Slow response and failed federal policies worsened impact of Hurricane Katrina

December 30, 2009 at 12:00a.m.

By ALLEN G. BREED

At an estimated $81 billion in property damage, Katrina ranks as the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history.

Katrina. For most Americans, it needs no qualifiers.

Just as we hear the word “Vietnam” and think first of war, someone says “Katrina,” and we think, not of a woman, but of broken levees and broken promises. Of property, lives and innocence lost.

The name conjures images of desperate, half-naked people waving white flags from rooftop islands emblazoned with pleas of “SOS.” and “HELP US.”

Of sweaty, hunger-crazed mobs swarming as soldiers push cartons of food and water from hovering helicopters.

Of bloated corpses, left to rot in the sun and be gnawed on by stray dogs.

Things like that don’t happen here, we told ourselves. In the Third World, yes, but not in the United States.

That was before Aug. 29, 2005. Before Katrina.

At an estimated $81 billion in property damage, it is the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history. But to many, especially to those in greater New Orleans, this catastrophe was anything but an act of God.

Residents on the Mississippi and Alabama coasts knew they were exposed to storms in the Gulf of Mexico, and that they built near the beaches at their own risk. But the people of New Orleans thought they were safe behind their network of earthen levees and concrete floodwalls.

By armoring and raising its banks, we had “tamed” the Mississippi River. But in the process, we starved of silt the delta marshlands that buffered the mainland from the Gulf of Mexico.

For years, experts had worried that a direct hit by a major hurricane would swamp the largely below-sea-level city. In the end, it didn’t even take that.

As Katrina grew into a Category 5 monster, New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin, calling it the “storm that most of us have long feared,” ordered the city’s first-ever mandatory evacuation. But in the last hours, the storm weakened to a Category 3 and veered east, sparing the city the full force of its wind and tidal surge.

To those of us who’d waited it out in the French Quarter or at the Superdome, Katrina seemed at first to have been just another “shoo-shoo” — a firecracker that fizzles, then goes out.

Then the water began to rise.

What we didn’t know was that overflow from Lake Pontchartrain to the north was battering down the floodwalls on the 17th Street and London Avenue Canals. To the southeast, wind-driven storm surge funneled up the 76-mile Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet — the “Mr. Go” — was overtopping and eroding the city’s outer defenses.

Within hours, 80 percent of New Orleans and nearly all of neighboring St. Bernard Parish were inundated.

Many of the storm’s 1,600 U.S. victims — among them, 35 who drowned in their beds and wheelchairs at St. Rita’s Nursing Home in St. Bernard Parish — died in the first violent rush of water. Others, like the 45 whose bodies were found in the chapel at New Orleans’ Memorial Medical Center, languished for days as they waited in vain for rescue.