History > 2006 > USA > Weather > Hurricane Katrina

Studies (I)

New Orleans

sinking faster than expected

Updated 5/31/2006 2:13 PM ET
USA Today

WASHINGTON (AP) — Parts of New Orleans are sinking far more rapidly than scientists first thought, more than an inch a year, new research suggests.
That may explain some levee failures during Hurricane Katrina and raises more worries about the future.

The research, being published Thursday in the journal Nature, is based on new satellite radar data for the three years before Katrina struck in 2005. The data show that some areas are sinking — from overdevelopment, drainage and natural seismic shifts — four or five times faster than the rest of the city. And that, experts say, can be deadly.

"My concern is the very low-lying areas," said lead author Tim Dixon, a University of Miami geophysicist. "I think those areas are death traps. I don't think those areas should be rebuilt."

For years, scientists figured New Orleans on average was sinking about one-fifth of an inch a year based on 100 measurements of the region, Dixon said. The new data from 150,000 measurements taken from space finds that about 10% to 20% of the region had yearly subsidence in the inch-a-year range, he said.

As the grounds in those rapidly sinking areas shift downward, the protection from levees also falls, scientists and engineers said.

For example, the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, built more than three decades ago, has sunk by more than 3 feet since its construction, Dixon said. That, he added, explained why water poured over the levee and part of it failed.

"The people in St. Bernard got wiped out because the levee was too low," said co-author Roy Dokka, director of the Louisiana Spatial Center at Louisiana State University. "It's as simple as that."

The subsidence "is making the land more vulnerable; it's also screwed up our ability to figure out where the land is," Dokka said. And it means some evacuation roads, hospitals and shelters are further below sea level than emergency planners thought, he said.

So when government officials talk of rebuilding levees to pre-Katrina levels, it may really still be several feet below what's needed, Dokka and others say.

"Levees that are subsiding at a high rate are prone to failure," Dixon said.

The federal government, especially the Army Corps of Engineers, hasn't taken the dramatic sinking into account in rebuilding plans, said University of Berkeley engineering professor Bob Bea, part of an independent National Academy of Sciences-Berkeley team that analyzed the levee failures during Katrina.

"You have to change how you provide short- and long-term protection," said Bea, a former engineer in New Orleans. He said plans for concrete walls don't make sense because they sink and can't be easily added onto. In California, engineers are experimenting with lighter weight reinforced foam-middle levee walls, he said.

Dixon and his co-author Dokka disagree on the major causes of New Orleans not-so-slow falling into the Gulf of Mexico.

Dixon blames overdevelopment and drainage of marshlands, saying "all the problems are man-made; before people settled there in the 1700s, this area was at sea level."

But Dokka said much of the sinking is because of natural seismic shifts that have little to do with construction.

All is not completely lost, Dokka said. Smarter construction can buy New Orleans some time.

"We've made the pact with the devil by moving down here," he said. "If we do things right, we probably can get another 100-200-300 years out of this area."

    New Orleans sinking faster than expected, UT, 31.5.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-05-31-sinking-new-orleans_x.htm

NYT        May 29, 2006

 An Autopsy of Katrina: Four Storms, Not Just One        NYT

30.5.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/30/science/30storm.html

2 Studies Link Global Warming

to Greater Power of Hurricanes

May 31, 2006
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Climate researchers at Purdue University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology separately reported new evidence yesterday supporting the idea that global warming is causing stronger hurricanes.

That claim is the subject of a long-running scientific dispute. And while the new research supports one side, neither the authors nor other climate experts say it is conclusive.

In one new paper, to appear in a coming issue of Geophysical Research Letters, Matthew Huber of the Purdue department of earth and atmospheric sciences and Ryan L. Sriver, a graduate student there, calculate the total damage that could be caused by storms worldwide, using data normally applied to reconciling weather forecast models with observed weather events.

The Purdue scientists found that their results matched earlier work by Kerry A. Emanuel, a hurricane expert at M.I.T. Dr. Emanuel has argued that global warming, specifically the warming of the tropical oceans, is already increasing the power expended by hurricanes.

The approach used by the Purdue researchers, concentrating on what is called reanalysis data, has never been tried for this purpose before, Dr. Huber said in an interview, adding, "We were surprised that it did as well as it did."

In a statement accompanying the release of the study, Dr. Huber said the results were important because the overall measure of cyclone activity, whether through more intense storms or more frequent storms, had doubled with a one-quarter-degree increase in average global temperature.

In the other new study, Dr. Emanuel and Michael E. Mann, a meteorologist at Pennsylvania State University, compared records of global sea surface temperatures with those of the tropical Atlantic and said the recent strengthening of hurricanes was attributable largely to the rise in ocean surface temperature.

Some researchers say long-term cycles unrelated to global warming are the major cause of hurricane strengthening in recent decades. But Dr. Emanuel and Dr. Mann, whose work is to be published in Eos, a publication of the American Geophysical Union, maintained that the cycles, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, had little if any effect.

In fact, they reported that the most recent cooling cycle could just as well be attributed to the presence of particle pollutants in the atmosphere that block sunlight and, they said, could have temporarily counteracted some of the influence of warming from accumulating greenhouse gases. Dr. Mann said the new findings also suggested that as efforts to cut pollution by particles and aerosols continued to intensify, their cooling effects would diminish while the heating effects of greenhouse gases would remain unconstrained.

As a result, he said, "we could be in for much larger increases in Atlantic sea surface temperatures, and tropical cyclone activities, in the decades ahead." He joked that some might urge an increase in pollution, but called it "a Faustian bargain."

Stanley B. Goldenberg, a meteorologist with the Hurricane Research Division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who has expressed skepticism about any connection between global warming and hurricane intensity, said he had not seen the new papers but had read nothing in other recent research to change his view.

"There's going to be an endless series of articles from this circle that is embracing this new theology built on very flimsy interpretation" of hurricane data, Mr. Goldenberg said. "If global warming is having an effect on hurricanes, I certainly wouldn't base it on the articles I've seen."

    2 Studies Link Global Warming to Greater Power of Hurricanes, NYT, 31.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/31/science/31climate.html

An Autopsy of Katrina: Four Storms, Not Just One

May 30, 2006
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Most people believe that a single Category 3 hurricane, Katrina, devastated New Orleans on Aug. 29 of last year. The flood protection system for the New Orleans area was designed to protect the city from a direct hit by a fast-moving Category 3 storm.

Yet Hurricane Katrina, a Category 4 storm that did not strike the city directly, overwhelmed systems in dozens of places and cost more than 1,500 lives and billions in property damage.

Why? In part, say experts who studied the disaster, because the hurricane was more like four storms — at least — that battered the area in different ways. They say the system in New Orleans was flawed from the start because the model storm it was designed to stop was simplistic, and led to an inadequate network of levees, flood walls, storm gates and pumps.

The 2006 hurricane season begins Thursday, with four to six major storms predicted for this year by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And experts say that understanding the failings is essential in planning the next generation of flood protection for a rebuilt New Orleans, and for systems nationwide.

"This is a national issue," said Raymond Seed, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and an author of a stinging report released last week. That report has identified flaws in design, construction and maintenance of the levees that contributed to the failures. But underlying it all, the report stated, were the problems with the initial model used to determine how strong the system should be.

With the right hurricane protection, he said, the result of Hurricane Katrina would have been different: "we call it 'wet ankles.' "

The flood protection system was first authorized by Congress after Hurricane Betsy flooded the city in 1965, and it was supposed to protect the area from the kind of storm that would come only once in two centuries. It was expected to take about 13 years to complete and cost about $85 million, according to a history by the Government Accountability Office.

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans 40 years later, the system was still not finished, and it had already cost $738 million. In the eight months since the storm, the Corps of Engineers has spent some $800 million in direct costs to repair the system — $62 million more than it had cost in the first place.

The main tool used to design the system was a fiction — a hypothetical storm called the "standard project hurricane." The corps began developing the model with the Weather Bureau in 1959. The idea, as the corps has put it , was that the model would represent "the most severe storm that is considered reasonably characteristic of a region."

The corps based its model on data from previous storms, with some relatively straightforward calculations to estimate the surge and waves at various points. Maj. Gen. Don T. Riley, the director of civil works for the corps, said in an interview that the levee system "was built at the standard of the time."

