Searchers above the fl ood, 

New Orleans 

Louisiana Army National Guard photo
21

Introduction

I

n the early morning of Monday, August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina came ashore in 

southern Louisiana, changing American history. Since September 11, 2001, when two 

American cities suff ered devastating attacks, the United States had been working to 

better protect itself. Almost four years and billions of dollars later, Katrina destroyed an entire region, killing more than 1,500, leaving hundreds of thousands homeless, and ravaging 

one of America’s most storied cities. 

Katrina revealed that this country remains ill-prepared to respond to a catastrophe. More 

should have been done to prepare before the storm and to mitigate the suff ering that followed: more to save lives; more to evacuate the most vulnerable citizens; more to move the 

victims to safety earlier; more to get aid to aff ected areas sooner.

Before the storm, government planning was incomplete and preparation was oft en ineff ective, inadequate, or both. Aft erward, government responses were oft en tentative, bureaucratic, or inert. Th ese failures resulted in unnecessary suff ering.

Katrina’s damage unnerved even hardened search-and-rescue professionals. “Federal Urban 

Search and Rescue teams that had been to earthquakes in California, 9/11, Oklahoma City, I 

mean, extremely knowledgeable professionals, and even they said they hadn’t seen a disaster 

area that large,” Jim Brinson of the Mississippi Offi ce of Homeland Security recalled. “9/11 

was blocks. [Here] we were talking miles aft er miles aft er miles of complete devastation.” 

Hurricane Katrina laid waste to 90,000 square miles of land, an area the size of the United 

Kingdom. At its fi ercest, the storm extended for 460 miles, nearly the distance from Kansas 

City to Dallas. As the Mississippi Gulf Coast’s Sun-Herald pointed out, “the world’s fastest 

river rapids move at about 10 to 12 feet per second,” challenging even experienced athletes 

protected by kayaks and life jackets. At about only a third of its strength, Katrina’s storm 

surge – the swell of water snowballed by a storm approaching shore – “could have been 

moving as fast as 16 feet per second.”

Th ough Katrina made landfall as a Category 3 storm (on the 1-5 Saffi r-Simpson scale), it 

had begun driving its storm surge in the Gulf of Mexico when it was a Category 5. As a 

result, Katrina brought ashore surge that reached as high as 27 feet above normal sea levels 

in Mississippi and between 18 and 25 feet in Louisiana. By contrast, New Orleans had no 

levees or fl ood walls higher than 17 feet. Th ough levees had begun to breach as early as 

landfall, overtopping of the levees may have caused an equal amount of damage. 

Citizens and government offi cials alike knew that it was only a matter of time before a hurricane inundated the Gulf Coast – especially New Orleans, which lies as much as 10 feet 

below sea level, and continues to sink an inch every three years. (Meanwhile, wave-slowing 

marshlands and barrier islands in coastal Louisiana erode by 10 square miles a year – losing 

the area of a football fi eld every 30 minutes – due to fl ood-control constraints on the Mississippi River, which prevent it from depositing sediments to replenish the subsiding soils.)

For years, meteorologists, emergency-management, and government offi cials had referred 

to it, simply, as the “New Orleans scenario.” In 1965, Hurricane Betsy, also a Category 3, 

had provided a preview of Katrina when, in the memorable words of Louisiana’s then-U.S. 

Senator Russell Long, it “picked up the lake [Pontchartrain] ... and put it inside New Orleans and Jeff erson Parish.” When Hurricane Andrew leveled parts of south Florida in 1992, 

Robert Sheets, Ph.D., then head of the National Weather Service, reminded Congressional 

Chapter 1
Chapter 1

22

investigators that the country had actually been lucky – for a while aft erward, the storm 

looked like it was making its way toward New Orleans. 

“People think Andrew was the big one,” he told the Committee on Governmental Aff airs, 

as it was then named, in 1993. Andrew had come “within a gnat’s eyelash of being our 

nightmare and the big one,” he went on. Sheets displayed a computer projection of what 

Andrew’s storm surge would have done had the hurricane’s track shift ed slightly and hit 

New Orleans directly. It showed the hurricane whipping the waters of Lake Borgne, on the 

eastern side of the city, and Lake Pontchartrain, on the northern edge of the city, over the 

city’s levees. Katrina would follow this very pattern 12 years later. “Th e city will be under 20 

feet of water,” Sheets predicted.

In 1998, Hurricane Georges narrowly missed New Orleans, striking Mississippi and Alabama instead. Roused by the close call, local emergency-management planners began to 

seek federal funding for a massive exercise to consider the potential impact of a direct strike 

on New Orleans by a slow-moving – and, 

therefore, more damaging, by virtue of its 

longer duration – Category 3 hurricane. 

Th at funding did not arrive for fi ve years. 

Th e eff ort, known as the Hurricane Pam 

exercise, fi nally began in 2004, and tried 

to address the consequences of a Katrinalike hurricane as developed by government 

scientists and emergency-management 

offi cials and contractors: Widespread fl ooding; 67,000 dead; 200,000 to 300,000 in need 

of evacuation aft er landfall, and hundreds of 

thousands displaced in need of shelter, exceeding state and local capabilities; hospitals 

and nursing homes overcrowded and short 

on critical resources; and incapacitated fi rst 

responders. Sadly, Katrina proved many of 

these predictions true. 

Katrina formed on August 23, 2005, 200 

miles southeast of the Bahamas. Within 

24 hours, it had been designated Tropical 

Storm Katrina by the National Hurricane 

Center. Two days later, it became a Category 1 hurricane, just two hours before 

striking the Florida coast between Fort 

Lauderdale and Miami. By early aft ernoon 

on Friday, August 26, Max Mayfi eld, the 

director of the National Hurricane Center, 

and fellow forecasters in the Miami headquarters and regional offi ces throughout the Gulf 

Coast believed Katrina might be heading toward New Orleans.

