Emergency Preparedness
March 2, 2007
The National Guard and Reserves don't get enough money or equipment and are left out of important planning for national emergencies, an independent panel concluded Thursday, long after the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina exposed serious stresses on the services. The report from the Commission on the National Guard and Reserves compounds earlier criticism of the Bush administration's response to the devastating hurricane that struck the Gulf Coast in August 2005, according to The Associated Press. The administration also is still struggling to better manage the reserves nearly four years into the Iraq war.
March 1, 2007
The Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Homeland Security Department's emergency preparedness division need to improve oversight and management of grants, lawmakers told agency officials Wednesday. Calls for improvement come about a month before FEMA is slated to receive more responsibility for distributing grants, reports govexec.com. Matt Jadacki, DHS deputy inspector general for disaster assistance oversight, said about 2,700 grants, worth about $8.7 billion, have been executed for Hurricane Katrina alone. The DHS inspector general continues to conduct reviews of those grants, he said.
February 26, 2007
Thousands of New Orleans college students who received disaster assistance after Hurricane Katrina received letters later from the Federal Emergency Management Agency demanding repayment, reports The Times-Picayune. Federal law says that anyone incurring a "disaster-related" expense is eligible for assistance, regardless of whether he is a resident of the state where the disaster struck. But FEMA says things aren't so clear-cut when it comes to college students whose primary residence is often their parents' house.
January 24, 2007
The Little Sisters of the Poor, a famed order of nuns who take a vow of poverty, say the city of New Orleans owes them a hefty sum of money after Hurricane Katrina. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has doled out $1.4 million to reimburse the order because one of its facilities, the Mary Joseph Residence for the Elderly in New Orleans, was used as an emergency operations center after the storm. But the money had to go through channels — first to the state and then to the city of New Orleans, reports The Associated Press. It has been sitting in the city's coffers for about a month and it could take several more weeks before the nuns receive the funding.
A bold plan put forward by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — and currently being discussed in the new Congress — would build a semipermeable "Great Wall of Louisiana" from the Mississippi River to Texas to block the advancing Gulf of Mexico and, at the same time, do the opposite of what a levee is supposed to do: Allow water through to keep marshlands from drowning in the kind of brackish backwaters that are killing off Louisiana's signature swamps at the rate of more than 30 acres a year. For some 120,000 people along Louisiana's blue-collar coast, the "Morganza-to-the-Gulf" levee is seen as salvation, especially since the 2005 storms, reports The Christian Science Monitor. But critics say that such a "leaky levee" is a false hope, a taxpayer-funded Louisiana hay wagon that is scientifically unproven and even detrimental to both the region's ecology and economy.
See Christian Science Monitor article
January 23, 2007
New Orleans area hospitals have been using a Web page since October to improve coordination among their crowded emergency rooms, reports The Times-Picayune. After a chemical scare last month, the hospitals immediately posted online how many beds they had available, and nursing homes relayed that they could absorb patients if the hospitals were overwhelmed. While the incident did not ultimately swamp the hospitals, it illustrates how Internet technology has helped promote a spirit of collaboration among local emergency rooms, all of which have suffered from gridlock since Hurricane Katrina.
Newly minted commissioners of the regional levee board now controlling much of the hurricane protection system east of the Mississippi River say they will do whatever it takes to fortify flood defenses that were gradually eroded by years of neglect, then ravaged overnight by Hurricane Katrina. The Times-Picayune reports that only two weeks into the board's state mandate to manage historically balkanized levee districts, improve the battered levees and win the public's trust, Tom Jackson, president of the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East, is leading the effort with what appears to be a take-no-prisoners style.
January 2, 2007
When the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers admitted in June that design flaws in the New Orleans levee system had caused most of the flooding during Hurricane Katrina, it seemingly left little to argue about. But the fight wasn't over. The corps is now engaged in an effort to predict how New Orleans would fare in the next big hurricane, and is once again being second-guessed by some of the nation's top civil engineers, reports the Los Angeles Times. The National Research Council complains that the corps' official investigation into the levee failures reaches premature conclusions, glosses over problems, and fails in its most important task: giving the public the information it needs to make informed decisions about living in New Orleans.
December 12, 2006
Under the guiding hand and watchful eye of a state transition team, the commissioners of four local levee boards in the New Orleans region are preparing to conduct business a final time before their appointments expire Dec. 31, reports The Times-Picayune. The dissolution of local governing boards in favor of regional oversight fulfills a congressional mandate that the state consolidate levee operations in southeast Louisiana or forfeit millions of federal dollars earmarked to study how to best protect against catastrophic storms. Two new authorities will manage the maintenance of flood- and hurricane-protection systems on both sides of the Mississippi River, ending the balkanized system of management that some critics say contributed to the failed patchwork of levees and floodwalls during Hurricane Katrina.
December 4, 2006
With almost $6 billion in hand and work well under way to strengthen flood defenses throughout southeast Louisiana, the levee system protecting the New Orleans region still could be likened to a patient who no longer needs life support but remains in intensive care, according to The Times-Picayune. Officials with the Army Corps of Engineers expect New Orleans area levees to get higher and better every year, but they acknowledge four more hurricane seasons will pass before they can completely correct fundamental weaknesses responsible for much of the devastating flood — and that timetable may be optimistic for the largest structures.
November 3, 2006
With a $221 million bid, Motorola Inc. won selection Thursday to build an emergency radio system in Mississippi that will connect state agencies and allow counties and cities to buy into the network, reports The Clarion-Ledger. The state Wireless Communication Commission and the Information Technology Services Department Board voted unanimously for the Motorola bid, which undercut competitor M/A-Com's by $90 million. Hurricane Katrina highlighted the need for a statewide system: with communications antennae down and a multitude of state, federal, local and private responders, confusion and chaos ensued.
