Editorial: How Much Do Katrina Response Failures Cost?

With the Dubai Ports World issue on its way to a solution, with the Iraq War still waging and with Missouri River malcontents still registering complaints, we are now being made privy to awe-inspiring, Hurricane-Katrina recovery revelations: Michael Brown, former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), deliberately ignored the new National Response Plan (NRP) and circumvented his boss, Michael Chertoff, homeland security secretary. A new report from the House of Representatives said Brown tried to manage hurricane response directly with the White House. So much for the best-laid plans of mice and men.

By disregarding the NRP, Brown “deprived the nation of an opportunity to determine whether it worked,” the House investigation concludes.

Right or wrong, the nation has a pretty good idea as to the effectiveness of the response effort still underway. Some victims would describe it in terms not suitable for this publication. We have no idea how much it costs the taxpayer to conduct investigations, but hurricane-response failure includes many other financial losses. How about the fraudulent acceptance of money by people who didn’t deserve it and fell through the cracks? How about the trailers that were parked at an Arkansas airport and still to this day, to our knowledge, have not been sited in the hurricane destruction area? The list would be lengthy if one had time to sort it out.

While it is important to learn about flaws in the NRP—and we may have to wait for another disaster to discover them—it is more important to take the kinks out of the present effort. Someone along this long, long chain of red tape should get at straightening out the acknowledged mistakes and move on to get the job done! Let’s forget about Michael Brown.

Brown may not have followed the plan, but he surely didn’t act alone. The entire nation looked on as survivors spent days going through hell on bridges and housetops without water, food or shelter. Certainly someone in government could see that things were amiss. And if they did and didn’t wave a red flag they were remiss.

In the aftermath of the hurricane, we reported in this column the efforts of Mississippi Power, which was able to restore power to 195,000 consumers in just 12 days. As we said then, Mississippi Power did not waste money. They avoided price gougers. What they did do very well was employ ingenuity.

It was in 1992 that Hurricane Andrew smacked into Florida. Others struck before and after that. In many of these cases mobile homes were employed to provide temporary housing for victims. Somewhere along the line someone in charge should have learned from those experiences about what it takes to deliver mobile homes and set them up in devastated areas. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to do that. It just takes common sense and determination.

On relatively short notice-—remember, Mississippi Power had never gone through such a mess either-—the company had more than 11,000 repairman from 24 states and Canada in the field, only 1,150 of its own.

Yet FEMA and the U.S. government couldn’t even communicate at a sensible and satisfactory level with the governor and mayor of Louisiana and New Orleans. How sad! Mississippi Power demonstrated that, with solicited assistance from other power companies, it could almost do the impossible. Dollars to doughnuts that if the power company officials had been put in charge of Katrina recovery efforts, even along the entire Gulf, they would have made government officials look like pikers.

When pressed into action, the Coast Guard nearly outdid itself saving lives and working through stress and long hours to get the job done. Even now, having such a heavy role in homeland security, our government is about to under-finance the agency. Does history teach us anything? Yes it does. Historically, both the Coast Guard and the Army Corps of Engineers have been under-funded for ages. The Corps responded well, also, but a black shadow has fallen over the issue because investigators are laying heavy criticism on decades of levee construction. Never mind that the Corps knew for decades what the Gulf really needed in the way of levees, but approval and financing were not forthcoming. Historically, the Corps has only done what Congress financed and mandated.

Common sense dictates that we clean up the hurricane-destruction mess along the Gulf and analyze why it went wrong later. There are still a lot of hurting businesses and citizens down there. And there are still people all across this great land willing to help with money and labor.

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