Chertoff delayed federal response, memo shows

[Arlos]

From: http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/12637172.htm

WASHINGTON - The federal official with the power to mobilize a massive federal response to Hurricane Katrina was Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, not the former FEMA chief who was relieved of his duties and resigned earlier this week, federal documents reviewed by Knight Ridder show.

Even before the storm struck the Gulf Coast, Chertoff could have ordered federal agencies into action without any request from state or local officials. Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown had only limited authority to do so until about 36 hours after the storm hit, when Chertoff designated him as the "principal federal official" in charge of the storm.

As thousands of hurricane victims went without food, water and shelter in the days after Katrina's early morning Aug. 29 landfall, critics assailed Brown for being responsible for delays that might have cost hundreds of lives.

But Chertoff - not Brown - was in charge of managing the national response to a catastrophic disaster, according to the National Response Plan, the federal government's blueprint for how agencies will handle major natural disasters or terrorist incidents. An order issued by President Bush in 2003 also assigned that responsibility to the homeland security director.

But according to a memo obtained by Knight Ridder, Chertoff didn't shift that power to Brown until late afternoon or evening on Aug. 30, about 36 hours after Katrina hit Louisiana and Mississippi. That same memo suggests that Chertoff may have been confused about his lead role in disaster response and that of his department.

"As you know, the President has established the `White House Task Force on Hurricane Katrina Response.' He will meet with us tomorrow to launch this effort. The Department of Homeland Security, along with other Departments, will be part of the task force and will assist the Administration with its response to Hurricane Katrina," Chertoff said in the memo to the secretaries of defense, health and human services and other key federal agencies.

On the day that Chertoff wrote the memo, Bush was in San Diego presiding over a ceremony marking the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II.

Chertoff's Aug. 30 memo for the first time declared Katrina an "Incident of National Significance," a key designation that triggers swift federal coordination. The following afternoon, Bush met with his Cabinet, then appeared before TV cameras in the White House Rose Garden to announce the government's planned action.

That same day, Aug. 31, the Department of Defense, whose troops and equipment are crucial in such large disasters, activated its Task Force Katrina. But active-duty troops didn't begin to arrive in large numbers along the Gulf Coast until Saturday.

White House and homeland security officials wouldn't explain why Chertoff waited some 36 hours to declare Katrina an incident of national significance and why he didn't immediately begin to direct the federal response from the moment on Aug. 27 when the National Hurricane Center predicted that Katrina would strike the Gulf Coast with catastrophic force in 48 hours. Nor would they explain why Bush felt the need to appoint a separate task force.

Chertoff's hesitation and Bush's creation of a task force both appear to contradict the National Response Plan and previous presidential directives that specify what the secretary of homeland security is assigned to do without further presidential orders. The goal of the National Response Plan is to provide a streamlined framework for swiftly delivering federal assistance when a disaster - caused by terrorists or Mother Nature - is too big for local officials to handle.

Dana Perino, a White House spokeswoman, referred most inquiries about the memo and Chertoff's actions to the Department of Homeland Security.

"There will be an after-action report" on the government's response to Hurricane Katrina, Perino said. She added that "Chertoff had the authority to invoke the Incident of National Significance, and he did it on Tuesday."

Perino said the creation of the White House task force didn't add another bureaucratic layer or delay the response to the devastating hurricane. "Absolutely not," she said. "I think it helped move things along." When asked whether the delay in issuing the Incident of National Significance was to allow Bush time to return to Washington, Perino replied: "Not that I'm aware of."

Russ Knocke, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, didn't dispute that the National Response Plan put Chertoff in charge in federal response to a catastrophe. But he disputed that the bureaucracy got in the way of launching the federal response.

"There was a tremendous sense of urgency," Knocke said. "We were mobilizing the greatest response to a disaster in the nation's history."

Knocke noted that members of the Coast Guard were already in New Orleans performing rescues and FEMA personnel and supplies had been deployed to the region.

The Department of Homeland Security has refused repeated requests to provide details about Chertoff's schedule and said it couldn't say specifically when the department requested assistance from the military. Knocke said a military liaison was working with FEMA, but said he didn't know his or her name or rank. FEMA officials said they wouldn't provide information about the liaison.