October 26, 2006
Jimmie Fore, the president of New Orleans' Ernest N. Morial Convention Center said Wednesday he does not want the giant riverfront hall to be used as the main staging area for evacuating people during hurricane threats after this year, according to The Times-Picayune. The plan for the 2006 storm season announced in May by Mayor Ray Nagin called for using Regional Transit Authority buses to transport residents unable to evacuate on their own to a site behind the convention center; once there, they would be put on intercity buses that would take them to shelters out of the hurricane's path. The plan was strongly endorsed by Convention Center board Chairman Warren Reuther, but board member Ralph Brennan objected, saying the facility could suffer irreparable damage to its image among convention planners around the nation and world if it showed up again on TV screens as a hurricane shelter.
October 19, 2006
U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., is locking horns with President Bush because he struck a provision that would have required the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency to have emergency preparedness management experience, reports The (Baton Rouge) Advocate. Landrieu sent a letter to Bush, saying the Senate in recent legislation intended to "protect against further mistakes such as those that plagued the 2005 hurricane response." Last year, former FEMA head Michael Brown was removed from the job for his handling of Hurricane Katrina; he had no real emergency preparedness experience when he joined the agency.
October 16, 2006
A new Louisiana emergency rule hopes to give first responders more information about possible post-hurricane hazardous waste. Flooding resulting from Hurricane Katrina pushed railroad cars off the tracks and left them scattered across the area in and around New Orleans. State Department of Environmental Quality officials, who are charged with assessing the potential environmental threat these rail cars posed, did not immediately have information about what the cars contained, their location or their conditions, reports The (Baton Rouge) Advocate. Under the new emergency rule, industries or companies in control of rail cars, barges and other temporary or mobile vehicles that contain hazardous material must report information to a state hotline within 12 hours of a parish-declared mandatory evacuation.
October 11, 2006
More than a year after Hurricane Katrina killed 35 nursing home patients, Louisiana nursing homes are better prepared to evacuate if another storm threatens, Gov. Kathleen Blanco said Tuesday, pledging state support to help get the elderly out of harm's way if a home's plan unravels. One of the lessons of Hurricane Katrina was the need to better evacuate nursing homes and to ensure, for example, that different homes haven't contracted with the same busing services to move residents, she said. The Associated Press reports that a state-federal review of roughly 70 nursing homes in the hurricane-affected area found that all had plans that do not rely on the same resources; all indicated they are prepared to evacuate successfully, if necessary, Blanco said.
September 21, 2006
Congress ordered the nation's disaster planners Wednesday to make sure that pets don't get left behind in the next catastrophe. Reacting to reports of Hurricane Katrina victims refusing to leave New Orleans without their dogs, cats and birds, Congress passed legislation requiring state and local governments to draw up plans for evacuating and sheltering pets in a disaster, reports The Times-Picayune. The legislation, which received final congressional approval Wednesday, also gave FEMA the authority to finance shelter renovations to house pets on a temporary basis.
August 24, 2006
Hurricane Katrina knocked out most of the towers for cell phones and radio systems used by state and local agencies. Yet even if the equipment had kept working, it would have been impossible to connect with many other emergency crews out on the water that night, The Associated Press reports. A year later, rescuers and relief workers along the Gulf Coast are more likely to be able to communicate with one another during a crisis than they were after Katrina. But despite the patchwork measures taken to help avert a repeat of last year's debacle — itself a repeat of communications failures on Sept. 11, 2001 — political turf battles still threaten to create a Tower of Babel any time there's an emergency requiring a response from more than one of the nation's 60,000 public safety entities.
August 21, 2006
Nearly one year after Hurricane Katrina punched into the Gulf Coast, much damage remains, both in the shattered homes that litter parts of New Orleans and in the battered reputation of government institutions. The Washington Post reports that in the heart of a new hurricane season, many Americans are not persuaded by federal officials' assurances that the government is ready for the next big storm. A national poll conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that fewer than half of those surveyed said they thought the government is "very prepared" to deal with this year's hurricane season. Only half agreed that the federal government had "learned a lesson from Hurricane Katrina."
August 18, 2006
Frail elderly residents who were evacuated from nursing homes in Gulf Coast states suffered more than the vast majority of those who were not moved during last year's hurricanes, according to a report to be issued today by the inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services. The report is based on site visits and interviews with administrators and staff members at 20 nursing homes in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, all with emergency plans that meet the requirements of federal and state law. But it found that the plans had many deficiencies, especially in ensuring the safe and comfortable evacuation of residents with complex needs, reports The New York Times.
July 28, 2006
Haunted by memories of the confusion and sense of helplessness in the chaotic weeks after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans-area churches have thoroughly retooled evacuation plans to protect themselves from the next hurricane — and in a few cases, to help get their elderly and shut-in members out of harm's way. Church planners have tried to build more robust communications systems that will survive the widespread cell phone failures that everyone now anticipates. They want to make sure that faith communities scattered by the next hurricane can maintain a sense of cohesion. Last year, some churches and major denominations had evacuation plans that proved unequal to Katrina, according to The Times-Picayune.
July 27, 2006
When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast last year, it revealed serious shortcomings in nursing homes' evacuation plans, reports the Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch. A year after the disaster, flaws in emergency plans still have not been fixed according to "Disaster Preparedness: Limitations in Federal Evacuation Assistance for Health Facilities Should be Addressed," a report released the Government Accountability Office. The GAO found that facility administrators faced several challenges, including deciding whether to evacuate, obtaining needed transportation and maintaining outside communication. The GAO also found that the Department of Homeland Security's National Response Plan — the basic framework for how the federal government helps states and local governments during disasters — fails to address the evacuation of nursing home residents.
See Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch article
July 11, 2006
Accompanied by a warning that protecting New Orleans and the Louisiana coast from major hurricanes would cost "double-digit billions of dollars" and take decades to accomplish, the Bush administration and the Army Corps of Engineers on Monday submitted to Congress an interim protection report that includes no recommendations for specific projects. The decision to leave individual projects out of the interim Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration report in favor of language on how future projects would be chosen was immediately criticized by high-ranking officials from the state, reports The Times-Picayune. Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana asked Sen. Pete Domenici, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on Energy and Water, for a hearing to investigate why the administration changed the report that was being agreed to by local corps officials and the state. Meanwhile, Gov. Kathleen Blanco demanded that the corps submit to Congress the five major projects recommended by the state for initial authorization. (Report link under Government Data)
June 30, 2006
As New Orleans rebuilds tens of thousands of homes damaged by Hurricane Katrina, FEMA has recommended rebuilding at levels below last year's floods, reigniting a debate about how the levee-ringed city can be rebuilt safely. If buildings are rebuilt too low, most of the money spent on construction could be wasted, while a level too high would be costly for the cash-strapped city, according to Reuters. FEMA, widely criticized for its response to Katrina last year, published preliminary rebuilding height guidelines earlier this month based on its model for a 100-year flood. Katrina and Rita led the agency to re-examine its previous flood maps, but researchers ruled out using either storm as the basis for the 100-year hurricane model.
June 26, 2006
Ten months after Hurricane Katrina exposed failures at all levels of government, Congress is seeking to avert another debacle the next time the country faces a catastrophic natural disaster or terrorist attack — and its focus is the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The public debate has centered on calls to take FEMA out of the Department of Homeland Security and allow it to again report directly to the president, reports The Washington Post. The White House opposes such a move. Experts say the argument obscures older, deeper problems that undermine the nation's preparedness.
June 16, 2006
Nearly five years after the 9/11 attacks and 10 months after Hurricane Katrina, most American cities and states remain unprepared for catastrophes, an analysis by the Homeland Security Department concludes. Although emergency plans appear to be stronger in 18 states along the nation's "Hurricane Belt," the analysis cited preparedness gaps in 131 state and city emergency response plans, according to The Associated Press.
June 13, 2006
A bill that could make Louisiana the first state in the nation with a hurricane evacuation plan for cats and dogs won approval Monday in a House committee, reports The (Baton Rouge) Advocate. The legislation is a response to complaints from animal lovers that thousands of cats and dogs died needlessly after Hurricane Katrina.
June 5, 2006
Days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Louisiana/Mississippi border, it became clear that people with disabilities were having trouble getting help. Census figures indicate that more than 20 percent of the population affected by Hurricane Katrina had some type of disability, according to National Journal. As people flowed out of New Orleans last August, complaints began flowing in from those with disabilities who were poorly served during the evacuation.
May 30, 2006
Most people believe that Katrina, a Category 3 hurricane devastated New Orleans on Aug. 29 of last year. But that’s not so. 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, reports The New York Times. 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 of dollars 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, floodwalls, storm gates and pumps.
The Army Corps of Engineers on Monday announced that a 400-foot section of earthen hurricane protection levee being rebuilt near Buras High School in Plaquemines Parish slumped by more than 6 feet overnight Saturday, and said repairs could take three to six weeks. Corps spokesman Jim Taylor said the levee section, just west of the main Mississippi River levee and about 60 miles south of downtown New Orleans, seemed to twist in place, losing 6.5 feet of height at its top. The levee had been raised to 15 feet by Saturday, and was scheduled to be raised to 17.5 feet by Thursday, the beginning of hurricane season, reports The Times-Picayune. Since Hurricane Katrina, the corps has spent more than $700 million to restore 169 miles of devastated hurricane levees, floodwalls and gates in the New Orleans area.
It begins as a conversation, perhaps over dinner, at the end of the day: Where are you going this year? As a symptom of the general uneasiness in New Orleans, this year's hurricane evacuation talk ranks among the most acute. Within it are the immediate and long-term threats: the unnamed storm everyone may soon have to flee, and the grim likelihood that the next big one could be the knockout punch for this struggling city. Never has a coming hurricane season generated as much anxiety, many here say. The official start to the season is Thursday but the unofficial worrying has long since begun, according to The New York Times. On top of the ever-present reminders of last year's catastrophe — ruined neighborhoods, piles of debris, empty streets — the new threat is proving to be too much for some. Everyone here, it seems, knows someone who is picking up and leaving New Orleans for good. Many who swear they will not abandon the city have at least set up an alternative home-place somewhere else.
May 26, 2006
Federal officials must issue emergency declarations faster this hurricane season, to allow military, homeland security and state and local response authorities more time to mobilize, Defense Department officials said at a hearing Thursday. Paul McHale, the Defense Department's assistant homeland defense secretary, said he and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff both would like to have as much as a week to begin federal preparations for a major storm, reports GovExec.com. But McHale cautioned members of a House Armed Services subcommittee that taking precautions before accurate forecasts are available could lead to overpreparation.
With most of St. Bernard Parish's current residents living in travel trailers, local officials will recommend that residents evacuate at least 72 hours before any storm with tropical storm-force winds makes landfall in Louisiana, reports The Times-Picayune. And depending on the path of the storm, officials say that recommendation could become a mandatory evacuation order. The recommendations, made during the parish's annual hurricane summit Thursday, differ sharply from those of last hurricane season, when officials asked residents to leave 50 hours in advance of Category 2 or stronger hurricanes, said Larry Ingargiola, director of the parish Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.
