Related Resources On NationalJournal.com National Journal Cover Story: "Struggling To Survive" (8/11/06) · National Journal Cover Story: "Camp FEMA" (3/10/06) · National Journal: Q&A With Michael Brown (3/10/06) · National Journal: Q&A With Haley Barbour (8/12/06) · National Journal: "After Katrina - Beyond Federalism" (10/8/05) · National Journal: "Learning From Mistakes" (9/10/05) · National Journal: "Katrina FAQs" (9/10/05) · Budget Battles: "The Cost Of Katrina" (9/06/05) [an error occurred while processing this directive] Additional Resources On The Web The Federal Response To Katrina: Lessons Learned (White House report, 2/06) [PDF] · Hurricane Katrina: What Government Is Doing (DHS Web site) · American Red Cross Response to Hurricane Katrina & Rita

By Carl M. Cannon, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Sept. 21, 2007

In "Last of the Red Hot Poppas," a novel by New Orleans writer Jason Berry, Louisiana's sins are washed away not by absolution but by a historic flood. A logical literary device, but this book was written before Hurricane Katrina inundated the state during the last days of August 2005. Berry is a liberal Catholic Democrat, which differentiates him from George W. Bush, America's conservative Protestant Republican president.

Both Berry and Bush are believers in omens, however, and in the unhappy wages of wrongdoing -- and in redemption.

So where is Louisiana's?

Although the story is two years old, it is still chilling. On August 24, 2005, a meteorological depression near the Bahamas was upgraded to tropical storm status and given a name, Katrina. The next day, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush declared a state of emergency, a surety matched by few others in authority. The storm cut across Florida before heading into the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, where it picked up lethal ferocity. At 10:11 a.m. on Sunday, August 28, the National Weather Service warned of a hurricane with "unprecedented strength" that would leave "most of the area uninhabitable for weeks, perhaps longer."

That proved to be an understatement. Katrina slammed into the Mississippi coast and the low-lying Louisiana bayou towns with enough force to toss barges around like toy boats, dislodge oil rigs, and wash away bridges and interstates. The wind and storm surge killed more than 200 Mississippians -- eclipsing the toll from Hurricane Camille in 1969 -- but it was Louisiana where events turned truly biblical. Katrina made landfall in the bayou town of Buras, in Plaquemines Parish, at 6:10 a.m. on Monday, speeding over open water that once had been the cypress marshes that calmed hurricanes. New Orleans was inundated by storm surge, rainwater, canal breaks, and breaches in the levees bordering Lake Pontchartrain. Eighty percent of the city was flooded. More than 1,460 Louisianans died, most by drowning, and most of them impoverished residents of New Orleans. It was, President Bush told the nation, "a cruel and wasteful storm."

True enough, but that was only part of the story. Mississippi was hit by a hurricane; New Orleans and its surrounding parishes were knocked to their knees by a man-made flood. The region's canals, built on the basis of specious economic rationales, funneled tsunami-like waves of water into the city. "This was a flood, not a hurricane," notes Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., a New Orleans native. "It was the federal infrastructure that failed." The levees that were supposed to protect people were poorly designed, shoddily built, and haphazardly maintained. New Orleans's evacuation plans revealed themselves to be grotesquely inadequate; the response of the Federal Emergency Management Agency instantly became a source of national embarrassment. Hurricane Katrina, it was clear, represented a failure of government at all levels.

Standing in New Orleans's famed Jackson Square two weeks later, Bush acknowledged as much. "This government will learn the lessons of Hurricane Katrina," the president vowed, adding that he would do "what it takes" to rebuild the city bigger and better than before.

In the ensuing two years not much has gone right for either the president or the city he promised to help resurrect. At one level this is understandable, while at another level it makes no sense at all: Bush and New Orleans simply need each other too badly not to make it work. For the president, especially, time is growing short.

The Big Uneasy
The relationship between George W. Bush and New Orleans is neither easy nor natural. The president is a teetotaler, a fitness nut, an early riser, a white man from a wealthy family whose idea of a good time is him and his wife in a quiet place with a couple of friends or an old movie. New Orleans is spicy food, spicier politics, mixed races, exotic music, the crowded and clamorous French Quarter. It is Mardi Gras in February, Jazz Fest in April, and it embraces Louisiana's unofficial slogan, Laissez les bons temps rouler, year-round. In New Orleans, uttering the word "hurricane" usually meant you were ordering a rum drink.

