Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security

"It’s interesting you say that, because after the disaster people said it was all about race. I don’t doubt there would have been a difference between 50,000 black folks trapped in New Orleans versus 50,000 mostly white people in Orange County. I’m not saying race isn’t a factor. But ideology was a big factor too. When Bush was a candidate he gave Bill Clinton credit for turning around FEMA [the Federal Emergency Management Agency]. It became this amazing agency, it was finally being run by a professional, somebody who understood emergency management rather than a political appointee. But then the Bush administration came in and they believe in smaller government. One way to shrink the size of the government was to cut funding to FEMA, so they demoted the agency to a cabinet level — which made a big difference, it didn’t have the ear of the president any more, it had to go through an intermediary — and on top of that it had a much smaller budget. To me, ideology played a big role. What I love about Disaster is that it’s co-written by two Wall Street Journal reporters. They tell the story through Homeland Security, through FEMA. They look at this disaster from the perspective of the apparatus that was supposed to be in place to rescue people. It’s rich with stories. Michael Brown [the then head of FEMA], who was hung out to dry by the Bush administration and, in everyone’s minds, is to blame for the botched response, actually comes off looking pretty well in the book. He’s not perfect but he was made a scape goat. A lot of other people made big mistakes too. There was a lot of political infighting. “I’m not saying race isn’t a factor. But ideology was a big factor too.One way to shrink the size of the government was to cut funding to FEMA.” You really feel with this book like you’re in the rooms where decisions are being made. You’re in the rooms when the wrong decisions are being made. It’s just two good reporters who did a good job of telling an important story. We need to understand what happened, why mistakes were made and maybe, hopefully, the people running FEMA have now read the book and can learn from it. New Orleans is much safer today than it was at the time of Katrina. It has a $14.5 billion flood protection system. Some complain, but it’s a really good system. FEMA, though, it can’t change. There are rules our government came up with rules, our Congress passed them, our president has signed them that say you have to go through these steps. There are regulations that have been created and so everything takes longer than you think. The city of New Orleans and FEMA are still negotiating today, ten years later, over how much money the city is owed for Katrina. It’s just endless. One of my favourite anecdotes in the book is this guy in City Hall who works out how he wants to spend some discretionary recovery money. He sends it to the state and the state sends back a flowchart eight feet long. This guy said ‘it took us eight months to get the first two feet.’ If you thought anything was going to take six months it meant it was going to take six years. There literally were ambulances at the parish lines that FEMA wasn’t letting in because some regulation hadn’t been satisfied. That’s a time when rules don’t exist."