Knocke said members of almost every federal agency had already been meeting as part of the department's Interagency Incident Management Group, which convened for the first time on the Friday before the hurricane struck. So it would be a mistake, he said, to interpret the memo as meaning that Tuesday, Aug. 30 was the first time that members of the federal government coordinated.

The Chertoff memo indicates that the response to Katrina wasn't left to disaster professionals, but was run out of the White House, said George Haddow, a former deputy chief of staff at FEMA during the Clinton administration and the co-author of an emergency management textbook.

"It shows that the president is running the disaster, the White House is running it as opposed to Brown or Chertoff," Haddow said. Brown "is a convenient fall guy. He's not the problem really. The problem is a system that was marginalized."

A former FEMA director under President Reagan expressed shock by the inaction that Chertoff's memo suggested. It showed that Chertoff "does not have a full appreciation for what the country is faced with - nor does anyone who waits that long," said Gen. Julius Becton Jr., who was FEMA director from 1985-1989.

"Anytime you have a delay in taking action, there's a potential for losing lives," Becton told Knight Ridder. "I have no idea how many lives we're talking about. ... I don't understand why, except that they were inefficient."

Chertoff's Aug. 30 memo came on the heels of a memo from Brown, written several hours after Katrina made landfall, showing that the FEMA director was waiting for Chertoff's permission to get help from others within the massive department. In that memo, first obtained by the Associated Press last week, Brown requested Chertoff's "assistance to make available DHS employees willing to deploy as soon as possible." It asked for another 1,000 homeland security workers within two days and 2,000 within a week.

The four-paragraph memo ended with Brown thanking Chertoff "for your consideration in helping us meet our responsibilities in this near catastrophic event."

According to the National Response Plan, which was unveiled in January by Chertoff's predecessor, Tom Ridge, the secretary of homeland security is supposed to declare an Incident of National Significance when a catastrophic event occurs.

"Standard procedures regarding requests for assistance may be expedited or, under extreme circumstances, suspended in the immediate aftermath of an event of catastrophic magnitude," according to the plan, which evolved from earlier plans and lessons learned after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. "Notification and full coordination with the States will occur, but the coordination process must not delay or impede the rapid deployment and use of critical resources."

Should Chertoff have declared Katrina an Incident of National Significance sooner - even before the storm struck? Did his delay slow the quick delivery of the massive federal response that was needed? Would it have made a difference?

"You raise good questions," said Frank J. Cilluffo, the director of George Washington University's Homeland Security Planning Institute. It's too early to tell, he said, whether unfamiliarity with or glitches in the new National Response Plan were factors in the poor early response to Katrina.

"Clearly this is the first test. It certainly did not pass with flying colors," Cilluffo said of the National Response Plan.

Full text of the memo described in the story is available: http://www.realcities.com/multimedia/na ... embers.pdf

So, lets see, Chertoff waited til 36 hours to start the wheels of the federal government's response moving, when he could have made the declaration on the 27th. The Department of Homeland Security is empowered to get a response going before any formal request is made by state and local governments, yet it wasn't done.

So, you Fox News dittoheads still going to lay the blame solely at the feet of Blanco and Nagin? (not that either of THEM are blameless, especially Blanco), but both have been savaged for not following the pre-existing disaster plan. Well, what'd Bush do? He also was winging it instead of following the plan, EXACT same thing that Blanco and Nagin have been attacked for.

-Arlos

[Lyion]

Except outside of Fox every other MSM is lambasting W like this is primarily a federal response problem, when that is not accurate. Almost every one of your post rails on about Fed Fed Fed.

There's no doubt FEMA made some mistakes, but as more and more of the local and state incompetence comes out, it's easy to see who deserves the lions share of the blame..

Unlike your link which takes a lot of liberties, this link is directly from the horses mouth!

http://thepoliticalteen.net/2005/09/12/ ... ndaybreak/

Also, this is a good editorial that the rapid vitriolic Bush haters still do not grasp

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/2 ... ngs14.html

Out of the trauma of Hurricane Katrina, we have a great object lesson in American civics. This disaster has highlighted what it is that makes us American, and how departing from these basics is a recipe for tragedy.

Over and over in the news and rehashing, we hear people decrying that the federal government simply didn't do enough to prevent this, didn't do enough to remedy that and simply doesn't care enough about the victims' predicament.