Mayfi eld called his friend Walter Maestri, Ph.D., the emergency-preparedness director of 

Jeff erson Parish, on the western edge of New Orleans. “Th is is it,” Maestri recalled Mayfi eld 

saying. “Th is is what we’ve been talking about all of these years. It’s a 30-90 storm,” Maestri 

said Mayfi eld told him. “Th at’s the longitude and latitude of the city of New Orleans,” Maestri explained. Beginning with that phone call, Mayfi eld and other forecasters embarked on 

Near the beach, Biloxi, MS

Denton Herring photo
Introduction

23

a round of urgent communications with local, state, and federal offi cials to alert them to 

the encroaching threat. 

Ordinary citizens, as well as their leaders in 

local, state, and federal government knew 

that Katrina was coming. But few could 

imagine the impact. By the time Katrina 

subsided, it had taken with it the Gulf Coast 

as its 9.5 million residents knew it. 

“You could easily identify what building 

east of you was [fl oating] by,” recalled D. J. 

Ziegler, the Gulfport, Mississippi, harbormaster, who weathered the storm at a parking garage not far from shore. “You could 

see church pews and knew what church it 

was and you could see doors from the motels 

with room numbers on it.” 

Katrina carried away not only police cruisers 

and homes, but also the instruments of daily 

life. “All our medical records, all the legal 

documents,” Lynn Christiansen, a housewife 

in St. Bernard Parish, recounted. “My safety 

deposit was under water for three weeks.” 

As Jim Brinson, of the Mississippi Offi ce 

of Homeland Security, traveled toward the 

coast from his headquarters in Jackson shortly aft er the storm, he encountered scenes of 

near-apocalyptic destruction and bewilderment. “Going down [Route] 49 and seeing all 

these people just dazed and confused – you 

know, I’ve been to bad areas all over the 

world in the military; I’ve seen, you know, 

entire cities that have been bombed out ... 

and these folks are just dazed. ... Th ey’re 

trying to get anything and everything they 

possibly can. ... Th e further south we went, 

the worse and worse it got.” 

Katrina turned fi rst responders – police, 

medical personnel, etc. – into some of the 

storm’s fi rst victims. As the storm pummeled New Orleans, some 80 police offi cers – 5 

percent of the city’s force – were stranded at home, according to Warren Riley, then Deputy 

Superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD). In New Orleans East, Riley 

said, an offi cer named Chris Abbott moved to the attic of his home to avoid the rising water, 

but it continued to climb. Abbott tried to break his way out, but couldn’t. In desperation, 

he attempted to raise colleagues on his police radio even though the storm had knocked out 

most of the region’s communications network.

Abbott lucked out, eventually reaching Captain Jimmy Scott, one of the city’s eight district 

commanders. Captain Scott asked if Abbott had his service weapon and advised him to fi re 

rounds through the base of the attic vent until he could knock it out. Abbott agreed to try, 

Witnesses’ locations, Louisiana

GAO
Chapter 1

24

but then communication ceased. Offi cers listening in on the conversation called for him, 

but there was no reply. Finally, fi ve minutes later, Abbott’s voice broke through the air: 

“I’m halfway out, and I’m going to make it!” Th e water had been chest-high when he fi nally 

scrambled onto his roof, where he was rescued.

Even headquarters could do little. At 7 a.m. on Monday, August 29, just 50 minutes aft er 

the storm had made landfall in Plaquemines Parish, southeast of New Orleans, Deputy 

Superintendent Riley visited the communication section of the department’s emergency 

operations center. “Almost every dispatcher and 911 operator was crying,” he recalled. “I 

did not know that only moments earlier, the Industrial Street Canal levee breached and had 

an almost 200-yard opening and water was now pouring into the Lower Ninth Ward. ... It 

went from nothing to as high as 14 feet within 23 minutes. We had 600 911 calls within the 

fi rst 23 minutes. ... But [the 911 dispatchers and operators] were powerless to assist. ... We 

still had sustained winds in excess of 100 miles per hour.” 

Similar calls were arriving at the fi re department offi ce in St. Bernard Parish, in eastern 

New Orleans, from where Larry Ingargiola, the Parish Director of Homeland Security and 

Emergency Preparedness, was operating a makeshift response center with his wife and his 

secretary. “I am in the attic, I have my child with me in my attic, I need somebody to come 

get me out,” he recalled a typical plea. “And they are crying. Let me tell you, it got to the 

point where my secretary and wife couldn’t answer the phones anymore. ... We knew that 

the majority of these people we are talking to now were going to die and we were the last 

people they were talking to. Th ere was nothing we could do. Nothing physically possible for 

us to do.”

Most of the people in the area, civilians and offi cials alike, could talk to no one at all. Telephone lines were down. Switching stations were fl ooded. Radio and cell-phone towers had 

been knocked out. Some emergency personnel had to rely on runners to relay messages. As 

Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour described it, “My head of the National Guard might as 

well been a Civil War general for the fi rst two or three days, because he could only fi nd out 

what was going on by sending somebody.”

On Saturday, a day before New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin would order the fi rst mandatory 

evacuation of New Orleans in the city’s history, city residents had begun to evacuate using 

a system known as contrafl ow, which converts incoming highway lanes to outbound to 

expedite evacuation. More than a million residents of southeastern Louisiana left the area 

in just over 24 hours, a marked improvement over the 12-15 hour bottlenecks that stalled 

the evacuation before Hurricane Ivan in 2004. Th ose delays, coupled with the fact that Ivan 

– initially a Category 5 storm that came within 135 miles of New Orleans – banked eastward 

at the last moment, persuaded some to remain behind this time. 