In hindsight, however, it was a rough and inadequate tool. This month, Dr. David Daniel, the chairman of a panel reviewing the corps' investigation, said in an interview, "It was not a terribly sophisticated or detailed analysis by today's standards."

The report by Professor Seed's group found that the creators of the standard project hurricane, in an attempt to find a representative storm, actually excluded the fiercest storms from the database.

Storms like Hurricane Camille in 1969 were taken out of the data set as lying too far out of the norm; the Berkeley researchers noted that "excluding outlier data is not appropriate in the context of dealing with extreme hazards." Also, the calculations of the cost-benefit ratio did not take into account the costs of failure, both economic and social, far greater in an urban area like New Orleans than a rural one.

Once the standard project hurricane was completed, characterizing it was difficult. The standard was developed before the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale came into use, and the features of the storm fit poorly with the scale. The wind speed for the project hurricane was just 100 miles per hour, which falls into Category 2; other features more closely resemble a much more severe Category 4. The corps generally calls it the equivalent of a fast-moving Category 3.

The standard project hurricane became enshrined within the corps, wrote the Berkeley group, and the corps saw little need to go back and reanalyze "the true risks of catastrophic flooding" in New Orleans. Even when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the successor agency to the Weather Bureau, recommended increasing the strength of the model, the corps did not change its construction plans.

A report released this month by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs said that calling the standard hurricane project storm a Category 3 was "at best a rough estimate, and at worst, simply inaccurate," and gave New Orleanians a false sense of security. In the report, Al Naomi, the senior project manager for the corps on the system, admitted to a simplification borne of convenience — or, as he put it to the Senate investigators, "What am I going to tell the Rotary Club?"

What the Rotary Club experienced last August was not what New Orleans was prepared for. The first stage of Hurricane Katrina touched Louisiana as it passed south of the city in the Plaquemines Parish town of Buras with winds of more than 125 miles per hour pushing a storm surge. The wind and water overwhelmed the local hurricane defenses: levees built to withstand 13 feet of water were overwhelmed by more than 17 feet of surge, damaging levees and scattering homes and boats across the thinly populated parish like toys.

As the hurricane moved across Lake Borgne to the east, the effect was quite different: the second storm sent strong waves and a surge estimated at 18 feet or more back across the lake to the levees bordering St. Bernard Parish. The long levees there had been designed to handle 13 feet of water. The assault washed over Chalmette and other communities with floodwaters exceeding 14 feet in some areas. A similar pounding took out the southeastern levee of the development known as New Orleans East.

In its third incarnation, the storm sent the water up a funnel formed at the northwest corner of Lake Borgne and into the city's Inner Harbor Navigation Canal, where the water rose and churned with exceptional force, said Hassan Mashriqui, a researcher with the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center. Those waters shattered flood walls in several places and destroyed the city's Lower Ninth Ward.

As the storm pushed into Mississippi, it sent a final surge toward New Orleans across Lake Pontchartrain, north of the city. As the water stacked up against the south shore of the lake, it rose against the walls of the three main drainage canals that run from the center of the city. Though the surge was weaker than the others and the water did not reach the tops of the flood walls, the 17th Street Canal and the London Avenue Canal suffered breaches that caused the lake's waters to spill into the center of the city.

Other parts of the area, like the West Bank communities, fared comparatively well. "If you were sitting over on the West Bank, you didn't think it was such a big deal," said Edward Link, an engineering professor at the University of Maryland, who is a leader of the corps investigation of the disaster.

Had the storm taken a westerly course instead, the effect would have been radically different, he said, and even a weak storm can, if it sits in one spot, cause profound flood damage. The lesson is that "a single storm cannot be equated to a single set of forces, or a single wave or surge environment," he said.

Dr. Daniel, who is reviewing the corps inquiry, said that today's engineers based their designs for buildings in areas prone to hazards like floods and earthquakes on statistical analyses that run through all probable conditions and produce estimates that more closely characterize the risks.

The Netherlands has built flood protection to withstand surges that might be expected every 10,000 years. Jurjen Battjes, a flood expert there who is working with Dr. Daniel's group, said his nation began embracing the statistical approach in the 1930's and got a wake-up call with floods in the 1950's. The Dutch planners extrapolated conditions far greater than anything seen in history but still possible, he said, and estimated the costs of protection, including the economic and social costs of failure, and boiled it down to a cost-benefit curve. The ultimate decision, he said, is less technical than political: "How much money do we want to spend now for protection in the future?"

In New Orleans, the hurricane protection system has now been restored to the strength it was intended to have before the storm, and it will be further improved. Congress has told the corps to study ways to improve protection for southern Louisiana. And this time, said Daniel Hitchings, director of the corps task force in charge of overall hurricane recovery for the Gulf Coast, it will be done right, with the probabilistic approach that experts have called for and a greater willingness to take new data into account.

"If we don't get the wake-up call now," he said, "we never will."

    An Autopsy of Katrina: Four Storms, Not Just One, NYT, 30.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/30/science/30storm.html

New Study of Levees Faults Design and Construction

May 22, 2006
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

NEW ORLEANS, May 21 — Most of the major breaches in the New Orleans levee system during Hurricane Katrina were caused by flaws in design, construction and maintenance — and parts of the system could still be dangerous even after the current round of repairs by the Army Corps of Engineers, according to a long-awaited independent report to be published Monday.

"People didn't die because the storm was bigger than the system could handle, and people didn't die because the levees were overtopped," said Raymond B. Seed, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and the chief author of the report, in a weekend briefing for reporters here.

"People died because mistakes were made," he said, "and because safety was exchanged for efficiency and reduced cost."

The report differs in significant ways from the findings of the Army Corps' own investigation.

That inquiry will produce its report June 1, but interim findings the corps has issued describe a hurricane protection system that failed in some places because of unanticipated design flaws and in other places was simply overwhelmed.

A corps spokesman, Lt. Col. Stan Heath, said in an e-mail message that "it would be inappropriate for the corps to comment" on the Berkeley-led report since it had not had time to review it thoroughly.

The language of the new report, which was created by a group of three dozen engineers and disaster experts led by a team from Berkeley and was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, tends toward arcane geotechnical details.

But the message, delivered in some 500 pages, is blistering: The design and construction of the New Orleans hurricane protection system, a project spanning more than 40 years that remains incomplete, was inadequate to protect hundreds of thousands of people in an urban setting.

Dozens of factors contributed to the disaster, the authors state, including political decisions that caused the corps to squeeze miles of floodwalls on too-narrow levees along the city's drainage canals, with sheet piles, the interlocking sheets of steel that anchor the levees, driven to a depth too shallow to block water or the shifting of the mucky New Orleans soil.

All of the factors, they concluded, add up to a culture of inattention that put safety lower on the scale than cost.

The Berkeley study finds fault across the complex web of public and private organizations that should have kept New Orleans safe, from Congress to local levee boards.

"There's plenty of blame to go around," said J. David Rogers, a professor of engineering at the University of Missouri, Rolla, who teaches flood control courses for the corps and is one of the report's authors.

The group recommended extensive changes for the corps, along with a transformation of the nation's approach to flood protection.

The authors applauded the corps' efforts to put in new canal gates, which have taken the riskiest floodwalls in the system out of the front lines, and the use of good construction materials and methods used to rebuild the St. Bernard Parish levees.

But, they warned, the parts of the system with sheet piles that were too short before the storm and which are built on weak soil are still very much at risk in a future storm.Under similar circumstances in another storm, Professor Seed said, "It may still be a very dangerous system."

    New Study of Levees Faults Design and Construction, NYT, 22.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/22/us/22corps.html

Number of deaths from Katrina rises

Posted 5/19/2006 9:59 PM ET
USA Today

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Louisiana raised its Hurricane Katrina death toll by 281 Friday to 1,577 after including more out-of-state evacuees whose deaths were deemed related to the storm or its grueling aftermath.

The Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals decided that if residents' deaths were hastened by the stress and trauma associated with relocating — or even an accidental injury during travel — those deaths should be counted in the toll.

"Katrina was a tragedy like no other, and the human toll of the tragedy extends further than our traditional definition of a storm-related death," said Dr. Louis Cataldie, medical incident commander for Louisiana.

