"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome Concepts

A Paradise Built in Hell: Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster

by Rebecca Solnit · 31 Aug 2010

.penguingroup.com PRELUDE: FALLING TOGETHER Who are you? Who are we? In times of crisis, these are life-and-death questions. Thousands of people survived Hurricane Katrina because grandsons or aunts or neighbors or complete strangers reached out to those in need all through the Gulf Coast and because an armada of

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earthquake as its centennial approached, I started to see how often this peculiar feeling arose and how much it remade the world of disaster. After Hurricane Katrina tore up the Gulf Coast, I began to understand the limits and possibilities of disasters. This book is about that emotion, as important as it

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the overlapping beliefs of the media and the elites can become a second wave of disaster—as they did most dramatically in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. These three subjects are woven together in almost every disaster, and finding the one that matters most—this glimpse of paradise—means understanding the forces

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of the twentieth century—the big northeastern blackouts in 1965 and 2003, the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area, 2005’s Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast—the loss of electrical power meant that the light pollution blotting out the night sky vanished. In these disaster-struck cities

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, the same ingredients as most contemporary disasters, the same social solidarities and schisms, the same generous and destructive characters. It certainly prefigures the clashes of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. What makes the small utopias like the Mizpah Café all the more remarkable is that they took place in the context of

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groups, and there was no joy or solidarity in being handed food by people who required you to prove your right to it first. After Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, I heard the infamous former Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) director Michael Brown tell a group of disaster experts that business

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have the resources or the luck that Tassajara did, and they faced water, not fire. They were dedicating their brand-new temple the day that Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, and the head monk from Vietnam, a visiting senior monk, about eighteen elderly women, a neighboring African American family, a Vietnamese

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to be a job for private philanthropy, while emergency response in other countries is often still delegated to the military (as it ultimately was in Hurricane Katrina in the United States). She approves, too, of the growing ranks of trained emergency managers. Many disaster scholars concur that if public awareness on disaster

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communities they served; in Halifax, most agencies behaved well; on the morning of 9/11 the Centers for Disease Control responded rapidly and appropriately; in Hurricane Katrina the Coast Guard distinguished itself for performing a maximum of rescues with a minimum of fuss and fear. Responses vary. Asked how decades of studying

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crime when they commit it. General Funston having citizens shot as looters believed he was somehow saving the city, and the officials and vigilantes in Hurricane Katrina unloosed even more savage attacks on the public because that public was portrayed as a monster out of control—a collective King Kong or Godzilla

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in an unfamiliar world playing unfamiliar roles. Certainly it was so in San Francisco in 1906, in the big Mexico City earthquake of 1985, and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. But in Mexico, the majority mattered most, with extraordinary consequences. III CARNIVAL AND REVOLUTION: MEXICO CITY’S EARTHQUAKE POWER FROM BELOW Shaking

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Clara Rita Bartholomew, a strong, outspoken woman of sixty-one, went into the closet of the house she’d inherited from her sister to escape Hurricane Katrina’s wind. She’d been awakened by the howling gale at six that Monday morning, August 29, 2005. She sheltered first in the bathroom, where

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anyone in it float by and took it as a sign from God. She waited to die. A lot of people waited to die in Hurricane Katrina, and more than sixteen hundred did so, though some of them were so unwell they never knew what got them, or they died not of

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succession of guns pointed at him. Fed by racism and the enormity of the storm, the elite panic reached extraordinary levels in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. That generated a disaster of its own, whereby the victims of Katrina were regarded as menaces and monsters, and the response shifted from rescue to

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-enforcement, medical, and civilian officials in positions to know.” Locked and Loaded There were many ways in which the war in Iraq spilled over into Hurricane Katrina. Governor Blanco’s troops fresh from the battlefields of Iraq, M16s locked and loaded, implied that New Orleans too was a war zone and that

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article headlined, “Troops Begin Combat Operations in New Orleans” that began, “Combat operations are under way to take this city back in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.” In other words, the stranded citizens were the enemy and the city was to be taken from them. New Orleans was not to be rescued

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with the caption, “A New Orleans man grabs a couple hours of sleep next to an arsenal of guns. He and several friends rode out Hurricane Katrina. . . . The guns were donated to them by out-of-town residents so they could protect everyone’s property.” Most people would come up with two

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saved children. He saved family. He saved the neighbors. He saved strangers. The twenty-nine-year-old could have evacuated his hometown, New Orleans, as Hurricane Katrina approached, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave his grandparents. Their home in the St. Bernard housing project out near City Park on the

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disasters, with generous improvisations to save themselves and others. Two things struck me most powerfully on my travels in New Orleans during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. One was those murders hidden in plain sight. The other was the love. There was a sweet emotional directness in many of the people in

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been her disaster; that she made something remarkable of her response to it was clearly her salvation. I stopped by Camp Casey the day that Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf and found a big camp and an extraordinary community akin in many ways to disaster communities. The rolling green landscape studded with

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heat waves all at once. Peru had been hit by a big earthquake, and the devastation of Pakistan’s 2005 earthquake, the Gulf Coast’s Hurricane Katrina, and the Indian Ocean’s 2004 tsunami were far from over. As I rewrote this book a year later, central China was recovering from the

