Better Luck Next Time?

Photo: Ben Sklar/APWhile President Bush and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco urge prayer on behalf of those devastated by Hurricane Katrina, it seems that a sense of fatalism has overcome us. But couldn't we have done more to minimize the effects of Katrina?A Category 4 Hurricane is a big event, but it's not a surprising one. Katrina unfurled her fury in a hurricane prone region during hurricane season. Given the probability of just such an event occurring, I can't help but wonder why the levees were built to endure only a Category 3 storm?The day before the storm hit, levee engineer, Geneve Grille had this to say: "If we had a direct hit of a category 4 or 5, or maybe even a slow moving cat 3, we would be totally inundated with water. You couldn't pump it all out."So what exactly was the official strategy? Cross your fingers? Did we really leave the fate of an entire US city to luck?Secondly, why wasn't the evacuation planned better?In an eerily prescient 2002 edition of NOW with Bill Moyers, LSU Engineer and hurricane specialist, Joe Suhayda uses a pole held up against an old building in the French Quarter to predict how high the water would rise if a storm caused New Orleans to flood. While Suhayda demonstrates how the city would virtually disappear under water, local emergency management official, Walter Maestri, describes the city's emergency response exercise against a Category 5 storm, they dubbed "Delaney:""when the exercise was completed [and] it was evident that we were going to lose a lot of people we changed the name of the storm from Delaney to K-Y-A-G-B... kiss your ass goodbye... because anybody who was here as that Category Five storm came across... was gone."That was in 2002.We now know that many if not most of the people who remained in harm's way despite the evacuation order did so not out of stubbornness but because they lacked the means to get out. Why weren't the means to get them out provided?And finally why did New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin order the majority of his city's police force to divert their energies from search and rescue to cracking down on looters? Is property more valuable than human lives?We should be better than this. We are better than this. Aren't we?