Louisiana officials asked other states to classify evacuees' deaths as storm-related if they occurred between Aug. 27 — two days before the storm hit — and Oct. 1 and met several general requirements.

During that period, 480 evacuees died in 30 states — mostly Texas, Mississippi and Alabama — of causes found to be related to Katrina. Some of those deaths were reported previously; the state's toll is up 281 from the last report, in February.

Health officials said much of what Katrina evacuees endured could have had lingering health effects: suffering in hot rooms when power had been knocked out, being stranded for days awaiting rescue, getting stuck in traffic during an hours-long evacuation and the stress of personal losses and the widespread devastation.

"Admittedly it is arbitrary, but (Cataldie's) belief was if someone already has an illness, is sick and institutionalized, the trauma involved in being relocated could hasten somebody's death," health department spokesman Bob Johannessen said.

If someone died in an auto accident while relocating, that too would be counted as Katrina-related. But if the accident occurred after new residence had been taken up, it would not be counted, Johannessen said.

Of the deaths reported out of state, 223 occurred among those who had fled to Texas. Mississippi has reported 63, Alabama 48, Florida 30, Tennessee 24 and Arkansas 20. Twenty-four other states, from Rhode Island to Montana, and the District of Columbia also reported at least one Katrina-related death.

The toll could be lowered if Louisiana officials disagree with other states' conclusions when they review evacuees' death certificates, Johannessen said.

    Number of deaths from Katrina rises, UT, 195.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-05-19-katrina-deaths_x.htm

Teenage Prisoners Describe Hurricane Horrors

May 10, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

NEW ORLEANS, May 9 — More than 100 teenagers held in detention during Hurricane Katrina endured horrific conditions in the storm's aftermath, including standing for hours in filthy floodwater, having nothing to eat and drink for three to five days, and being forced to consume the waters as a result, according to a report released here Tuesday.

The report was prepared by the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, a group that has long advocated changes in the state's troubled juvenile system. It was based on interviews with more than 60 teenagers held at the Orleans Parish Prison during the storm, as well as with prison staff members.

Youths who were interviewed described water rising in their darkened cells and a scramble onto top bunks to avoid it. They also said that when they were finally rescued — in some cases, after several days — they experienced dizziness and dehydration because of lack of food. One reported being "roped together" with plastic handcuffs as he and others were led out through neck-high water.

"There was food floating in the water and we tried to catch it and eat it; that's how hungry we were," said one 15-year-old identified as E. F. in the report.

T. G., 16, said, "Kids were going crazy, shaking their cells for food and water."

Another youth, R. S., 16, said: "We went five days without eating. Kids were passing out in their cells."

Among the many wrenching stories of evacuation after Hurricane Katrina, including the chaotic removal of more than 7,000 prisoners from the Orleans Parish Prison, that of the teenagers ranks as one of the more disturbing — an anarchic portrait of about 150 youthful inmates fending for themselves in dire conditions.

The prison was under the supervision of Marlin Gusman, the Orleans Parish criminal sheriff, who, through a spokeswoman, declined to respond to the report. The authors of the report said city and parish officials should have ordered the prison to be evacuated but lacked a formal plan to do so.

The report described what happened after the storm as symptomatic of a juvenile justice system recognized as one of the country's worst, an outpost of a sprawling prison empire where more people were locked up, per capita, than in any other state.

Only a week ago, a federal judge in Baton Rouge released the juvenile system from Justice Department control, six years after Louisiana was ordered to make changes and after numerous investigations and lawsuits. Several youth prisons in the state had achieved infamy as places of routine beatings and systematic deprivation, and federal authorities concluded that conditions were unconstitutional.

For years, advocates and a handful of state legislators had pushed for an overhaul but had met with resistance from state prison bureaucrats and indifference from elected Louisiana officials. Finally, the Legislature agreed in 2003 to a series of changes, shutting down the most notorious youth prison, in the northern part of the state.

At the same time, Louisiana agreed to move away from simply locking up hundreds of teenage offenders, instituting a more residential model of incarceration, as other states were doing.

But those changes, while lauded by advocates, were not all in place in August of last year, and the teenagers taken handcuffed and shackled to the Orleans Parish Prison ahead of the hurricane were exposed to the deficiencies of the old system.

"They left us in there with no food and no water," said Eddie Fenceroy, 15, a former detainee against whom charges have since been dismissed, advocates said.

Mr. Fenceroy described standing in the floodwater for "a whole day" before being rescued. "Some people were drinking the water," he said.

The advocacy group's director, David J. Utter, said that in a telephone conversation Monday evening, Sheriff Gusman pledged not to continue holding juveniles in the jail system here.

    Teenage Prisoners Describe Hurricane Horrors, NYT, 10.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/10/us/10prison.html

Report Links Corps' Planning

to Inadequacies in Levee System

May 3, 2006
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

The Army Corps of Engineers did not shift course to meet the needs of the changing landscape of New Orleans, and as a result the city did not get the hurricane protection system that it needed, a panel of outside engineers said in a report yesterday.

The report, prepared by members of the American Society of Civil Engineers at the request of the corps, was stinging in its criticism of the corps' planning and development of New Orleans's hurricane protection system in the decades after Hurricane Betsy in 1965.

It said the corps did not follow its own procedures in monitoring the rate at which land was subsiding and water was rising around the city, and it criticized the corps as designing the levee system around outdated data that left floodwalls nearly two feet lower than they should have been.

It questioned the corps' decision to base the city's protection on what it called the "standard project hurricane," a strong storm that the corps has said is equivalent to a fast-moving Category 3 storm. The report called the standard "questionable," and said a stronger storm should have been the yardstick. The standard project hurricane, it said, "is not equivalent to the 100-year storm or even to the largest storm of record."

The corps never before fully assessed the risks of the New Orleans levee system, the panel noted, and should have done so before the storm.

David E. Daniel, chairman of the engineering panel, said panel members found that the hurricane protection system had evolved piecemeal over time, with no single entity in charge of the whole system. He said the corps showed a tendency to "cut too close to the margins" when it came to building in safety measures. The result, he said, was "gross catastrophic failure."

Responding to the report, Lu Christie, a communications manager for the corps in New Orleans, said: "We appreciate the work that A.S.C.E. and other organizations have done to support the corps in our effort to repair the New Orleans hurricane protection system. We are reviewing the report now."

An expert not involved in the new report, Robert G. Bea of the University of California, Berkeley, called the panel's work "exactly right on." The failure to take new information on the local elevation into account and the choice of a "horribly flawed" standard for setting the design, Mr. Bea said, were part of "a whole string" of breakdowns.

    Report Links Corps' Planning to Inadequacies in Levee System, NYT, 3.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/03/us/03levees.html?ex=1148702400&en=c672d1a11c9adec8&ei=5070

For Hurricane Victims, a Flawed System

April 21, 2006
The New York Times
By RON NIXON and LESLIE EATON

The federal government's main program for helping the victims of Hurricane Katrina rebuild their homes and businesses, operated by the Small Business Administration, has been plagued by inadequate leadership and poor planning, federal investigators have told Congress.

The Government Accountability Office, the auditing arm of Congress, has found that the agency was hampered in its hurricane response by its failure to participate in disaster drills and to prepare for a disaster of the hurricane's magnitude, according to written testimony and briefings it has given Congressional committees.

Rather than anticipating challenges and problems, "S.B.A. was close to being in a purely reactive state," William Shear, a Government Accountability Office analyst, said in an interview about his office's preliminary findings. "They didn't have in place mechanisms to address what you would do under different scenarios. No one was in a planning position."

The agency, which makes low-cost loans to disaster victims for long-term recovery efforts, has said repeatedly that it did as good a job as possible given the scope of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita.

The accountability office is not expected to release its full reports on the Small Business Administration until later this year, and the S.B.A will wait until the reports are complete to comment on them, said Anne Marie Frawley, a spokeswoman for the agency.

"It would be irresponsible for us to do otherwise," Ms. Frawley said in an e-mail message, noting that investigators were still asking the agency for documents to review.

The agency says that it has approved more than $8.3 billion in loans to more than 126,000 homeowners, renters and business owners and that it has processed 90 percent of the 2.4 million loan applications it has received since the hurricanes. More than 40 percent of the applications were approved, according to agency data.