Gulf Coast residents call it “hurricane roulette.” Some who had endured 1969’s Category 5 

Hurricane Camille, the region’s benchmark for catastrophic storms, thought that no other 

storm could come close. But Katrina ended lifetimes of successful storm-dodging. Jeff Elder, 

an insurance rep, had ridden out 20 years of hurricanes with his family in a two-story, 

wood-frame home three miles north of the Biloxi, Mississippi, beachfront and 14 feet above 

sea level. “Th e eye of Hurricane Georges passed directly over our home,” he wrote in an 

e-mail, “and, while the bay [just south of the Elders’ home] rose to a level of about ten feet 

above normal, the water never reached our property. In fact, during Hurricane Camille... 

the water in Back Bay only rose to a level approximately 12 feet above normal.” By early 

aft ernoon on Monday, August 29, the day Katrina made landfall, the Elders had six feet of 

water in their living room.
Introduction

25

As Biloxi city spokesman Vincent Creel said of Hurricane Camille survivors lulled into a 

false sense of security, Camille killed more people in 2005 than it did in 1969. 

In many cases, however, hubris or miscalculation had nothing to do with why some stayed 

behind. Katrina struck in the very last days of August, when those living check-to-check 

were running out of their bi-weekly or monthly allotments. Tens of thousands didn’t have 

cars. Even many who did may not have been able to shoulder the costs of evacuation; the 

average cost for three days for a family of four, including lodging, food, and transportation, 

could easily exceed a thousand dollars, according to an analysis of Hurricane Ivan prepared 

for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). For the poor of neighborhoods 

like the Lower Ninth Ward, one of the city’s lowest-lying areas, this was an impossible sum, 

though they had an alternative in the Superdome, the city’s “refuge of last resort.”

Nearly 100,000 New Orleanians either couldn’t or didn’t comply with Mayor Nagin’s evacuation order. Th e city had no plan for evacuating them, and the Louisiana Department of 

Transportation and Development, the state agency responsible for transportation during a 

disaster, had done nothing by the time of landfall. New Orleans’ enterprising health department director, Dr. Kevin Stephens, had begun negotiating agreements with several transportation agencies, but they remained incomplete at the time of landfall. Federal offi cials, 

who had participated in the Hurricane Pam exercise and knew that state and local authorities would need evacuation help, had no plans in place, either.

Witnesses’ locations, Mississippi

GAO
Chapter 1

26

Bobbie Moreau, a legal secretary in Nairn, a small town in Plaquemines Parish, stayed at 

home because she didn’t have the means to evacuate. She was with her daughter Tasha and 

Tasha’s four-month-old daughter, who was born prematurely and required a heart monitor. 

Moreau woke up at 4 a.m. on Monday, just as the wind and storm surge preceding Katrina’s 

eye were reaching shore. “Th e pressure was so bad in the house, I opened a crack in the 

living room window,” she recalled. When she walked into the den, she saw water pouring through the grout in the marble tile that lined a part of the wall. By the time she had 

climbed to the second fl oor, the water had risen halfway up the stairs. Moreau could see her 

living-room furniture fl oating.

“I shut the door upstairs, I guess thinking I could shut the water out,” she said. “From then 

on, it was a nightmare. I held the baby at the foot of the bed fanning her. Th e pressure was 

awful; we thought the windows were going to pop. We got on our knees and prayed and 

begged God to save us. Th en I felt the water under me on the second fl oor. ... I got up and 

walked to the window and the water was right under the window. My legs felt like Jell-O, I 

staggered. My daughter screamed, ‘Mama, what’s wrong?’ I knew at that moment we were 

going to die.”

But “in an instant, survival kicked in.” Moreau tore the canopy from the bed and tied knots 

so that she and Tasha could hold on to each other. She used a belt to create a makeshift 

life jacket for the baby. With the water halfway up the bed, they climbed out onto the roof, 

managing to take along Moreau’s three dogs. “Th e eye of the hurricane was on us,” Moreau 

recalled. “I told my daughter, you will have to swim and get a boat, I am too weak. She said, 

‘Mama, I’m scared.’ Th ere was dead animals fl oating by, snakes, debris, oil. I told her, ‘We 

will die if you don’t.’ She handed me the baby and slipped into the water. ... Th en I lost 

sight of her and called and called because the wind was picking up. And then I knew it was 

the eye. Nothing but silence. I thought she had drowned. I was crying and praying. And 

then I heard an outboard motor start up. And I knew she was alive.

“Where she pulled [up] the boat, the power lines to the house was between us,” Moreau 

continued. “I had to drop the baby through the power lines to her and the dogs and then 

myself. By then, the wind was so hard, we could not control the boat with the motors. ... 

We came to a stop in the top of some little trees. We huddled under the steering wheel with 

the baby because a window was broke out of the cabin. We stayed there for about 6-7 hours. 

Th e wind would almost turn the boat over and we sang and prayed. ... It was so weird. Felt 

like we were the only people left in the world, everything covered by water.”

Around the same time, at Hancock Medical Center in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, the fi rst 

fl oor was beginning to fl ood. Patients would have to be moved upstairs. Staff ers managed to 

use the elevator to move a 600-pound, non-ambulatory patient to safety before fl ood waters 

damaged the hospital generators. Physicians and service staff carried the remaining patients 

upstairs on their backs. Th e fi rst fl oor quickly fi lled with three feet of water, disabling and 

washing away equipment.

Th e Hancock staff had considered evacuating its 34 patients, but eventually decided to 

“shelter in place.” In the past, patients had deteriorated and even died while languishing in 

evacuation gridlock, some of it in response to storm warnings that turned out to be false 

alarms. But few hospitals had the resources to withstand the assault of a storm like Katrina, 

and, as the Hurricane Pam exercise predicted, became victims themselves. State governments had failed to address the problem prior to the storm. In Louisiana, the Department of 

Health and Hospitals required nursing homes to have evacuation plans, but did not require 

the institutions to actually follow them. 
Introduction

27

On the second fl oor of Hancock, patients were treated in the hall, as wind and rain prevented the use of patient rooms. Because the water pumps failed, staff had to use buckets of 

water to fl ush toilets. Maintenance staff hung multi-colored emergency glow-lights to mark 

the way down corridors and stairwells. Because communications were down, no one knew 

whether their loved ones had made it.