Until 2005. That year, water rolled into the city instead of good times. It was then that the fortunes of Bush and New Orleans became inextricably linked. Bush's job-approval rating had slipped below 50 percent before Katrina, a casualty of a bruising 2004 re-election campaign, the mess in Iraq, and six months of wasted motion on his doomed Social Security reform. It's much lower now, and part of that erosion is because of Katrina. Bush waited two days before flying over the flooded region, instead of going to it. FEMA's habit of putting paperwork over people didn't help. A president who won re-election with 51 percent of the popular vote now has a job-approval rating around 30 percent. All second-term U.S. presidents are lame ducks by virtue of the 22nd Amendment, but if Bush were a stock, the shareholders would sell.

Louisianans can relate. Gov. Kathleen Blanco was so damaged by the state's response that she chose not to run for re-election this year. The prohibitive favorite is Republican Rep. Bobby Jindal, whom Blanco defeated four years ago. In a racially charged campaign, resentful New Orleans voters re-elected beleaguered Mayor Ray Nagin but almost immediately came to regret their choice. In any event, Nagin oversees a shrunken city. The Census Bureau had New Orleans's population at 455,000 when the flood hit; today, fewer than 300,000 souls live in the Crescent City. Housing is scarce, hotel rooms are easy to find, and downtown New Orleans is quiet -- many businesses and corporate headquarters have relocated to Houston or Atlanta. Crime rates are up, and school enrollments are only 40 percent of what they were pre-Katrina.

In nearly every neighborhood, houses still bear the ominous codes spray-painted on their front siding two years ago indicating the presence of human bodies, dead pets, or hazards inside. All over the city, roads buckled under the weight of the water; some are barely passable today. The lighthouse in the posh Lakeview neighborhood is still on its side, the nearby shopping center is abandoned, and the venerable Southern Yacht Club, which burned to the ground, has yet to be rebuilt.

In the lower 9th Ward, a beautifully restored Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School for Science and Technology gives a visitor hope -- briefly. Four blocks down Caffin Avenue sits Fats Domino's compound -- but Fats's place is uninhabitable. The house next door fell down; no one has bothered to rebuild it. In block after block, grass grows where homes used to stand. Around the corner on Lamarche Street three burned-out boats lie across the road. Fats escaped in a boat, but these aren't monuments -- they are garbage that no one has bothered to remove because no one goes there anymore.

The main signs of life in this part of town come from do-gooders. A sign says that Tipitina's Foundation -- the famous uptown music hall survived the flood -- is helping Fats rebuild his house. ACORN, the nationwide community housing organization, has posted "No bulldozing" signs. Jackson Barracks, which straddles the border of the lower 9th Ward and St. Bernard Parish is being rebuilt. It took as much as 8 feet of water two years ago, forcing the National Guard to relocate. Otherwise, government isn't much in evidence down here. "We're the country that put men on the moon?" Jason Berry says, as he surveys the scene. "Look at this!"

Bush acknowledged such feelings when he marked Katrina's second anniversary in an August 29 visit to the King charter school. "It's one thing to come and give a speech in Jackson Square; it's another thing to keep paying attention to whether or not progress is being made," he said. "I hope people understand we do, we're still paying attention. We're still engaged."

He can yet prove that, but time is running out. In the presidential limousine on the way to the school, Blanco handed Bush a wish list. If he wants to leave a legacy here, it's going to take more than pretty words. National Journal visited New Orleans and Baton Rouge, spoke with members of the congressional delegation, officials in the governor's office, and other Louisiana movers and shakers. They were asked: What can the Bush administration still do to help Louisiana's recovery? Here are their answers.

Restore The Delta
The Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 put 26,000 square miles of land under 30 feet of water, drove almost a million people from their homes and farms, and destroyed some 40,000 buildings. In response, Congress passed the 1928 Flood Control Act, essentially directing the Army Corps of Engineers to prevent the Mississippi from flooding its banks ever again. This has proved impossible and unwise.

Midwesterners could have told President Coolidge that old-timers who lived along the river counted time by its major floods -- 10 since the end of the Civil War, including one in 1922. The 1927 flood nearly inundated New Orleans, but the locks, canals, levees, concrete river walls, and upstream dams constructed afterward ensured that the city would forever be in the path of danger. The reasons were little understood 80 years ago; they are well known now. The Mississippi was called the Big Muddy for a reason; it dumped some 400 million tons of sediment a year in the Delta, making it a great land-replenishing resource. No more. Most of the river's annual sediment load is trapped behind those dams and levees. As a consequence, the Delta has been shrinking for decades while seawater reclaims the marshes, wetlands, and barrier islands south of New Orleans.

