Popular Mechanics Takes on the Katrina Report

I haven’t looked into the Congressional report on Katrina yet, but I was prepared to find it both unimpressive and unpersuasive no matter what it said. Call me a pessimist, but I haven’t found Congress to be impressive in a few years, and any time it deals with science it flops. It finds scapegoats. It points fingers. It distorts. It protects big name figures connected to disastrous policies (cough Jamie Gorelick cough). It does very little to enlighten, inform and point the way to fix things in the future. That seems to be true regardless of which party happens to be in the majority.

Popular Mechanics has taken a quick look at the Katrina report, though, and isn’t any more impressed than I expected to be.

At 2:00 this afternoon, the Select Bipartisan Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina will release its final report after more than five months of investigation. POPULAR MECHANICS obtained excerpts of a draft copy of the report last night. We’ve given the report an initial read and found it riddled with poor logic, internal contradictions and exaggerations. This is no 9/11 Commission Report. We’ll have a fuller review once we get our hands on the official copy.

This blog wasn’t even impressed with the 9-11 Commission’s report, so the Katrina report must be really useless.

While the 9/11 effort pinpointed large institutional problems and focused on solutions, this report seems designed to narrow attention onto a few individuals, ignoring larger, and frankly more important, issues —- such as what role FEMA should actually take in large-scale emergencies.

For now, though, here’s a quick overview of what seems to be the report’s most troubling shortfall: consistently blaming individuals for failing to foresee circumstances that only became clear with the laser-sharp vision of hindsight.

For example, the report states:

“Fifty-six hours prior to landfall, Hurricane Katrina presented an extremely high probability threat that 75 percent of New Orleans would be flooded, tens of thousands of residents may be killed, hundreds of thousands trapped in flood waters up to 20 feet, hundreds of thousands of homes and other structures destroyed, a million people evacuated from their homes, and the greater New Orleans area would be rendered uninhabitable for several months or years.”

This statistic is referred to often, and refers to computer modeling of a direct Category 5 hurricane landfall in New Orleans. However, it’s also a distortion. According to the data the Committee itself examined, 56 hours prior to landfall, Katrina was a relatively weak Category 3 storm, heading west in the Gulf of Mexico. Over the next few hours, it began its turn north, but where the storm was going to make landfall along the Gulf Coast was any weatherman’s bet. In fact, it was not until the next day, Saturday, that it became clear —- with any certainty —- the hurricane was heading toward New Orleans. Furthermore, hurricane forecasters and emergency managers tell PM that until about 24 hours before landfall, hurricanes are too unpredictable to warrant the sort of blanket evacuation orders the report describes.

And according to transcripts obtained by POPULAR MECHANICS of the Sunday, August 28, videoconference between FEMA, DHS, Gulf State authorities, the National Weather Service and the White House, as late as Sunday —- only 24 hours before landfall —- National Hurricane Center storm tracks predicted: “There will be minimal flooding in the city of New Orleans itself.” The death tolls listed in the congressional report presuppose: A) certainty that the storm would hit New Orleans directly, and B) certainty the storm would strengthen to a Category 4 or 5. Neither of these propositions was certain 56 hours prior to landfall. And, in fact, the hurricane was a Category 3 storm when it did hit.

Sure, in hindsight lots of things could have been done that were not. But most of those things were not the federal government’s responsibility. The levees that failed were managed locally, as was the evacuation of New Orleans that left so many stranded. When the feds offered help, Gov Blanco at least initially couldn’t decide what to do, then rebuffed the offer, before being talked into it by the president and Mayor Nagin.

One last time, FEMA’s response was far from perfect and Brownie deserved most of the criticism that came his way, but FEMA isn’t primarily in the business of preventing disaster and it’s not a first-responder when the worst happens. It’s a backstop for local governments coping with crisis. Congress’ report doesn’t seem to address that basic fact. When those local governments fail, as they did in Louisiana last fall, FEMA cannot and should not simply take over, send in the troops and fix everything. It’s impossible. The Congressional report doesn’t seem to address that, either.

Read the entire PM post on the report. PM’s editor says the magazine will provide more in-depth coverage of the report before long. They’re one of the few outlets in the media that consistently gets science right, so I would expect that their coverage, however it turns out, will be solid and reliable.