Also In This Issue Click here for all Katrina coverage from the Sept. 10 National Journal. (Available to subscribers only) Related Resources On NationalJournal.com Budget Battles: "The Cost Of Katrina" (09/06/05) · CongressDaily: "Katrina Relief Clears Congress" (09/03/05) · Off Message: "Storm Surge" (09/09/05) · Off To The Races: "Katrina: Trying To Forget, Or At Least Forgive, The Administration's Response" (9/06/05) · On The Trail: "Leadership Vacuums Galore" (09/07/05) · Poll Track: National Polling On Hurricane Katrina · Wealth Of Nations: "An America I Never Expected To See" (09/09/05) Additional Resources On The Web DHS: National Response Plan · National Flood Insurance Program · Federal Emergency Management Agency · American Red Cross

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Friday, Sept. 9, 2005

Hurricanes, in the incongruously spiritual language of insurance riders, are considered "acts of God." But the role of humans is more telling. Except in the rarest of cases -- last year's South Asian tsunami, for one -- nature by itself doesn't kill many people. Progress kills people.

In 1811 and 1812, a series of earthquakes and aftershocks near New Madrid, Mo., caused the Mississippi River to flow backwards, created new lakes, knocked people out of bed hundreds of miles away -- and caused one confirmed death. Tepees are not lethal, and one-story log cabins proved to be seismically sound structures. The New Madrid Fault is still active, and quakes of that magnitude, estimated in excess of 8.1 on the Richter scale, today could lead to a million casualties.

It wasn't primarily wind and water that caused most of Hurricane Katrina's carnage. The gambling ships moored off Biloxi that broke loose and leveled stately, 100-year-old neighborhoods like runaway glaciers were not made by God. The crumbling levees that surrounded New Orleans -- and doomed it -- were built by human beings.

So these were largely man-made disasters, requiring a man-made response. But this, too, went awry. And amid the inevitable blame game, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Navy Adm. Timothy J. Keating talked more productively this week about the "lessons learned" to protect the U.S. from the next dangerous event. This disaster, however, served as a reminder that learning from mistakes is never easy.

The 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon killed more Americans than all the U.S. hurricanes in the last 50 years -- put together. And so the Federal Emergency Management Agency was reorganized, yet again, and folded into the Department of Homeland Security. This reorganization was understandable. But if Katrina claims more lives than the 2,972 lost on 9/11 -- as seems likely -- the Bush administration will learn, as the previous Bush administration learned after Hurricanes Hugo and Andrew, that FEMA works best when it has clear lines of authority.

What are the other major lessons? One is that calamities don't always arrive individually. Like the hijacked planes on 9/11, the blows from Hurricane Katrina kept coming. This was not a single disaster, but three. Each caused the other, but they were distinct and presented different challenges.

The first disaster was the hurricane itself. Katrina, with its 145-mile-per-hour winds and 20-foot storm surge, was measured as the equal of Hurricane Camille, which blazed virtually the same path in August 1969, mauling the same Mississippi towns and killing 255 people. This, then, is one of the lessons: This storm was worse because it encountered many more people and buildings in its path.

The second calamity was the flooding of New Orleans, which had been predicted many times. A prescient 2002 series in the local newspaper forecast it all: the hurricane-induced breaching of the levees; the flooding of the city; the death toll; the destruction of the city's sewage system; the lack of water, food, shelter, and medical care for residents who didn't make it out. "Tens of thousands more would be stranded on rooftops and high ground, awaiting rescue that could take days or longer," The Times-Picayune foretold.

The third calamity was the breakdown of social order. Looting happens in hurricanes, but who torches buildings during a flood with people in the attics? Who fires on rescuers? Who sends people to an enclosed stadium and forgets about them? Whose cops abandon their posts? One lesson is that a city with the most underpaid, undertrained police force in the country will underperform in a crisis. And a city that issues "mandatory" evacuation orders, but sits idly by as the means to effect that evacuation -- buses, trains, trucks, emergency vehicles -- are stowed for safekeeping is a city that will blow up. Here, too, 9/11 may have provided the wrong lesson. Perhaps it's trite to say that in a crisis a city's true character will emerge and that New Yorkers really are tough and resilient and that New Orleans' reigning ethic -- laissez les bons temps rouler -- doesn't come in very handy when waves of water are rolling in, instead of good times. But it's not too pat to point out that long-term planning pays off and that, in a crisis, leadership matters.

On 9/11, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani became a national hero by rushing from City Hall to Ground Zero to take charge. Gov. George Pataki rallied to the city's side, too, as did President Bush. After initially flying off in the wrong direction, the president quickly found his voice and, along with the mayor, came to epitomize an unbending -- and united -- national mood.

The contrast to Katrina is stark. The country hasn't pulled together -- it has turned on itself. In Giuliani's role was New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who couldn't control his own police department. Instead of marshaling forces from the rest of the state as Pataki did, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco joined Nagin in begging for federal help while appearing shell-shocked. They pointed fingers at FEMA and the White House, which pointed right back. But some Bush administration officials conceded that anyone would have needed help.

"In this disaster and a disaster of this magnitude, the would-be first responders at the state and local level were themselves victims in very large numbers," Rumsfeld said this week. "We had a situation that was distinctly different than in past events of this type."