But Congressional critics say the agency actually rejected close to 70 percent of applicants, and that so far only a small amount of loan proceeds — about $336 million — has gotten into the hands of disaster victims. The agency's response, they contend, has been far too slow.

The Government Accountability Office's preliminary findings validate Congressional complaints, said Representative Nydia M. Velázquez of New York, who is the ranking Democrat on the House Small Business Committee and a harsh critic of the agency's management.

Ms. Velázquez said she was struck by the G.A.O.'s finding that the Small Business Administration had not adequately planned for the disasters, and said it was "outrageous" that the agency had failed to participate in disaster-response exercises.

"Hurricane season is coming up, and I am afraid under the current administration the S.B.A. is not going to be ready," she said. "They continue to be stubborn and say everything is fine."

Among the subjects the accountability office is looking into is the agency's adoption of a new computer system for processing disaster loans. Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, called for an investigation after getting a letter from S.B.A. employees who complained about the computer system, months before Hurricane Katrina hit.

Investigators found that the computer system, which the agency put into service shortly before the storms ravaged the Gulf Coast, initially broke down repeatedly and worked very slowly. Investigators are still trying to determine how this affected the processing of loans.

Agency officials told the auditors that the computer system did not work as promised and that they did not get adequate assistance from the computer contractor, which nevertheless was awarded a new $54.1 million contract to upgrade the system.

The agency also lacked basic resources for processing loans, including office space, phones and staff, investigators found.

Shortly before the hurricanes in the Gulf Coast region, the agency had reorganized and centralized its operations, a move the auditors found contributed to the agency being overwhelmed by the disasters.

In reorganizing, the agency reduced the number of its disaster employees. But it then had to hire thousands of people to help process loans. The agency lacked an adequate plan for hiring and training the new employees, the G.A.O. said.

Another issue that complicated the agency's efforts was its limited participation in disaster planning exercises, which permit federal, state and local agencies to test their plans in staged disaster conditions. This may have resulted from the agency being unclear about its role in disaster planning, the accountability office said.

"S.B.A.'s planning efforts to address a disaster of this magnitude appear to have been inadequate," said Mr. Shear, the G.A.O analyst.

    For Hurricane Victims, a Flawed System, NYT, 21.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/21/washington/21sba.html

Homeland Security criticizes FEMA over Katrina: report

Sat Apr 15, 2006 1:14 AM ET
Reuters

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. government officials allowed concerns about terrorism to overshadow the dangers posed by natural disasters after the September 11 attacks, even though such disasters occur more frequently and are not preventable, The New York Times reported on Saturday citing a new Department of Homeland Security report.

The report concluded that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, roundly criticized for its slow and often ineffective response to Hurricane Katrina last year, needed to improve.

"Much of the criticism is warranted," the Times quoted the report as saying about FEMA's Katrina response.

The report by the department's inspector general, Richard Skinner, offered 38 recommendations for improving FEMA's effectiveness in areas ranging from housing for disaster victims to communicating with local officials, the Times said.

It said the agency must do a better job training employees, improve its computer systems and win more effective support from the Department of Homeland Security, which recently assumed responsibility for the embattled, once-independent agency.

It added that Homeland Security's takeover of FEMA had not been smooth, with full integration requiring "additional work and a level of support not currently demonstrated," the report said.

    Homeland Security criticizes FEMA over Katrina: report, R, 15.4.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyid=2006-04-15T051427Z_01_N15190848_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY-FEMA.xml

Foreign Experts Critique U.S. Red Cross on Katrina

April 5, 2006
The New York Times
By STEPHANIE STROM

The American Red Cross's response to Hurricane Katrina was poorly planned, relied too heavily on inexperienced managers and often failed to meet the needs of victims, say reports by international Red Cross officials who were dispatched to assist their American counterparts.

The unusually harsh reports, prepared in late summer and the fall, detailed mismatches between the needs of victims and the supplies the Red Cross had arranged, the absence of a plan to guide the distribution of supplies and a lack of record-keeping, which allowed inventory to go astray.

"What is clear is that the basic needs of the beneficiaries are not being met," Mike Goodhand, head of the international logistics division of the British Red Cross, wrote on Sept. 15.

The reports, which were provided to The New York Times by a former American Red Cross official who insisted on anonymity, closely echo concerns raised by volunteers in the disaster area.

Those concerns are now the subject of a wide-ranging investigation by the American Red Cross that has already produced evidence of possible criminal misconduct by volunteer managers. The F.B.I. and the Louisiana attorney general are also conducting inquiries, seeking to determine whether relief supplies were stolen.

The Red Cross, which had 235,000 volunteers in the field after Hurricane Katrina, received roughly 60 percent of the $3.6 billion that Americans donated for hurricane relief.

Mr. Goodhand's report described a case in which victims in Mississippi, where his team had been sent, were requesting prepared meals and the only food that Red Cross volunteers could offer was bananas. Volunteers driving out into neighborhoods were asked for water and juice, but had only bleach on hand, he wrote.

"All efforts to address the situation were rebuffed," Mr. Goodhand wrote. He said that when his team offered its expertise on distributing supplies, it was instead assigned to hand out the supplies, work that could have been done by less experienced volunteers.

On Sept. 12, two weeks after the hurricane, his team did what he described as "a nonscientific but representative and valid" assessment of what victims were saying they needed. The most requested items were juice; Gatorade; feminine hygiene, general hygiene and household cleaning products; and insect repellent. The team found none of those in the warehouse.

"The demand for these items is entirely predictable," he wrote.

Senator Charles E. Grassley, the Iowa Republican who heads the Senate Finance Committee and has been pushing for an overhaul of the American Red Cross, called Mr. Goodhand's report, which he obtained independently, "very sobering reading."

"The report and similar findings from whistle-blowers make it clear that there is a significant need for deep, substantial reform at the American Red Cross," he wrote in an e-mail message to a reporter.

Mr. Goodhand's assessment, and a similar one by Thomas Riess, a German logistics expert with the International Committee of the Red Cross, were filed in September with the authors' home agencies, the American Red Cross and, in Mr. Goodhand's case, a number of other Red Cross agencies. While they did not allege criminal wrongdoing, they warned of the potential for it.

"The insufficient control on deliveries allows, without any effort, to unlawfully appropriate" supplies, Mr. Riess wrote on Sept. 12.

Mr. Riess's report also incorporated the observations of logistics experts from Red Cross organizations in Colombia, Ethiopia, Jordan and Russia, while Mr. Goodhand's included those of officials from the Red Cross agencies in Finland, the Netherlands and Spain. Current and former Red Cross officials said the language was far more pointed than is common in such reports, which are routinely filed when foreign Red Cross organizations participate in a disaster relief effort.

Armond T. Mascelli, vice president for response operations at the American Red Cross, said the organization was already working to address the concerns raised by the foreign experts.

For the coming hurricane season, Mr. Mascelli said, the Red Cross is striving to better its positioning of supplies and to find ways to improve delivery of necessities like food and water. For the longer term, he said, the agency is seeking the expertise of its corporate supporters to transform its rather simple distribution operation into a comprehensive system of supply chain management.

"Our plan is to do what we can that is reasonable for this hurricane season," he said, "but also look at what we put in place in the future to take care of catastrophic events."

Sir Nicholas Young, the chief executive of the British Red Cross, who coincidentally was at American Red Cross headquarters in Washington yesterday, said Mr. Goodhand's report provided a snapshot of what had happened in a small part of the disaster area and was not a commentary on the American Red Cross's overall response.

"What Mike's report in fact reflects is that he was working in Biloxi with one chapter with paid staff and with volunteers who didn't necessarily have the logistics skills they needed," Sir Nicholas said.

Both reports strongly praised the Red Cross volunteers. Mr. Riess wrote that he was "impressed by the motivation of volunteers and by the deep generosity of the American people." Mr. Goodhand called the volunteer corps "one of the best, if not the best, any of us have experienced."

But both also criticized the American Red Cross for assigning volunteers to tasks for which, the reports said, they were unprepared. For example, Mr. Goodhand said a volunteer in charge of managing a fleet of more than 100 vehicles did not know where cars and trucks were, why they had been dispatched or who had them.

Mr. Riess warned that a lack of accountability, resulting from a weak system of tracking inventory, threatened to damage relations with victims and donors alike.

