Via WaPo White House Got Early Warning on Katrina

The documents shed new light on the extent on the administration’s foreknowledge about Katrina’s potential for unleashing epic destruction on New Orleans and other Gulf Coast cities and towns. President Bush, in a televised interview three days after Katrina hit, suggested that the scale of the flooding in New Orleans was unexpected. “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees. They did anticipate a serious storm,” Bush said in a Sept. 1 interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

The documents in question were prepared by two elements of the Department of Homeland Security: National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center (NISAC) and FEMA.

The NISAC document, among other things:

warned that a storm of Katrina’s size would “likely lead to severe flooding and/or levee breaching” and specifically noted the potential for levee failures along Lake Pontchartrain. It predicted economic losses in the tens of billions of dollars, including damage to public utilities and industry that would take years to fully repair. Initial response and rescue operations would be hampered by disruption of telecommunications networks and the loss of power to fire, police and emergency workers, it said.

The FEMA doc:

compared Katrina’s likely impact to that of “Hurricane Pam,” a fictional Category 3 storm used in a series of FEMA disaster-preparedness exercises simulating the effects of a major hurricane striking New Orleans. But Katrina, the report warned, could be worse.

The FEMA report was issued two days before landfall, and the NISAC document was sent to the White House at 1:47 am the day Katrina hit land.

As such, it really is difficult for the administration to behave as if what happened was an utter surprise. This really was a massive failure of disaster management. While it would have been impossible to have prevented the actual damage, the federal response was woeful, especially if one takes this information into account.

It certainly does not bespeak well of the capacity of DHS, and the federal government in general, to respond to a massive terrorist attack, even if some intelligence existed as to what the event would be–let alone if the attack was a total surprise. Given that the whole notion of the formation of DHS was to better the government’s ability to respond to terrorism, the response to Katrina underscores that we are not better off after that rearranging of the deck chairs.

Via the NYT version of the story, we get some political parsing: White House Was Told Hurricane Posed Danger - New York Times

A White House spokesman, asked about the seeming contradiction between Mr. Bush’s statement on Sept. 1 and the warning as the storm approached, said the president meant to say that once the storm passed and it initially looked as if New Orleans had gotten through the hurricane without catastrophic damage, no one anticipated at that point that the levees would be breached.

As well as the suggestion the lack of preparedness was widespread, and not just federal:

The Senate investigators have also found evidence that at least some federal and state officials were aware last summer that the hurricane evacuation planning in the New Orleans area was incomplete.

The whole thing was an utter debacle.

And yes: the scope of the disaster is primarily the culprit. This is obvious. My point is that the the governmental response, at all levels, to that disaster was pathetic as compared to what it reasonably could have been. Clearly the local evacuation plans were radically inadequate, but above all else the sluggish and inept response by FEMA was unforgivable.