Thousands of miles of canals, most of them built by the Corps or by private interests at the behest of the energy and shipping industries, have exacerbated this problem. These canals, including the infamous Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, or MRGO, slice up Louisiana's marsh, funneling salt water into the bayou country and ravaging the marsh in the process.

A decade ago, Louisianans produced a 50-year plan to reclaim their land. Dubbed Coast 2050, the project presupposes that the federal government can't simply dismantle the dams and levees and let the Mississippi flow freely, so its cost was estimated at $14 billion for projects ranging from closing MRGO to replanting marsh grasses on barrier islands. Neither Congress nor the Clinton administration acted on the plan, although by Bush's first term it had the support of the Corps. But the $14 billion price tag was too steep for the Bush administration. The Office of Management and Budget told Congress that it would agree to $2 billion worth of restoration.

That's where things were when Katrina hit, followed by Hurricane Rita a month later, and it's where they are now.

In fact, the latest policy statement out of the White House has the president vowing to veto a water bill that both houses of Congress passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. The legislation includes a significant sediment-diversion project as well as authorization to close MRGO. But on August 1, OMB Director Rob Portman and John Paul Woodley Jr., the ranking Pentagon official who oversees the Corps, issued the written veto threat [PDF] on the president's behalf.

The administration did agree to legislation shepherded through Congress by Landrieu and Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., that will allow Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas to use 37.5 percent of the revenues from new offshore oil leases for environmental restoration -- but not for another decade. Landrieu's office estimates that Louisiana's share will come to $1 billion a year eventually; but in return for OMB's support, the law doesn't take effect until 2017.

Such foot-dragging surprised Bush allies and critics alike. Blanco personally asked Bush to reconsider his stance against the water bill; Louisiana's Republican senator, David Vitter, is agitating for quick Senate action so that Congress can override any Bush veto. It all seems so inexplicable. The president could own the issue of wetlands restoration. Mostly, it would take a national speech and a request for $14 billion or so from Congress, about the amount the United States will spend in Iraq between now and early November.

"We're not talking about a beach resort," Landrieu said. "This is the mouth of the Mississippi River. This is what Andrew Jackson fought for. It's worth spending a significant amount of money to save."

Reform The Corps
While Bush and Blanco observed a moment of silence for the victims at the charter school event on Katrina's second anniversary, Mayor Nagin rang bells at 9:38 a.m., the moment when the city's 17th Street Canal was breached two years earlier, flooding the city center. "Give us the wisdom not to fight each other," Nagin implored in prayer. To the much-maligned Army Corps of Engineers, such an attitude would be a welcome change, but even its top officials acknowledge that the priorities of the Corps must be reset.

When the Corps began, it very much was part of the Army -- the Continental Army -- and its first chief engineer reported to George Washington. It evolved over the next two centuries into a colossus that operated independently of the U.S. Army and with little oversight from the executive branch. Its true masters reside in Congress. It's not a good match. Members like pork, and the Corps likes to build things -- whether they work or not.

The day the Industrial Canal broke in New Orleans, the Corps was already working on a $748 million construction project to upgrade the canal, work unrelated to either flood control or improving the ecology. The Corps was constructing a massive lock at the behest of Louisiana's congressional delegation, a project that the Corps erroneously claimed was necessitated by increasing barge traffic through the canal.

In the aftermath of the flood, voices across the political spectrum agreed that the Corps's culture needed changing. Katrina presented the opportunity, and the chastened Corps itself seemed receptive. What it still needed was leadership. With the administration and the Louisiana delegation playing mostly passive roles, Sens. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., and John McCain, R-Ariz., stepped into the breach. They fashioned amendments to the water bill -- the same one Bush has threatened to veto -- with two main requirements. The first forces the Corps to submit major projects to independent review of everything from design to construction. The second obliges the Corps to assign priority order to its proposed projects based on flood and storm damage mitigation, navigation needs, and environmental restoration.

"There are plenty of elements within the Corps that would like the agency to become a force for effective ecosystem operation, but they need a clear signal from Congress," said Paul Harrison, the coastal Louisiana project manager for Environmental Defense.