What seems to be absent from the reports is the lack of prevention, preparation and protection that is incumbent upon local governments to provide.

The federal government's role is to be a means to spread the risk in times of disaster but the first and foremost line of defense against tragedy falls to state and local governments. Our Founding Fathers started from the proposition that the states were sovereign. It makes sense that the local governments are in the best position to determine, assess and mitigate the peculiar vulnerabilities of the locale and plan for and around these.

Throughout history we have reaffirmed our commitment to this principle -- e.g., the Posse Comitatus Act in 1878. Our federal government is ill-suited at best to minister to the needs of a town, let alone a community, family or individual. How is it rational to expect the federal government to be better at identifying the needy, the elderly, infirm or simply intractable in a community?

It seems that many voices critical of the federal government's response have mentally written off one of the fundamental strengths of U.S. governance -- the idea that primary responsibility for people's well-being falls first to the individual, and from there flows through the family and community to local and state governments. It is only after passing through these channels that the federal government is, or should be, implicated.

When we invoke the federal government as the initial responder, we effectively adopt a European model. We must resist this path, as it is inherently less effective. For a contrasting example, remember the European heat wave in August 2003 -- 15,000 deaths in France alone!

Our news sources have again shot their credibility in the foot with their coverage of this event. First, let's put the New Orleans coverage in perspective. There is great human suffering, and a great need for compassion and aid, and we must and will respond. People are responding with support at every level of need, and the feds have authorized amounts of more than $63,000 per Katrina victim in assistance.

That said, it is important to remember that fewer than 400 have been reported dead. This event ranks around 25th in U.S. history for fatalities caused by a natural disaster. Predictably, however, the ubiquitous and overblown media reports are shamelessly manipulating our perception of this tragedy -- presumably so that we all buy tickets for the train of manufactured outrage.

If the goal of our media has been to report and inform, it has failed. Mainstream media is well known to favor governmental control and the nanny state. The industry is also no fan of the current administration. If the media is able to blow public perception of the suffering in Louisiana into biblical proportions, it gets a twofer: "Obviously, the federal government should have stepped in sooner/more extensively/ ... and obviously this particular administration failed."

Let's look at reality: First, before the hurricane, the governor of Louisiana had to be begged by President Bush to make the evacuation mandatory. Complaints about the elderly and infirm not getting assistance in evacuation? The Louisiana emergency plan states that in an emergency, public transportation, including school buses, can be appropriated for evacuation purposes. Yet we see pictures of parking lots full of school buses that were never used, still sitting empty in their lots, flooded. Complaints that no aid was turning up? Red Cross supply vehicles were turned back on their way to the Superdome, because the governor didn't want the dome to be a magnet for more refugees seeking help. The level of suffering has primarily been a function of local government failing in its own duties and frantically trying to externalize the blame.

What we learn from Katrina is that local areas must have functional disaster plans tailored to their individual vulnerabilities, and decision makers must be leaders enough to execute them.

Here in the Pacific Northwest, we are not prone to hurricanes, but we are looking at a doozy of an earthquake one of these days, and rumor has it that we have volcanoes down the street. Our plan shouldn't be to wait for the feds

[Arlos]

Even before the storm struck the Gulf Coast, Chertoff could have ordered federal agencies into action without any request from state or local officials

Chertoff didn't shift that power to Brown until late afternoon or evening on Aug. 30, about 36 hours after Katrina hit Louisiana and Mississippi.

Chertoff waited some 36 hours to declare Katrina an incident of national significance

According to the National Response Plan, which was unveiled in January by Chertoff's predecessor, Tom Ridge, the secretary of homeland security is supposed to declare an Incident of National Significance when a catastrophic event occurs

According to the plan ... "Notification and full coordination with the States will occur, but the coordination process must not delay or impede the rapid deployment and use of critical resources."

Show me where I have ever defended Blanco at all. She's a useless bimbo and complete waste of flesh who should be impeached and tossed out on her ass. Yes, I know she's a Democrat, but contrary to what I've been accused of here before, I couldn't give a rat's ass WHAT party she is. However, the attempted spin from people here and the Fox News crowd that it is ONLY the fault of the State and Local officials, and the Fed's are blameless is patently ridiculous and false.

<there was more to this, but it got eaten>

-Arlos

[Thon]

i concur

edit - why were like 2 of my replies, along with 1 of finalose's deleted?