May 25, 2006
In a breathless finale that has been called one of this generation's greatest adventures in civil engineering, the Army Corps of Engineers has all but completed its repairs to New Orleans' ruined levee system, The New York Times reports. With just days to go before the beginning of the hurricane season, the corps' $800 million effort has even improved the system in many ways, engineering experts say, with tougher concrete flood walls, brawny new canal gates and more than 150 miles of new or repaired levees. But even though all sides agree that the corps has largely achieved its goal, independent engineers say it is the goal that is the real problem. New Orleans is still very much at risk, they say, because the level of protection the corps has reached is still not as strong as the city needs.
New Orleans, still down and out from last year's assault by Hurricane Katrina, is projected as the U.S. city most likely to be struck by hurricane force winds during the 2006 storm season, expert researchers said Wednesday. Reuters reports that the forecast offered by Chuck Watson of the Georgia risk assessment firm Kinetic Analysis Corp., and University of Central Florida statistics professor Mark Johnson gives New Orleans nearly a 30 percent chance of being hit by a hurricane and a 10 percent chance the storm will be a Category 3 or stronger, meaning sustained winds of at least 111 miles per hour. "Given the state of the infrastructure down there and the levees, gosh, that's just not good news. But that's what the climate signals look like," Watson said, adding that they predict oil production in the Gulf of Mexico will be disrupted for a minimum of a week.
Wrapping up a hurricane preparedness drill, Louisiana and federal officials said Wednesday that the state has improved its ability to respond to natural disasters, but technology and media outreach needs to get better, The Times-Picayune reports. The two-day drill tested the pre- and post-storm response by federal, state and local agencies as the fictional storm bore down on New Orleans. The first day of mock drills was focused on pre-storm evacuations and sheltering, while the second day tested the state's ability to respond in the immediate aftermath of a storm.
Plans to use the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center as the main staging area for evacuating people from New Orleans by bus during hurricane threats this year came under strong attack Wednesday from board member, Ralph Brennan. At the monthly meeting of the Convention Center's board, Brennan, said the center could suffer irreparable damage to its image among convention planners around the nation and world if it shows up again on TV screens this fall as a hurricane shelter, reports The Times-Picayune. The evacuation plan announced May 2 by Mayor C. Ray Nagin calls for using RTA buses to transport most residents who can't leave the city on their own to a site behind the Convention Center.
May 24, 2006
A mock evacuation that was supposed to be part of a two-day Louisiana hurricane preparedness drill was canceled due to a question about who had jurisdiction over a Federal Emergency Management Agency trailer park, the Associated Press reports. The two-day statewide drill that began Tuesday was aimed at avoiding the chaos that followed last year's deadly Hurricane Katrina, and is expected to continue Wednesday. The mock evacuation was to take place in the state's largest FEMA trailer park in Baker, La., 10 miles from Baton Rouge. But the Baker evacuation was canceled because of an apparent communication breakdown, said JoAnne Moreau, director of the East Baton Rouge Parish Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness. "We were unable to get any information from the state or federal government on what policies or procedures were for evacuating those sites — whose jurisdiction it was," Moreau said.
U.S. disaster-preparedness officials declared themselves ready yesterday for the June 1 onset of hurricane season, amid mounting anxiety in Gulf Coast states hit by last year's devastating storms that recovery efforts and repairs to the nation's emergency response system remain incomplete. Federal authorities have stockpiled four times as much food and ice as they had before hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck last year, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and top U.S. military commanders said at a news conference. The government has also spent $800 million improving National Guard communications and has forged the closest civilian and military disaster response command structure ever, they said. But FEMA's hurricane operations plan is unfinished, state officials said, and the agency remains 15 percent understaffed. Repairs to New Orleans's levee system by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are incomplete, and a state commission recently warned that 40,000 Floridians could face a catastrophic flood if a storm hits weakened flood-control systems near Lake Okeechobee, reports The Washington Post.
The race against the clock to restore the New Orleans area’s battered hurricane protection system to pre-Katrina levels by the start of a new hurricane season next week is 92 percent complete, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers official, Col. Lewis Setliff III said Tuesday. Katrina flooded 80 percent of the Crescent City, and much of the flooding was blamed on lake surge that put too much stress on the 17th Street Canal and London Avenue Canal floodwalls, causing portions of them to collapse. Setliff, who is overseeing the rebuilding of 169 miles of levees and floodwalls breached by hurricanes Katrina and Rita in metropolitan New Orleans, said the damaged levees are being repaired to their pre-Katrina “authorized” heights. That is an important distinction, he said, because the levees were lower than their authorized heights at the time of the storm because of years of subsidence, reports The (Baton Rouge) Advocate.
May 23, 2006
For the next two days, New Orleans will test new evacuation plans and emergency response strategies meant to prevent the widespread confusion, especially among the poor, that accompanied Hurricane Katrina. As part of the tests, about 80 volunteers will board city buses on Tuesday and head to the convention center and train station as a mock Category 3 hurricane bears down on the Gulf Coast. Make-believe evacuees will then be tagged with wristbands for tracking, reports The Associated Press. In a real hurricane, the evacuees would be taken by bus or train to shelters first within the state and then elsewhere, depending on availability.
The head of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, Mike McDaniel said his agency will be better prepared for a hurricane this year than last year when Katrina and Rita destroyed the state’s coast. The department is working on better communication equipment and improving the ability to collect environmental samples, conduct tests and give results as soon as possible, he said. For example, before a storm hits the DEQ will require railroads to identify the location of hazardous rail cars, The (Baton Rouge) Advocate reports. After Katrina and Rita, the railroads often did not know where hazardous cargoes were and that caused lots of problems, McDaniel said.