"Louisianans," the New Orleans Times-Picayune editorialized last summer, "should be able to believe that the Corps, which is rebuilding our levee system and restoring our coastline, is a wiser, better managed, and more reliable agency than the one that failed us when Hurricane Katrina came to town."

It is an effort that Bush could lead instead of watch.

Sign The Water Bill
The legislation's formal name is the Water Resources Development Act, and signing it is a small step, compared with restoring the Delta and reforming the Army Corps of Engineers. But it is related to both -- and signing it would go a long way toward convincing Louisianans that Bush means what he says when he expresses solicitude for their plight.

In his veto threat, Portman noted wryly that the water bill went into conference ostensibly to work out differences between a $15 billion House bill and a $14 billion Senate bill -- only to emerge as a $20 billion-plus bill. "This is not how most Americans would expect their representatives in Washington to reach agreement," the letter says, "especially when it is their tax dollars that are being spent."

Feingold, for one, agreed. "I supported the Senate version of this bill because it included strong reforms," he complained. "But the conference report significantly weakened those reforms and raised the price tag to $21 billion in pet projects."

Under normal circumstances, agreement between the liberal Feingold and the conservative president might carry weight, but in Louisianans' minds the time for good-government scolding is long past. Most of the money in the bill is allocated to bringing the levees back up to par, in addition to closing MRGO and building a sediment-replenishment facility at a place called Myrtle Grove in Plaquemines.

"The president ... recognized the need for $7.6 billion more for hurricane and flood protection but will not take the proper measures to get the money down here quick enough," Sen. Vitter told NJ in a written statement delivered by his spokesman. "Instead of calling for an emergency supplemental appropriations bill, as I requested, the administration wants to wait until the end of next year. That means money to get shovels in the ground won't be in Louisiana until close to 2010 -- the date the president promised to have the levees back to pre-Katrina levels or better, in his famous speech in Jackson Square."

On the gubernatorial campaign trail, Jindal, another Republican in the delegation, sounds as though he's hoping to help override Bush's veto as a way of showing his independence. "I'm happy to agree with my party when they're right," Jindal has said. "But party doesn't come first."

This issue unites Louisianans like little else does. Blanco told Bush as much on August 29. In case he was only half-listening, she gave him a letter reiterating the point: "I can assure you," it said, "that WRDA is the single most important infrastructure bill for Louisiana."

When Bush was in the 9th Ward last month, he acknowledged how important such projects were to the mind-set of recovery in Louisiana. "We fully understand that New Orleans can't be rebuilt until there's confidence in the levees." To Louisianans, he can prove that by signing a water bill -- even if it is bloated. They believe they deserve that much.

Put More Money In The Pipeline
The centerpiece of the federal response to Katrina was the Road Home program, the largest disaster home-recovery effort in U.S. history. The program essentially gave Gulf state homeowners up to $150,000 in compensation if they returned to their damaged or destroyed homes. Reimbursements were maddeningly slow; but now the pipeline is flowing, and Louisiana authorities say they'll run out of money by year's end.

The reasons, Blanco told Bush, are threefold:

• The number of displaced homeowners was higher than originally thought.
• Damage to their homes or business was greater than estimated.
• Insurance covered less than expected.

The state has kicked in $1 billion, but next year the program will realize a shortfall of $4 billion to $5 billion.

A fourth factor was the hasty decision Congress made that no state could receive more than 54 percent of the federal community development block grants that fund this program. Since Louisiana suffered far more death and destruction than Mississippi, Louisiana lawmakers want this formula tweaked.

They know they are running up against "Katrina fatigue." Partly it is a normal human reaction two years after the fact. Partly it stems from frustration with the state's notoriously corrupt and inefficient politics. Ray Nagin ran his first race for mayor as a reformer. For his re-election effort, he retreated to the timeworn pathology of identity politics. It can be effective -- and was in his case -- but it comes at a cost in credibility. After his re-election, Nagin had several false starts before getting his city's recovery plans off the ground. Ultimately, he brought in noted recovery expert Edward J. Blakely, a Californian who was running an urban-planning program at the University of Sydney. Next week, Blakely will unveil his proposal for 160 rebuilding projects in 17 target areas of the city.