[Captain Insano]

Chertoff's a fucking complete tard... This clownshoe actually thinks that concentrating on people of arabic decent is a stupid way to deter terrorism... Instead he would rather be PC and just waste time anal probing catholic nuns at JFK instead of Acqbar the destroyer from Lebanon who just smuggled a nuke dressed up like a shit-tzu through airport security.

When will people learn in general that if you want anything done in a timely, cost-effective and efficient fashion that godamn government is the last place to turn to?

This relieving people of command shit when they fuck up is also a crock of shit. Those dumb mutherfuckers including the governor of LA should be FIRED. Not chastised, or moved to some position where they can do less damage, but FIRED.

Like: "Pack your shit you worthless dung beetle and get the fuck out of my building. OH, and kiss that retirement check goodbye."

When we start canning some of these worthless assholes that have gov't jobs we might see some shit actually get taken care of.

[Tikker]

i couldn't get past

federal documents reviewed by Knight Ridder show.

I immediately had flashbacks to the episode where Michael and Kitt had to fight the semi that had the same powers as Kitt, and the only way to win was to ram kitt full blast in the corner of the bumper of the semi and kitt went insane and almost died omg

[Lyion]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/15/natio ... r=homepage

WASHINGTON, Sept. 14 - Hours after Hurricane Katrina passed New Orleans on Aug. 29, as the scale of the catastrophe became clear, Michael D. Brown recalls, he placed frantic calls to his boss, Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, and to the office of the White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr.

Mr. Brown, then director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said he told the officials in Washington that the Louisiana governor, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, and her staff were proving incapable of organizing a coherent state effort and that his field officers in the city were reporting an "out of control" situation.

"I am having a horrible time," Mr. Brown said he told Mr. Chertoff and a White House official - either Mr. Card or his deputy, Joe Hagin - in a status report that evening. "I can't get a unified command established."

By the time of that call, he added, "I was beginning to realize things were going to hell in a handbasket" in Louisiana. A day later, Mr. Brown said, he asked the White House to take over the response effort.

He said he felt the subsequent appointment of Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honoré of the Army as the Pentagon's commander of active-duty forces began to turn the situation around.

In his first extensive interview since resigning as FEMA director on Monday under intense criticism, Mr. Brown declined to blame President Bush or the White House for his removal or for the flawed response.

"I truly believed the White House was not at fault here," he said.

He focused much of his criticism on Governor Blanco, contrasting what he described as her confused response with far more agile mobilizations in Mississippi and Alabama, as well as in Florida during last year's hurricanes.

But Mr. Brown's account, in which he described making "a blur of calls" all week to Mr. Chertoff, Mr. Card and Mr. Hagin, suggested that Mr. Bush, or at least his top aides, were informed early and repeatedly by the top federal official at the scene that state and local authorities were overwhelmed and that the overall response was going badly.

A senior administration official said Wednesday night that White House officials recalled the conversations with Mr. Brown but did not believe they had the urgency or desperation he described in the interview.

"There's a general recollection of him saying, 'They're going to need more help,' " said the official, who insisted on anonymity because of the delicacy of internal White House discussions.

Mr. Brown's version of events raises questions about whether the White House and Mr. Chertoff acted aggressively enough in the response. New Orleans convulsed in looting and violence after the hurricane, and troops did not arrive in force to restore order until five days later.

The account also suggests that responsibility for the failure may go well beyond Mr. Brown, who has been widely pilloried as an inexperienced manager who previously oversaw horse show judges.

Mr. Brown was removed by Mr. Chertoff last week from directing the relief effort. A 50-year-old lawyer and Republican activist who joined FEMA as general counsel in 2001, Mr. Brown said he had been hobbled by limitations on the power of the agency to command needed resources.

With only 2,600 employees nationwide, he said, FEMA must rely on state workers, the National Guard, private contractors and other federal agencies to supply manpower and equipment.

He said his biggest mistake was in waiting until the end of the day on Aug. 30 to ask the White House explicitly to take over the response from FEMA and state officials.

Of his resignation, Mr. Brown said: "I said I was leaving because I don't want to be a distraction. I want to focus on what happened here and the issues that this raises."

A spokesman for Ms. Blanco denied Mr. Brown's description of disarray in Louisiana's emergency response operation. "That is just totally inaccurate," said Bob Mann, the governor's communications director. "Everything that Mr. Brown needed in terms of resources or information from the state, he had those available to him."

In Washington, Mr. Chertoff's spokesman, Russ Knocke, said there had been no delay in the federal response. "We pushed absolutely everything we could," Mr. Knocke said, "every employee, every asset, every effort, to save and sustain lives."

As Mr. Brown recounted it, the weekend before New Orleans's levees burst, FEMA sent an emergency response team of 10 or 20 people to Louisiana to review evacuation plans with local officials.

By Saturday afternoon, many residents were leaving. But as the hurricane approached early on Sunday, Mr. Brown said he grew so frustrated with the failure of local authorities to make the evacuation mandatory that he asked Mr. Bush for help.

"Would you please call the mayor and tell him to ask people to evacuate?" Mr. Brown said he asked Mr. Bush in a phone call.

"Mike, you want me to call the mayor?" the president responded in surprise, Mr. Brown said. Moments later, apparently on his own, the mayor, C. Ray Nagin, held a news conference to announce a mandatory evacuation, but it was too late, Mr. Brown said. Plans said it would take at least 72 hours to get everyone out.

When he arrived in Baton Rouge on Sunday evening, Mr. Brown said, he was immediately concerned about the lack of coordinated response from Governor Blanco and Maj. Gen. Bennett C. Landreneau, the adjutant general of the Louisiana National Guard.

"What do you need? Help me help you," Mr. Brown said he asked them. "The response was like, 'Let us find out,' and then I never received specific requests for specific things that needed doing."

The most responsive person he could find, Mr. Brown said, was Governor Blanco's husband, Raymond. "He would try to go find stuff out for me," Mr. Brown said.

Governor Blanco's communications director, Mr. Mann, said that she was frustrated that Mr. Brown and others at FEMA wanted itemized requests before acting. "It was like walking into an emergency room bleeding profusely and being expected to instruct the doctors how to treat you," he said.

On Monday night, Mr. Brown said, he reported his growing worries to Mr. Chertoff and the White House. He said he did not ask for federal active-duty troops to be deployed because he assumed his superiors in Washington were doing all they could. Instead, he said, he repeated a dozen times, "I cannot get a unified command established."

The next morning, Mr. Brown said, he and Governor Blanco decided to take a helicopter into New Orleans to see the mayor and assess the situation. But before the helicopter took off, his field coordinating officer, or F.C.O., called from the city on a satellite phone. "It is getting out of control down here; the levee has broken," the staff member told him, he said.

"It is beginning to flood downtown," the field coordinator said. "We have got enough food for 24 hours, but the water is really beginning to rise."

When they boarded the helicopter, Mr. Brown said, he was surprised to find both of Louisiana's senators and several other people along for the ride. The crowd in the Superdome, the city's shelter of last resort, was already larger than expected. But he said he was relieved to see that the mayor had a detailed list of priorities, starting with help to evacuate the Superdome.

Mr. Brown passed the list on to the state emergency operations center in Baton Rouge, but when he returned that evening he was surprised to find that nothing had been done.

"I am just screaming at my F.C.O., 'Where are the helicopters?' " he recalled. " 'Where is the National Guard? Where is all the stuff that the mayor wanted?' "

FEMA, he said, had no helicopters and only a few communications trucks. The agency typically depends on state resources, a system he said worked well in the other Gulf Coast states and in Florida last year.

Meanwhile, "unbeknownst to me," Mr. Brown said, at some point on Monday or Tuesday the hotels started directing their remaining guests to the convention center - something neither FEMA nor local officials had planned.

At the same time, the Superdome was degenerating into "gunfire and anarchy," and on Tuesday the FEMA staff and medical team in New Orleans called to say they were leaving for their own safety. "They were in tears," he said. "They were brokenhearted. It was gut-wrenching."

That night, Mr. Brown said, he called Mr. Chertoff and the White House again in desperation. "Guys, this is bigger than what we can handle," he told them, he said. "This is bigger than what FEMA can do. I am asking for help."

"Maybe I should have screamed 12 hours earlier," Mr. Brown said in the interview. "But that is hindsight. We were still trying to make things work."