"Critics may rise," he wrote, "and attract the unwelcome interest of journalists."

    Foreign Experts Critique U.S. Red Cross on Katrina, NYT, 5.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/05/us/nationalspecial/05cross.html

Red Cross Fires Administrators in New Orleans

March 25, 2006
The New York Times
By STEPHANIE STROM

In a major shake-up of its relief operations in New Orleans, the American Red Cross dismissed two key supervisors yesterday as part of a wide-ranging inquiry into the improper diversion of relief supplies after Hurricane Katrina, a Red Cross official said.

The supervisors — volunteers, as are 95 percent of Red Cross personnel — were in charge of the organization's kitchens and shelters, which have assisted tens of thousands of the hurricane's victims.

The move came a day after the interim president of the Red Cross said the organization was investigating accusations of impropriety, including possible criminal activity.

"We have relieved certain volunteers of their duties in connection with our investigation," said a senior Red Cross official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the actions.

Three volunteers currently working in the area identified one of the officials who was dismissed as Patrick Keena, the senior official responsible for the organization's food and shelter operations in the disaster area. They said he was fired early yesterday.

The identity of the other dismissed supervisor could not be determined.

Mr. Keena, who has been affiliated with the Red Cross for 25 years, told volunteers in the disaster area that he was leaving because of a medical emergency.

He could not be reached for comment yesterday.

Several volunteers who had served in the area complained over the last four months that Mr. Keena had ignored Red Cross rules, overridden efforts to establish procedures to keep track of relief supplies and interfered with internal investigations into the diversion of supplies.

Two volunteers assigned by Red Cross national headquarters last fall to look into those and other accusations of wrongdoing urged the removal of Mr. Keena and other senior managers in a report they filed with senior organization officials on Dec. 5.

A second supervisor, Jill Paul, who was in charge of the kitchens where meals were prepared for delivery to the needy, told volunteers yesterday that she had elected to leave the operation, several volunteers said. But it could not be determined if Ms. Paul was the second worker ordered out of the area.

She could not be reached for comment.

Teala Brewer, a former Secret Service agent who is the Red Cross's director of ethics and compliance, was in New Orleans yesterday with volunteers who had pointed out problems.

One of the accusations they are investigating is that supervisors in charge of the kitchens have been ordering more food than is needed, raising questions about where the extra food is going.

In one case highlighted by the volunteers, Ms. Paul recommended sending 1,500 meals a day into the New Orleans neighborhood of Bywater because residents had only limited access to utilities, potable water and a small convenience store.

Eight days after she filed her recommendation, volunteers assigned to go street by street in Bywater to estimate the number of meals needed said they came up with an assessment of only 500 meals needed on the route every day.

"They found that not only did a great portion of the route have full utilities, they also had a major grocery store up and running and public transportation," said a volunteer who had seen their report but requested anonymity because she said she had been physically threatened by a supervisor. "Much of the area was back to pre-Katrina, and the rest of it was so bad that no one was living in it."

Volunteers delivering meals said investigators from national headquarters had been trailing them over the last week and interviewing people living along their routes.

The interim president of the Red Cross, John F. McGuire, acknowledged this week that the organization was investigating accusations that relief supplies had been improperly diverted and that procedures for tracking inventory had been ignored.

Initially, according to those raising such concerns, their warnings were ignored.

In fact, Jerome H. Nickerson Jr. and Michael A. Wolters, who wrote the report recommending that the supervisors in New Orleans be removed, said they were relieved of their responsibilities.

Mr. Nickerson, a Maryland lawyer, said his name disappeared from the Red Cross database of trained disaster volunteers, and Mr. Wolters, a security guard, said his local chapter was told that he was forbidden from entering disaster areas on orders of the Red Cross's general counsel.

"When I first came out of New Orleans, I couldn't sleep for about a month because I just couldn't figure out why people weren't moving on this," Mr. Nickerson said yesterday. "But now people are paying attention, and the people who were doing this bad stuff are being called to account."

According to Red Cross publications, Mr. Keena has assisted with disaster response for the last 12 of his 25 years as a volunteer, working at 26 major disasters. The Colorado Springs Gazette reported last year that Mr. Keena, whose wife is in the Air Force, worked at the Double Eagle Casino in Cripple Creek, Colo.

The Gazette said Mr. Keena volunteered at the local Pikes Peak Chapter of the Red Cross, but Paul Koch, the financial director there, said yesterday that he did not know Mr. Keena.

Mr. Keena was on an elite team of paid Red Cross volunteers, known as temporary disaster reserves, who have extensive experience in disaster relief work. They are called out at the onset of an emergency and paid because they are needed for an extended period.

    Red Cross Fires Administrators in New Orleans, NYT, 25.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/25/national/nationalspecial/25cross.html?hp&ex=1143349200&en=013467ac3685ad1c&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Red Cross Sifting Internal Charges Over Katrina Aid

March 24, 2006
The New York Times
By STEPHANIE STROM

The American Red Cross, the largest recipient of donations after Hurricane Katrina, is investigating wide ranging accusations of impropriety among volunteers after the disaster.

John F. McGuire, the interim president and chief executive of the Red Cross, and Senator Charles E. Grassley, the Iowa Republican who is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said some of the actions might have been criminal.

The accusations include improper diversion of relief supplies, failure to follow required Red Cross procedures in tracking and distributing supplies, and use of felons as volunteers in the disaster area in violation of Red Cross rules.

There are no known official estimates of the cash or the value of supplies that might have been misappropriated, but volunteers who have come forward with accusations said the amount was in the millions of dollars. The Red Cross received roughly 60 percent of the $3.6 billion that Americans donated for hurricane relief. Mr. McGuire said the investigation started "a number of weeks ago" and was continuing.

"We're in the middle of this, and we're looking at a range of possible problems," he said, "from issues between a few people that are really nothing other than bad will, to failure to follow good management principles and Red Cross procedures that have caused a lot of waste, to criminal activity."

He said the organization would do everything in its power to hold wrongdoers accountable. "We need to bring this through to the proper and right conclusion," he said. "We owe that to donors and the people who needed our services."

Among the specific problems identified by volunteers were the disappearance of rented cars, generators and some 3,000 of 9,000 air mattresses donated by a private company, as well as the unauthorized possession of Red Cross computer equipment that could be used to add money to debit cards and manipulate databases.

Mr. McGuire said the investigation was being conducted by a team from the Red Cross ethics and compliance department. Because the inquiry is continuing, he said that he could not respond to specific accusations. When it is completed, he said, any finding of criminal activity will be turned over to the law enforcement authorities.

A telephone call to the attorney general's office in Louisiana was not returned, and there was no response to an e-mail message to an official in the Department of Homeland Security who had been contacted by a volunteer looking into the accusations several months ago at the request of the Red Cross.

In interviews over the last two weeks, more than a dozen Red Cross volunteers from around the country described an organization that had virtually no cost controls, little oversight of its inventory and no mechanism for basic background checks on volunteers given substantial responsibility.

Though there was little direct evidence of criminal activity, the volunteers said the magnitude of the missing goods had convinced them that Red Cross operations were being manipulated for private gain.

"I can't find any other reason for what was going on," said Anne Tolmachoff, a volunteer from Louisiana. "Otherwise, it just didn't make any sense."

While the Red Cross has drawn harsh criticism for failures in responding to Hurricane Katrina and for failing to address longstanding governance problems, the concerns raised by volunteers pose new questions about the organization's ability to prevent fraud and theft and protect its resources amid the chaos of a major disaster.

Senator Grassley has threatened to rewrite or revoke the organization's charter if it does not thoroughly overhaul its operations. This is the second time Mr. Grassley has prodded the Red Cross to get its house in order. He first made demands after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but his effort sputtered as a result of other pressing matters, like the war in Iraq.

"The allegations from Red Cross volunteers are wide-ranging and include possible criminal misconduct," said Mr. Grassley, who in February demanded to know what the Red Cross was doing to address complaints from volunteers. "The Red Cross needs to change its mind-set so it addresses volunteers' concerns swiftly and appropriately, regardless of whether a Senate committee chairman is asking questions."

In one case cited by volunteers, a kitchen manager swapped 300 prepared meals for parking spaces for Red Cross emergency response vehicles without creating any record of the transaction.