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, where Professor James Scott provided brilliant commentary and encouragement. It then metamorphosed into an essay for Harper’s magazine that went to press the day Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. My splendid editor there, Luke Mitchell, insisted that my optimism about human nature would be proven right even while I quailed

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“fear of social disorder”: Ibid. 127 “The media emphasis on lawlessness”: Kathleen Tierney et al., “Metaphors Matter: Disaster Myths, Media Frames, and Their Consequences in Hurricane Katrina,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (2006). Available at http://ann.sagepub.com/cgi/framedreprint/604/1/57/. 128 “whereas, in

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little babies in there”: Quoted in Douglas Brinkley, The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 573. 236 Nagin reported . . . “hundreds of gang members”: Brian Thevenot and Gordon Russell, “Reports of Anarchy at Superdome Overstated,” Newhouse News Service, September 26, 2005. 236 “in that frickin

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,” Counterpunch, January 21/22, 2006, http://www.counterpunch.org/shorrock01212006.html/. 241 “Reporters, even from some of the big papers”: Jed Horne, Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near-Death of a Great American City (New York: Random House, 2007), 107-8. 241 “Katrina’s big lesson is that the crust

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’t”: Ibid., 113. 264 “The Louisiana Society for the Prevention”: Tom Jawetz, in “ACLU Report Details Horrors Suffered by Orleans Parish Prisoners in Wake of Hurricane Katrina,” August 10, 2006, http://www.aclu.org/prison/conditions/26421prs20060810.html/. 264 The 1973 volcanic eruption on Heimaey: See United States Geological Survey, “Man Against

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Hernandez, Marisol Herrington, Donnell Heston, Charleton Hobbes, Thomas Holhouser, Anna Amelia Holme, Rasmus Holy Cross Neighborhood Association Horne, Jed Hot Eight Brass Band Human nature Hurricane Katrina HurricaneHousing.org Huxley, Thomas Henry Ice storm of 1998 Iceland Ingram, Stuart Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) Jackson, Linda Jacobson, Pauline Jaffery, Zaheer James, Henry James

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, William Janoff-Bulman, Ronnie Jawetz, Tom Johnstone, Dwight Joy See also Carnival Joyce, Kate Jubilee Kanto Earthquake, Japan Kaplan, Temma Katrina, see Hurricane Katrina Katsouros, Father James King, Edwin King Jr., Martin Luther King, Robert (Wilkerson) Klein, Laura Cousino Klein, Naomi Klinenberg, Eric Koudelka, Josef Kropotkin, Peter Lafler, Henry

Risk: A User's Guide

by Stanley McChrystal and Anna Butrico · 4 Oct 2021 · 489pp · 106,008 words

climate and challenging geography.” It was inevitable because of its location so close to the mouth of the Mississippi River. The moniker forebodes storm damage. Hurricane Katrina hit the height of its fury on Monday, August 29, 2005. Although technically a Category 5 storm with winds hitting 140 miles per hour

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external risk of the fourth most intense Atlantic hurricane ever to strike the continental United States at the time was by itself huge. But ultimately, Hurricane Katrina was a failure in risk management. Weaknesses in the Risk Immune Systems at almost every level of government, complicated by personalities and the inevitable

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. Although many of the rescue responses were imperfect, and some badly flawed, had officials improved only the timing of their actions, the impact of Hurricane Katrina would have been far less painful. Dilatory pre-storm decision-making led to sluggish responses, as actions taken by New Orleans, the state of Louisiana

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a stop, audibly exhales—and the doors open for the passengers to embark. For Hurricane Katrina, there were two stages of busing: one to transport citizens into the Superdome for last-minute shelter, and another to move the Superdome’s hungry and tired inhabitants out, to a safer and more permanent place of

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for remaining citizens had similarly been canceled. But this wasn’t even the most troubling timing challenge of the Hurricane Katrina response. When it was time to transport citizens out of the Superdome after the storm had passed, there was a lack of coordination between federal organizations like the Federal Emergency Management

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timing delay occurred when the bus drivers got lost trying to find the Superdome, presumably overwhelmed at having to navigate an unfamiliar city, where water blocked off normal traffic. By Friday morning, September 2, five days after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the city of New Orleans, eight hundred buses evacuated fifteen thousand people

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at Taiwan’s successful response to COVID-19, a case in which swift decisions united with equally rapid execution. The late decision-making efforts during Hurricane Katrina told a more cautionary tale. Finally, we saw how a counterintuitive strategy to stop more often during a Formula 1 race proved to be

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, in all cases, important, the political courage to act coupled with effective levers of management is essential. In the case of COVID-19 and Hurricane Katrina, HHS and FEMA conducted two separate exercises that predicted the risks of an imminent global pandemic on the one hand (Crimson Contagion) and a hurricane

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conducted before the respective crises occurred—and eerily predicted the circumstances that would later arise when COVID-19 droplets dispersed across the globe, and when Hurricane Katrina’s winds whipped on New Orleans’s famous Bourbon Street. The imminent nature of the threats, as well as the requirements of making decisions