Which gets to the federal response. Bush had been in office only months on 9/11, and Americans set partisanship aside and rallied behind him. The opposite has happened this time, and part of the reason is the response of this president, who has now been in office for five years. When the levees failed late Monday morning, Bush was heading to California from Arizona in the final week of a long working vacation. As New Orleans filled with water on Tuesday, Bush delivered a speech commemorating the 60th anniversary of V-J Day, then headed back to Crawford ahead of schedule. White House press secretary Scott McClellan announced that Bush's vacation was being cut short. The following day, Wednesday, Bush ordered Air Force One to fly low over the damaged areas as he flew back to Washington. Bush's two subsequent trips to the Gulf Coast didn't dampen the developing consensus: Bush was out of touch, FEMA was back to its bureaucratic ways, and the federal government, despite ample warning, had not responded rapidly, efficiently, or humanely enough to an unprecedented disaster on America's own shores.

The investigations of culpability are only beginning -- Bush himself has vowed to investigate -- and Hurricane Katrina will be studied only slightly less than Noah's Flood. If there is any rainbow beginning to emerge, it is in the professed eagerness of public officials to prepare better for the next disaster. Following are some of the initial conclusions to be drawn from the first two weeks' experience. -- Carl M. Cannon

Prioritize Army Corps Projects
The Army Corps of Engineers fought alongside George Washington, dug the fortifications around New Orleans for Andrew Jackson, and once ran the military academy at West Point. But not since 1824, when Congress appropriated $75,000 for the Corps to remove snags and sandbars from the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, has the agency really been in charge of its own agenda. This point was driven home on Monday, August 29, when the levees protecting New Orleans from the deadly waters of Lake Pontchartrain failed.

"The president's budget for fiscal 2005 is $3.0 million," explained a fact sheet on New Orleans-area hurricane-protection efforts updated by the Corps's New Orleans District this May. "We could spend $20 million if the funds were provided.... Several levees have settled and need to be raised to provide the [desired] protection. The current funding shortfalls in fiscal year 2005 and fiscal year 2006 will prevent the Corps from addressing these pressing needs."

The Corps has been predicting for decades that a massive storm could overwhelm the New Orleans levees, flood the city, and drown thousands of people. "There have been many times the Corps has asked for dollars and the money has gone elsewhere," said Lee Butler, a former Army Corps engineer. "From the time of Ronald Reagan on, administrations have not paid enough attention."

But when it comes to the priorities of the Corps, the White House is only part of the problem. It is Congress, using the power of the purse, that really sets the agency's priorities. And Congress, note numerous congressional watchdog groups, puts politics first when deciding which Army Corps projects to fund among the thousands of navigation, flood-control, shore-protection, and other water-management proposals from local officials each year. "There were high-priority Corps initiatives that were not funded as a result of member projects," said Scott Lilly, former Democratic staff director of the House Appropriations Committee.

"There are so many [congressional] mouths to feed, so everyone gets a little bit of the money," said Steve Ellis, vice president of programs at Taxpayers for Common Sense. He said that even in Louisiana, Corps money has gone to waterway and wastewater projects that should have been deemed lower priorities than levee protection.

Donald Sweeney, a Corps economist-turned-whistle-blower, said the Corps plays a role, too. "The Corps is basically incapable of saying no to projects," he said. "Every district recommends every project as high priority, and when everything's a high priority, nothing is."

Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, commander of the Corps, said the levees in New Orleans were designed to protect the city in 99.5 percent of storms. Katrina fell within the 0.5 percent that planners had deemed an acceptable risk. "The government of this country, from the local up to the national level, needs to reassess what level of risk is acceptable," Strock said on September 2. But even if the nation adopts a more risk-averse approach to flood control and other natural disasters, the Corps's culture of acquiescence to Congress's wishes -- and Congress's unwillingness to discriminate between pork and necessity -- will have to change. -- Brian Friel and David Baumann

Get Everybody Out
In late July, emergency officials in New Orleans started recording a DVD of hurricane instructions, for distribution to the city's poorest residents: Pack your medicines and legal documents, the officials planned to say, have a communication plan ready for your family, and, most importantly, help your neighbors leave town.

Because the city wasn't going to get people out of harm's way. "We just don't have the resources to take everybody out," Joseph Matthews, the city's emergency-preparedness director, told the local paper, The Times-Picayune, in May.

Evacuation isn't easy, even for people with resources. Traffic is a nightmare, hotels are expensive. Bunking with relatives is fine -- in short doses and large spaces. In small towns, officials can order, cajole, and go door to door to plead, but in big cities, fast evacuations depend on people's willingness to depart, and the persuasion skills of those requesting the departure.

"You say, 'Evacuate,' they say, 'So what?'" said Mark Marchbank, director of emergency services for Virginia Beach, Va. "You say, 'Mandatory evacuation,' " and people pay attention.

Force rarely comes into play: Americans aren't generally sympathetic to images of law-abiding citizens being removed from their homes by gun-toting officials, no matter how dire the circumstances. In New Orleans, in fact, even as Mayor Ray Nagin finally authorized forced evacuations on Tuesday night, more than a week into the flooding, police captain Marlon DeFillo was telling the Associated Press that the move would be a "PR nightmare."

One reason that large-scale hurricane evacuations are hard to pull off is that the weather is fond of crying wolf. And once a family has spent eight hours in gridlocked traffic trying to clear out for a storm that never came, they're not eager to repeat the experience. Jamie Hardy, 47, a New Orleans native, hadn't left town for a hurricane since 1997, when an evacuation to his brother's home in Baton Rouge went on for "too many days with too many families, too many dogs, and too many short tempers, including my own." He planned to stay for Katrina, too, in an old, solid French Quarter apartment, until his wife, who is six months pregnant, persuaded him to head out on Sunday afternoon. "If it was just me, I probably would have stayed," he said. "Obviously, that would have been the wrong answer."