"When a swap takes place, those products become untraceable," said Jerome H. Nickerson Jr., a Maryland lawyer who in mid-November was assigned by the Red Cross, as a volunteer, to look into accusations of theft and fraud in the disaster area. "It's the disaster relief equivalent of money laundering."

Mr. Nickerson and his partner in the inquiry, Michael A. Wolters, a security guard from Wisconsin who uncovered wrongdoing during an earlier three-week tour in Texas shortly after Hurricane Katrina, filed a report on Dec. 5 with the safety and security division at Red Cross headquarters. In it, they cited "a breathtaking systematic failure" by senior managers to enforce inventory control procedures and "outright contempt for well-established internal fiscal controls."

But they said the report had been ignored until a reporter for The New York Times began speaking with other volunteers who had seen similar questionable actions.

Mr. McGuire said the organization had pursued every tip about potential wrongdoing and noted that it had an internal hot line, called Concerned Connection, that volunteers could use.

"The vast majority are misconceptions or cases of 'I don't like somebody, so I'm going to say something,' " he said. "The key for us is to know whether we've got a problem in the Red Cross system and procedures, whether we've got well-intentioned people who just wasted stuff or whether we have a criminal problem."

Still, several volunteers said Red Cross managers in the disaster area had pooh-poohed their concerns and intervened to prevent them from documenting the problems they had encountered.

Willie A. Taylor, a volunteer from Michigan who owns a computer business, said he was part of a team that was asked to use a computer system to track every item from the time it was ordered until it was delivered to the end user.

He said the program revealed that roughly half of the "greenies," the requisition forms used to track supplies as they move through the system, could not be reconciled, meaning the supplies could not be accounted for.

"They asked me to do this," Mr. Taylor said, "we came up with a bulletproof process — and then they squashed it when it showed how big the problem was."

Mr. Taylor and others said they suspected that some volunteers were manipulating the flaws in the distribution system for their own benefit.

The Red Cross had 235,000 volunteers working in the hurricane disaster area, more than five times the previous peak of 40,000, and the sheer number wreaked havoc with the normal vetting process, the volunteers said.

For instance, the Red Cross prohibits anyone with a criminal record from working in a disaster area. "We do background checks on our D.S.H.R. volunteers," Mr. McGuire said, referring to the Disaster Services Human Resources division. "But we did not do them on some of our spontaneous volunteers."

Several of those volunteers had criminal records. For example, a volunteer working in the security unit in Baton Rouge, La., Kathleen Collins-Fowler, reported on Nov. 7 that the authorities in New York had issued an arrest warrant for Joe Tominaro, a volunteer then working in New Orleans, on grand larceny charges. According to New York State Department of Corrections records, Mr. Tominaro has twice served prison time for car theft and possession of stolen goods and is on parole.

Yet he signed on as a Red Cross volunteer and opened a distribution center in Marrero, La., without authorization from the Red Cross logistics division, which is in charge of such matters.

He then rang up a $17,936 bill installing eight industrial fans and an evaporative cooler and moving the cooler a week later to another wall. He was given at least $800 in cash and more than $2,000 was loaded onto his staff debit card, according to records included in Mr. Nickerson's and Mr. Wolters's report. The Red Cross gave him 11 cellphones and two automobiles while he was in the disaster area, even though New York had revoked his license.

Mr. Tominaro did not respond to an e-mail message sent to an address listed on his volunteer records.

On Nov. 2, two volunteers reported their concerns about Mr. Tominaro to Gary Niki, a senior official in the security and safety department at headquarters.

A day later, Ms. Collins-Fowler reported, Mr. Niki ordered that Mr. Tominaro's staff card remain active until further notice. It was suspended, however, on Nov. 7.

Another volunteer falsely passed himself off as a New York City police officer, a criminal offense, and was buying equipment for local law enforcement officials using his staff card, according to the report.

Volunteers said the breadth of the misallocation of supplies made them suspect foul play. Every volunteer interviewed had an example of supplies appearing in places where they were not needed or where the distribution point seemed to be ad hoc.

For instance, Robert M. Cooke, a volunteer serving as bulk distribution manager, was baffled to find industrial-size cans of diced chicken at a middle school in New Orleans.

Mr. Cooke said the school was not an official distribution site and the neighborhood around the school lacked utility service, so the likely recipients of the chicken would have no way to cook it, let alone store such large quantities.

"Those cans were supposed to go to Red Cross kitchens, where they could be properly cooked and prepared," he said.

Mr. Taylor similarly was puzzled by the distribution of supplies in Cameron Parish when he was in charge of bulk distribution. "We were giving out bleach, paper towels and mops, but the houses there were devastated," he said. "We should have been giving out wheelbarrows, hacksaws and other repair equipment."

Moreover, Mr. Taylor said, volunteers at the site did not seem to know who the recipients were. "People were driving up and picking up stuff and driving off, and my question was, how do you know that these people live in this area and need what you're giving them?" he said. "They basically shrugged at me."

Mr. Taylor and Mr. Cooke, who do not know each other, said the scope of the disaster, as well as poor training of the volunteers, explained some but not all of the problems they saw.

"It's a really bad system, of course, because you couldn't account for everything, but there was some funny stuff going on, too," Mr. Taylor said. "People were definitely taking advantage of the huge flaws in accountability."

    Red Cross Sifting Internal Charges Over Katrina Aid, NYT, 24.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/24/national/nationalspecial/24cross.html?hp&ex=1143262800&en=2f0d5e041f341d04&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Unaware as Levees Fell, Officials Expressed Relief

March 2, 2006
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

WASHINGTON, March 1 — A newly released transcript of a government videoconference shows that hours after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, federal and state officials did not know that the levees in New Orleans were failing and were cautiously congratulating one another on the government response.

In the videoconference held at noon on Monday, Aug. 29, Michael D. Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, reported that he had spoken with President Bush twice in the morning and that the president was asking about reports that the levees had been breached.

But asked about the levees by Joe Hagin, the White House deputy chief of staff, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana said, "We have not breached the levee at this point in time." She said "that could change" and noted that the floodwaters in some areas in and around New Orleans were 8 to 10 feet deep. Later that night, FEMA notified the White House that the levees had been breached.

The transcript offers new details but does not significantly alter the picture as it has been put together by investigators as to how officials prepared for the hurricane and responded in the first critical days.

The transcript also shows that on that day the same federal and state officials who would soon be trading recriminations were broad in praising one another's performance.

A Louisiana emergency official, Jeff Smith, said, "The coordination and support we are getting from FEMA has been just outstanding." And Mr. Brown told Governor Blanco that "you have a really good team, and they're just doing an excellent job."

While transcripts of other videoconferences before and after the storm hit were provided to Congressional investigators months ago, the Aug. 29 video and transcript could not be found by FEMA officials. Employees at a regional FEMA office in Atlanta found a tape a few days ago, and a transcript was delivered to Capitol Hill on Tuesday, officials said.

The reports late Wednesday by several television networks and The Associated Press, prompted by the release of the Aug. 29 transcript, brought new attention to other transcripts that had previously been provided to Congress.

A videoconference on Sunday, Aug. 28, showed serious concern from Mr. Brown, who bore the initial brunt of public unhappiness with the federal response, and a more confident reaction from Mr. Bush.

"I want to assure the folks at the state level that we are fully prepared to not only help you during the storm," Mr. Bush said, "but we will move in whatever resources and assets we have at our disposal after the storm to help you deal with the loss of property. And we pray for no loss of life, of course."

Having heard a dire briefing about the storm from the National Hurricane Center, Mr. Brown said that it would be a "a bad one and a big one" and that he worried about the government's "ability to respond to a catastrophe within a catastrophe."

Noting that the Superdome was about 12 feet below sea level, Mr. Brown expressed concern about its adequacy as an emergency shelter.

At one point, on Aug. 28, he urged federal officials to cut through red tape to give timely help. "Go ahead and do it," he said. "I'll figure out some way to justify it. Just let them yell at me."

Asked about the transcripts, Mr. Brown, who resigned under intense criticism of the hurricane response, said Wednesday in an interview that they vindicated his actions and cast doubt on statements by his former boss, Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary.