May 22, 2006
A wide range of design and construction defects in levees around New Orleans raise serious doubts that the system can withstand the pounding of another hurricane the size of Katrina, even after $3.1 billion in repairs are completed, a team of independent investigators led by the UC Berkeley civil engineering school said Sunday. The findings undermine assurances by the Bush administration and the Army Corps of Engineers that the federal levee repair program due to be completed in June will provide a higher level of protection to New Orleans, the Los Angeles Times reports. The team's 600-page report disputed most of the corps' preliminary findings about what caused the levee breaches, saying the investigators had made critical errors in their analysis. The mistakes raise concerns about whether the corps is competent to oversee public safety projects, said Raymond Seed, a professor who led the investigation.
With the hurricane season starting June 1, flooding is on everyone's mind in New Orleans these days. Downtown last week, government officials, military men in desert gear and private suppliers ran a tabletop exercise against a fictional Category 4 hurricane named Oscar. Along Lake Pontchartrain, contractors for the Army Corps of Engineers are rushing to finish new floodgates on the city's perimeter, working even at night under klieg lights. New levees replacing those wiped out by the hurricane are nearly finished, reports Time magazine. Still, New Orleanians learned a valuable lesson from Katrina: Trust no one and nothing. They're not counting on the levees to hold or the government to rescue them this time. Neighborhoods like Broadmoor are recruiting block captains to canvass residents who have returned, noting which homes are occupied, who lives in flimsy trailers and which elderly residents might need help. In Gentilly, where many senior citizens died, residents are looking into their own text-messaging system for emergency alerts. Self-sufficiency is everyone's mantra, from civic associations to city hall.
May 19, 2006
The failure of New Orleans' levees during Hurricane Katrina reflected decades of technical and institutional problems in the Army Corps of Engineers' efforts to protect the city, according to investigators who will publish their findings Monday. The report from the University of California-Berkeley engineering department will say that the corps lacked a coherent strategy for protecting the city, the Los Angeles Times reports. The organization's technical prowess suffered when it was forced to deal with modern political realities, particularly in Louisiana, according UCB professor Bob Bea, and at the same time, the corps has suffered an erosion of its technical capabilities. The implications of the report are far-reaching because the corps is responsible for civil works projects that guard public safety in almost every corner of the nation.
Massive floodgates designed to better protect the heart of New Orleans from the type of storm surges that breached levees during Hurricane Katrina may not be installed until July, more than a month after hurricane season starts, a top Army official said Friday. But large storms are rare before August, and the Army Corps of Engineers said it has a plan to reinforce the levees if another major storm threatens any earlier than that. The Corps is installing the floodgates to protect the levees that Katrina weakened along three major drainage canals that channel rainfall from city streets into Lake Pontchartrain, reports The Associated Press.
May 18, 2006
Two House committees approved competing proposals to revamp the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Wednesday, reflecting the uncertainty over the future of the troubled disaster-response organization criticized for its disorganized response to Hurricane Katrina. Reuters reports that the Transportation Committee voted unanimously to turn FEMA back into an independent agency reporting directly to the president, but the Homeland Security Committee passed a plan that would strengthen it while keeping it within the Department of Homeland Security.
Officials on both sides of the Orleans-Jefferson parish line are sparring over control of two huge pump stations, including one that drains neighborhoods in the city and the suburbs that flooded heavily during Hurricane Katrina, The Times-Picayune reports. The main prize is Pump Station No. 6. The New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board owns the facility and wields the lion's share of power over pumps there that drain about 7,500 acres of Broadmoor and Uptown. But because the station also drains about 2,500 acres of Old Metairie and Old Jefferson, Jefferson Parish pays for about a quarter of the cost to operate and maintain it. The point of contention is the plan drafted by Jefferson officials, which they say would let them drain Old Metairie and Old Jefferson without overloading the 17th Street Canal by slightly reducing the amount of water Orleans Parish drains into the canal. But S&WB officials said the plan would risk flooding the Interstate 10 underpass near the Mounes Street railroad crossing, shutting down one of the area's main routes for evacuating hundreds of thousands of people.
The next hurricane like Katrina will be met with earlier, quicker deployments of supplies and military units, according to The Times-Picayune. That's the forecast as adjutant generals from 12 states met with Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and state and federal homeland security officials Wednesday to plan emergency responses designed to deploy National Guard and, if necessary, federal military units to disaster areas sooner and with better coordination than after Katrina. Blanco said the plan calls for better and more unified performance among the various agencies for evacuations, hospital services, access to food and water, rescue, law enforcement and transportation. Among the planners' assumptions is that the governor will keep command of National Guard forces from Louisiana and other states, just as she did after Katrina even though the White House was pressuring her to turn her authority over to a general under the president's command.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency is installing a new tracking system to make sure that emergency supplies go where they're supposed to go as it prepares for hurricane season, reports National Public Radio. Officials hope to improve communications equipment and better equip search-and-rescue teams. Much of the activity is taking place at FEMA's logistics center in Fort Worth, Texas, which provided emergency supplies for much of the Gulf Coast region.
Hear National Public Radio report
May 17, 2006
With the next hurricane season two weeks away, Northrop Grumman Ship Systems has made "radical changes" in its plans to protect its coastal shipbuilding facilities and recover from a storm as powerful as Hurricane Katrina, a company official said Tuesday. Northrop Grumman, which bills itself as the world's largest military shipbuilder, will evacuate workers and start securing its facilities in Pascagoula, Gulfport and New Orleans at least 24 to 36 hours earlier than it typically did for past hurricanes, officials said. Vehicles and equipment will be moved to higher ground. Water, food, generators and gasoline will be stockpiled in greater quantities. Fewer workers will stay behind to ride out the storm, reports The Associated Press.