Forty miles away, at Ocean Springs Hospital, physicians struggled with dwindling supplies 

and an increasing number of patients. “We couldn’t sterilize anything because there was 

no power,” said Dr. Bill Passarelli, a cardiologist who was on duty as Katrina came ashore. 

“Th ere were only like two surgical packets left . So unless somebody was absolutely going to 

die, you weren’t going to surgery.”

“It got so hot that the laboratory computers had to be shut down to prevent them from 

overheating,” Dr. Passarelli’s colleague and friend Dr. Jeff Bass, an emergency-room doctor, 

recalled. “We were able to do only extremely basic lab tests. I could not even get a basic test 

of kidney function.” Th e fi rst fatalities arrived at around 5 p.m., before the wind had died 

down. “A friend who was a police offi cer told me that every bayou and every waterway had 

bodies in them, and that they were pulling bodies from the trees. ... Our morgue only holds 

two people. We had living people to worry about. At about 6 o’clock I wrote on [a wipe 

board facing the emergency room door] ‘DON’T BRING US ANY MORE DEAD BODIES. 

WE DON’T HAVE ENOUGH ROOM FOR THE LIVING PEOPLE.’”

“I had always dreamed of working for Doctors Without Borders and going to a Th ird World 

country right aft er a disaster,” Dr. Bass said. “Never in my wildest dreams did I think I 

would experience that without leaving my home.”

At Hancock, survivors who had injured themselves clinging to trees or breaking out of their 

attics were also beginning to trickle in, many aft er walking for miles, others on makeshift 

stretchers, as ambulances had been washed away. Staff treated 850 new patients during the 

next 48 hours. Th ough a Hancock medical specialist had e-mailed the director of the National Disaster Medical System less than 24 hours aft er landfall that county authorities were 

“pulling bodies from trees,” a federal Disaster Medical Assistance Team did not arrive until 

Wednesday evening. It had been pre-staged in Memphis, Tennessee, 350 miles away. Hancock general surgeon Brian Anthony repaired a man’s severed radial artery while a scrub 

tech held a fl ashlight overhead. Coast Guard helicopters refueling between rescues airlift ed 

critical patients to fully functional hospitals further inland. 

Th e Coast Guard performed heroically during Katrina, rescuing more than half of the 

60,000 survivors who were stranded by the storm. (Th e Louisiana Department of Wildlife 

& Fisheries, the state’s lead agency for search-and-rescue, similarly distinguished itself, 

rescuing much of the rest.) Coast Guard rescue swimmer Sara Faulkner’s fi rst rescue was in 

East New Orleans: “My fi rst hoist was down to the second story of [an] apartment building. 

And they handed me their baby like it was nothing, you know. ... And I was so terrifi ed for 

that baby, of him starting to squirm or wiggle, you know, for not knowing any better. And 

making it hard for me to hold him because the rescue, the quick strap is too small for him 

and he didn’t fi t, so you just have to hold him in your arms. And I’m already two stories up 

and I have to go up a hundred feet, you know, on a cable. I was holding on to him so tight, 

I had to check him to make sure I wasn’t crushing him ’cause, you know, I was just holding 

on to him so tight. And, uh, he was fi ne. I don’t even think he was scared. I think he was too 

young to be scared. But the fl ight mech[anic] said when I came out from underneath the 

roof that he got chills because his son was about that same size, same age, so. ... Th at, uh, 

that was bad, that one, but then I did three more and they weren’t as bad as that one, but, 

um, I don’t think I’ll forget that fi rst baby.”
Chapter 1

28

Another typical rescue took place several days later in Gentilly, in north-central New 

Orleans. Coast Guard rescuer Bill Dunbar was leaving to refuel when an older man fl agged 

him down. “Th is guy was 86 years old and had climbed up... two 17-rung straight-up ladders aft er being without water for three or four days,” Dunbar recalled. And he’s laughing, 

he’s in [a] good mood. I thought he was delirious.” Back at the Coast Guard station, the 

man asked Dunbar to call his son Jeff , who was a Marine. “So I 

dialed the phone number and I asked for Jeff and he says, ‘Yeah, 

who’s this?’ and I say, ‘Well, my name is Lieutenant Bill Dunbar 

and I’m calling from the Coast Guard. We just saved your father. 

We just pulled him off a roof.’ And the guy broke down crying. 

And I got a little weepy, ’cause, you know, aft er that you’re a little 

tired. He said that every day of ... 26 years in the Marine Corps 

was worth that one moment knowing that his Dad was alright. 

So we put a little money in his dad’s wallet, put some food in his 

pockets, and we fl ew him out to Armstrong [Airport] and put 

him with a doctor. And the doctor said that he’d make sure he 

got to Houston where his son was coming to meet him to take 

him home.”

But the Coast Guard’s fi rst Katrina rescue, at 2:50 p.m. on the 

day of landfall, came in response to “a Mayday from a frantic 

woman saying that her and her daughter ... and her grandchild were stuck on a small boat in the middle of the city of Port 

Sulphur.” It was Bobbie Moreau, who had managed to use the 

radio in the boat her daughter had found to summon the Coast 

Guard. A direct hoist was impossible because the boat was under 

trees, so rescue swimmer Laurence Nettles was lowered into the 

water by the side of the boat. A Coast Guard video of the rescue 

records what happened next:

Pilot: You want me to come to the right?

Nettles: No, hold position. ... On deck, picking up slack, 

waiting for the survivor to get in basket. Hold position. 

Woman and baby are getting in the basket. Ready for 

pickup. Picking up slack. Start taking the load. ... Clear 

vessel, clear back to the left .

Pilot: Okay, I can move it to the right, if I can.

Nettles: Roger, that’s fi ne. ... Basket’s coming up ... 

basket’s halfway up. ... Roger, she’s got a dog with her, 

too. [Pause]

Pilot: Th at’s fi ne. Let her bring the dog, it’s fi ne.

