Managing Hurricane Katrina

Lessons from a Megacrisis

Arjen Boin, Christer Brown, James A. Richardson

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780807170441
• eBook ISBN: 9780807170922
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The government's response to Hurricane Katrina, one of the most devastating natural disasters in U.S. history, suffered numerous criticisms. Nearly every assessment pointed to failure, from evaluations of President George W. Bush, FEMA, and the Department of Homeland Security to the state of Louisiana and the city administration of New Orleans. In Managing Hurricane Katrina: Lessons from a Megacrisis, Arjen Boin, Christer Brown, and James A. Richardson deliver a more nuanced examination of the storm's aftermath than the ones anchored in public memory, and identify aspects of management that offer more positive examples of leadership than bureaucratic and media reports indicated. Katrina may be the most extensively studied disaster to date, but the authors argue that many academic conclusions are inaccurate or contradictory when examined in concert. Drawing on insights from crisis and disaster management studies, Boin, Brown, and Richardson apply a clear framework to objectively analyze the actions of various officials and organizations during and after Katrina. They specify critical factors that determine the successes and failures of a societal response to catastrophes and demonstrate how to utilize their framework in future superdisasters. Going beyond previous assessments, Managing Hurricane Katrina reconsiders the role of government in both preparing for a megacrisis and building an effective response network at a time when citizens need it most.

1

HURRICANE KATRINA REVISITED

REFLECTING ON SUCCESS AND FAILURE

What went wrong? Just about everything . . . hesitancy, bureaucratic rivalries,
failures of leadership from city hall to the White House and epically bad luck.

—EVAN THOMAS, “WHAT WENT WRONG”

THE SHAME OF KATRINA

In late August of 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck the city of New Orleans and several nearby parishes. In a matter of 24 hours, much of the city was covered by floodwaters as deep as eighteen feet in places. Hundreds drowned, trapped in their homes. Thousands were stranded on roofs, raised berms, highway overpasses, at a darkened, sweltering stadium, and in an empty Convention Center. Live images showed desperate residents calling for help from rooftops, people looting stores, and lifeless bodies floating facedown in the floodwaters. Journalists broadcasting on live television were shaken to tears by reports of rape and violence.

Hurricane Katrina produced a mega-disaster, the largest in US history. Katrina was not just a natural disaster. It was also a man-made disaster in at least two ways. First, Katrina could wreak havoc because of a woefully inadequate protective levee structure. This failure to protect the Crescent City has been scrutinized and rightly so.

But it was also, and perhaps foremost, the response to the event that turned Katrina into a disaster. In the first days after landfall, local, state, and federal authorities seemed incapable of doing anything. Images of helpless victims and violent looters dominated the news. Mayhem and anarchy appeared to reign in New Orleans.

Public and political assessments quickly branded the response as a deep failure: government officials failed, the president failed, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) failed, the system failed. One report found “a litany of mistakes, misjudgments, lapses, and absurdities all cascading together.”1 These dire assessments undermined the legitimacy of the nation’s crisis response system. They also undermined the legitimacy of key institutions, ranging from local government agencies to the presidency of the United States. The response, today, is still considered so poor that “Katrina” has become shorthand for shameful government performance.

This is a powerful indictment, which we will carefully consider and dispute. For starters, we can say that this assessment does not take into account the many things that actually went well right before, during, and after Katrina. To be sure, the response to Katrina was not as good as one might have hoped or expected. Mistakes were made. Some actors failed; some failed miserably. But many things went remarkably well, especially given the circumstances.2

For instance, the pre-landfall evacuation of New Orleans and the surrounding areas was well organized and went smoothly. After the city flooded, a flotilla of heroic rescuers saved many lives. In addition to first responders (residents and local officials), personnel from all over the United States joined the search and rescue effort and provided medical assistance to the wounded and the displaced. Federal troops helped, as did churches, volunteer associations, and corporations. Within six days after landfall, the authorities had evacuated tens of thousands of survivors from the drowned city. The federal government sent an unprecedented amount of resources to Louisiana and other affected states in the first two weeks after landfall and earmarked a massive amount of funding to support the recovery of the stricken areas.