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often know they must act, overcoming inertia or knowing when to wait for the best opportunity requires good leadership. As the failed relief efforts during Hurricane Katrina show us, it is easy to delay doing what must be done, and leaders must be able to control the trigger—decisions like that

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” Your organization either fails to respond to a threat or acts too late to be effective. Examples: Officials delay critical decisions in the face of Hurricane Katrina at great cost. Special Operations Forces continue to employ counterproductive tactics in Afghanistan. RELEVANT RISK CONTROL FACTORS Timing, Action & Communication SOLUTIONS TO DIAL UP

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’s flatterers were also quieted. There were forces that no one, not even the king, could do anything about. The rising waters brought by Hurricane Katrina, the inexorable advance of disruptive technology, the despair of Depression-era unemployment, and Santa Anna’s army surrounding the Alamo all invite a kind of

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Robertson, “Lockdown Delays Cost at Least 36,000 Lives, Data Show.” “the impossible but inevitable city”: Arjen Boin, Christer Brown, and James A. Richardson, Managing Hurricane Katrina: Lessons from a Megacrisis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019), 4. Original source was P. F. Lewis, New Orleans: The Making of an

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Urban Landscape (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1976). It was inevitable because: Boin, Brown, and Richardson, Managing Hurricane Katrina, 4. Original source was Lewis, New Orleans. Category 5 storm: “Hurricane Katrina,” National Weather Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, accessed September 24, 2020, https://weather.gov/jetstream/katrina. up to twelve

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thousand citizens: This number does not include the citizens with special needs. Boin, Brown, and Richardson, Managing Hurricane Katrina, 43. small hole in the Superdome’s: “I Was There: Hurricane Katrina: Superdome Survivor,” YouTube, uploaded by History, August 20, 2015, https://youtube.com/watch?v=Am-hb3ZCPUQ; makeshift shelter of “last resort

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”: Boin, Brown, and Richardson, Managing Hurricane Katrina, 9. twenty-five thousand Americans: Boin, Brown, and Richardson, Managing Hurricane Katrina, 9. plumbing couldn’t keep up: “I Was There: Hurricane Katrina: Superdome

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Survivor.” Elderly citizens who sought refuge: “I Was There: Hurricane Katrina: Superdome Survivor.” million people who had escaped: Boin, Brown, and Richardson, Managing

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Hurricane Katrina, 15. between 1,200 and 1,800 deaths: Boin, Brown, and

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Richardson, Managing Hurricane Katrina, 8. fourth most intense Atlantic hurricane: “Meteorological History of Hurricane Katrina,” KLTV, August 16,

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2006, https://kltv.com/story/5293566/meteorological-history-of-hurricane-katrina/; Talmon Joseph

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Katrina and Its Unlearned Lessons, 15 Years On,” The New York Times, August 21, 2020, https://nytimes.com/2020/08/21/sunday-review/coronavirus-hurricane-katrina-anniversary.html. Dilatory pre-storm decision-making: US House of Representatives, Select Bipartisan Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to

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Hurricane Katrina, A Failure of Initiative: Final Report of the Select Bipartisan Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 2006), 1–5, 108–114, 133–36,

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usgs.gov/circ/1306/pdf/c1306_ch2_b.pdf. achieved hurricane status on the twenty-fifth: Sarah Gibbens, “Hurricane Katrina, Explained,” National Geographic, January 16, 2019, https://nationalgeographic.com/environment/natural-disasters/reference/hurricane-katrina/. mandatory evacuation only nineteen hours: US House of Representatives, Select Bipartisan Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and

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Response to Hurricane Katrina, Failure of Initiative, 108–109. drivers the Regional Transit Authority: Boin, Brown, and Richardson, Managing Hurricane Katrina, 42–43. city’s other expected bus

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services: Boin, Brown, and Richardson, Managing Hurricane Katrina, 43. formally request permission from FEMA: Boin, Brown, and Richardson

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, Managing Hurricane Katrina, 91. “ ‘logistics system in FEMA was broken’ ”: Boin, Brown, and Richardson, Managing

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Hurricane Katrina, 91. Governor Blanco personally redirected: Boin, Brown, and Richardson, Managing Hurricane Katrina, 93. overrun with looters and murderers: Boin, Brown

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, and Richardson, Managing Hurricane Katrina, 94. National Guard protect the buses: Boin, Brown

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, and Richardson, Managing Hurricane Katrina, 94. the bus drivers got lost: Boin, Brown,

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and Richardson, Managing Hurricane Katrina, 94. eight hundred buses evacuated: Boin, Brown, and

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Richardson, Managing Hurricane Katrina, 94–95. last three hundred evacuees left: Boin,

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Brown, and Richardson, Managing Hurricane Katrina, 94. nearby Convention Center: Boin, Brown, and Richardson, Managing Hurricane Katrina, xvi, 145. For this 1998 Hungarian Grand Prix: Mark

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, 102, 127 human immune system, xvii–xix, 10–11, 13–14, 101, 235 Hungarian Grand Prix, 166–70, 242 Huntington, Samuel, 133 Hurricane Pam, 171 Hurricane Katrina, xvii, 160–65, 171–72, 201, 239, 285 Hussein, Saddam, 23, 128, 131–32, 274 I Want YOU for U.S. Army, 65, 66

Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life

by Richard Beck · 2 Sep 2024 · 715pp · 212,449 words

, that he and another man had driven down to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. They’d seen reports of looting on television, and they wanted to help keep the peace. Kyle said that while standing on top of the Superdome, the stadium where the NFL’s New Orleans Saints play their

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years later for leaving thousands of New Orleanians stranded after Hurricane Katrina, oversaw the evacuation plan in case terrorists did manage to strike.[9] The mayor of New Orleans estimated that forty-eight different agencies were involved.[10] If the inside of the Superdome was a football- and America-themed amusement park, the

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reasonable, generated fear and backlash and ultimately placed limits on progress.”[33] As a brand-new senator in 2005, Obama went on television shortly after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in majority-Black New Orleans and insisted that racism had played no part in the Bush administration’s incompetent response. “The incompetence was

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duty. His rank and pay were reduced, but he was not discharged from the military. He served no jail time. In the summer of 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit the low-lying city of New Orleans, breaching its network of poorly maintained levees and putting 80 percent of the city under as much

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, 366, 368 accountability of, 424, 429, 431 and Afghan war, 222, 462 approval ratings of, 239, 371 and consumerism, 98–99 and evangelicals, 189 and Hurricane Katrina, 422 and immigration reform, 308–10, 325 and Iraq War, xxi, 53, 129, 262, 268, 377–79 media image of, 428 and Paul Bremer, 238

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–77 housing market bubble, 100, 198–200, 329, 332–35 Human Rights Watch, 424, 426 Humvee, 72–73, 251, 443, 447 Huntington, Samuel, 202–4 Hurricane Katrina, 68, 83, 215, 421–22 Hussein, Saddam, 48, 50, 53, 263–64, 345, 363 and al-Qaeda, 355, 358, 361, 377–78 capture of, 262

Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy

by Chris Hayes · 11 Jun 2012 · 285pp · 86,174 words

the President as an institution was above 50 percent. But by 2010 it had plummeted back down toward Bush levels in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Part of the reason for that decline was that despite his campaign promises to take on the “system,” the President has operated safely within it

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. Take, for instance the case of New Orleans and the thousands of its citizens stranded in the drowning city. EVACUATING NEW ORLEANS Nineteen hours before Hurricane Katrina made landfall, at 11 A.M. on the morning of Sunday, August 28, 2005, New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin called a press conference. After several

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. When the hurricane hit, as many as three hundred thousand people were holed up in their homes, or left to the deprivations of the overwhelmed Superdome. In the Katrina aftermath, some critics took this as a sign that those who had stayed behind, largely black and poor, deserved what they got

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”: See U.S. House of Representatives, A Failure of Initiative: Final Report of the Select Bipartisan Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2006), p. 106. http://www.gpoaccess.gov/serialset/creports/pdf/hr109-377/evac.pdf, accessed February 23

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: Three Rivers Press, 2007. Heclo, Hugh. On Thinking Institutionally. Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm Publishers, 2008. Heerden, Ivor Van. The Storm: What Went Wrong and Why During Hurricane Katrina—the Inside Story from One Louisiana Scientist. New York: Viking, 2006. Ho, Karen Zouwen. Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. Durham, N.C.: Duke University

America, You Sexy Bitch: A Love Letter to Freedom

by Meghan McCain and Michael Black · 31 May 2012 · 367pp · 117,340 words

have come to view Katrina, and the subsequent disastrous way in which it was handled by our government, like the canary in a coal mine. Hurricane Katrina was a warning sign about so many other areas of weakness within us as a nation and within our government. It showcased how bureaucracy can

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. We are going to spend the day taking a tour of the Lower Ninth Ward. It’s incredible to think that Hurricane Katrina happened so recently. For a lot of people Hurricane Katrina and the handling of the disaster by the Bush administration was the end of trust, or at least support, of the

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at the Superdome, and the endless red X’s and body bags. I do not pretend to completely understand where things exactly failed, starting from what could have been done to strengthen the levees so they wouldn’t break, to getting FEMA to New Orleans faster, to everything that made Hurricane Katrina the

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with Jacques Morial, an outreach and research director for Heath Law Advocates of Louisiana, and immediately start discussing what it was like for him during Hurricane Katrina. We talk about everything from President Bush to Mayor Ray Nagin and his infamous “Chocolate City” comments. A few years ago I happened to meet

On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World

by Timothy Cresswell · 21 May 2006

this book. The book ends with an epilogue on the politics of mobility in and around New Orleans during and following the devastating experience of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. RT52565_C001.indd 24 4/13/06 7:21:48 AM CHAPTER 2 The Metaphysics of Fixity and Flow The purpose of this

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continue to refuse to comply. RT52565_C009.indd 258 4/18/06 7:48:33 AM Epilogue Hurricane On August 29, 2005 a category four hurricane, Katrina, hit the Gulf Coast of Louisiana with 150-mile-per-hour winds and a huge tidal surge that broke the levees of New Orleans and

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O’Toole of the American Dream Coalition—a rightwing/libertarian organization that opposes the development of light rail initiatives and supports automobility. In response to Hurricane Katrina, O’Toole writes: What made New Orleans more vulnerable to catastrophe than most U.S. cities is its low rate of auto ownership. According to

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instead they should have worked on a model of mobility as a public need. The argument that those who suffered most from the effects of Hurricane Katrina were those without cars is often contrasted to the argument that there is a racial politics to the disaster. Mobility, in this formulation, is emptied

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• On the Move New Orleans were of elderly hospital patients abandoned as the waters rose. Many died. To say that the human disaster that followed Hurricane Katrina was not about race or age or class, but instead about car ownership is to divert attention to how mobility is social through and through

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where they are, unable to escape. Tourists were not the only mobile figures to become an issue following Katrina. In the days and weeks following Hurricane Katrina, stories began to emerge about the categorization of people who were displaced by the hurricane and the floods that followed it. These displaced people were

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:44 AM Epilogue • 265 racialized because of a long history of negative representations of refugees as other, as being from somewhere else, as threateningly mobile. Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath have highlighted the politics of mobility. The material infrastructure of mobility opportunities has been shown to serve some more than others. The

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, 251 in Schiphol Airport, 248–251 Honig, Bonnie, 189–190 Hopper, Kim, 251 hotels, 210, 225 horses, and photography, 59–60 humanistic geography, 30–32 Hurricane Katrina, 259–65 4/18/06 7:52:11 AM 324 • Index I Iberlings, Hans, 221 ideal movements, 29 ideology, of mobility, 123, 199 Illich, Ivan

Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker · 21 Oct 2013

train plucked off its track, a causeway collapsed into rubble. And he saw the next daunting challenge confronting his presidency. It was August 31, and Hurricane Katrina had ravaged the shores of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, laying waste to everything in its path. Hundreds of thousands of people were without shelter, electricity

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a concerted public campaign explaining a strategy that Condoleezza Rice had termed “clear, hold and build.” This had been the plan for the fall until Hurricane Katrina came along and blew it out of the water. But once again, Karl Rove and Dan Bartlett argued over what tone Bush should take—defiant

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but uncertain what to do, Bush took off on Au- gust 3 for a break at the Crawford ranch, his first summer retreat there since Hurricane Katrina. As soon as he landed, he began pounding the pedals on the bicycle trails he had come to love. Just as exercise helped him purge

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Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times, making the same point. He expressed disillusionment with the man he had helped elect, over his handling of Hurricane Katrina, Cindy Sheehan, Abu Ghraib, Donald Rumsfeld, and most important Iraq, where his own son was deployed as an army intelligence specialist. “I think he’s

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. Bush was miffed when he hosted the leaders of Mexico and Canada for a summit meeting in New Orleans to show off its recovery from Hurricane Katrina, only to have McCain show up in the Lower Ninth Ward two days later denouncing the administration’s response to the storm as “disgraceful.” When

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of which the crisis came, to which the president heroically responded,” Frum observed. “Bush made crises through neglect and then resolved crises through courage.” Arguably, Hurricane Katrina fit the same pattern. After stumbling in the early days after the storm, Bush then demonstrated a powerful commitment to rebuilding the region, traveling there

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Indifference, 203–4. 41 cost 1,833 lives, did $108 billion in damage: Richard D. Knabb, Jamie R. Rhome, and Daniel Brown, Tropical Cyclone Report: Hurricane Katrina, National Hurricane Center. First published December 20, 2005; updated September 14, 2011. 42 “it was the worst moment”: George W. Bush, Decision Points, 326. 43

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W. Bush, Decision Points, 94–96. In an e-mail exchange with the author, Clay Johnson remembered applying that description specifically to the handling of Hurricane Katrina. Bush in his book remembered it being a more overall assessment of the White House organization. 44 “You don’t know how”: Senior administration official

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spending bill: The bill authorized a total of $124 billion in spending, of which $95 billion would go to the wars. The rest was for Hurricane Katrina recovery, emergency aid to farmers, medical care for veterans, homeland security, and other spending items. The House voted for it 218 to 208, with two

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& Schuster, 2006. Bridgeland, John M. Heart of the Nation: Volunteering and America’s Civic Spirit. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012. Brinkley, Douglas. The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. New York: Morrow, 2006. Broadwell, Paula. All In: The Education of General David Petraeus. With Vernon Loeb. New

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York: Penguin Press, 2012. Brown, Michael, and Ted Schwarz. Deadly Indifference: The Perfect (Political) Storm: Hurricane Katrina, the Bush White House, and Beyond. Lanham, Md.: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2011. Bruni, Frank. Ambling into History: The Unlikely Odyssey of George W. Bush. New

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States Army. New York: Crown, 2009. Coll, Steve. Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power. New York: Penguin Press, 2012. Cooper, Christopher, and Robert Block. Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security. New York: Times Books, 2006. Cramer, Richard Ben. What It Takes: The Way to the White House. New York

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housing crisis and policies of, 24.1, 26.1, 27.1, 33.1, 34.1, 35.1, 35.2, 36.1, 37.1, epl.1 Hurricane Katrina response of, 23.1, 23.2, 23.3, 24.1, 27.1, 31.1, 35.1, 35.2, epl.1, epl.2, nts.1n–29n

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, 28.1, 33.1, 35.1 Hume, Brit Hundred Degree Club, 11.1, 27.1 Hunt, Al Hunt, Terence, 28.1, 28.2 Hurricane Gustav Hurricane Katrina, 23.1, 23.2, 23.3, 24.1, 27.1, 31.1, 35.1, 35.2, epl.1, epl.2, nts.1n–29n, nts.2n

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inaugural address outlining a freedom agenda was, according to Andy Card, “not a speech Dick Cheney would give.” (illustration credit 1.27) Surveying damage from Hurricane Katrina from Air Force One made Bush look removed from the disaster, but privately he was aggravated. “What the hell is taking so long?” he asked

Warnings

by Richard A. Clarke · 10 Apr 2017 · 428pp · 121,717 words

CONTENTS Cover Title Page Dedication MISSED WARNINGS CHAPTER 1 Cassandra: From Myth to Reality CHAPTER 2 The Spook: Invasion of Kuwait CHAPTER 3 The Rebuilder: Hurricane Katrina CHAPTER 4 The Arabist: The Rise of ISIS CHAPTER 5 The Seismologist: Fukushima Nuclear Disaster CHAPTER 6 The Accountant: Madoff’s Ponzi Scheme CHAPTER 7

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of Kuwait in 1990, an event that gave rise to a series of disasters that continue today. Next, we examine what happened in Louisiana before Hurricane Katrina. We examine the concurrent calamities of a tsunami and multiple nuclear reactor meltdowns in Japan. Back in the United States, we go underground in West

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national intelligence officers to warn.” Perhaps so, but the explanation raises a question: who among them is actually listening for Cassandra? CHAPTER 3 The Rebuilder: Hurricane Katrina There is no faith like the faith of a builder of homes in coastal Louisiana. —DAVE EGGERS, ZEITOUN After gaining strength during its relentless march

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poor to arrange reliable transportation out of New Orleans before disaster struck. This was the hurricane New Orleans had long feared, but it was not Hurricane Katrina. It was a disaster-preparedness simulation called Hurricane Pam run by the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in late July 2004, just over

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, and emergency communications plans. Van Heerden credits the much-lauded success of the Coast Guard and Wildlife and Fisheries search-and-rescue efforts during actual Hurricane Katrina recovery operations to their assiduous involvement in the Hurricane Pam exercise. Still, major aspects of the disaster planning went unfinished. The Hurricane Center had previously

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the Louisiana Emergency Operations Center in Baton Rouge, Dr. Ivor van Heerden prayed for the best, but he knew that the region was unprepared for Hurricane Katrina as it made landfall over the Mississippi Delta on Monday, August 29. As reports trickled in over the subsequent hours that large swaths of the

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botched recovery operation. The answers to those questions are not the aim of this book. The problems that befell the city of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina had been discussed in the prescient warnings of Cassandras like Dr. Ivor van Heerden for years, even decades. Why had Cassandra’s warning cries not

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exposed, in painstaking detail, the precariousness of the continued existence of the Big Easy. THE LEVEES FAILED, BUT YOUR GOVERNMENT FAILED TOO In a sense, Hurricane Katrina is both the most straightforward and most tragic case study we examine in this book, because the affected communities and their leaders largely heeded their

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to wearing his heart on his sleeve and minces no words when asked about the many failures of leadership leading up to, during, and after Hurricane Katrina. His three-hundred-page narrative entitled The Storm lays bare his disdain for politicians who derailed efforts to rebuild Louisiana’s wetlands, for FEMA officials

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created Department of Homeland Security, further removing the agency from relevance and causing morale to plummet. Michael Brown, the FEMA director at the time of Hurricane Katrina, had literally no emergency-management experience, having landed the job because of his connections to the Bush White House. Prior to joining FEMA, first as

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were caught entirely off guard, with an organization that was underfunded and entirely unprepared to handle any disaster, let alone one on the order of Hurricane Katrina. Sadly, many of these bureaucratic deficiencies and political motivations persisted through and after the Katrina crisis. Completed in 2015, New Orleans’s new levee system

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was built by the Army Corps of Engineers to supposedly withstand a “1-in-100-year storm,” approximately equivalent to Hurricane Katrina. But a 2013 study has already suggested that the levees in some parts of the city remain insufficient to withstand a Katrina-size storm surge

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influenced by his political commitments, what we might think of as an ideological filter. Such a filter is similar to what we saw in our Hurricane Katrina case study, when the Bush administration’s single focus on terrorism reduced the resources and effort that could have been put toward preventing the destruction

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, that all-too-frequent human cognitive error whereby an individual is overinfluenced by information already known, as in the case of Dr. van Heerden and Hurricane Katrina. The Fukushima panel did know of the 869 tsunami, but it was so distant that they had no emotional connection to it, so they didn