But evacuation is even harder for people who don't have the money to sit in traffic.

About 28 percent of the city's residents lived below the poverty line. Fifty-seven thousand households didn't have access to cars. By the time the levees broke, the choices for the poor were either to stay home and hope to ride it out, or to make their way to the Superdome or the city's convention center, neither of which was properly equipped as a shelter.

Once there, they were "expected to fend for themselves," as the city's homeland-security director, Terry Ebbert, told The Times-Picayune the day before the hurricane.

New Orleans is far from the only city in which the poor have no good options for escaping disaster, according to Derrick Span, president of the Community Action Partnership. In the wake of 9/11, the partnership, which represents 1,000 anti-poverty agencies around the country, initiated a program called Community Land Security to connect local emergency planners with the poor in their communities. The program is now up and running in 10 cities; after Katrina hit, Span rapidly drafted a proposal to expand the effort to 1,000 cities. -- Corine Hegland

Use Every Means of Transportation
The United States' vehicle inventory includes at least 135 million personal cars; 5.6 million big trucks; 500,000 school buses; 139,000 transit vans, buses, and commuter trains; 8,000 airliners; 200,000 general aviation aircraft; 2,000 Amtrak passenger cars; 13 million recreational boats; and 40,000 barges and ships -- plus the helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, tanks, and other vehicles of the U.S. military. But in much of New Orleans, once the levees broke, there was no way out.

In the latter stages of that city's post-Katrina evacuation, after thousands of people had been stranded for days, enough of the nation's transportation fleet finally arrived on the scene to evacuate survivors by plane, train, bus, boat, and helicopter.

But the day before the hurricane hit, the airlines closed up shop, the intercity buses and trains stopped running, the school buses sat in their lots, and the New Orleans transit buses went only as far as the Superdome. By and large, anyone who wanted to evacuate had only one effective means of escape: personal car.

For people with cars, the pre-storm evacuation went relatively well. Ever since major traffic jams snarled evacuation efforts on the East Coast in advance of Hurricane Floyd in 1999, transportation engineers and emergency-management officers across the South have worked to do a better job of coordinating highway-evacuation procedures. Doubling the number of vehicles leaving a danger area by making all the lanes go in one direction is a complicated undertaking. Traffic lights have to be re-timed, special crossover areas have to be built, and evacuation-route markers must be erected. The highway evacuation for Hurricane Katrina "definitely appeared to [have worked] much better than anything we had in the past," said Brian Wolshon, a Louisiana State University transportation expert who helped design the New Orleans exit strategy.

For the many thousands of New Orleans residents without cars, however, there was no such sophisticated plan. Transit officials have spent much more time figuring out how to protect their property and passengers from terrorist attacks than figuring out how to use their vehicles for evacuation. "Most emergency planning has assumed that it would be a very small number of people that would have to be moved without cars," said Community Transportation Association of America Executive Director Dale Marsico. In New Orleans, at least one in five residents -- including the poor, the elderly, and the disabled -- didn't have access to a car.

In the future, transit experts say, emergency-response planners need to include the owners of various vehicle fleets at the table when they're drawing up evacuation procedures. "Quite often, regions don't recognize the resources transit can bring to a disaster situation," said American Public Transportation Association official Greg Hull.

The mayor of New Orleans, the governor of Louisiana, and the president of the United States told people to clear out, but they provided no ride for the people who needed one.

"It wasn't that we didn't have the transportation capacity," said former Transportation Secretary Jim Burnley. "It was a failure to execute." -- Brian Friel

Federal Leadership and Local Initiative Are Both Essential
The shock of Katrina was not just the destruction, but the disorganization. Accusations shot back and forth from New Orleans to Baton Rouge to Washington, and blame settled on all. But the deep-rooted disarray -- that it was even possible, say, for Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and President Bush to deadlock over command of the National Guard -- suggests that the problem goes beyond personalities and parties to the principle of federalism itself. More than 200 years of deference to state and local sovereignty, re-emphasized in the new National Response Plan published last December, give mayors, county officials, and governors the leading role in responding to disasters in their jurisdictions, with federal officials providing aid if asked. But what happens in a disaster so overwhelming that the stricken regions cannot even communicate what kind of help they need?

"In past disasters, the locals are first to respond, and when they're overwhelmed, they request state assistance. And when the state is overwhelmed, they request federal assistance," said Trina Sheets, executive director of the National Emergency Management Association. "But if state and local capabilities -- even their capability to request assistance -- are compromised, how far forward does the federal government lean?"

All the way, says Randall Larsen, a retired Air Force colonel and an outspoken homeland-security strategist. "The National Response Plan structure works well for your 'standard' disaster -- a couple of tornadoes, a Category 2 hurricane, a small earthquake -- where the state and local folks are in charge, and the [federal agencies] come in with special equipment and money," he continued. "But there are certain circumstances where the state and locals are so decimated that the feds have to take over for a time." That, in practice, means the military. Only the armed forces can carry a complete new infrastructure -- food, water, power, shelter, security, and communications -- into an area where every essential has been swept away.

"A military takeover should be a last resort," countered former Virginia Gov. James Gilmore. Civil liberties aside, he said, "just practically speaking, they're not going to get there for 72 hours." The same mobile city of supplies that makes the military so useful in disasters is also so big that it takes time to deploy. Gilmore, who chaired a prominent commission on homeland security, has since founded a National Council on Readiness and Preparedness. The council encourages states, local governments, and even the private sector to take the initiative in their own defense, he said, and "not to wait around for federal direction."