As for many survivors of Katrina, the rescue hardly brought Moreau’s ordeal to a close. Th e 

Coast Guard crew dropped off her and her family at West Jeff erson Hospital in Jeff erson 

Parish. “Barefoot, no purse, no money, no shoes,” Moreau recalled. “My daughter went in 

with the baby. I sat on the curb crying.” Soon, they were moved to a shelter. “Th ere was over 

100 people in one room. Th e heat was incredible, could not go outside with the baby for 

mosquitoes. We fanned her all night.” Moreau appealed to a National Guardsman, but she 

said he told her they would be at the shelter for another week. “My daughter said, ‘I am not 

going to let my baby die. We are going to walk out of here and get help.’” 

Waiting, New Orleans

AP/Wide World Photo
Introduction

29

According to Moreau, Jeff erson Police tried to prevent her from leaving, presumably for her 

safety, but “I said, ‘Do what you want to do, I have nothing left anyway.’” Moreau and her 

family snuck out when the police were distracted by a scuffl e and hitched a ride to Westwego, on the west bank of the Mississippi River, where a friend lived. He had evacuated. “I 

broke into his house, cooled the baby off , we took a shower and ate can food,” Moreau said. 

“He had left his truck in the driveway. ... [It] had no gas in it, and there was nowhere to buy 

gas, so I siphoned gas out of his boat, two gallons at a time, and put [it] into his truck. I left 

him a letter with my nephew’s phone number [in Arkansas]. Th e only clothes he had that 

would fi t us was boxer shorts and t-shirt, so that is what we left in. ... We went across the 

Sunshine Bridge [across the Mississippi River], got to Prairieville, and my nephew picked us 

up. We had a hard time since then, but we made it.”

In the Lower Ninth Ward, Reverend Leonard Lucas of Light City Church was trying to 

persuade dazed survivors to leave their homes. Parts of the neighborhood had fl ooded to 

the rooft ops aft er weak levees on its west side gave way in two spots to water from Lake 

Borgne rushing down the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet. “We went house to house telling 

people they had to leave,” Reverend Lucas recalled. “Th ey kept coming and coming and 

coming. People were leaving everything and only taking a packed bag and their kids. Some 

people had pets and wouldn’t leave them. I don’t know how many people told me that their 

pet ‘was all they had.’ We kept telling everyone to go to Stallings Park in the Upper Ninth 

[west of the Lower Ninth, across the Industrial Canal]. It was a steady fl ow of people marching like zombies to the park.” Th e less fortunate who were stranded on rooft ops sometimes 

remained there for days awaiting rescue. 

Some of the rescues were performed by volunteers who came to help in the wake of the 

storm. Th e assistance was unorganized and frustrated authorities trying to streamline 

response. Groups of volunteers in civilian clothes converged, frequently armed and without coordination, on the same areas of a sometimes lawless city, adding to the tension. But 

they also performed an invaluable service. Among them was Jeohn Favors, an emergency 

management technician (EMT) from Franklin, an hour west of New Orleans, who joined a 

group of fellow fi refi ghters and police heading to the city.

“Th e fi rst fi ve minutes into New Orleans, someone came out and asked for a medic,” he 

recalled. “[We] rode up to the water’s edge and then waded through water till we got to the 

boat. A R[egistered] N[urse] ... had just fi nished delivering a baby. Th e girl was 16 years 

old, had been taken off her roof, and was having her fi rst child and actually delivered in the 

boat. Th e nurse had just cut the umbilical cord, and they handed me the baby to check it 

out. It was my fi rst delivery.”

Favors’s crew hotwired empty boats, rescuing 350 people from rooft ops by the end of the 

day. By his account, they were the fi rst rescuers in Lakeview, a neighborhood in western 

New Orleans. Th ey traveled through water riddled with six-foot plumes of fl ames rising 

from what must have been gas leaks. Power lines – some still active – hung above the water; 

beneath, submerged obstructions threatened to puncture the boats.

“Th e thing I’ll never forget was the look on people’s faces, you know, Could this really happen?” Favors recalled. “People were so happy to see us there.” He mentioned a boat that ran 

out of gas on its way to a hospital, for a passenger whose blood pressure was dangerously 

elevated. “We gave them gas and tried to direct them to a hospital. ... Th ey had nothing, 

house destroyed, just wearing cutoff s, nothing left , and they tried to pay us for the gas. We 

couldn’t believe it. People were so grateful.” 

Someone like Favors helped Kemberly Samuels, a teacher who sheltered from the storm 

with her husband at a housing development in St. Bernard Parish, where he worked. Th e 
Chapter 1

30

building fl ooded. “You know, everyone heard about all the young gang bangers in New 

Orleans, but you didn’t hear about the young men who came and found us,” she said. “Th ey 

had to be in their teens or early twenties. ... Th ey came ... on Tuesday night with boats. 

Th ey brought us food and drinks. I asked them where they got it from, they said, ‘Don’t 

worry about that, just eat it.’ Th ey also said the boats were ‘borrowed.’”

Th e rescuers took Samuels and her husband to Interstate 610, a highway overpass in 

downtown New Orleans where rescuers had begun depositing survivors. (Local authorities had identifi ed only one offi cial drop-off point, at an intersection of Interstate 10 and 

the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway known as the Cloverleaf, about two miles away. It was 

also the only rescue point where they had positioned food, water, and medicine.) “Th ere 

were people lined up as far as I could see,” Samuels recalled. “I saw one 9-year-old boy try 

to drag his grandmother up the interstate on a blanket. She was too weak to make it on her 

own. I tried to get them help, but none of the offi cials would help them. It was so hot you 

wouldn’t believe. ... We went for a while without water and when it fi nally did get there 

they just started throwing it at the crowd. People were fi ghting over it and I did not want to 

get in the middle of that. Th ey did the same thing with the MREs [Meals Ready to Eat],” the 

military-style rations.