The indictment does not take into account the circumstances under which government agencies were asked to respond. This was the first time that government agencies faced the challenge of a major US city being almost completely flooded. There were no plans for this contingency, and there was very little experience to adequately guide public agencies in their crisis management efforts.

So if the management of this disaster is rated as woefully inadequate, as it has been, we must ask ourselves: How could things have worked better, realistically speaking? Here we encounter a rarely noticed but deeply important problem: we lack a clear and agreed-upon framework for assessing the response to a mega-disaster (or for any sort of crisis for that matter). It is striking to see how a range of official committees and investigative bodies have boldly passed judgments and prescribed remedies in the aftermath of the storm without such a framework. Fast assessments that serve political ends do little to enhance public trust in those systems and processes that should protect society from the impact of future disasters.

This book aims to offer a more balanced way to study and assess the response
to a mega-disaster. Unlike other assessments, we make use of an explicit framework that guides our analysis of the response. We assess the quality of the response in terms of four performance indicators on which, we argue, citizens may expect high scores from their government before, during, and after a disaster.
We refer here to the strategic tasks of crisis management—those tasks that research has shown enhance the quality of the crisis response.3 These tasks make up our framework for assessment, which we outline later in this chapter. In this study, we identify the factors that affected the capacity of government organizations to fulfill these tasks. Each task will be discussed in a separate chapter.

This is a book on managing a mega-disaster. Hurricane Katrina was a unique event, a “black swan” event, which required a response developed more or less on the fly.4 We seek to learn the lessons from this response—lessons that help governments at all levels to better prepare for the next mega-disaster. Before we lay out our analytical framework, let’s first briefly recount what happened during that first week after landfall of Hurricane Katrina.

What Happened

New Orleans: The City That Care Forgot

The focus of this book is confined to New Orleans, though we recognize that it was by no means the only community affected by the storm. Areas of Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida also suffered tremendously. Nevertheless, New Orleans was the single largest metropolitan area affected by Katrina and saw the largest loss of life.

The city of New Orleans is coextensive with Orleans Parish and covers 118 square miles. The city is situated between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain in a low coastal plain, dipping to as much as 14 feet below sea level in places. Prior to Hurricane Katrina, the city was home to 454,000 residents, making it the nation’s thirty-first-largest city. A total of 1,330,000 people resided in Greater New Orleans, a region encompassing eight parishes.

New Orleans has been called “the impossible but inevitable city”—inevitable to the extent that a city must exist near the mouth of the Mississippi River, impossible in light of the region’s inhospitable climate and challenging geography. In order to make the area more comfortable and economically viable, residents have altered the landscape over the course of centuries.5 Many of these interventions increased the vulnerability of the city and its inhabitants to forces of nature.6

Until the Louisiana Purchase transferred New Orleans into American hands, the city’s Creole and African slave populations were confined to what today is the French Quarter, a small neighborhood on high ground near the banks of the Mississippi River. The arrival of additional residents during the 1800s prompted growth into low-lying areas protected by natural levees. Subsequent technological advances made possible the construction of artificial flood control measures, allowing the local population to move into low-lying areas that were more susceptible to flooding.

Over time, ethnic animosities and structural discrimination would lead to the division of the city into three self-governing “municipalities,” namely the French Quarter...

Table of contents

• COVER
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• ABBREVIATIONS
• HURRICANE KATRINA: A Quick Timeline
• 1. Hurricane Katrina Revisited: Reflecting on Success and Failure
• 2. Why Didn’t They See It Coming? The Challenges of Timely Crisis Recognition
• 3. Understanding the Unimaginable: Why Collective Sense Making Failed
• 4. Who’s in Charge Here? Coordinating a Multilevel Response
• 5. Meaning Making in Crisis: The Detrimental Effects of Missing Narratives and Escalating Blame Games
• Conclusion: Lessons of a Mega-disaster
• APPENDIX I: Timeline on Levee Breaches
• APPENDIX II: Emergency Management in the American Federal System
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX