Katrina Warning: Too Late to Act

White House Got Early Warning on Katrina

By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 24, 2006; Page A02

In the 48 hours before Hurricane Katrina hit, the White House received detailed warnings about the storm's likely impact, including eerily prescient predictions of breached levees, massive flooding, and major losses of life and property, documents show.

A 41-page assessment by the Department of Homeland Security's National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center (NISAC), was delivered by e-mail to the White House's "situation room," the nerve center where crises are handled, at 1:47 a.m. on Aug. 29, the day the storm hit, according to an e-mail cover sheet accompanying the document.

The NISAC paper warned that a storm of Katrina's size would "likely lead to severe flooding and/or levee breaching" and specifically noted the potential for levee failures along Lake Pontchartrain. It predicted economic losses in the tens of billions of dollars, including damage to public utilities and industry that would take years to fully repair. Initial response and rescue operations would be hampered by disruption of telecommunications networks and the loss of power to fire, police and emergency workers, it said.

In a second document, also obtained by The Washington Post, a computer slide presentation by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, prepared for a 9 a.m. meeting on Aug. 27, two days before Katrina made landfall, compared Katrina's likely impact to that of "Hurricane Pam," a fictional Category 3 storm used in a series of FEMA disaster-preparedness exercises simulating the effects of a major hurricane striking New Orleans. But Katrina, the report warned, could be worse.

The hurricane's Category 4 storm surge "could greatly overtop levees and protective systems" and destroy nearly 90 percent of city structures, the FEMA report said. It further predicted "incredible search and rescue needs (60,000-plus)" and the displacement of more than a million residents.

The NISAC analysis accurately predicted the collapse of floodwalls along New Orleans's Lake Pontchartrain shoreline, an event that the report described as "the greatest concern." The breach of two canal floodwalls near the lake was the key failure that left much of central New Orleans underwater and accounted for the bulk of Louisiana's 1,100 Katrina-related deaths.

The documents shed new light on the extent on the administration's foreknowledge about Katrina's potential for unleashing epic destruction on New Orleans and other Gulf Coast cities and towns. President Bush, in a televised interview three days after Katrina hit, suggested that the scale of the flooding in New Orleans was unexpected. "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees. They did anticipate a serious storm," Bush said in a Sept. 1 interview on ABC's "Good Morning America."

President Bush was telling the truth. No one truly expected what happened during Katrina.

It is easy for a model to predict any number of scenarios, but seeing it occur is entirely different. Perhaps the White House should have taken the storm more seriously, but then what article reports is nothing new.

Engineers have been predicting the collapse of the levees under those same conditions for decades, but there is a difference between certainty, and the words in the report, "likely lead to severe flooding and/or levee breaching".

What the report does tell us is why President Bush requested Governor Blanco declare a state of emergency as early as he did.

Everyone who was paying attention knew that Max Mayfield issued his dire warnings early on. If the NISAC report was delivered by e-mail at "1:47 a.m. on Aug. 29, the day the storm hit," then it was already too late for the White House to respond.

Certainly the post Katrina reponse by all government officials concerned is up for due criticism, but to attempt, once more, to lay the fiasco entirely at the feet of the President, as this reporter is doing, is a bit beyond the belief.

Full Story: Still Trying to "Blame Bush"

What do you think?

To leave your opinion click on the word "COMMENT(S)" below