Th ough the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) positioned resources in the 

area before the start of the hurricane season, the food and water – critical supplies when a 

disaster has disrupted local services – were insuffi cient. Mississippi received only a fi ft h of 

the water and ice that state offi cials estimated was necessary; shipments didn’t meet demand 

in Mississippi until September 9, 12 days aft er landfall.

FEMA, the federal government’s primary disaster-response agency, had no eff ective supply-tracking system, so replenishing provisions turned out to be complicated. Planning 

and coordination were so poor that truck drivers didn’t know where to go, and emergencymanagement offi cials didn’t know what was en route, or when it might show up. Phone 

lines were down, so it was hard to clarify. “We’d fi nd [the trucks] parked along [Highway] 

49,” Mike Beeman, FEMA’s liaison to coastal Harrison County in Mississippi, said. “[We’d] 

go over and fi nd out who he was, what he had in the back end, because ... many times 

[we] knew items were sent to us, but we didn’t know where they were. ... We’d fi nally fi nd 

maybe fi ve or six truckloads of water or ice that were sitting off the roadway in some apron 

at a supermarket. ... Some of them sat sometimes two or three days. I found 25 trucks one 

day. ... Th ey were just sitting there, waiting for somebody to tell them where to go. ... I 

have no idea where they came from.”

Th e situation called for occasionally morbid forms of improvisation. In Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, Bill Carwile, FEMA’s lead representative in Mississippi, and Robert Latham, the 

head of the state’s emergency-management agency, encountered a funeral home director 

“in tears. And he says, you know, I have no more room for bodies. ... My funeral home is 

full and I’m fi xing to have to start putting people in the parking lot and on the sidewalk,” 

Latham recalled. FEMA had ordered several refrigerator, or reefer, trucks as temporary 

morgues, but they hadn’t arrived. 

Just then, a tractor-trailer pulled up. “I said, What are you hauling?” Latham continued. 

“[Th e driver] said, Well, I’m hauling ice. ... I said, Well, can I rent your truck? ... We need 

to use it as a morgue. And he said, No, this is the way I make my living. If I give you that, 

I won’t ever be able to use that trailer again for hauling ice or anything else refrigerated. I 

says, can we buy your truck? I’ll buy it. I looked at Bill and I said, Bill, can I do this? He said, 

Yeah, we’re going to do what we have do.” Carwile and Latham negotiated a price ($25,000) 

and started loading bodies. Th e reefer trucks fi nally showed up fi ve days later. 
Introduction

31

Supplies also were 

stretched at the New 

Orleans Superdome, the 

“refuge of last resort” for 

city residents who did not 

evacuate. It saved many 

lives during the hurricane, 

but at a dismaying cost. 

Lighting and plumbing 

failed. As 25,000 evacuees 

waited in heat and humidity for evacuation buses 

that wouldn’t arrive for 

days, the Superdome deteriorated into nightmarish 

squalor. Th ough conditions 

were oft en worse at spontaneous rescue points like 

the one where Kemberly 

Samuels found herself, the 

Superdome became a center of the crisis, a symbol of 

the ways in which America 

failed New Orleans.

Dorothy Stukes rode out 

the hurricane at 1517 

Virginia Marie Place, her home in Gentilly. She didn’t evacuate because her sister, who had 

recently undergone surgery, was at Charity Hospital, in the Central Business District. Aft er 

the storm had passed, she went outside and walked for several miles until city police offi cers 

picked her up and drove her to the Superdome.

“A female offi cer searched us before we went inside,” she recalled. “She took some medicine 

I had, but she also took some insulin from an elderly woman behind me because it was not 

in its proper box. I don’t know how they expected her to make it without her insulin. When 

we got in, we found a chair and just sat there. All I could think about was my daughter. Th e 

last time I talked to her, water was coming through the walls and roof of her house. I didn’t 

know if she was dead or alive. 

“Th e Dome was horrible; it was like jail or something,” she went on. “One guy jumped from 

a balcony and committed suicide. We saw some people having sex under a blanket. Th ere 

were kids all around. Some kids found where they were hiding the ice and stole some of it 

and started selling it. Most of the supplies were going to the people [special-needs patients] 

up in the suites. Some folks found a newborn baby in a trash can; they ended up taking care 

of it. People were sleeping in the halls on cardboard boxes in the middle of all that waste. 

And it stank; it was past stink due to all the urine and feces all over the fl oor. We just sat 

there and put our shirts over our face to mask the smell. We used an empty MRE bag and a 

box to go in. We would try to hide ourselves but you couldn’t really get away. Th ey wouldn’t 

open any extra doors to let us get fresh air.”

Among Stukes’ fellow refugees was Patricia Morris, a home-care nurse who had passed up 

the chance to evacuate to Mississippi with her daughter because she wanted to help at the 

Superdome. “I kept telling [the] National Guard that I’m a registered nurse, and disasterHeading for airlift from the 

Superdome, New Orleans 

U.S. Coast Guard photo
Chapter 1

32

certifi ed,” she said. “Finally they got angry with me, and told me, Look, woman, Red Cross 

didn’t even show,” referring to the Red Cross’ refusal to certify and staff the Superdome 

because it was in the fl ood zone. Morris says she off ered her help to FEMA medics, as well 

as representatives of the state health department. “I could not understand with all the need 

they had how they could refuse help,” she said. (Generally, medical personnel turned away 

volunteers because there was no way to evaluate their skills.) Meanwhile, Morris had to fi nd 

ways around the same indignities as Dorothy Stukes. “Aft er the second day I decided that if 

I didn’t eat, I wouldn’t have to go to the bathroom,” she said. 

As conditions at the Superdome deteriorated, offi cials scrambled to fi nd a way to evacuate 

the population. Prior to landfall, city authorities had failed to position buses outside the 

fl ood zone. Th e Regional Transit Authority, the city’s transit system, pre-positioned two 

fl eets of buses on high ground within New Orleans, but no level of government attempted 

to send drivers until three days aft er landfall. 

