Características del hombre entregado al vértigo

The focus of my thesis is on crisis leadership and particularly emergent crisis leadership (see Chapter VI). The purpose in discussing the response of the established federal, state, and city organisations, e.g. military, police, prison and health, is to show that despite all the investment, re-structuring, training and education post-9/11 there was systemic failure and personal negligence (Adams & Balfour 2007; Preston 2008;

Bateman 2008).

There were extensive investigations of what went wrong in the preparation and response to Katrina. At the political level this included the White House (Townsend 2006), the US Senate (2006), US House of Representatives (2006) and the Government Accounting Office (US GAO 2006). Reports were prepared by Federal departments such as FEMA (US DHS 2006) and the National Guard (2005), and at city level by New Orleans Police Department (Bayard 2005) whilst the performance of the physical infrastructure was examined by a consortium of universities, companies and agencies making up the Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force (Ink 2006). This was in parallel with the equally extensive academic research effort epitomised by the Social Science Research

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121 Council’s task force (Erikson & Peek 2011). With few exceptions, these investigations share a common theme of delay and failure, usually systemic but sometimes personal.

Strategic leadership

Congress harked back to the 9/11 Commission’s finding that lack of imagination was the important failure in that instance and this time concluded that

“Katrina was primarily a failure of initiative. But there is of course a nexus between the two. Both imagination and initiative – in other words, leadership – require good information and a coordinated process for sharing it. And a willingness to use information – however imperfect or incomplete – to fuel action” (US House of Representatives 2006: 1).

The Senate (2006) was equally frank, believing that “leadership failures needlessly compounded these losses [deaths]”. Their report went on to name Mayor Nagin of New Orleans and Governor Blanco of Louisiana for their part in the failures in the government’s response and added that Michael Brown, the Director of FEMA, “lacked the leadership skills that were needed” and that Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff did not convey to his department that “government agencies were expected to think and act proactively in preparing for and responding to Katrina” (p7).

The strategic findings of the White House, Senate, and Congress were analysed by Ink (2006) who found “a public administration case study in failure of gigantic proportions”

(p800) and listed: warnings that were not heeded; communications failures; information gaps; lack of coordination; inadequate training; medical shortcomings; lack of shelter;

lack of initiative; and public administration failure.

The contribution of the White House to the analysis was seemingly candid, summarising the federal response as “a litany of mistakes, misjudgements, lapses, and absurdities all cascading together, blinding us to what was coming and hobbling any collective effort to respond” (Townsend 2006: x). There was “disappointment and frustration at the seeming inability of the government…to respond effectively to the crisis” and

“emergency plans at all levels of government . . . were put to the test, and came up short” (ibid). Ink (2006) was impressed that it was “unlike many White House documents that are defensive in tone and content, carefully avoiding admission” (p802) but as Harrald (2012) reminds us the author was President Bush’s political appointee as Homeland Security Advisor and hence the report was skilfully crafted to downplay Presidential failures.

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122 Catalogue of failure

A journalist for the New York Times (Lipton 2006) who covered the various hearings highlighted the failings and missed opportunities from the testimony, including:

• The dire warning issued by the National Weather Service, quoted in part at the start of this chapter, did not trigger a reaction appropriate to an impending catastrophe;

• Although the warning was repeated by the director of the National Hurricane Centre by conference call with officials including President Bush and DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff on 28.8.2005 at noon, the consequences did not appear to be fully appreciated. The same day FEMA issued a storm warning that predicted flooding and 1 million people trapped.

• Although 1 million people evacuated ahead of Katrina’s landfall a Louisiana official admitted that he had done nothing about the transportation of at-risk populations, an outstanding action from the ‘Hurricane Pam’ exercise debrief.

At a FEMA planning meeting a month before Katrina the transcript shows officials were aware of the danger.

• A Louisiana official turned down an offer of assistance to evacuate medical patients two days before Katrina’s landfall. In Louisiana 21 nursing homes were evacuated ahead of Katrina but 36 did not evacuate until afterwards and patients died.

• Hospitals were without power because generators were flooded.

• There was confusion about the levee breaches in that a sole FEMA official in New Orleans photographed a break in a levee on Monday 29.8.2005 at 5.15pm but this information was delayed by several hours.

• An urgent request for supplies was made to FEMA by Mayor Nagin but not met for days or not at all.

• The New Orleans Office of Emergency Preparedness “failed” (Bayard 2006: 3).

• The National Guard which eventually sent 30,000 troops to the area suffered a lack of situational awareness (National Guard 2005), namely that it was a humanitarian emergency and not an insurrection or terrorist attack (Blum 2005).

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123 Personal testimony

A graphic picture was painted by individuals representing the established organisations.

Bahamonde was an experienced FEMA official sent to Louisiana on Saturday 27.8.2005 ahead of the hurricane. After the eye had passed he made an overflight next day and saw that in his estimate 80% of New Orleans was flooded and that there was a levee break. He telephoned his findings shortly afterwards to Mike Brown, the head of FEMA, and stayed in New Orleans passing information back to FEMA. On 20.10.2005 he gave his testimony to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security including

“I am most haunted by what the Superdome became … imagine no toilet facilities for 25,000 people for five days. People were forced to live outside in 95-degree heat because of the smell and conditions inside. Hallways and corridors were used as toilets, trash was everywhere, and amongst it all, children, thousands of them. It was sad, it was inhumane, and it was so wrong”

(Bahamonde 2005:8).

This was an image shared by General Honore, another experienced professional, who led the military response to Katrina, and was later minded to say that “one of the most enduring images of New Orleans after Katrina was one of thousands of people at the Superdome standing hip to hip in their own waste without food, water, or sanitary facilities” (2009: 229).

Honore met and worked with many local politicians and officials in his role. A subtler image is provided by him when describing his impression of Governor Blanco of Louisiana “…it was clear that, like [Mayor] Nagin, she was under a great deal of stress and also was a victim of the storm. Victims tend to act and speak like victims and that becomes quite apparent to those who are not victims” (p16).

Another very personal and emotionally chilling account was given by Marcie Roth, now a Director at FEMA. In her testimony to Congress in 2010 she opened with “On the morning of August 29, 2005, I received a call that I will never forget” asking for her intervention concerning a New Orleans resident who was paralyzed from the shoulders down and had been trying to evacuate to the Superdome for three days. She went on “I was on the phone with her that afternoon when she told me, with panic in her voice,

‘the water is rushing in’ and then her phone went dead. We learned five days later that she had been found in her apartment, dead, floating next to her wheelchair” (Roth 2010: 2).

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124 Rich and emotional descriptions such as those above and in the next chapter are essential to crisis leadership otherwise lessons are ignored and human suffering is lost in officialise, such as the summary by the US House Select Committee that during the crisis

“there were lapses in command and control” and that “its impact on unity of command, degraded the relief efforts” (2006: 186).