By Wednesday morning, Mr. Brown said, he learned that General Honoré was on his way. While the general did not have responsibility for the entire relief effort and the Guard, his commanding manner helped mobilize the state's efforts.

"Honoré shows up and he and I have a phone conversation," Mr. Brown said. "He gets the message, and, boom, it starts happening. With Honoré, I have got exactly what I need."

Mr. Brown said that in one much-publicized gaffe - his repeated statement on live television on Thursday night, Sept. 1, that he had just learned that day of thousands of people at New Orleans's convention center without food or water - "I just absolutely misspoke." In fact, he said, he learned about the evacuees there from the first media reports more than 24 hours earlier, but the reports conflicted with information from local authorities and he had no staff on the site until Thursday.

There were also conflicts with the Congressional delegations that wanted resources for their offices and districts, FEMA officials said. Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi said he "resisted aggressively" a decision by Mr. Brown to dispatch a Navy medical ship to Louisiana instead of his home state.

Mr. Brown acknowledged that he had been criticized for not ordering a complete evacuation or calling in federal troops sooner. But he said the storm made it hard to communicate and assess the situation.

"Until you have been there," he said, "you don't realize it is the middle of a hurricane."

[Captain Insano]

i couldn't get past

federal documents reviewed by Knight Ridder show.

I immediately had flashbacks to the episode where Michael and Kitt had to fight the semi that had the same powers as Kitt, and the only way to win was to ram kitt full blast in the corner of the bumper of the semi and kitt went insane and almost died omg

That is the coolest name ever... I wonder if his brothers are named: Airr Wolf and aAa Team?

[Lyion]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 02196.html

Canal May Have Worsened City's Flooding
Disputed Project Was a 'Funnel' for Surge, Some Say

By Michael Grunwald
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 14, 2005; Page A21

On May 19, Hassan Mashriqui addressed a roomful of emergency planners and warned of a "critical and fundamental flaw" in the coastal defenses for New Orleans. Mashriqui, a computer modeler at Louisiana State University's Hurricane Center, singled out the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a 40-year-old shipping canal aimed at the city's gut.

For years, local residents had decried the little-used canal as a "hurricane highway" that would deliver massive storm surges into their neighborhoods.

But now Mashriqui was offering proof. His hydrodynamic modeling showed that a "funnel" created by the Gulf Outlet and a nearby waterway would amplify storm surges by 20 to 40 percent. He described the funnel as "Crescent City's Trojan Horse," carrying the Gulf of Mexico's waters into the city.

"I showed how dangerous that outlet was -- there was no ambiguity," says Mashriqui, who came to the United States after a tropical cyclone devastated his native Bangladesh. "And now it's all come true."

Authorities have not yet concluded what caused the drowning of New Orleans, and most attention has focused on two breached floodwalls near Lake Pontchartrain, to the city's north. But now experts believe that the initial flooding that overwhelmed St. Bernard Parish and the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans came from the Gulf Outlet, a channel that was an ecological and economic disappointment long before Hurricane Katrina.

Satellite images show that levees along the outlet were severely damaged by storm surges. Flyovers by the Army Corps of Engineers have revealed a path of destruction consistent with Mashriqui's theory that the Outlet provided a pathway for storm surges from the Gulf and neighboring Lake Borgne.

Mashriqui had warned that the confluence of the MRGO and the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway created a funnel that would direct storm surges into the New Orleans Industrial Canal and on into St. Bernard Parish. On the Friday before Katrina made landfall, the parish's state senator, Walter Boasso, complained at a congressional hearing that the federal government was "playing Russian roulette" with his constituents.

Katrina's first storm surges apparently shot up the Gulf Outlet and neighboring Lake Borgne from the southeast, then overtopped levees along the Outlet and the Industrial Canal. The floodwaters eventually breached the Industrial Canal's levees, and officials believe a large portion of the Outlet's levees have been destroyed as well.

"That funnel was a back door into New Orleans," said G. Paul Kemp, an oceanographer at the LSU Hurricane Center. "I don't think there's much doubt that was the initial cause of the disaster."

In 1965, the Corps of Engineers completed the MRGO -- pronounced "Mr. Go" locally -- which was a larger dirt-moving project than the Panama Canal. It was designed as a 76-mile shipping shortcut from the Gulf of Mexico to the Port of New Orleans that would give cargo ships an alternative to the sinuous Mississippi River.