Amy Zegart, a professor of public policy at the University of California (Los Angeles), said, "Local officials base their response planning on the assumption that the federal cavalry will ride to their rescue. It is not going to happen." Strong, active federal leadership is critical, and in response to Katrina, she said, "FEMA made tragic mistakes -- but even if FEMA does everything well, local officials are still going to be on their own for a critical period. They need to understand that, and start planning rather than whining." -- Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.

FEMA May Work Best Standing Alone
President Bush's father took the blame when the Federal Emergency Management Agency was slow to respond to Hurricane Hugo in 1989. By 1992, when FEMA's initial response to Hurricane Andrew was perceived as bureaucratic, Bush dispatched then-Transportation Secretary Andy Card down to Florida to kick a few fannies, including the one belonging to Florida Gov. Lawton Chiles. That wasn't enough to spare Bush from bad press -- during an election year. The lessons weren't lost on President Clinton, who elevated his FEMA director, James Lee Witt, to Cabinet-level status. And during Cabinet meetings, recalls one participant, Clinton would bluntly tell the other Cabinet officials, "Give James Lee anything he wants."

So why did Bush's son -- with Andy Card as his chief of staff -- downgrade FEMA, a decision that almost certainly hamstrung the Hurricane Katrina rescue efforts? The answer, of course, is 9/11. Inside the White House, folding FEMA into the Department of Homeland Security seemed the obvious step. But this week, the nation was confronted with the ghastly implications of that judgment.

A day after Hurricane Katrina hit, Eric Holdeman, the director of the Office of Emergency Management in King County, Wash., lamenting Katrina's damage, stressed in a Washington Post op-ed "how important it is to have a federal agency capable of dealing with natural catastrophes of this sort.... Which makes it all the more difficult to understand why, at this moment, the country's premier agency for dealing with such events -- FEMA -- is being, in effect, systematically downgraded and all but dismantled by the Department of Homeland Security."

Holdeman was echoing the criticism of disaster-management professionals nationwide who have warned for two years that retooling FEMA to respond to terrorist attacks and placing it within the vast Homeland Security bureaucracy has distracted the agency from its traditional mission of responding to natural disasters, and that doing so has made it less likely that FEMA will react well to either type of calamity.

Homeland Security's leaders have said for more than two years that the skills required to prepare for disasters, and to respond to them -- two distinct actions -- are essentially the same for natural and man-made events. Not so, experts rejoin. Terrorist attacks, by definition, come by surprise, and precise targets are hard to predict. So with attacks, response is critical.

But with natural disasters, targets are more predictable, and planners can mitigate damage early by, for example, mapping flood-prone areas, or issuing stronger building codes along earthquake fault lines. In the early 1990s, when homes in the Midwest were wiped out by floods, FEMA bought the land and made it a flood barrier. When the waters rose again a few years later, remaining homes weathered the damage.

The administration has maintained that preparing for disasters is largely a state and local responsibility. Yet, because states and localities have been told to spend their Homeland Security grants on terrorism response, they can't pull their weight on natural-disaster mitigation, says Jane Bullock, FEMA's chief of staff during the Clinton administration.

In the coming weeks, lawmakers will undoubtedly question whether FEMA should remain in its current, terrorism-focused department, or once again become independent. -- Carl M. Cannon and Shane Harris

Communications Are Still Fragile
Like a kick to the head, Hurricane Katrina didn't just hurt: It left the U.S. stunned, and staggering to respond. The same high winds and water that devastated the Gulf Coast destroyed the communications systems essential to any effort to cope with the aftermath. New Orleans police fought looters and staged rescues without the aid of working radios, while 911 calls got relayed through ham radio operators and distant cities; FEMA Director Michael Brown took days to learn of the people dying at the New Orleans convention center; the Louisiana and Mississippi emergency operations centers often struggled to get a working phone line.

In a "normal" disaster, requests for aid flow from the city or county up to the state and then out across the country; but in the deadly silence after Katrina, "we weren't getting any requests," said Charlottesville, Va., Fire Chief Charles Werner. On August 30, Werner said, Virginia officials spent four straight hours trying and failing to reach either the Louisiana or Mississippi emergency operations center. Ultimately, Werner told his department's mobile communications unit -- a sport-utility vehicle full of gear bought with a FEMA grant -- to just start driving south. His unit had reached Tennessee before a request got through to Werner, not from the stricken states or even from FEMA, but from Florida emergency officials who had adopted six otherwise cut-off Mississippi counties. Across much of the Gulf Coast, out-of-state command trucks like Werner's now provide the only communications for emergency workers. In flooded New Orleans, it took a flying command post -- a P-3 surveillance plane from the Customs and Border Patrol -- to provide a new hub for the police and fire radio system.

Part of the problem was an overreliance on telephones. But even purpose-built emergency radio networks failed. Modern communications are so smooth, so omnipresent that it is easy to forget how fragile they are. Without a massive and eminently destructible infrastructure, the compact, high-tech cellphones in everyone's hands are just paperweights. Even when there is no physical damage, the high call volumes of a crisis can overload systems, especially cellular networks, as the D.C. area found out on 9/11. And once the power fails and emergency generators run out of fuel, any communications system works only until the batteries die.

