Dry run for Katrina

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Monty Solomon <monty () roscom com>
Date: September 8, 2005 12:35:14 AM EDT
To: undisclosed-recipient:;
Subject: Dry run for Katrina


http://www.boston.com/news/weather/articles/2005/09/07/ 
dry_run_for_katrina/

The Boston Globe

GLOBE EDITORIAL

Dry run for Katrina

September 7, 2005

BEFORE THERE was Hurricane Katrina, there was Hurricane Pam. You
won't find it on any of the lists of storms that have struck in the
past. Pam was a 2004 simulation exercise with federal, state, and
local officials to estimate the impact of a major hurricane on New
Orleans. It predicted that the levees would be swamped. One million
people from the area would be evacuated in time, but 300,000 or so
residents, mostly the poor without transportation, would be left
behind.

Pam was the alarm bell that should have alerted the Bush
administration that its preference for tax cuts and defense spending
over necessary domestic projects could have disastrous consequences.
One government official who rang the alarm, Assistant Secretary of
the Army Michael Parker, was fired for accusing the Bush
administration of shortchanging the Corps of Engineers, the agency
responsible for the levees in New Orleans. Parker, a former
Republican congressman from Mississippi, was an unlikely martyr to
the cause of big government.

But from Washington's failure to maintain the levees to its long-term
neglect of the wetlands and barrier islands that protect the Gulf
Coast, Katrina has proven that much of government is like keeping a
roof in good repair: You pay now or you pay much more later. This
time, the price was in lives as well.

Looking back at ''Hurricane Pam" is also useful because it shreds the
defense for the federal government's poor response made by both
President Bush and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that
no one foresaw the cataclysm that struck last week. The New Orleans
newspaper the Times-Picayune published a series in 2002 on the danger
posed to the city by the failure to strengthen the levee system and
the long-term degradation of the coast's natural defenses. A 2001
article in Scientific American by Mark Fischetti also predicted the
city's flooding.

As planning exercises go, Pam was inadequate. Participants'
suggestion for helping those left behind was that members of churches
locate fellow congregants without cars and help them escape. This
could certainly have helped but would not have solved the evacuation
problem entirely. Nor was it ever followed through.

Planners should have insisted that local or federal government ensure
there were sufficient buses identified beforehand and organized to go
into neighborhoods and help residents escape. Churches will
undoubtedly have a role in helping Katrina's victims. But only public
officials whose views of government's role have been stunted by
decades of antigovernment hectoring could have failed to see that a
safe, swift evacuation was a job for government, not God.

© Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company.



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