Excitement over these plans is tempered by the knowledge that New Orleans officials have run into numerous roadblocks thrown their way in the past two years -- and have erected some of their own. Nagin, for instance, continues to frustrate FEMA bureaucrats -- and that takes some doing -- with his fetish for process. For example, following his reading of the city charter, an interpretation that nearly everyone regards as idiosyncratic, Nagin has refused to start any construction project unless all of the federal money to pay for it is in the bank.

"The mayor can't organize a two-car funeral, and the governor hasn't been up to snuff, either, but we have to work together," said a prominent New Orleans Democrat. "Just as we have to work with the president."

Cut Through The Red Tape
Most of the red tape is not the mayor's, it is the federal government's, specifically bureaucratic interpretations of the Stafford Act, the law that gave rise to FEMA. The act is designed to prevent fraud. It also stifles creativity, compassion, and common sense.

Every Louisiana official has a favorite FEMA horror story. Landrieu's is Peebles Elementary School in Iberia Parish. Katrina destroyed Peebles, and FEMA agreed to rebuild it -- provided that local authorities moved it out of the floodplain. Iberia lawmakers readily agreed and purchased a new site. Six months later, FEMA officials reversed course, saying that the school could be built on the old site -- with half the promised funding. Landrieu fixed that problem with a specific amendment to the Homeland Security Appropriations bill, not exactly an efficient rebuilding strategy.

Kevin Davis, president of St. Tammany Parish, recounts the nightmare of trying to get FEMA reimbursement for the removal of 6 million cubic yards of downed trees and other debris. "We learned a very expensive lesson about what words were -- or were not -- acceptable in [FEMA-required] "Project Worksheets,' " Davis recalled this summer. "The word 'assessment' cost us $320,000. According to FEMA, we cannot employ a contractor for assessment work.... Unfortunately, once you use a term you cannot take it back."

Andy Kopplin, executive director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, points out that FEMA would pay only one-third of the $6.4 million it cost to rebuild the Martin Luther King charter school that Bush visited; the state fronted the rest in hope of getting reimbursed -- someday. "After a catastrophe, the Stafford Act doesn't work," he wrote recently. "We've got all the proof we need in our growing mountain of paper."

And so it went, and still goes.

"The federal government can do a great deal to expedite the recovery, beginning with cutting the bureaucracy," Vitter told NJ. "Our local parish and municipal governments are extremely frustrated with FEMA's varying levels of red tape and constant turnover in personnel."

These frustrations, too, have been brought to Bush's attention. "He's amicable, and he listens," Blanco said. "Yet he defers to the process."

Make Louisiana A Top Priority
On April 22, 1927, while the waters of the Great Mississippi River Flood were still rising, President Coolidge created a quasi-governmental organization (FEMA did not exist) to manage the disaster, and named Herbert Hoover as its chairman. Hoover was then secretary of Commerce, and the only person in Coolidge's camp with an international reputation. He was given near-dictatorial powers -- and used them.

Far from being the unidentified "little fat man" of Randy Newman's famous song about the '27 flood, Hoover was dynamic to the point of being draconian. But Hoover's decisiveness helped put him in the White House. The flood claimed fewer than 250 lives. Repair and recovery efforts started before the river was back inside its banks. After Katrina struck, numerous voices urged Bush to appoint a recovery czar based on the Hoover model. He resisted such entreaties, and his resistance is still being second-guessed.

No "czar" was in place to urge Washington's policy makers to revisit spending formulas or cut red tape or see to the myriad issues that arise on an ad hoc basis. These range from addressing Louisiana's need for increased mental health services for frightened youngsters, to tackling the problem of obtaining suddenly expensive and hard-to-find private insurance to cover homes and businesses. The president discharged his FEMA director, and ultimately tapped a fellow Texan, Donald Powell -- a banker from Amarillo, who had been running the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. -- as "federal coordinator" for Gulf Coast rebuilding.

"This recovery has progressed slower than a glacier moves," said Jim Brandt, the president of the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana. "Donald Powell is a great guy, a nice gentleman, but he's not a recovery czar."

Last month, Nagin mused aloud that another Powell -- Colin Powell -- could be tapped, even now. Privately, some Democrats wondered if it was too late in the 2008 campaign cycle for Bush to ask Bill Clinton to take the job. The answer to that question is, yes, it's too far along in Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign for that. But one former Southern governor is underemployed these days. He's the same chief executive who reacted with alacrity to Hurricane Katrina, and he sure as hell is close to the president. Fella name of Bush. Jeb Bush.

"Why not?" said Brandt. "We need somebody."

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