On Monday, the day of landfall, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco had turned to FEMA 

Director Michael Brown with a request for 500 buses. He promised they would come. For 

reasons that have never been explained, those buses did not begin to arrive at the Superdome until Wednesday evening. By Katrina’s impossible clock, two and a half days was a 

lifetime. Waiting, even if because the facts on the ground weren’t clear, was an unconscionable luxury. If ever there was a time to overreact, this was it. 

“We kept being told that the buses were coming,” Dorothy Stukes said. “Th ey promised 

they were coming on Monday, and then Tuesday, and then Wednesday. Th ursday they fi -

nally got us to line up to load on the buses. At fi rst they said [to] make a single-fi le line, and 

then someone said women and children fi rst. Some of the men started snatching kids away 

from women so they could get on the bus.” 

“Aft er we got on the bus they wouldn’t tell us where they were taking us, and they said they 

forgot to load water for us,” Kemberly Samuels recalled. “Once we got settled we started 

reading signs and realized we were going to Houston. We found out that there were kids 

on the bus that had been separated from their parents. Th ere were at least four. I was asked 

to take care of one of them. Once we got to Houston, I took the kid to a Red Cross offi cial 

and let them know that the kid had gotten lost. By that time, a lot of people had gotten sick. 

People were bathing in the sinks. We hadn’t had a bath since Sunday. It was now Friday.”

Th e Louisiana National Guard troops who developed the Superdome evacuation plan were 

assisted by members of a 50,000-strong Guard deployment from all 50 states, as well as the 

District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Guam. Aft er initiating the Superdome evacuation on Th ursday, they moved on to the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center.

Tuesday evening, Mayor Nagin had opened the Convention Center as an alternate 

refuge. Before landfall, the city had not intended to use the Convention Center for this 

purpose, so no food or water had been positioned, and few law enforcement, medical or 

government personnel were present. Over the next two days, 19,000 people converged on 

the facility, but all levels of government were slow to grasp the gravity of the unfolding 

crisis. Th e fi rst supplies may not have arrived until Th ursday. Th e fi rst media reports of the 

crowds at the Convention Center appeared Wednesday evening; by the next day there was 

video of thousands of stranded, desperate victims chanting “We want help.” 

Th e National Guard moved in on Friday, restoring order, distributing provisions, and 

evacuating the entire population in just over a day. Louisiana National Guard Colonel 

Jacques Th ibodeaux recalled his fi rst encounter with the people inside: “Th e fi rst time I went 

into the building ... groups of people just lying there immobile, and when I say immobile, 
Introduction

33

they assume that several were deceased because they actually kicked a couple to see if they 

were, ‘Hey, are you okay?,’ just to see, to get an assessment, and they didn’t move.” Th e 

people Th ibodeaux saw were alive, but so malnourished that they did not respond to physical stimuli. 

“Th ey’re hot, they’re tired, they’re hungry,” Wendell Shingler, the head of the Federal Protective Service, who assessed the situation at the Convention Center for the Department of 

Homeland Security (DHS), recalled. “Th ey had no place to go to the bathroom. Th ey – some 

of these folks could not walk, so they were relieving themselves in their pants, and they had 

just lost their sense of humanity, they had lost their sense of dignity, and that was something that you could just see, they were just so distraught. Th ey had now gone from a retired 

person with a home and probably some income to a homeless person sitting on a sidewalk, 

owning everything they had in the bag.”

Th ough initial reports like Colonel Th ibodeaux’s suggested that as many as a hundred had 

died at the Convention Center, the actual toll was far lower. But this was cold comfort. One 

of Katrina’s most enduring images was that of 91-year-old Ethel Freeman, whose lifeless 

body, partially covered by a poncho, sat in a wheelchair at the Convention Center for days.

Th e evacuation of most of the city was complete by Saturday, when 8,800 active-duty 

ground troops began to arrive. It’s unclear why President Bush waited until Saturday to deploy federal ground troops – whether because of delay in settling command issues with state 

offi cials, because of the Defense Department’s doctrine of relying on National Guard units 

fi rst, because of federal units’ inability to take on law-enforcement duties, or other reasons. 

Th e National Response Plan, the document meant to guide federal response to a disaster 

like Katrina, assigns a supporting role to the Department of Defense, to be called on by 

FEMA as necessary. On Th ursday evening, three and a half days aft er landfall, FEMA asked 

the Department of Defense to take over its logistics operation. By that time, the Department had already begun to mobilize a signifi cant amount of its resources, including ships, 

aircraft , and medical support. Some commanders had seized the initiative to mobilize assets 

so that they would be ready to deploy when the orders fi nally came.

Perhaps the most visible among them was Lieutenant General Russel Honoré, Commander 

of U.S. First Army, based in Atlanta, Georgia. Military commanders have limited authority 

to deploy their troops without orders from above as part of an “exercise.” A native Louisianan who had assisted FEMA during the 2004 hurricane season, Honoré decided to stage 

an “exercise” that took his command element to Camp Shelby, Mississippi. Once Katrina 

subsided, Honoré was ideally positioned to take charge, and was named head of Joint Task 

Force Katrina by U.S. Northern Command, the headquarters for domestic military operations.

“When you landed here, with everybody walking with these red berets, in 45 minutes 

everybody’s attitude changed,” said Colonel Terry Ebbert, a former Marine who was New 

Orleans’ head of Homeland Security when Katrina struck. “Nothing really changed but 

their attitude. Everybody, instantaneously, when they saw these guys walking down the 

street, you know, they’re all good-looking, slim, tough guys that walk with a swagger, and 

it was over. Everybody felt good. Had that response come in on Tuesday,” Colonel Ebbert 

said, the situation may have improved sooner.

