The saga of Hurricane Katrina began 20 years ago, on August 29, 2005, when Louisiana Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco examined weather forecasts concerning a tropical storm that had assaulted south Florida but that was now a Category 3 hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico and declared a state of emergency for all Louisiana.
Blanco’s statement pushed officials to open up the New Orleans “Comprehensive Emergency Disaster Plan,” which stated: “The Office of Emergency Preparedness [OEP] will coordinate with the Louisiana Office of Emergency Preparedness [LOEP]” and the Association of Contingency Planners [ACP], with OEP and LOEP working together to conduct workshops at the Emergency Support Function [ESF] level, prepare Mass Casualty Incident [MCI] scenarios, and learn Emergency Operating Center (EOC) procedure.
The acronyms didn’t stop there. Officials were to take advice from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and attend the National Hurricane Conference [NHC]. The city plan detailed specific ways New Orleans would avoid chaos: For example, two traffic control officers would stand at each key intersection because the state plan stipulated that relief agencies were not to bring food and supplies into New Orleans, as that would only slow evacuation the city would order.
Katrina struck New Orleans at 8 a.m. on August 29 with an 18-foot storm surge and 125 mph winds. FEMA director Michael Brown arrived at the LEOP in Baton Rouge at 11 and said the evacuation had gone according to plan; his words were “very smooth.” One thousand FEMA employees were to report in two days to help in a variety of ways, particularly by helping residents fill out disaster relief forms. Paper ruled.
The government would handle it, according to the headline of an August 29 FEMA press release: “First Responders Urged Not to Respond to Hurricane Impact Areas Unless Dispatched by State, Local Authorities.” That top-down understanding might have made theoretical sense in conjunction with FEMA’s statement that “the National Incident Management System is being used during the response to Hurricane Katrina and that self-dispatching volunteer assistance could significantly complicate the response and recovery effort.”
That System quickly proved inadequate, and FEMA justly received ridicule for going by the book even as high winds were ripping out its pages. On August 29, as President George W. Bush declared the states of Louisiana and Mississippi “Major Disaster Areas,” New Orleans officials expressed relief that Katrina had ticked east and not given New Orleans a direct wallop. That afternoon, however, a levee break at 17th street and flooded one-fifth of the city; more breaks occurred until four-fifths of New Orleans streets were submerged.
President Bush sent a message to New Orleans via a speech in Arizona: “The federal government has got assets and resources that we’ll be deploying to help you.” Shortly thereafter, Michael Brown acknowledged he was unable to get a team into downtown New Orleans and thus could not give an estimate of what help would be needed. As reports of grave danger rose with the water, Mayor Ray Nagin responded by emphasizing paperwork, telling reporters, “We’re giving [FEMA] a hell of a list” of city needs.
On August 30, the New Orleans Convention Center became one of the “Shelters of Last Resort” noted in the city plan, but since it was not listed by name in the planning documents that FEMA and Louisiana officials had, its use apparently came as a surprise to them. Soon more than 20,000 people were in and around the center, which Mayor Nagin visited on August 31 and quickly left, saying “my security people advised me not to go back.”
The blame game quickly commenced. Kenya Smith, head of intergovernmental relations for New Orleans, asserted that the city had never designated the Convention Center as an “official” shelter, and technically he was correct. Smith blamed hotels for sending guests there and said someone at the Convention Center told those arriving that FEMA would send buses to take them out of the city, but federal officials, including Department of Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff, said they did not know a crowd was there to begin with.
Politicians orated about lack of planning, but plans existed in abundance, and they transported as many people to safety as paper airplanes do. Governmental plans sometimes made things worse: The American Red Cross was ready to go to the Superdome on August 29 or 30 to provide relief for the 25,000 there, but the Louisiana Department of Homeland Security said such action ran counter to its plan, since a Red Cross presence “would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city.”
