• Hurricane Katrina: Lead, don’t blame Hurricane Katrina: Lead, don’t blame St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Sunday, September 4 The individual most responsible for the disaster that destroyed New Orleans last week was Jean Baptiste le Moyne, sieur de Bienville, the French
• Hurricane Katrina: Lead, don’t blame
Hurricane Katrina: Lead, don’t blame
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Sunday, September 4
The individual most responsible for the disaster that destroyed New Orleans last week was Jean Baptiste le Moyne, sieur de Bienville, the French explorer who decided in 1718 that a strip of land between the Mississippi River and the marshes south of Lake Pontchartrain would make a good spot for a settlement.
But he’s been dead for 237 years, so he won’t do as a scapegoat.
How about the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers? The corps built and maintained the 17th Street Canal levee, which failed shortly before midday last Monday and turned a natural disaster into a national catastrophe. Had the levee held, there still would have been wind damage and localized flooding, but Lake Pontchartrain wouldn’t have emptied into the center of the city.
But the corps never claimed the 17th Street levee would withstand a Category 4 or 5 hurricane. That would have required several billion dollars more work, and although the project was under discussion, reinforcing New Orleans’ levees was not a national budget priority. You could blame the corps, but the corps could blame Congress, and institutions make unsatisfactory scapegoats, as do dead French explorers, as does Mother Nature.
The finger of blame is drawn, almost magnetically, toward the White House. As Katrina struck on Monday, President George W. Bush was at his vacation home in Crawford, Texas. Late in the day, he flew to Arizona to pitch his new Medicare prescription drug plan, and then flew on to California. He returned to Washington on Wednesday, making a tepid speech as New Orleans was descending into anarchy.
That casual approach, combined with the slow and fumbling response by federal disaster officials, recalled the president’s slow reaction to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But on 9-11, other leaders stepped into the breech. Richard A. Clarke, the president’s counter-terrorism advisor, ran the White House situation room. And Rudolph W. Giuliani, then mayor of New York, became a towering symbol of strength and resolve.
As the fires in the rubble of the World Trade Center were still burning, Mr. Giuliani appeared on television with words of comfort, power and determination.
“Tomorrow New York is going to be here,” he said. “And we’re going to rebuild, and we’re going to be stronger than we were before … I want the people of New York to be an example to the rest of the country, and the rest of the world, that terrorism can’t stop us.”
At times of crisis, people need a leader to reassure them, to tell them the battle is winnable, to stand as an example of courage. New Orleans didn’t have a Rudy Giuliani. It had instead Mayor Ray Nagin, who preferred blamesmanship to leadership. “I don’t know whose problem it is,” he told a radio interviewer Friday. “I don’t know whether it’s the governor’s problem. I don’t know whether it’s the president’s problem, but somebody needs to get their ass on a plane and sit down, the two of them, and figure this out right now.”
This should have been said behind closed doors, not on radio station WWL’s 50,000 watts. Mr. Nagin’s own emergency planners, as well as some of his first responders, let him down. Their plan was inadequate, and too many members of the police and fire department didn’t – or couldn’t – show up for work.
This is not to say Mr. Nagin didn’t have a point. The Federal Emergency Management Agency took too long to gear up. The Department of Homeland Security got bogged down in counting cots and bags of ice instead of racing to the rescue. America, in the age of terrorism, has to be better prepared.
Five days after Katrina blew in, order and relief started returning to New Orleans. The National Guard began patrolling, relief supplies began flowing and the evacuation moved toward completion. Had proper leadership, with an adequate plan, been in place, this timeline could have been cut by 72 hours – enough to save countless lives.
Proper leadership and planning will be needed in the weeks, months and years to come. Because this is a national disaster, that planning and leadership will have to come from the federal government.
New Orleans and Louisiana, with their history of Byzantine political corruption, may need to come under federal control, under a strong leader who’s not afraid to exercise power.
Rudy Giuliani’s telephone number is 212-931-7300.