The videoconferences show "what I have been trying to say throughout this bashing of Mike Brown," he said. "I was aware of the magnitude of the storm. I was pushing the envelope. I was pushing the bureaucracy, and there is no excuse for Michael Chertoff to claim he didn't know what was going on or that I didn't have a command of what was happening in New Orleans."

Mr. Brown said he had warned for three years that budget cuts and the bureaucracy of the Homeland Security Department were crippling FEMA's ability to respond to such a disaster.

"We were all sitting in the same room facing what I was predicting for three years," he said.

A spokesman for Mr. Chertoff, Russ Knocke, said the department had provided 300,000 pages of documents to Congress and 60 witnesses who testified under oath. "The bottom line," Mr. Knocke said, "is there's nothing new here."

The transcript from Aug. 29 added little to the picture, he said.

Mr. Knocke said Mr. Brown had testified that at times during the disaster, he contacted the White House directly and bypassed Mr. Chertoff, suggesting that the FEMA director had contributed to the "fog of bureaucracy" he is now criticizing.

"We're taking the lessons learned from Katrina and applying them to our preparedness and response planning as we go into the next storm season," Mr. Knocke said.

Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans watched parts of the videoconferences and said he now had a "realization" that "there was full awareness before the storm, and a promise to do whatever it takes."

"It seems as though they were aware of everything," Mr. Nagin said. "It surprises me that, if there was that kind of awareness, why was the response so slow."

Democrats on Capitol Hill saw the transcripts as offering a new opportunity to criticize the president's handling of the disaster, and they took it.

"Despite the president's claims, the federal government was clearly not 'fully prepared' for this disaster," Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, said in a statement.

The Senate minority leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, said, "Never has the need for an independent and thorough investigation into the government failures surrounding Hurricane Katrina been more plainly demonstrated than today."

    Unaware as Levees Fell, Officials Expressed Relief, NYT, 2.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/02/national/nationalspecial/02katrina.html

N.Orleans mayor "shocked" by pre-Katrina Bush video

Wed Mar 1, 2006 10:22 PM ET
Reuters
By Jeffrey Jones

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said on Wednesday he was shocked by video showing U.S. President George W. Bush being told the day before Hurricane Katrina hit that the city's protective levees could fail.

The tape contradicts the president's statement four days after the hurricane struck: "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees."

"It surprises me that if there was that kind of awareness, why was the response so slow?" said Nagin, whose city was devastated when the storm struck on August 29 and causing massive flooding.

"I have kind of a sinking feeling right now in my gut. I mean, I was listening to what people were saying and I was believing them that they didn't know. So therefore it was an issue of a learning curve.

"From this tape it looks like everybody was fully aware."

Nagin listened with headphones and watched an excerpt from the video for the first time as reporters stood around him.

The tape shows Bush and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff being told on August 28 that the hurricane could trigger breaches of the levees that protect the city and threaten the Superdome, which became a chaotic shelter for storm victims.

The tapes were obtained by the Associated Press, which played Nagin the excerpt.

"I want to assure the folks at the state level that we are fully prepared to not only help you during the storm, but we will move in whatever resources and assets we have at our disposal after the storm to help you deal with the loss of property," Bush says in the video. "We pray there's no loss of life, of course."

TRANSCRIPTS

White House spokesman Trent Duffy said "the president was fully engaged and involved in meetings on the response."

He was active in making disaster declarations, pushing for evacuations and urging state officials to get people to move to safer ground, Duffy added.

The Department of Homeland Security released a transcript of an August 29 videoconference in which then FEMA Director Michael Brown tells officials he had spoken twice, with the vacationing president, once while Bush was at his Crawford, Texas ranch and later on Air Force One.

According to the transcript, Brown said Bush was "very, very interested" in the hurricane developments. "He's obviously watching the television a lot and he had some questions about the Dome. He's asking questions about reports of breaches. He's asking about hospitals. He's very engaged."

The Bush administration has been heavily criticized for its sluggish response to Katrina, which killed about 1,300 people along the Gulf Coast and plunged New Orleans into anarchy.

The storm surge caused massive flooding that submerged entire neighborhoods, some of which are still in ruins.

After watching the tape, Nagin said it looked as though top officials, including Brown, knew the storm could be devastating, that the Superdome roof was "a question mark" and the military would likely have to be brought in to help.

"I'm just shocked," he said.

Russ Knocke, spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, said the video shows discussions that have been in documents previously made public. "I'm not sure what is shocking about this video. There's really nothing new or insightful from it," he said.

Last month, a congressional report written by Republicans said federal agencies were unprepared for the catastrophe and quicker involvement by Bush might have improved the response.

At the time, Chertoff acknowledged his department was overwhelmed by the magnitude of the storm but said it was wrong to suggest he and Bush were unresponsive.

(Additional reporting by Joanne Allen and Caren Bohan in Washington)

    N.Orleans mayor "shocked" by pre-Katrina Bush video, NYT, 2.3.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=uri:2006-03-02T032232Z_01_N01488040_RTRUKOC_0_US-HURRICANES-VIDEO.xml&pageNumber=1&summit=

nvestigators Criticize Response to Hurricane

February 2, 2006
The New York Times
By ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON, Feb. 1 — No one from the federal government was clearly in charge of the response to Hurricane Katrina, Congressional investigators said Wednesday, and in the absence of clear leadership the general federal approach was "to wait for affected states to request assistance."

In a preliminary report, the Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, criticized Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, for waiting until Tuesday, the day after the storm hit, to designate Hurricane Katrina an "incident of national significance," a status that more clearly put his department in charge.

"Government entities did not act decisively or quickly enough to determine the catastrophic nature of the incident," the report said. "In the absence of timely and decisive action and clear leadership responsibility and accountability, there were multiple chains of command."

The findings were immediately criticized by the Department of Homeland Security. The department's press secretary, Russ Knocke, called them "premature and unprofessional."

Mr. Knocke acknowledged, as the department had before, "that Katrina revealed problems in national response capabilities," but he said President Bush's emergency declaration the weekend before the storm clearly put the department and its Federal Emergency Management Agency in charge.

Separately Wednesday, Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans told a Senate committee investigating the storm that a conflict over who was in charge during the days after it hit severely hurt the response effort.

"There was an incredible dance going on between the federal government and the state government on who had final authority," Mr. Nagin said, referring to a dispute between the Bush administration and Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco over who should control troops sent to the region. "And it was impeding, in my humble opinion, the recovery efforts, and it was very frustrating."

Mr. Nagin also said that perhaps 150 New Orleans police officers would be let go after an investigation into officers who abandoned their posts after the storm hit. It remains unclear, he told the committee, if the city will be ready for the 2006 hurricane season.

"Today we're not ready," Mr. Nagin said, adding that the Army Corps of Engineers was working to at least restore the levee system to its previous strength by June, when the hurricane season begins.

"If the Corps of Engineers does what they claim they will do — and it appears as though they will — the core of the city will be pretty well protected for the next hurricane season," he said.

    Investigators Criticize Response to Hurricane, NYT, 2.2.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/02/politics/02katrina.html

Committee Focuses on Failure to Aid New Orleans's Infirm

February 1, 2006
The New York Times
By ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON, Jan. 31 — Government complacency, poor planning and dereliction of duty during Hurricane Katrina contributed to the deaths of dozens of the frail and sick in New Orleans, and to the suffering of many others who were stranded in area hospitals and nursing homes unable to care for them, Senate investigators said Tuesday.

In the second day of Senate hearings on the hurricane response, the focus was on what investigators called perhaps the most outrageous chapter of the storm: the mistreatment of nursing home and hospital patients during the disaster.

"How could such a thing happen?" Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine and chairwoman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, asked the officials from the State of Louisiana, the City of New Orleans and the state association of nursing homes who attended the hearings. "Why were so many left behind?"

The witnesses acknowledged a long list of failures that meant there was no coordinated or tested plan in place to evacuate the frail, sick or poor, though studies had warned for more than a decade that an estimated 100,000 New Orleans residents without transportation would need such help in a major hurricane.

As a result, patients sat in hospitals and nursing homes for days without electricity, fuel, air-conditioning or sufficient food, the witnesses and senators said.

"It is natural for all of us to believe that fault lies with someone else," said Johnny B. Bradberry, secretary of the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development. "The real truth is Katrina moved faster than we did. All of us on the local, state and the federal levels were overwhelmed, undermined and outmuscled by Mother Nature."