High winds topple telephone poles, cell towers, and police and fire department transmitters; floods short out switchboards and backup generators. Police and firefighter radios can function without the network, but they become little more than walkie-talkies, with poor range -- a mile or two at best, if large buildings aren't in the way. And those radios are squeezed onto a few, overcrowded channels. Relief officials and military commanders in the Gulf Coast have relied heavily on satellite phones, whose infrastructure is orbiting hundreds of miles up, safe from anything short of a solar flare; but high cost and limited bandwidth mean that even the military uses satellite communications only for selected leaders.

Emergency officials have struggled with communications problems for decades. One overriding lesson: Relying on one system is suicidal. Said Chief Werner, whose own department has 800 Mhz radios, Nextel cellphones, and satellite communications: "You have to have redundancy." -- Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.

Guard the Guns, Patrol The Streets
The power went out, the streets filled with looters, a large portion of the police force didn't report for duty, and shots rang through the air. That describes New Orleans after the levees broke. But it also describes New York City on July 13, 1977, when a blackout was followed by widespread social disorder. Anarchy lasted one night -- just like the blackout -- in the Big Apple. In the Big Easy, it lasted five days and nights, until National Guard units, the 82nd Airborne, and the U.S. Marine Corps took back the city. "There are always concerns about lawlessness in communities when the controls are weakened relative to what they were before," said Robert McCrie, professor of security management at the City University of New York.

If law and order can be expected to break down amid disaster, maintaining law and order must be part of any emergency-management preparation. "What's clear [is that] the planning in New Orleans didn't go far enough," McCrie said. A case in point is control of caches of firearms, some in the local Wal-Marts. Since the 1800s, when New York City police guarded armories to prevent rioters from stealing big guns, law enforcement planners have known to secure gun shops in crisis situations. "No one was prepared to deal with what should have been very, very obvious, given the crime rate in that city," said Joseph McNamara, former police chief in San Jose, Calif., and Kansas City, Mo., and now a Hoover Institution research fellow. "In the two cities I was chief in, in every emergency plan, one of the first places that is guarded by officials are gun stores. It's one thing for the supermarket to be looted; it's another thing for people to be running off with AK-47s."

McNamara said the New Orleans police department has a reputation for corruption, incompetence, and underpaid cops. The city's murder rate is among the worst in the nation. The city had all of the other ingredients for post-disaster lawlessness as well -- high poverty, low education levels, tension between residents and authorities, and troubled race relations.

Maintaining a show of force is a key part of keeping law and order. Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, said in a September 3 briefing that the National Guard stormed the New Orleans Convention Center with 1,000 military police in a carefully coordinated push to seize control back from armed thugs. The New Orleans police, by comparison, had earlier attempted to take control with just 88 officers. The local police failed; the Guard succeeded.

The New Orleans police were overwhelmed by the disaster. As of September 5, the force had only 1,000 of its 1,600 officers on duty. Some had walked off the job; others were unaccounted for; two committed suicide; one was shot in the head. "The real issue, particularly in New Orleans, is that no one anticipated the disintegration or the erosion of the civilian police force," Blum said.

Local law enforcement can plan how to maintain law and order after a disaster. Higher authorities must plan what to do if the local police aren't up to the task. -- Brian Friel

Bolster Public Health
Surgeon General Richard Carmona knew right away that the federal government didn't have nearly enough emergency medical crews to handle Katrina's devastation. "As we looked at the needs, they exceeded the resources the federal government had," Carmona, the head of the U.S. Public Health Service, told National Journal. "The planning we've had in place for years has served us well through [past] hurricanes. But we have to step it up."

Indeed, on August 31, the day that Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt declared a federal public health emergency -- and announced plans to stage up to 40 MASH-style emergency medical shelters with a total of 10,000 beds and 5,000 medical professionals -- he also put out an urgent call to private-sector hospitals for volunteers. The first 10 of those shelters could be staffed by the Veterans Affairs and Defense departments, the National Disaster Medical System, and Carmona's Commissioned Corps and Medical Reserve Corps. But Leavitt had to look to the private sector to staff the next 10 shelters and to eventually relieve the first contingent.

Leavitt appealed to the American Hospital Association to ask member hospital systems to organize 100-person teams to deploy as units. About 480 hospitals responded, from which Leavitt created 200 teams. Sentara Healthcare, in Norfolk, Va., assembled a team of volunteers, but Vicky Gray, its vice president for system development, said they were delayed while HHS changed its mind over location and checked licenses and credentials.

Ideally, said Donald Thompson, senior research fellow at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy at National Defense University, "the federal government needs to provide a coordinating and funding role" to network with the private sector ahead of time.

Carmona said he and Leavitt have already talked about improving their system for calling in private-sector help in the future. Leavitt "recognizes the need to institutionalize these [volunteer] practices, so if in the future, God forbid, we encounter something of this size, we have a template of what needs to be done."

Lew Stringer, senior medical adviser at the Homeland Security Department, had warned at an Institute of Medicine workshop last year that another "20,000 trained and credentialed response personnel" were needed for effective mass-casualty response.

Shelley Hearne, executive director of Trust for America's Health, a nonpartisan group, said that the focus on public health has diminished after spiking after the 9/11 attacks and the anthrax episodes. She is particularly concerned that Congress's fiscal 2006 budget resolution calls for cuts of $130 million from state preparedness efforts. The states have submitted their plans to Washington, but benchmarks have yet to be set, Hearne complained. "This is a gentle, but very serious, wake-up call about how far we have to go in preparedness," she said. -- Marilyn Werber Serafini

Electric Power: Think Small
The vast electrical system, with its always-operating generators, transmission lines, substations, transformers, and household outlets, is constantly waging a low-level war against ice, wind, floods, falling trees, errant backhoes, and rodents. A disaster on the scale of Hurricane Katrina is a different story. But even after such a catastrophe, a system based on numerous small power plants could provide power sources even when the grid goes down.

