks or months.

A 28 August 2005 report by DHS’s National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center concluded that a Category 4 or 5 hurricane would cause severe damage in the city, including power outages and a direct economic hit of up to $10 billion for the first week. “Overall, the impacts described herein are conservative,” stated the report, which was sent to DHS’s office for infrastructure protection. “Any storm rated Category 4 or greater … will likely lead to severe flooding and/or levee breaching, leaving the New Orleans metro area submerged for weeks or months,” said the report. The document was released Monday by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The committee is examining the government’s breakdown in responding to Katrina.

On 29 July 2005, exactly one month before Katrina hit the coast, the Department of Transportation (DoT) briefed federal and state officials on the lack of readiness of evacuation plans for New Orleans. Don Day, DoT regional emergency officer, told the officials: “If you think soup lines in the Depression were long, wait till you see lines at these collection points.”

The documents are but the latest indication that the federal government knew beforehand of catastrophic damage likely from a storm of Katrina’s magnitude.

-read more in this AP report; and see some of the released documents at the Senate committee’s Web site