Mr. Bradberry, in an interview with Senate staff members before the hearing, acknowledged that he had done nothing to honor an agreement he signed in April 2005 that his department would be responsible for planning the evacuation of the frail in an emergency.

"We had no plans in place to do any of this," he said.

Instead, he testified Tuesday, his focus was on improving the plan for the mass evacuation of the general population, creating a system that opened all the major highway lanes moving away from New Orleans. This "contraflow" plan is credited with helping perhaps 1.2 million area residents get out of harm's way.

Dr. Kevin U. Stephens, director of the New Orleans Health Department, testified that starting in late 2004 he had tried to create his own plan with bus companies, riverboat owners and Amtrak to evacuate the city's "special needs" population. But the negotiations were not complete when Hurricane Katrina hit, Dr. Stephens said, in part because of liability questions.

Nursing homes, meanwhile, were each supposed to have evacuation plans. At hospitals, because some patients would inevitably be deemed too ill to move, backup generators were to be in place so care could be provided during and after the storm. But both plans failed, the investigators were told, in a breakdown that had been predicted in regional hurricane emergency drills.

First, only 21 percent of area nursing homes, or nearly 60, evacuated before the storm; one witness said this occurred because in the past, nursing homes were not reimbursed for the cost of the evacuation if the predicted storm did not hit. And many hospitals ignored years of warnings to put generators and electrical switching equipment in places protected from flooding, the witnesses said.

Once the storm had passed and the city had flooded, even though thousands of patients needed to be evacuated, nursing home operators often could not call for help. Even when the requests got through, they were not given a high priority, testified Joseph A. Donchess, executive director of the Louisiana Nursing Home Association.

Extraordinary suffering and even death resulted, Mr. Donchess said. At Bethany Nursing Home in New Orleans, for example, which was surrounded by floodwaters, six or seven patients died while they waited four days for buses to move them, he said. Louisiana statistics released this week show that nearly 70 percent of the 796 deceased Hurricane Katrina victims identified as of late January were 61 years old or older.

Senator Collins read an e-mail exchange that took place two days before the hurricane hit, in which an official of the federal Department of Health and Human Services asked a Louisiana official if help was needed "for patient movement/evacuation or anything else." The response, an e-mail message from the federal official said, was that "they do not require anything at this time and they would be in touch if and when they needed assistance."

Dr. Jimmy Guidry, the state health officer of Louisiana, said the offer for aid was rejected because he did not believe that the federal government was prepared to help. Ms. Collins said this answer was unacceptable.

"I wonder," she said, "if the dire straits that we heard described this morning would have been as bad as they were if this offer had been accepted."

    Committee Focuses on Failure to Aid New Orleans's Infirm, NYT, 1.2.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/01/national/nationalspecial/01katrina.html

Interior Dept. Report Describes FEMA's Scant Use of Its Help

January 30, 2006
The New York Times
By ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON, Jan. 29 — As Hurricane Katrina passed across the Gulf Coast last August, the federal Interior Department offered hundreds of trucks and flat-bottomed boats, thousands of law enforcement officers and even 11 aircraft to help with the rescue effort. But much of the equipment and personnel were not used as part of the federal response, or at least not used effectively, according to an account prepared by department officials.

"Clearly these assets and skills were precisely relevant in the post-Katrina environment," said the department's assessment, prepared at the request of a Senate committee investigating the government's flawed reaction to the storm. The report focused on the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The Interior Department, the document says, has a staff of 4,400 law enforcement officers, "many of whom work in harsh environments and are trained in search and rescue, emergency medical services and evacuation," and many of them were in the Gulf Coast area. Yet the report says they were not called to help by FEMA until late September.

The Interior Department was not the only government agency to offer assistance that was not used, or at least not used effectively. Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, said in September that Amtrak had offered, before the storm, to carry residents out, but that its train had left nearly empty. New Mexico offered National Guard troops, but for days officials waited for formal approval to use them.

But the internal documents note that the Interior Department is formally a part of the January 2005 Southern Louisiana Catastrophic Hurricane Plan, prepared by FEMA, and was supposed to play a support role in the "need for rescue and sheltering of thousands of victims," according to the plan.

Russ Knocke, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, said that the department realized that mistakes were made and that it, along with FEMA, was studying what went wrong.

"We are going to be our own toughest critics," Mr. Knocke said.

Even without an official federal assignment, some Interior Department boats and security squads took part in rescue efforts, but it occurred on an ad hoc basis, ultimately helping about 4,500 people, the department said.

The examination of the Interior Department's role also says that some agency employees may have used government resources to repair their own homes, or the homes of friends or relatives, after the storm.

Monday's scheduled hearing, on the search and rescue efforts, is the first of two weeks of hearings by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which hopes to wrap up its investigation by mid-March.

    Interior Dept. Report Describes FEMA's Scant Use of Its Help, NYT, 30.1.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/30/politics/30fema.html

Hurricane Investigators See 'Fog of War' at White House

January 28, 2006
The New York Times
By ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON, Jan. 27 — The White House was beset by the "fog of war" in the crucial days immediately after Hurricane Katrina, leaving it unable to respond properly to the unfolding catastrophe, House investigators said Friday after getting the most detailed briefing yet on how President Bush's staff had handled the events.

The closed-door briefing, attended mostly by House committee aides, was provided by Kenneth Rapuano, who as Mr. Bush's deputy domestic security adviser was the senior official in charge of managing storm events at the White House when the hurricane struck. The meeting was a compromise, a result of White House objections to the investigators' requests for copies of e-mail messages and other correspondence from top presidential aides.

Mr. Rapuano, those present said, acknowledged that he left the White House about 10 p.m. on Monday, Aug. 29, the night the storm hit. Some two hours later, the White House received a report indicating that a major levee in New Orleans had been breached and that most of the city had already been flooded. The report was sent by an official of the Federal Emergency Management Agency who had flown over the city late that afternoon.

But Mr. Rapuano said that before he left that night, the White House received a separate report from the Army Corps of Engineers saying an evaluation of the levees was still under way.

The White House, Mr. Rapuano said, finally received confirmation about the levee breach about 6 a.m. on Tuesday, the morning after it occurred. But even then, it does not appear that word got immediately to Mr. Bush, who was on vacation and who later said that he had had a "sense of relaxation" and had thought the city had "dodged a bullet."

"We are left with a picture of a White House that was plagued by the fog of war," said David Marin, the Republican staff director to the House committee investigating the government's response to the hurricane. "The committee is likely to find a disturbing inability by the White House to de-conflict and analyze information — and that had consequences."

Trent Duffy, the deputy White House press secretary, who also attended the briefing, acknowledged that all levels of the government had suffered from a lack of clarity about the events as they developed.

"There was a lack of situational awareness at all levels," Mr. Duffy said in an interview on Friday. "That is one of the biggest lessons everyone in emergency preparedness has learned because of the storm."

With the House not yet in session, only one lawmaker from the investigative committee — its chairman, Tom Davis, Republican of Virginia — was present for the briefing. Mr. Rapuano told him and the staff investigators that the White House role had been to monitor the situation. The Federal Emergency Management Agency and its parent, the Department of Homeland Security, were operationally in charge, he said.

The investigators expressed frustration that the White House did not seem to have been more actively involved. But Mr. Duffy, echoing a point made by Mr. Rapuano, said: "The White House should not be making combat decisions in Iraq. The same is true for a domestic emergency response."

The committee staff members also asked why it had taken Mr. Bush until the following Saturday, nearly a week after the storm, to order a large number of federal troops to the Gulf Coast.

Mr. Rapuano said that the Pentagon had already started to send troops and that in fact 5,000 of them had arrived by that point.

Louisiana's governor, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, had asked for many more three days earlier, but Mr. Rapuano said the problem was that she had not provided specifics as to what kind of troops she needed.

If the investigators cannot determine, through either testimony or written correspondence, what various presidential aides knew, and when, it will be hard to pinpoint where failures occurred within the White House, said Mr. Marin, the staff director for the House committee.

"There is a difference between having enough information to find institutional fault, which we have," he said, "and having information to assign individual blame, which in large part we don't."

    Hurricane Investigators See 'Fog of War' at White House, NYT, 28.1.2006,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/28/national/nationalspecial/28katrina.html