Electricity companies routinely deal with weather disasters, and Katrina was "not different -- it was just a lot more and a lot worse," said Ellen Vancko, a director of the North American Electric Reliability Council, an industry-funded organization.

It isn't feasible, utility regulators say, to try to bury the interconnected power system deep enough, or to brace it strong enough, to survive every threat. It is impractical "to design a power system to defend against a floating house" such as those uprooted by Katrina, said Harold Adams, a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

"Are utility ratepayers going to be expected to pay for a system to withstand a 1-in-40-year event?" asked Chris Mele, the legislative director for the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, whose members regulate electric-power services in their states. "I don't see the cost-benefit analysis" to make the case, he said.

Still, the contentious, multilayered, overlapping regulatory system is constantly improving the power grid, albeit slowly. More and more building owners install power generators atop new buildings rather than in basements; research companies constantly develop new technology; and the various professional and industry associations set higher requirements every few years for adoption by state and local governments. In response to blackouts on the West and East coasts in the past several years, Congress recently directed the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to establish an organization that will mandate reliability standards for the long-distance transmission of power.

The system has shown some ability to anticipate unfamiliar problems. Officials at all levels, for instance, worked to head off the Y2K problem, when the software running many computers seemed set to crash because of the date change from 1999 to 2000; and they are now working to shield the power companies' central computers from hostile hackers.

By September 7, Entergy Corp. had restored power to 685,000 of the 1.1 million customers who had lost electricity nine days earlier when Katrina swept ashore across the Gulf Coast. That was faster progress than many had predicted in the storm's immediate aftermath. Still, greater reliance on many small power stations could have mitigated the disruptions, suggests John Jimison, executive director of the United States Combined Heat & Power Association. The association's members sell or use the "compact power stations" that are increasingly common in factories, hotels, universities, and other enterprises.

This year in Congress, the association had pushed for -- but lost in conference -- an energy-bill amendment providing a tax break for enterprises to buy these power stations, which produce electric power as well as steam for heating. Compact stations use fuel-efficient technology, can be sheltered from storms, and can share power with other local facilities, Jimison said. -- Neil Munro

Volunteers Need Coordination
Early on September 7, Maj. George Hood, the national community-relations secretary of the Salvation Army, got a call from the owner of a private jet. The caller offered to fly people in and out of the hurricane-stricken areas of Louisiana and Mississippi.

"It's wonderful how people want to find practical ways to help," Hood said. "And you do not want to insult the donor. Yet, logistically, you can't deal with the deluge of goodwill that is coming at you."

Hood's dilemma -- the mismatch between proffered aid and the capacity to use it effectively -- has plagued the Hurricane Katrina relief effort from the start.

Loudoun County, Va., tried to dispatch 22 sheriff's deputies and six medical specialists to the region after the storm. Even though they were equipped to support themselves for a week, they got no takers and returned home. Medical Missionaries, a Manassas, Va.-based group, was similarly rebuffed in its effort to send doctors to the region.

This failure to use obviously needed resources is attributable, in part, to poor planning and bureaucratic inefficiency. "This is about massive institutional failure to actually absorb the resources we have," said Ray Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America. But it also reflects a widespread consensus among aid agencies that donations of money are often more immediately useful in an emergency than are gifts of clothing, food, or even the services of well-meaning volunteers.

"Every nonprofit has a learning experience around donated clothing and household goods that ended up in warehouses, and no one knew what to do with it," lamented John Keightley, senior vice president for planning and external relations at Catholic Charities USA.

And in this case, said the Salvation Army's Hood, "this is such a dangerous disaster area, you don't want to bring inexperienced people in there."

Yet aid agencies are keenly aware that their management or mismanagement of the outpouring of Katrina assistance will have a long-term impact on Americans' philanthropic impulses.

"Volunteerism is a civic value we ought to cherish," Offenheiser said. "But there are difficulties in honoring people's first impulse."

While relief efforts have only just gotten into full gear, aid officials say they have already learned some valuable lessons. One is that cross-jurisdictional authorizations need to be worked out in advance. It took the Loudoun County sheriff's office days to orchestrate approvals from the states of Louisiana and Virginia, and once in hand, the authorizations were worded differently and had to be redone.

Another is the need for a "one-stop shop" to coordinate offers of assistance among various levels of government. "It took 12 hours to get through to the right person," said Loudon County Sheriff Stephen Simpson.

Yet another lesson is that relief agencies could benefit from building strategic alliances with corporations. In the wake of Katrina, the Salvation Army and Wal-Mart have teamed up to coordinate financial donations and distribution of food. "The nonprofit world has to accept the reality that there is not one organization that can deal with these disasters," Hood said.

And amid the bad publicity about rebuffs of proffered aid, relief organizations may need to find new ways to channel volunteerism while better educating the public about the value of simply writing a check. -- Bruce Stokes

Prepare for Relocation
Since 9/11, federal planners have quietly worked with FEMA to ensure that in the event of a calamity causing widespread evacuation, displaced Americans would not have to wait long to find new homes. Officials put particular emphasis on identifying available housing stock owned or managed by the Housing and Urban Development Department. But Hurricane Katrina has shown the limits of such planning: The government might be able to stockpile bottled water, but it cannot hoard vacant housing.