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4, 2015. 2. Daniel L. Schacter et al., Psychology, 3rd ed. (New York: Worth, 2014). CHAPTER 3: THE REBUILDER: HURRICANE KATRINA 1. Ivor van Heerden, The Storm: What Went Wrong and Why During Hurricane Katrina (New York: Penguin, 2007), 78–81; U.S. House of Representatives, A Failure of Initiative: Final Report of the

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Select Bipartisan Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina, Feb. 15, 2006, p. 81; and Madhu Beriwal, “Preparing for a Catastrophe: The Hurricane Pam Exercise,” Statement before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs

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Committee, Jan. 24, 2006. 2. Douglas Brinkley, The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 5–7. 3. John McQuaid and Mark Schleifstein, “Special Report: Washing Away,” New Orleans

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, 2004; and van Heerden, Storm, 5–7. 10. R. B. Seed et al., Investigation of the Performance of the New Orleans Flood Protection Systems in Hurricane Katrina on August 29, 2005, vol. 1, Independent Levee Investigation Team, July 31, 2006, 2–3 to 2–12. 11. Jon Nordheimer, “Nothing’s Easy for

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New Orleans Flood Control,” New York Times, Apr. 30, 2002. 12. U.S. Senate, Hurricane Katrina: A Nation Still Unprepared, Special Report of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs (Washington: 2006), 109; and Henry B. Hogue and Keith Bea

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.com/2005/US/09/03/katrina.chertoff. 14. Ivor van Heerden, G. Paul Kemp, et al., The Failure of the New Orleans Levee System during Hurricane Katrina (Baton Rouge: Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development, Louisiana State Project No. 704–92–0022, Dec. 18, 2006), 96–112. 15. Mark Schleifstein, “New Orleans

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, 147 Burry, Michael, 149 Bush, George H. W., 24, 28–29, 30, 242 Bush, George W., 8, 262, 315 energy policy, 243–44 FEMA and Hurricane Katrina, 47, 54 Iraq war, 37, 357–58 Butner Federal Correctional Complex, 114 “Bystander effect,” 176–77, 321 Caldeira, Ken, 254 Capital One, 152 Caribou Biosciences

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? (Enthoven), 361 Hsu, Steve, 343 Huckabee, Mike, 384n Human embryo gene editing, 326, 340–41, 345 Huntington, Samuel, 36 Hurricane Andrew, 53 Hurricane Betsy, 46 Hurricane Katrina, 6, 39–55, 72 government failures, 50–55 levee system, 40, 41–42, 46, 49, 50, 53–54 making landfall, 39–40, 49 New Orleans

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, 196–97 Neutron radiation, 83 New Deal, 213 New Orleans. See also Hurricane Katrina history of, 41–42 hurricane threat, 44–46 levee system, 40, 41–42, 46, 49, 50, 53–55 New Orleans Scenario, 45, 46–50, 52 New Orleans Superdome, 51 New Orleans Times-Picayune, 50 New York (magazine), 152, 157

Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen

by Dan Heath · 3 Mar 2020

as it moves through the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico,” wrote Christopher Cooper and Robert Block of the Hurricane Pam simulation in Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security, an indispensable account of how Katrina was handled. They continue: Though there is plenty of time to flee, many

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emergency-response plans: some richly detailed, some barely fleshed out. It was a start. Thirteen months after the Hurricane Pam simulation, in late August 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. In her Senate testimony roughly five months after Katrina, Beriwal showed a chart comparing the simulation to the reality: “HURRICANE PAM” DATA

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ACTUAL RESULTS FROM HURRICANE KATRINA 20 inches of rain 18 inches of rain City of New Orleans under 10 to 20 feet of water Up to 20 feet of flooding

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Orleans was unspeakably bad, and second, that many thousands of lives were saved because of the planning that was sparked by Hurricane Pam. In short: Hurricane Katrina’s effects were terrible, and they could have been much worse. Because there were two final rows in the chart that Beriwal showed the Senate

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—two rows that show the biggest points of difference between Hurricane Pam and Hurricane Katrina: “HURRICANE PAM” DATA ACTUAL RESULTS FROM HURRICANE KATRINA Over 60,000 deaths 1,100 deaths reported to date in Louisiana; over 3,000 still missing 36% evacuated prior to landfall

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bottlenecks and contributing significantly to the traffic jam. For Katrina, the lesson was clear: no talking, wave ’em forward. On Saturday, August 27, 2005, with Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf threatening New Orleans, Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco ordered contraflow to begin at 4:00 p.m., and it continued nonstop for 25

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://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/02/how-humans-sank-new-orleans/552323/. In the years after 9/11: Christopher Cooper and Robert Block, Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), author’s note. a contract for $800,000: Ibid., 2 and 6. The assignment

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to complete: Ibid., 2. convened approximately 300 critical players: Ibid., 4. “Though there is plenty of time to flee”: Christopher Cooper and Robert Block, Disaster: Hurricane Katrina, 1. “no fairy dust”: Ibid., 19. a chart comparing the simulation to the reality: Madhu Beriwal, “Preparing for a Catastrophe,” 6. account by journalist Scott