May 16, 2006
The repair of levees and floodwalls broken or destroyed by Hurricane Katrina is on track, but the system still won't be high enough to prevent flooding by a similar storm this year, a senior Army Corps of Engineers official said Monday. "If another Katrina were to occur tomorrow, you're going to have 6 feet of water overtopping some levees,” Don Resio told members of a National Academies of Science committee reviewing the corps' investigation of the levee failures. He explained that the agency is studying how to protect the New Orleans area from hurricanes even larger than Katrina. But until Congress provides authorization to build something safer, he said, the refurbished levee system will remain susceptible to overtopping, reports The Times-Picayune.
The government won't be ready for another major disaster such as Hurricane Katrina unless the Pentagon takes a more aggressive role in the federal response, congressional investigators said Monday. Poor planning and confusion about the military's role contributed to problems after the storm struck on Aug. 29., and without immediate attention improvement is unlikely, the Government Accountability Office said. It urged the Defense Department to establish procedures to speed aircraft, troops and reconnaissance gear to hurricane-stricken areas when local and state officials are overwhelmed as well as beef up communications support to Homeland Security officials, reports The Associated Press.
Crediting last year's contraflow system with keeping 1.3 million people safe from Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco said Monday that residents of metropolitan New Orleans will see few changes in the state's phased evacuation plan this hurricane season, reports The Times-Picayune. Blanco unveiled the state's disaster guide for southeast Louisiana, whose sole revision is a strict caution to the tens of thousands of people living in travel trailers or mobile homes that they are vulnerable to all levels of storm-force winds. Absent from Blanco's announcement were specific shelters outside southeast Louisiana, a step much anticipated by local governments who plan to use public buses to send residents without transportation to state-approved locations north of Interstate 12.
May 15, 2006
Biloxi City Council members could decide as soon as Tuesday whether to adopt advisory elevation levels developed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency — or come up with an alternative, reports The Clarion-Ledger. If approved, FEMA's advisory levels would require new and reconstructed buildings in the city's flood zones to be raised as high as 25 feet above sea level. Some council members, however, are pushing for a plan that would raise the city's current 13-foot building requirement to 16 feet above sea level in flood zones. Biloxi is among the Gulf Coast's 11 cities having to raise flood elevation levels because of Hurricane Katrina, which hit Aug. 29. All Gulf Coast municipalities will have to accept FEMA's requirements to participate in the National Flood Insurance Program, which some homeowners will need to qualify for mortgages.
May 12, 2006
The federal government is better prepared for this year's hurricane season — and local officials, companies and individuals should be just as ready, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Thursday. More than eight months after his department stumbled badly in its response to Hurricane Katrina and the devastating floods in and around New Orleans, Chertoff told USA TODAY that federal officials will be ready to step in any time lives are at stake. However, he took a hard line toward those who might not take responsibility for themselves in a disaster. State and local governments "have the principal responsibility to be the first responder," Chertoff said. "They know their people and geography best."
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has a video network to allow officials in Washington, D.C., to assess live feed of disasters and has equipped trucks with GPS devices so the agency can see when supplies are delivered to stricken areas, officials said Thursday. To better prepare for this year's hurricane season, FEMA has also stockpiled equipment for floods and started a partnership with the Coast Guard to use its boats when responding to some emergencies, reports The Associated Press. FEMA plans to reduce delays by sending relief supplies before a storm hits to cities close to the expected damage area, including generators and search-and-rescue and medical teams, said Ron Cooper, who supervises six of FEMA's nine logistics centers nationwide.
Floodgates to block tidal surges out of the weakened 17th Street and London Avenue canals, and auxiliary pumps to help prevent inland flooding when the gates are closed, will not be ready as promised when the hurricane season opens June 1, Army Corps of Engineers officials confirmed late Thursday. Corps commanders said braced-steel sheet piling will be installed at canal bridges to turn back high water, and portable pumps will be used to provide limited storm water drainage if an early-season storm surge threatens the city before the work is complete. And they added that the work probably won't be finished before early- to mid-July, reports The Times-Picayune. It isn't ideal, said Col. Richard Wagenaar, commander of the corps' New Orleans district, but the sheet-piling contingency plan will keep the floodwalls from breaching, as happened under the weight of Katrina's surge, inundating most of New Orleans and part of East Jefferson.
May 11, 2006
Spurred by dozens of deaths in south Louisiana nursing homes that failed to evacuate before Hurricane Katrina, a state Senate committee agreed Wednesday to let the state take a more active role in overseeing future evacuations, reports The Times-Picayune. A compromise bill that cleared the Senate Health and Welfare Committee would require nursing homes to beef up emergency plans and submit them to the state for approval by Aug. 1, but also calls for the state to serve in a backup role in case the arrangements made by nursing homes fall through. The bill was crafted in weeks of backstage negotiations between Gov. Kathleen Blanco's administration and the nursing home industry, which came into the current legislative session with starkly different visions of how future evacuations should be handled. Nursing home representatives had been pushing for the state to assume much of the cost and responsibility for moving residents, while the state Department of Health and Hospitals was proposing to assume new oversight duties while leaving nursing homes in charge of carrying out their own emergency plans.
May 10, 2006
The processing of disaster loans by the Small Business Administration was slowed by a new computer system that limited the number of employees who could access the system at one time, according to a report that evaluates the performance of 22 federal agencies in the aftermath of Katrina and Rita. The 226-page report was prepared by inspectors general for the agencies and is possibly the broadest look to date at the federal bureaucratic response to last year's hurricanes, The Times-Picayune reports. The report said that the immediate federal response to Katrina was delayed and impeded because FEMA did not have contracts in place for the quick distribution of ice, water, food, tarps, transportation and travel trailers. Because the planning process did not take place before Katrina, "FEMA found itself in an untenable position and hastily entered into contracts, with little to no contract competition for disaster commodities," the report concluded. The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Federal Emergency Management Agency, awarded 64 percent of the 554 Katrina-related contracts over $500,000 without competitive bidding in the first three months after the hurricane, the report said.
The House Homeland Security Committee is weighing a legislative proposal aimed at bolstering the Federal Emergency Management Agency rather than dismantling it as the panel's Senate counterpart has recommended, according to GovExec.com. A Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee investigation rapped FEMA officials for mismanagement, waste and susceptibility to fraud after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast, and recommended the agency be renamed and reorganized. In contrast, the House panel said the agency needs a direct line to the White House and more staff, but not a complete overhaul.
May 9, 2006
The day after Hurricane Katrina lashed New Orleans, the city drainage department's internal radio channel echoed with the appeals of workers stranded in Pump Station No. 5, a fortress that was deluged by 9 feet of water gushing in through gashes in the Industrial Canal. Officials at the Sewerage & Water Board, which manages the city's drainage pump stations, acknowledged that when Katrina struck, no formal plan existed for rescuing workers from flooded pump stations, reports The Times-Picayune. A plan is in the works, officials said, although no draft of it has been given to pump operators for review. And that has left some employees worried that they may be left to fend for themselves again in another disaster.
With hurricane season just a few weeks away, health care professionals are talking about the lessons learned during Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, according to a HealthDay News report. It wasn't the injuries that stymied relief efforts in Louisiana, said Dr. Lynn Witherspoon, chief information officer for the Ochsner Clinic Foundation, a health care system with 25 clinics across the region. The biggest problem was getting medical records so that patients could have the medications that keep them going. Hundreds of thousands of patients suddenly found themselves with no access to their heart, diabetes, blood pressure and other life-sustaining drugs. Many had to wait and then virtually start over with doctors they didn't know who then began the treatment process from scratch.
May 8, 2006
Ahead of the hurricane season that starts June 1, the Pentagon is buying cellular and satellite phone vans, cutting paperwork to speed delivery of aircraft, troops and supplies to stricken areas and already is sending military officers to Gulf states. Yet military officials fear falling short of the public's expectations when the next storm hits, given that the scenes of New Orleans' devastation are still vivid and frustration with the federal response still raw, reports The Associated Press. "The expectations of our citizens ... have gotten so high that regardless of the responder — local, state, National Guard and Defense Department — folks will be disappointed that they can't get everything they need right away," said Adm. Timothy Keating, commander of U.S. Northern Command.
May 5, 2006
When the Army Corps of Engineers finishes rebuilding the east side of the Katrina-shattered Industrial Canal floodwall to 15 feet by June 1, residents of the Lower 9th Ward and St. Bernard Parish will have the hurricane protection they were supposed to have before the storm hit, reports The Times-Picayune. The completion of that job, however, will have the unintended consequence of putting the rest of New Orleans in a more dangerous position than before Katrina, storm experts and engineers said. The west wall isn't scheduled to be raised to the authorized 15 feet until Sept. 1, 2007; should another Category 3 storm before then, the lower west wall will be overtopped faster and the volume of water pouring into the western section of the city from the canal will be greater and last longer than during Katrina. The commander of the corps' levee rebuilding effort said the agency is aware of the problem; he also said that he did not know why both projects were not attempted simultaneously.
The Pentagon's homeland-defense branch pledged major improvement Thursday in readiness, resources and response speed to help with catastrophic hurricanes this year, according to USA TODAY. New procedures are in place so disaster assistance can be requested and sent days quicker than in last year's response to Hurricane Katrina, said Adm. Tim Keating, commander of the U.S. Northern Command. The help ranges from damage assessment, mass feeding and air support to fuel distribution, medical evacuation and route clearing. In addition, NorthCom officers are permanently assigned at the 10 regional offices of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The daily presence at FEMA is to create familiarity so disaster response isn't caught in bureaucratic delays, Col. Stover James said.
Thousands of National Guard soldiers in Mississippi and Louisiana who were in Iraq last year when Hurricane Katrina slammed the Gulf Coast will be available to respond this summer if a major hurricane threatens the region, according to The Associated Press. Almost 40 percent of Mississippi's troops were deployed when Katrina pushed ashore Aug. 29. Nearly 3,500 were in Iraq; they returned earlier this year and now almost 97 percent of the men and women are stateside as the start of hurricane season approaches, Maj. Gen. Harold Cross said Thursday. In Louisiana, almost 3,000 of that state's 10,000 soldiers were in Iraq when Katrina hit. They began coming home just weeks after the storm made landfall.
May 4, 2006
Reversing the decades-long tradition of "vertical evacuation," local hotels will no longer let guests and employees ride out hurricanes in their towers, the Greater New Orleans Hotel & Lodging Association says. Thousands of guests were stranded in miserable, dangerous conditions amid smashed windows and flooded streets after Hurricane Katrina, and hotels had difficulty getting buses to evacuate them. The notion of sparing local residents and their pets the stress of sitting in traffic on the highways no longer seemed like a smart move to the group’s members, The Times-Picayune reports. "I don't know of any hotel that intends to do vertical evacuation this year," said Bill Langkopp, executive vice president of the hotel association, which surveyed its members on their storm plans. "Our thrust will be to get the visitors out."
May 3, 2006
The forces that caused two breaches in the London Avenue Canal floodwall, submerging much of New Orleans’ Gentilly neighborhood during Hurricane Katrina, were similar to those that brought down the 17th Street Canal floodwall, the team of government, academic and industry experts investigating the failures for the Army Corps of Engineers said in a report released Tuesday. The Times-Picayune reports that according to the team, rising water pressure inside the canal pushed the floodwall away from the canal, creating a space between the wall and its interior levee. The opening extended below the wall and through a narrow layer of clay silt that acted as a barrier between water in the canal and a thick layer of very porous sand; pressurized water moved down the opening into the sand and quickly traveled under the wall. The Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force does not think the disaster can be tied to any obvious engineering shortcomings, its leader said. But those involved with Team Louisiana, the state investigation into the failures, disagreed.