And it wasn't until after Katrina did its worst that HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson called on local leaders across the country to identify any available shelter in their communities that could be used to house disaster victims -- from schools to military bases to sports stadiums to private homes. "It's the first time we've had this kind of call," says Louisville Mayor Jerry Abramson.

This ad hoc national relocation effort, coupled with the disturbing images of thousands of Americans bedding down in unlit, unventilated convention centers and stadiums without running water, illustrates how much work remains to be done. The answer to the short-term problem came from Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Houston Mayor Bill White, and other officials. The long-term solution has yet to be devised. What Katrina has shown is that even if local leaders and relief officials keep up-to-date lists of shelter and housing options in their own communities, in the wake of a disaster, they may have to rely on their counterparts' having done the same across the country.

"We are really and truly writing a new chapter here in how disaster is mitigated in the long term," says Richard Turcotte, chief executive officer of Catholic Charities of Miami. Turcotte says that Catholic Charities is putting together a nationwide roster of immediately available housing options. The organization will take the same approach to managing people's longer-term housing, benefits, and job-assistance needs, he says. With respect to housing and other services, Hurricane Katrina "speaks very clearly to response planning and recovery planning on a scale that needs to be larger," says Elin Gursky, principal deputy for biodefense at the Virginia-based ANSER research institute.

For local government officials, inventorying housing resources ahead of a crisis is important, but any emergency plan for disaster relocation needs to be adaptable, says Jarrod Bernstein, a spokesman for the Office of Emergency Management in New York City. For instance, New York has a network of reception areas that can direct people to shelters all over the city through its mass transit system. But "you can't diagram down to a 'T' in every type of emergency," he says.

Other localities don't seem to have a plan for relocation and longer-term housing in place. "Not to my knowledge," responded Randy Patterson, executive director of the Lancaster Housing and Redevelopment Authorities in Pennsylvania, by e-mail, when asked whether his community has a contingency plan for housing residents displaced for several months.

Pensacola, Fla., on the other hand, is very familiar with the short- and long-term challenges associated with relocation and housing. Hurricane Ivan walloped Pensacola in September 2004, and the city is still trying to rebuild. About 1,500 people remain in FEMA travel trailers in Northwest Florida as a result of Ivan, says Mark Dufva, executive director of Catholic Charities for that area. Ivan devastated much of Pensacola's affordable housing stock, notes Buzz Ritchie, president of Rebuild Northwest Florida. Nearly a year after the hurricane rolled through, "plans aren't even drawn, much less the foundation poured," for rebuilding affordable rental housing units that Ivan destroyed, he says. "Something really needs to be done about that."

Many of the city's privately owned, multifamily affordable housing units that were destroyed have been replaced with condominiums and higher-end real estate. The Royal Arms apartment complex, which housed many low-income people, was declared permanently uninhabitable. The complex will be razed and the property likely turned into a commercial development, says Pensacola City Manager Tom Bonfield.

Based on Pensacola's experience, normal life is a long way off for Katrina's victims. And once it returns, it will be a very different life. -- Kellie Lunney

With Few Options to Secure Oil Supply, Conservation Is Key
Skyrocketing gasoline prices in the wake of Hurricane Katrina generated a new round of questions about the vulnerability of U.S. oil and gas supplies. About 25 percent of the nation's oil and natural-gas production is in the Gulf of Mexico, and nearly half of U.S. refining capacity is based there. Katrina disrupted almost all of this activity.

But energy experts said that the production resources in the Gulf are remarkably resilient, and that moving significant production or refining capacity elsewhere could cost billions of dollars and take decades. For the foreseeable future, conservation measures will be the country's only real protection against disruptions in oil and gas supply.

Federal officials reported that Katrina shut down about 90 percent of the Gulf Coast region's production, and that U.S. gas prices jumped from an average of about $2.60 a gallon to more than $3 in the aftermath. But a week later, most of the infrastructure was on its way to recovery, and most of the production and refining capacity is likely to be back on line within a few weeks. Prices for crude oil dropped in response to President Bush's release of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and a parallel release from other industrial nations through the International Energy Agency, according to the U.S. Energy Information Agency. An EIA spokesman said the agency expects gas prices to return to the $2.50 range by the end of the year.

"While we have hurricanes and other events like this, their impacts are generally short-lived," said Kenneth Medlock III, an energy policy research fellow at Rice University. Moving production and refining facilities elsewhere would be too expensive and would not necessarily reduce their vulnerability, he said.

The price of gas spiked because the demand has outstripped the growth of supply in recent years. Domestic refineries are producing at near-maximum capacity. No new refinery has been built in the U.S. since 1976, and none is likely in the near future. Industry spokesmen say that because of environmental regulations, huge capital requirements, and broad public opposition to industrial facilities in their neighborhoods, siting a refinery is almost impossible.

Republicans and Democrats alike say that without more refineries coming on line in the near future, reducing the demand for fuel is the best way to increase flexibility in the market. Bush asked consumers to limit their use of gasoline after the storm. Sens. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., and Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., the chairman and senior Democrat on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, issued a joint letter to Bush calling on federal agencies to cut their fuel consumption. The pair suggested that they may offer new legislation to tighten vehicle fuel-efficiency requirements, even though Congress excluded such provisions from the energy bill it passed a few weeks ago. -- Paul Singer

Establish a Central System for Tracking Survivors
Sitting at home in Erie, Pa., watching the devastation in New Orleans on television, Daniel Ford was frustrated. "You sit there and wonder, what can you do as a computer programmer?" Ford said in an interview. "I would have loved to get in my car and drive down there." That was out of the question. So Ford created KatrinaFinder.us, a Web site designed to link hurricane survivors with family or friends who are searching for them. Over the course of two lunch hours, Ford accomplished a task that government agencies had not tackled. "It was very easy to do," he said.