But less than 3 percent of the port's cargo -- fewer than one ship per day -- passes through it. MRGO's freight totals had dropped by half since 1994, while the port's had increased overall. But the Corps still spent $13 million dredging the canal last year.

Critics have calculated the cost to taxpayers at more than $12,000 per vessel per day, and the Outlet has destroyed or damaged more than 20,000 acres of adjacent wetlands.

Shirley Laska, director of the Center for Hazards Assessment, Response and Technology at the University of New Orleans, says local flood-control meetings have been dominated for years by complaints about the Outlet, but nothing has changed.

Before Katrina, the Corps was already studying whether to close the canal. The initial conclusion was no, but the Bush administration ordered the agency to redo its analysis.

The main advocates for the channel were the Port of New Orleans and its supporters in the Corps of Engineers and in Louisiana's congressional delegation. "You had the people of St. Bernard Parish against the Port of New Orleans," Boasso said at a community meeting Monday. "And the Port of New Orleans had the clout."

Port Director Gary LaGrange said "the jury is still out" on whether MRGO contributed to Katrina's devastation. But he said the port would have been willing to give up the Outlet if the Corps had completed a $750 million project to expand a lock on the Industrial Canal, another little-used shipping channel.

Most ships heading to New Orleans use the Mississippi River, but LaGrange said many local businesses rely on the alternative routes, including America's largest chicken exporter -- which now has 5 million pounds of rotting meat on its hands.

In any case, LaGrange said, the city would never have drowned if Congress had authorized levees protecting it from a Category 5 hurricane, instead of a Category 3.

"We've been stuffing a 250-pound body into 180-pound pants," he said. "That's your problem right there."

But in 1998, the St. Bernard Parish Council unanimously called for the channel's closing. In 2002, an LSU study noted that "locally, the MRGO is perceived as a superhighway for storm surge because of the channel's susceptibility to inundation by tropical storms and hurricanes." In 2004, a federally funded simulation drill called Hurricane Pam concluded that surges from a Category 3 hurricane would overwhelm the MRGO "funnel," flood surrounding areas and kill tens of thousands of people.

Mashriqui has dedicated his career to preventing a repetition of the Bangladesh catastrophe, and after the grim experience of the Hurricane Pam study, he became an evangelist for building a floodgate across the throat of the funnel.

When he spoke to emergency responders at the Metairie, La., library on "Hurricane Vulnerability Modeling for Southeast Louisiana," the next speaker was an Army Corps engineer. But he said Corps officials told him they could not study anything that was not in their congressional authorization. One colleague at the Hurricane Center predicted that nothing would happen until hundreds of people died.

"I told everyone: If New Orleans is a boat, here are the holes," Mashriqui said. "This is my passion; I don't want people to die in hurricanes. But nobody did anything."

Several current and former Corps of Engineers employees say the Corps' New Orleans district was reluctant to give up MRGO.

In recent years, Corps officials have spoken about closing it. But last year, they estimated their "project capability" for dredging the outlet at a whopping $38 million, signaling their desire to keep it open. "The general feeling was: 'There's no way we're closing that,' " says one biologist who left the district this year. "They wanted all the business they could get."

John Paul Woodley Jr., the assistant Army secretary who oversees the Corps, said the Bush administration had to instruct the agency to restart its study of whether to close the channel, because it hadn't taken into account the channel's destruction of wetlands, even though it was conducting a separate study of a $14 billion project to restore Louisiana's coastal wetlands. Woodley said there was also concern that further erosion could merge the channel with Lake Borgne -- which happened after Katrina.

Yesterday, Woodley pointedly declined to rule out the possibility that MRGO contributed to the tragedy of Katrina. "I've heard those concerns, and I wouldn't discount them," he said.

Woodley cautioned that the investigation of the catastrophe has just begun, but many scientists, environmentalists and St. Bernard Parish officials said they do not need a forensic investigation by the Corps of Engineers to know that their warnings have come true. Larry Ingargiola, the head of emergency management in St. Bernard, said he knows exactly why only 52 of its 28,000 structures made it through Katrina unscathed.

"That's where the damn water came -- right up MRGO," he said. "We've been screaming about it for years. I don't know how many politicians I've taken on tours. But there it is."

[Thon]

wtf ever happened to 'stop posting just articles'