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Times, September 1, 2005, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-sep-01-na-superdome1-story.html. points of difference between Hurricane Pam and Hurricane Katrina: Chart, Madhu Beriwal, “Preparing for a Catastrophe,” 7. “difference between the two is contraflow”: Interview with Madhu Beriwal, March 26, 2019, 00:23:50. “Contraflow

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12, 2019, 00:30:05. multiple additional exercises: Beriwal, “Preparing for a Catastrophe.” “unable to come up with money”: Christopher Cooper and Robert Block, Disaster: Hurricane Katrina, 21. $62 billion in supplemental spending: “FEMA Budget So Complex It Defies Consensus,” Associated Press, September 24, 2005, http://www.nbcnews.com/id/9460436/ns

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Delage, Deborah, 33–35, 38 Delgado, Pedro, 37 Deloitte & Touche, 212 diabetes, 192, 201–4 Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP), 240–41 Diniz, Simone, 35 Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security (Cooper and Block), 214–15, 220 disasters and disaster preparedness, 9–10, 213–14, 222–23 contraflow and, 218

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–19 earthquakes, 9–10, 140 Hurricane Ivan, 218–19 Hurricane Katrina, 213–20 Hurricane Pam simulation, 214–20 distant and improbable threats, 17, 207–28 DNA printers, 225, 226 doctors: Accountable Care Organization and, 201–2

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and Urban Development), 91–93 Hug-a-Hero Dolls, 229–31, 233 Human Dimension, 130 humility, 185 hurricanes, 9–10, 223 Hurricane Ivan, 218–19 Hurricane Katrina, 213–20 Hurricane Pam simulation, 214–20 Hynd, Noel, 100 IBM, 140–42 Iceland, 75–81, 125, 231, 239 ICUs (intensive care units), 145–46

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, 204 neighborhoods, 97–102, 106, 110–13 Network for College Success, 25 New England Patriots, 21–22 New Orleans, La.: Hurricane Ivan and, 218–19 Hurricane Katrina and, 213–20 New York, N.Y.: crime in, 162–66 falling branches in, 175–76 lawsuit data patterns in, 175, 184 New York City

The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America

by Charlotte Alter · 18 Feb 2020 · 504pp · 129,087 words

happens when adults fail, when institutions falter, and when brave young people have to take matters into their own hands. THE BIG ONE AUGUST 2005 HURRICANE KATRINA, NEW ORLEANS Everyone said this was the Big One. The city’s levees burst and water poured into the Ninth Ward of New Orleans—filled

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also in a period of relative black prosperity. Activists in their twenties and early thirties never directly experienced that prosperity: many saw the response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the daily degradations of black life in America as evidence that government didn’t care about black people and never would. “There

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2015 book, The Selfie Vote: Where Millennials Are Leading America (and How Republicans Can Keep Up), she wrote that after Bush’s disastrous handling of Hurricane Katrina, Republicans won less than 40 percent of voters under thirty in the 2006 midterms—one of the worst turnouts for any age cohort in decades

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storm, the true death toll emerged: more than 4,600 American citizens had died because of Hurricane Maria, almost as many as 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina combined. CHAPTER 16 The Pink Wave On April 1, 2017, about four months after she got that first call from Brand New Congress on her

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Times, September 11, 2005, nytimes.com/2005/09/11/us/nationalspecial/for-storm-survivors-a-mosaic-of-impressions.html. coffins dislodged from graves: Carlos Barria, “Hurricane Katrina: Scenes of Destruction 10 Years On—In Pictures,” The Guardian, August 28, 2015, theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/aug/28

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: Nat Scott, “Refuge of Last Resort,” USA Today, August 24, 2015, ftw.usatoday.com/2015/08/refuge-of-last-resort-five-days-inside-the-superdome-for-hurricane-katrina. schools were forced to close: Irwin E. Redlener and Gabrielle Schang, “Responding to a Humanitarian Crisis in Louisiana and Mississippi: Urgent Need for a Health

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/09/21/us/hurricane-maria-puerto-rico-recovery.html. threw rolls of paper towels: Aaron Blake, “Trump favorably compared Puerto Rico’s death toll to Hurricane Katrina. A study now says twice as many died in Puerto Rico,” The Washington Post, May 29, 2018, washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2018/05

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Americans Black Lives Matter and, 118–20, 123 civil rights movement, 29 crime bill of 1994 and, 30–31 Great Recession, impact of, 97–98 Hurricane Katrina, impact of, 43 incarceration rates of, 118–19 New Deal policies perpetuation of racial inequalities and, 217, 218–19 percentage voting for Democrats, in 2018

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, in 2018, 244 Hoff, Mr., 22 Hogg, David, 41, 247 Houlahan, Chrissy, 268, 270 Howe, Neil, xiv Hultgren, Randy, 206, 231, 242 Hurricane Harvey, 193 Hurricane Katrina, 43 Hurricane Maria, 225 Hurricane Sandy, 129 Hurst, Chris, 212 identity politics, 60–61 immigration, 160, 254, 279–80 income inequality deregulation and privatization and