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August 31, 2005
Chronology of errors: how a disaster spread
By Keith O'Brien and Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent and Globe Staff | September 11, 2005
NEW ORLEANS -- Late on Aug. 27, less than 36 hours before Hurricane Katrina crashed into the Gulf Coast, New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin's home phone rang. It was Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center in Florida.
Globe Headlines e-mail | Breaking News Alerts Katrina was a ''worst-case" pattern, Mayfield warned. A mandatory evacuation of New Orleans was necessary.
Mayfield's advisory was in an official timeline of events compiled by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees the National Hurricane Center.
Thousands of residents were streaming north by then, alarmed by the increasingly dire predictions on the Weather Channel and on the local news. But it was not until 11 a.m. on Sunday, Aug. 28, almost 12 hours after Mayfield's call, that Nagin ordered the evacuation.
The order would send buses to pick up people at designated locations and would take them to shelters, including the Superdome.
Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., that Sunday morning, Michael Chertoff, the US secretary of homeland security, and Michael D. Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, were receiving electronic briefings from the National Weather Service on the possibility of a levee break in the city. Despite the catastrophic implications, it would take more than a day for Brown to move to bring FEMA personnel into the region.
Every forecast from the National Hurricane Center, beginning 56 hours before the storm struck, had predicted that the hurricane would come ashore at Category 4 intensity or greater and that it would then pass over or near New Orleans and the Louisiana-Mississippi border.
Air Force ''hurricane hunter" planes, flying from Florida and into the eye of the storm, were clocking wind speeds of 145 miles per hour, then 150, then 160.
But from the critical hours before the hurricane made landfall to the desperate days after Katrina sent floodwaters surging into the streets of New Orleans, government officials at every level -- local, state, and federal -- had misjudged, miscommunicated, and underestimated both the power of the storm and the seriousness of its aftermath.
Their decisions, or in some cases failure to decide anything at all, left tens of thousands imperiled. And now, from city hall to Capitol Hill, people are calling for inquiries into what went wrong.
''There's a lot we don't know yet, but certainly we have a lot to learn from Katrina," said Richard Falkenrath, deputy homeland security adviser to President Bush until last year. ''The mobilization started too late. It should have been sooner."
The calm before the stormJasmine Haralson remembered a closed-door briefing at City Hall on the Saturday before the storm hit.
Nagin was there, as were Police Superintendent Eddie Compass, the city's department heads, and several City Council members. But the atmosphere was calm, routine. Haralson, chief of staff for a New Orleans city councilman, Jay Batt, was not worried.
Continued...
http://www.boston.com/news/weather/articles/2005/09/11/chronology_of_errors_how_a_disaster_spread/
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