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Administration Neglected to Heed the Threat of Katrina
House of Representatives - September 7, 2005
Extension of Remarks For HR 3645

Mr. Speaker, last Monday, August 29th, Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana and Mississippi as a Category 4 storm, with winds of over 140 miles per hour. We all know the aftermath of that terrible storm: thousands dead, more than a million refugees, billions of dollars in damage, and a major American city rendered uninhabitable. The greatest tragedy of all is that, for the most part, this could have been avoided.

The President told us that he didn't "think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees," a misinformed statement at best. New Orleans is the only major American city below sea level, and the federal government was well aware of the flooding threat to the city in the event of a hurricane.

Just last July, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) conducted a five-day hurricane exercise simulating the effects that a powerful storm would have on New Orleans. During the apocalyptic simulation, 120 mile per hour wind gusts and 20 inches of rain combined to top the levees, forcing the evacuation of more than one million residents.

Yet despite the lessons learned from that exercise the Bush Administration stunningly neglected to heed the threat.

The President slashed funding for the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project (SELA), the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' project to control flooding in the New Orleans area, to $10.4 million, one-sixth of what local officials had said they needed. Funding for Army Corps projects have been cut across the board for the last few years by this Administration and this Congress, whose reckless tax-cutting, combined with funding cuts and National Guard deployments to Iraq, have sharply increased vulnerability to natural disaster in this country.

It is worth noting that more than 7,000 soldiers from the Louisiana and Mississippi National Guard are stationed in Iraq, including more than 3,000 from the 256th Brigade Combat Team based in New Orleans.

Even as the hurricane was hitting land as a Category 4 storm, the Administration failed to mobilize help. Dr. Max Mayfield, Director of the National Hurricane Center, said that both Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and FEMA Director Mike Brown were made aware of the storm's potential in the days leading up to its landfall, yet it took until Friday, September 2nd, four days after the storm hit, for any meaningful National Guard presence to arrive to relieve the burden on local Guard units, bring about law and order, and ease suffering.

The first 72 hours after a disaster are the most important in terms of saving lives, and this Administration completely failed in that regard.

Sadly, the 200,000 or so people who did not evacuate the city in time were overwhelmingly those who were too poor, old, or sick to leave. It is they who have suffered the most from the gross federal government incompetence before, during, and after the storm.

See McDermott's statement on Hurricane Katrina from September 2 2005.