As state and local officials on the Gulf Coast scrambled to help panicked residents flee Hurricane Katrina on Aug. 29, mobile communications units developed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency were at Barksdale Air Force Base in Shreveport, La. — outside the disaster area — and did not make it to the state's emergency operations center in Baton Rouge until the day after the storm hit. In addition, according to a bipartisan Senate committee report released Tuesday, most of the U.S. Forest Service's 5,000 radios — the largest civilian cache in the United States — remained unused. In the eight months since Katrina devastated Louisiana and Mississippi, much has been written about how the failure of communications hampered relief and rescue efforts, reports the Los Angeles Times. The 750-page "Hurricane Katrina: A Nation Still Unprepared," issued by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee after 22 hearings over seven months, added some gripping details to the familiar narrative.
Statements by the Army Corps of Engineers that the New Orleans area was protected against the equivalent of a Category 3 hurricane were "at best a rough estimate and at worst simply inaccurate," according to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s final report on Hurricane Katrina released Tuesday. Noting data from the National Weather Service about the severity of storms, evidence of subsidence that left levees and floodwalls below authorized levels and gaps created by unfinished projects, the panel concluded in "Hurricane Katrina: A Nation Still Unprepared" that the system was not capable of protecting against a Category 3 hurricane, such as Katrina, with winds up to 130 mph and a storm surge as high as 12 feet, reports The Times-Picayune.
Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff said Tuesday he is "very confident" that federal officials are ready for the upcoming hurricane season, reports The Associated Press. In a letter sent Monday to Chertoff, Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., demanded specifics on staffing of the Federal Emergency Management Agency to ensure that enough experienced workers are on hand by the official June 1 start of the hurricane season. The agency will at least come close to its goal of filling 95 percent of its vacancies by then, Chertoff said.
May 2, 2006
After months of planning and tinkering, New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin said Monday that his administration today is set to unveil a new hurricane plan that relies heavily on using buses to evacuate thousands of residents and does not include the use of a megashelter of last resort like the Superdome. The plan, approved by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, also will detail what Nagin said was a carefully considered process to order voluntary and mandatory evacuations. And he suggested the plan will not rely on federal personnel coming to the rescue of the city in case of a catastrophe, reports The Times-Picayune.
The National Guard heads into the 2006 hurricane season with more troops at home than last year, but less equipment to handle emergencies, according to Stateline.org. State-based units are short on critical equipment because guardsmen about to return from overseas assignments in Iraq and Afghanistan are handing off their rifles, radios and vehicles to incoming units. State officials say shortages at home of Guard equipment, such as Humvees, mean they must rely on backup assistance from neighboring states once hurricane season begins June 1. In Louisiana, about 100 of the Guard's high-water vehicles remain abroad — even as the state continues to rebuild from Hurricane Katrina. Vehicles are particularly crucial to hurricane response because they are often the only way to ferry ice and water through devastated areas.
Four years before Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans, the Federal Emergency Management Agency endorsed a plan for the "National Grid," a unified mapping system to help emergency responders navigate a city where the street signs and other landmarks are submerged, blown down or washed away. At the time, FEMA said that the grid would "help save lives, reduce the costs of disaster, and enhance preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation efforts." In December 2001, a federal interdepartmental committee that studies mapping adopted the National Grid as the standard for federal agencies, reports GovExec.com. But when Katrina ripped through the Gulf Coast, FEMA didn't use the grid. Rescuers were left scrambling for usable maps to get them where they needed to be.
May 1, 2006
The release of yet another report condemning Hurricane Katrina failures has Federal Emergency Management Agency employees saying they just want to push forward for the upcoming hurricane season — and do so independently, reports GovExec.com. Agency workers, the union representing them and a former director are most concerned with seeing the agency become independent of the Homeland Security Department so FEMA can get immediate attention from the White House during a crisis. Employees are tired of seeing the agency pounded by the press and politicians, and would even accept its demise as long as the replacement agency would be autonomous, said Leo Bosner, president of the American Federation of Government Employees' Local 4060.
April 28, 2006
Congress and the White House are headed toward a collision over one of the big questions left unresolved in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina — whether to beef up the Federal Emergency Management Agency within the Department of Homeland Security or to create an independent agency to handle national emergencies, reports the Los Angeles Times. “FEMA is discredited, demoralized and dysfunctional. It is beyond repair. Just tweaking the organizational chart will not solve the problem," said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, whose Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee recommended Thursday that it be dismantled and reconstituted as a new, stronger agency within Homeland Security. Many House members are pushing instead to restore FEMA to independent agency status outside the department, while the White House urged a strengthening — but no reshuffling — of current operations.
Surrounded by evidence of the incomplete recovery from Hurricane Katrina, President Bush on Thursday tried to calm fears across the Gulf Coast that another monster storm could be lurking in the upcoming hurricane season. "We pray there is no hurricane this coming year, but we are working together to make sure that if there is one, the response will be as efficient as possible," said Bush. The 2006 hurricane season begins June 1, and the president said his administration is working with local officials to make sure communications are clearer and supplies are effectively positioned in advance, The Associated Press reports.
Facing renewed criticism of his administration's response to Hurricane Katrina, President Bush signaled Thursday while in New Orleans that his administration was listening to its critics. "All of us in positions of responsibility appreciate those who are working to help us to understand how to do our jobs better," Bush said during his visit to the heavily damaged Lower Ninth Ward. His trip was planned to highlight the progress of rebuilding efforts on the Gulf Coast and, this being National Volunteer Week, the role volunteers have played in them, according to The New York Times. But it came on a day that a bipartisan Senate panel’s report called the Federal Emergency Management Agency the living "symbol of a bumbling bureaucracy."