Th e Gulf Coast has been trying to fi nd its way back to normalcy. In the days aft er the storm 

“the weather was beautiful, ... but you’d smell rotting fl esh in the air,” Dr. Bill Passarelli, the 

cardiologist from Ocean Springs, Mississippi, recalled. “Whether it was animal or human 

you didn’t know, but it was everywhere. Th e closer you got to water the more intense it was.”
Chapter 1

34

“Just the devastation that was seen, it causes extreme – sudden and extreme duress,” Passarelli 

continued. “And we saw people who had heart attacks just from seeing their houses. One lady 

in particular, my daughter’s Spanish teacher, died that way. She was away for the storm, she 

survived the storm, and two days aft er the storm came back and died on her property.”

“Every little detail of life as I knew it here on the Gulf Coast before the storm has changed,” 

Dr. Jeff Bass, Passarelli’s colleague, wrote in an e-mail to friends in late September. “Th e 

schools are damaged, most of the local businesses are closed, and almost all of the police 

cars are from out of state because virtually all of the local cruisers were washed away. On the 

street, instead of greeting people with, ‘Hi, how are you?’ the greeting is ‘Hi, do you have a 

home, and is it livable?’”

Some 17,000 people lost jobs when the storm wiped out the local off -shore casinos, Bass 

continued. Th e destruction of Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi unemployed 50,000 more, he 

wrote. “Almost all of the nice local restaurants have been destroyed ... along with many of 

the small Mom and Pop businesses. I doubt that they carried adequate insurance.”

Katrina destroyed or made uninhabitable 300,000 homes and caused as much as $150 billion in damage. In three Mississippi coastal counties alone, it left behind more debris than 

the 9/11 attacks and Hurricane Andrew, the most destructive recent hurricane, combined. 

At Hancock Medical Center, the storm left three-quarters of the staff homeless. Hal Left -

wich, the hospital administrator, and Hank Wheeler, the facilities-services director, spent 

the fi rst two weeks aft er the storm on air mattresses in the business offi ce and the next 

month in patient rooms. Th e numbers were similar at Ocean Springs. In some cases, the 

survivors have chosen to rebuild elsewhere. As of late January, half of New Orleans’ population had not returned.

In the days aft er the magnitude of government’s failure to respond became apparent, the 

Homeland Security and Governmental Aff airs Committee initiated an investigation to 

“thoroughly examine what appears to be breakdowns in preparedness for and responses 

to” Hurricane Katrina and to “demand answers as to how this immense failure occurred,” 

according to a statement by Senators Susan Collins and Joseph Lieberman, Chairman and 

Ranking Member, respectively.

For the past seven months, the Committee has worked to discharge this obligation. It has 

held 22 days of hearings, interviewed or heard testimony from more than 400 witnesses, 

and reviewed in excess of 800,000 pages of documents. It has found failings at all levels of 

government. Preparations that were adequate in the past and that might have been suffi cient had Katrina been a “typical” hurricane proved to be grievously inadequate. Th e 

National Response Plan had its fi rst real-world test, revealing shortcomings. Katrina began 

as a human tragedy, but in the weeks aft er the storm, the fecklessness of the government 

response became a story unto itself.

Th is Report is a study of a catastrophe, an “ultra-catastrophe,” in the words of Department 

of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff . Th e National Response Plan defi nes 

a catastrophe as “any natural or man-made incident, including terrorism, that results in 

extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely aff ecting the population, infrastructure, environment, economy, national morale, and/or government functions.” By defi nition, they are rare, but the age of terrorism and climate change has ensured 

that the next occurrence is mainly a question of how and where, not when.

For that reason, the Committee intends this Report to serve as a catalyst for constructive 

reform before the next catastrophe, whatever shape it might take. Ironically, many of this 
Introduction

35

Report’s fi ndings have an alarming resemblance to the General Accounting Offi ce’s analysis of the government’s inadequate response to 1992’s Hurricane Andrew. Th e Committee 

hopes that this Report will never become part of a compendium of warnings similarly, and 

tragically, ignored. 

Th is is why the Committee’s report includes not only an analysis of the response at all levels 

of government, but assessments and recommendations as well. Th e Committee has found:

• A failure on the part of all levels of government to plan and prepare for the 

consequences of Katrina.

• A failure to heed the warnings of a looming catastrophe during the weekend 

preceding the storm, and a failure on the day of landfall to recognize that the 

worst predictions had come true.

• A failure on the part of government leaders to think “big” before Katrina 

struck and to challenge existing planning assumptions in the face of what was 

known to be a “nightmare scenario.”

• A failure on the part of all levels of government to plan and provide for the 

timely and eff ective evacuation of the elderly, the sick, and the disabled from 

New Orleans, and the evacuation of tens of thousands of able-bodied residents 

who did not have personal transportation.

• A failure to act on the lessons of past catastrophes, both man-made and natural, that demonstrated the need for a large, well-equipped, and coordinated 

law enforcement response to maintain or restore civil order aft er catastrophic 

events. 

• A failure to plan for and provide in a timely manner mass medical care and 

temporary shelter for tens of thousands of Katrina victims that all levels of 

government knew were likely to be impacted by a catastrophic hurricane.

Th e Committee has not used the power to judge lightly. Th is investigation has benefi ted 

from hindsight, which revealed that, for all the warnings and predictions, there had been 

too little foresight, aft er all. Th ough many understood and acknowledged the risks to the 

Gulf Coast, it seems few could imagine a major American city destroyed. 

Th e Committee has not assembled the complete record of what happened before, during, 

and aft er Hurricane Katrina. Areas for further study and clarifi cation remain. Th e issues 

raised by the response to Hurricane Katrina could not be more critical to America’s sense of 

itself in this moment in history, its security, prosperity, and honor.

Revisiting stories like those above recalls that endless week in late August and early September when the entire nation watched with frustration, anger, and despair as the disaster 

unfolded. It is the hope of this Committee that changes prompted by this Report will ensure 

that the anguish that might have been avoided or relieved sooner in America’s response to 

Hurricane Katrina will never come to pass again.