Us > New Orleans Asks Why Help Took So Long

'They Never Had the Ball': a Desperate New Orleans Asks Why Help Has Been So Long Coming

In this photo released by the Nebraska National Guard, Nebraska Air National Guard crews unload pallets of Meals-Ready-to-Eat (MRE's) from their KC-135R Stratotanker at Naval Air Station New Orleans, Thursday, Sept. 1, 2005. The Nebraska Air Guard deliver

"I continue to hear that troops are on the way," New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said in a statement broadcast Friday morning on CNN. "The people of our city are holding on by a thread."

On morning news shows, Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Mike Brown tried to explain that lawlessness, poor communication and the sheer scope of the catastrophe had all hindered relief efforts, but that help was on the way.

Still, it has been widely known for years that New Orleans could be rendered uninhabitable by a major hurricane. So why has the response to Hurricane Katrina been so inadequate?

A big part of the problem has simply been "an inability to imagine the situation," said Shirley Laska a sociologist with the University of New Orleans Center for Hazards Assessment, Response and Technology.

It is not clear what plans federal emergency management officials had in the event of the kind of disaster that hit New Orleans. They approached the aftermath of Katrina the same way they would any other major hurricane relief operation.

"Previous experience said that you mount that much and you've got it under control," Laska said.

But previous experience wasn't going to help in New Orleans this week. Take it from A.G. Norton, a New Orleans resident who was still trapped in the flooded city Friday: "They're talking about dropping the ball. They never had the ball," Norton said.

Certainly the situation has been further aggravated by the fact that the city was not sufficiently evacuated before Katrina hit. There should have been a sense of urgency in New Orleans as Katrina approached, said Dr. Michael Lozano, a Florida emergency medicine specialist who was visiting the city to deliver a lecture on post-hurricane search and rescue, just before Katrina hit.

Local authorities should have conducted a staged evacuation, starting with the most critical hospital patients and then to less vulnerable groups, he said.

As it was, doctors, nurses and patients at two of the city's three downtown hospitals were still waiting to be rescued on Friday. The hundreds of people still trapped in the facilities had run out of food and water, and hospital staff were keeping themselves nourished with intravenous sugar solutions. Dead bodies were being piled in stairwells.

"Some of them are on the brink of unable to cope any longer," said Don Smithburg, CEO of the Louisiana State University hospital system, which oversees Charity Hospital.

After Hurricane Georges barely missed New Orleans in 1998, there was talk of using city buses to evacuate New Orleans residents without cars. But apparently, that proposal never developed into an executable plan.

"A lot of it has to fall on planning," Lozano said.

The mayor recommended that people trapped in New Orleans during a major hurricane take shelter in the Superdome. But the stadium was never intended as a full-scale relief center; there were no stocks of food or water.

Nor was there an official plan for the evacuation of the Superdome in the event that the city was inundated and uninhabitable, or for the evacuation of anybody who did not leave the city before the storm.

"This is what happens when there is a natural disaster of this scope," First Lady Laura Bush said while touring a Lafayette, La., shelter Friday.

But disaster response experts insist it didn't have to be this way.

"In these large events we have to have military support to make these things happen," said Walter Peacock, director of the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center at Texas A&M University.

Peacock also faulted an increased concentration by FEMA on terrorism, at the expense of natural disasters.

"The whole nature of the organization has come to focus on terrorism," Peacock said. "Unfortunately, the changes since 9/11 may have had an influence in what has happened."

2005-09-03