Each group of officials—city, state, and federal—seemed to consider its plan preeminent. Each blamed others for not recognizing the true best-in-show. Mayor Nagin said, “Our plan never assumed people being in the Dome more than two or three days.” City officials, anticipating that the city water system would fail, included in their plan the expectation that National Guard troops would bring portable toilets to the Superdome. They never did.
Rule by paperocracy failed in multiple ways. On August 28, the day before Katrina landed, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson offered help from his state’s National Guard. Louisiana Governor Blanco accepted, but nothing happened because Washington did not get the paperwork done until September 1. Twenty deputies and six emergency medical technicians from Loudon County, Virginia, also could not help because neither FEMA nor Louisiana authorities acted on an emergency request.
Air Force Reserve Colonel Tim Tarchick told CBS that his unit “could have been airborne in six hours and overhead plucking out people [from floodwaters] but between all the agencies that have a part in the approval process it took 34 hours to get three of my helicopters airborne.” The American Ambulance Association was ready to send 300 emergency vehicles from Florida to the disaster area, but the General Services Administration needed to issue authorization, but GSA said FEMA had to do it, and so the ambulances never arrived.
International helpers were also exasperated. It took four days for FEMA to give permission to Sweden to send a transport plane with a water purification system. U.S. officials slowed the arrival of Canadian search and rescue helicopters and ships, and took a week to say yes to a telecommunications company from the Netherlands.
Then-Congressman (later governor) Bobby Jindal complained, “A mayor in my district tried to get supplies for his constituents, who were hit directly by the hurricane. He called for help and was put on hold for 45 minutes. Eventually, a bureaucrat promised to write a memo to his supervisor. … A sheriff in my district office reported being told that he would not get the resources his office needed to do its job unless he emailed a request. The parish was flooded and without electricity!”
Many doctors and nurses tried to volunteer through the National Disaster Medical System, but NDMS team leader Timothy Crowley, a doctor on the Harvard Medical School faculty, called the deployment a “total failure.” He said his team was summoned late, then left isolated in Baton Rouge for a week while New Orleans suffered. The team finally made it to the disaster zone and saw overwhelming needs. Crowley asked for reinforcements, only to hear no help was available. He later learned that many other teams were “sitting on their butts for days waiting and asking for missions.” He said NDMS was “completely dysfunctional.”
ABC’s John Stossel reported another aspect of paperocracy that crippled healthcare: “Dr. Jeffrey Guy, a Nashville trauma surgeon, recruited 400 doctors, nurses and first responders to help the people in New Orleans. Then FEMA gave them something to do: fill out 60-page applications that demanded photographs and tax forms.”
Guy and his associates submitted those forms, but the bureaucratic saga had just begun: He “received an e-mail from an emergency room doctor in Mississippi who needed bandages, splints and medicine, and coloring books for children. Guy had them—he’d been collecting corporate donations—but FEMA said they needed two state permits to transport these items from Tennessee to Mississippi. The supplies were only sent when two guys showed up with a church van and volunteered to take them—as rogue responders without FEMA’s permission.”
On September 6, 2005, eight days after Katrina hit, New Orleans was still desperate for help. An Associated Press story reported how FEMA had “put out a call for two thousand firefighters to help with community service.” The response was remarkable: “Firefighters arrived, as told, with lifesaving equipment and sleeping bags.”
The next development was even more remarkable: The firefighters were “sitting in Atlanta, playing cards and taking FEMA history classes, instead of doing what they came to do: help hurricane victims.” That’s because they had to sit through FEMA courses on diversity and sexual harassment. AP reported, “One firefighter points to nightly reports of hurricane victims asking how they were forgotten. He says, ‘We didn’t forget, we’re stuck in Atlanta drinking beer.’”
Contemporaries referred to Civil War casualties as “the butcher’s bill.” While volunteer firefighters had to twiddle their thumbs and politicians twaddled, Katrina’s butchering resulted in 1,392 deaths and damage of about $200 billion (in 2025 dollars), according to research by the National Hurricane Center, the National Centers for Environmental Information, and the National Flood Insurance Program.
In April 2006, the World Meteorological Organization retired the name Katrina.