Perhaps too easy. Various federal government Web sites feature links to do things such as help military families find loved ones or to register missing children, but no official repository was established to connect hurricane survivors with their families. The problem was that Ford wasn't the only one addressing this need. Within a week, a plethora of media outlets, volunteer organizations, bloggers, and other Web site operators filled the void. The obvious drawback to such an ad hoc system is that one family member may be searching on one Web site, while another is registered at a different site.

"The government should do it, but doesn't," said Craig Newmark, the founder of craigslist.org, the San Francisco-based site that has become a clearinghouse for people searching for family members affected by Katrina or offering jobs or other assistance to victims. The New Orleans community section of craigslist.org grew exponentially during the past week.

After 9/11, New York City formalized a system of family notification, says Jarrod Bernstein, spokesman for the city's Office of Emergency Management. Now, if a disaster strikes, the city will establish Family Assistance Centers, where people can receive a variety of services and give DNA samples that could link them to victims. "That's something we learned after September 11," Bernstein said.

In New Orleans, the Red Cross is operating a Web site and a telephone hotline for those searching for Katrina survivors. For now, that service may be the closest thing to an official notification system. "Due to the extent of the damage and the number of people displaced, concerned friends and family members are encouraged to visit the site daily and to consult the list, as it will be updated continuously," the organization said in a statement. Sara Blandford, the Red Cross's manager of International Family Tracing Services, said that by September 6, the site had registered 96,083 names. Volunteers are adding the names of Katrina victims who don't have Internet access.

Meanwhile, independent operators are pleased they have been able to fill a void. "I'm very gratified," Ford said. Newmark cited numerous success stories of Katrina victims reunited with loved ones, and added, "I guess I'm pretty proud of these."

One can see why. Although the profusion of nongovernmental Web sites can cause confusion, these private cyberteers were quick off the dime. By contrast, a U.S. Coast Guard site invites people to submit a missing- or stranded-person report for Katrina victims and tells them that a case identification number will be assigned to their report -- within four days. -- David Baumann

Planning Ahead Works
The levees of the Mississippi Delta first broke in April 1927, leaving Greenville, Miss., under 10 feet of water and ensuring that the river would inundate Vicksburg, Natchez, and Baton Rouge. New Orleans spared itself only by dynamiting its levees and deliberately flooding the poorer parishes of Plaquemines and St. Bernard. But the network of dams, locks, dikes, and levees remains in place even though it has failed repeatedly, because the alternatives seemed too expensive.

This may be the wrong way to look at it.

The current flood-control system has slowly caused New Orleans to sink; thwarted the Mississippi River from changing its course toward its natural channel, the Atchafalaya River; and prevented the Delta from replenishing itself, by depriving it of silt and sediment. Louisiana's bayous are disappearing; the nutrients that sustain farmlands and wetlands are poisoning the Gulf of Mexico.

In the same year as the great flood, California enacted the Uniform Building Code of 1927, spelling out seismic requirements for new construction. Six years later, during an earthquake in Long Beach, the buildings engineered under the standards survived, while older brick buildings with unreinforced masonry walls collapsed. The death toll was 120 people, including five students in a gym, and it would have been far worse if the quake had occurred during school hours. California promptly updated its seismic requirements, ordering that schools be retrofitted. The state has continued to improve its defenses in response to new temblors and new technology.

Over the years, seismic codes have cost California a lot of money, but here is the upshot: In 1994, an earthquake measuring 6.7 on the Richter scale rocked Northridge, Calif., killing 57 people and causing $40 billion worth of damage. If not for stringent building codes, the cost, in lives and in dollars, would have been inestimably greater. Two years ago, an earthquake weaker than Northridge's flattened the Iranian city of Bam, killing almost 30,000 people.

What's a life worth? A city?

These are questions that the United States will confront. It is expensive to have adequate teams of public health doctors ready for emergencies such as Hurricane Katrina. But this week proved that not having them was far more expensive. The Louisiana Superdome may have to be gutted. Those gambling boats in Biloxi didn't generate enough revenue to rebuild the entire Gulf Coast.

In 1998, a regional commission in Louisiana formulated an ambitious 30-year, $14 billion plan, called Coast 2050, aimed at restoring the shrinking wetlands along the lower Mississippi Delta. The plan wouldn't end the threat of hurricanes to New Orleans, but it would give the city the same level of protection it had 40 years ago. Today, $14 billion seems a bargain, especially compared with the $62 billion that President Bush has already requested for Katrina-related disaster relief and reconstruction.

The question is whether policy makers will begin to take the long view. Katrina -- and the demolished city of Bam -- are reminders that flood control, fire mitigation, and protection against terrorism all have a pay-me-now-or-pay-me-later equation.

"Should we protect New Orleans and other coastal cities against a Category 5 hurricane?" asks Martin Reuss, a historian with the Army Corps of Engineers. "That's tremendously expensive. Of course, when you have a calamity like this one, with incalculable suffering, great loss of life, massive relocation -- and you think you could prevent something like it in the future -- it seems like an incredibly sound investment."

-- Carl M. Cannon

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