A week ago, I didn't pay much attention to Katrina as she passed over Florida leaving 9 dead. To me, 200 miles safely inland, hurricanes are a natural feature of late summer along the Gulf. In Austin, we hope simultaneously that they bring a little rain to relieve the August heat without causing our neighbors along the coast too much grief.

I wasn't concerned over the weekend when New Orleans was evacuated. Boarding up houses and businesses, evacuating to higher ground, and hearing about the handful of deaths of those who won't or can't leave are just part of the annual storm season. A couple of days later, the storm will blow out and people will return to pick up the pieces. On Monday my friends and I were exchanging sighs of relief as Katrina was down-graded to a Category 4 storm as she landed and New Orleans was spared a direct hit. By Wednesday our initial relief dissolved into horror as the levees broke. Floodwaters engulfed New Orleans and the situation escalated from natural disaster to ecological catastrophe.

Those people who say "Oh, we couldn't have known!" have already begun to hide their culpability. Our president responds "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." Don't believe it. We did know. Our scientists and engineers warned us repeatedly. We knew and we chose to ignore the warnings.

In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S., including a terrorist attack on New York City.

The Bush administration's policy of turning over wetlands to developers almost certainly also contributed to the heightened level of the storm surge. In 1990, a federal task force began restoring lost wetlands surrounding New Orleans. Every two miles of wetland between the Crescent City and the Gulf reduces a surge by half a foot. Bush had promised "no net loss" of wetlands, a policy launched by his father's administration and bolstered by President Clinton. But he reversed his approach in 2003, unleashing the developers. The Army Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency then announced they could no longer protect wetlands unless they were somehow related to interstate commerce. -- Spiegel Online: No One Can Say They Didn't See it Coming

Perhaps now we we can show the link between the wetlands and interstate commerce. Louisiana's coast produces one third of the country's seafood, one fifth of its oil and one quarter of its natural gas. It harbors 40 percent of the nation's coastal wetlands and provides wintering grounds for 70 percent of its migratory waterfowl. Facilities on the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Baton Rouge constitute the nation's largest port -- Scientific American: October 2001

New Orleans is a disaster waiting to happen. The city lies below sea level, in a bowl bordered by levees that fend off Lake Pontchartrain to the north and the Mississippi River to the south and west. And because of a damning confluence of factors, the city is sinking further, putting it at increasing flood risk after even minor storms. The low-lying Mississippi Delta, which buffers the city from the gulf, is also rapidly disappearing. A year from now another 25 to 30 square miles of delta marsh--an area the size of Manhattan--will have vanished. An acre disappears every 24 minutes. Each loss gives a storm surge a clearer path to wash over the delta and pour into the bowl, trapping one million people inside and another million in surrounding communities. Extensive evacuation would be impossible because the surging water would cut off the few escape routes.

A direct hit is inevitable. Large hurricanes come close every year. In 1965 Hurricane Betsy put parts of the city under eight feet of water. In 1992 monstrous Hurricane Andrew missed the city by only 100 miles. In 1998 Hurricane Georges veered east at the last moment but still caused billions of dollars of damage. At fault are natural processes that have been artificially accelerated by human tinkering--levying rivers, draining wetlands, dredging channels and cutting canals through marshes. -- Scientific American: October 2001

We knew what would happen to the 100,000 in poverty, the old, the sick, and the infirm, who did not have the means to evacuate.

The region's sinking coast and rising flood risk also make the task of getting people out harder than it is elsewhere. South Louisiana presents some of the most daunting evacuation problems in the United States because:

• The region's large population, including more than 1 million people in the New Orleans area, requires a 72- to 84-hour window for evacuation, well ahead of the time that forecasters can accurately predict a storm's track and strength. Few north-south escape routes exist to move residents away from the coast, and many of those include low-lying sections that can flood days before a hurricane makes landfall.
• Evacuees must travel more than 80 miles to reach high ground, meaning more cars on the highways for a longer time as the storm approaches.
• A large population of low-income residents do not own cars and would have to depend on an untested emergency public transportation system to evacuate them.
• Much of the area is below sea level and vulnerable to catastrophic flooding. Based on the danger to refugees and workers, the Red Cross has decided not to operate shelters south of the Interstate 10-Interstate 12 corridor, leaving refuges of last resort that offer only minimal protection and no food or bedding.

-- The New Orleans Times-Picayune (Five-Part Series published June 23-27, 2002)

We knew that the cost of dealing with a problem were less than ignoring it and dealing with the consequences. -- Scientific American: October 2001 and National Geographic: October 2004.

We pooh-poohed the science. We made fun of the environmentalists. We were more worried about the cost of doing business than the cost of human lives. So we took the gamble. We cut the funding. And we lost big time. Sadly this is just the beginning of the story. How is it that the Department of Homeland Security absorbed FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) without taking on its responsibilities for planning and dealiing with emergencies? What if this had been a nuclear or chemical attack on multiple cities? What is your city's emergency and evacuation plan? How does it deal with people who are unable to evacuate themselves because they lack transportation or are infirm?

Even Republicans were criticizing Bush and his administration for the sluggish relief effort. "I think it puts into question all of the Homeland Security and Northern Command planning for the last four years, because if we can't respond faster than this to an event we saw coming across the Gulf for days, then why do we think we're prepared to respond to a nuclear or biological attack?" said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. -- AP via AOL News: 2005.09.02

More Reading

• When the Levee Breaks
• New Orleans Facing Environmental Disaster
• New Orleans in Anarchy
• Survivors perish as troops try to quell anarchy
• Bush's Role
• 2002.09.03 Murder and mayhem in New Orleans' Miserable Shelter
• Refuge in Austin

A National Guardsman refused entry [to reporters].

"It doesn't need to be seen, it's a make-shift morgue in there," he told a Reuters photographer. "We're not letting anyone in there anymore. If you want to take pictures of dead bodies, go to Iraq."