The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  As in most situations, dark humor was on display at the filling stations and motel parking lots of Baton Rouge. “At least we don’t have to watch the goddamn ‘Aints’ lose another goddamn game,” one evacuee driver chuckled. Another guy walked out of a convenience store holding a copy of People with Jennifer Aniston on the cover. “Next week she’ll be on again,” he laughed, “only wearing rubber boots.” The story of Strickland’s FEMA convoy getting lost had spread like wildfire. No matter how large the population in Baton Rouge had grown, it was still a small town. People began to joke that they would name their next baby “FEMA Aid” or “Federal Government,” because it took nine months to arrive. David Letterman later devoted one of his nightly top-ten lists to “Questions for the FEMA Director Application,” asking “Are you able to convey a false sense of security?” and “Can you screw up bad enough to take the heat off the President?”27 All over the Gulf South, a new verb had been created: “I’ve been FEMA-ed.”

  But there was nothing funny about being in Marty Bahamonde’s shoes. Using his trusty BlackBerry, a flabbergasted Bahamonde continued to warn of the dire conditions in New Orleans. He had seen the flooding with his own eyes. In all his years with FEMA, he had never seen such disorganization as there was at City Hall EOC and the Superdome. His urgent e-mails to Brown, asking for food, water, and medical aid seemed to fall on deaf ears. “I got the word to him as strongly as I could,” Bahamonde would later tell the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. “I don’t know where that information went.”28

  IV

  By all accounts, Michael Brown was an unlikely head of an emergency organization like FEMA. It’s been said that under his leadership, FEMA lost the “M” for Management. His official curriculum vitae was larded with troubling discrepancies. It was certain that he was a native of Oklahoma, earned a bachelor’s degree in public administration and political science from Central State University in Ohio, and went on to get a law degree at Oklahoma City University. But from there his biography got murky. In the wake of Katrina, Time published a scathing story titled “How Reliable Is Brown’s Résumé?” Brown claimed, for example, that from 1975 to 1978 he had been “overseeing the emergency services division of Edmond, Oklahoma.” In fact, he had been “more like an intern,” according to the city’s public relations head. Worse, he claimed on his résumé to have been an “outstanding political science professor, Central State University.” False—he was only a student there. Anxious to showcase evangelical credentials for the Republican right, he claimed he had been director of the Oklahoma Christian Home from 1983 onward—a stretch, since he had never been affiliated with it in any capacity. There were many other falsehoods on his padded résumé, which the White House swallowed when he was appointed head of FEMA in 2003.29 “It’s the kind of thing you’d think somebody would have caught by now,” Time reporter Carolina Miranda told CBS’s The Early Show following Katrina, “but, clearly, nobody has.”30 Without being specific, Brown claimed that Time distorted his record. But as of this writing, Brown has not shown any proof to refute Time’s story, nor did he file a libel suit.

  Nothing in Brown’s résumé, whether exaggerated or not, recommended him to lead America’s disaster relief efforts. Self-centered and comically suave, Brown was a cuff-link-shooting Republican dandy. Unflaggingly loyal to bosses, he was a kind, capable administrator, known for his dry, deadpan humor. Bill Dashner, the former city manager of Edmond, Oklahoma, recalled that the dapper Brown “always had on a suit and a starched white shirt.”31 At the time President Bush tapped Brown, he was second in command at FEMA; he’d been a staff attorney there, brought in with his longtime friend Joseph Allbaugh. Before that, Brown was the failed head of horse-show judging at the International Arabian Horse Association. His tenure there was fraught with lawsuits filed against the organization over disciplinary actions.32 Eventually, he was forced to resign. “There was a feeling,” said Stephen Jones, a prominent Oklahoma lawyer who was Brown’s boss in the early 1980s, “that he was not serious and somewhat shallow.”33

  To understand why President Bush would appoint Brown to lead FEMA one must go back to the relief organization’s founding. The Federal Emergency Management Agency was the brainchild of President Jimmy Carter, who created it in 1979 as a direct result of a National Governors’ Conference petition. “At that time there were sixteen different federal agencies that dealt with disasters like Katrina and we put it together with three specific commitments that I hoped at the time were permanent,” Carter explained in a speech on September 19, 2005, at American University. “One was that it would be headed by highly qualified professionals in dealing with disaster. Secondly, that they would be completely independent and not under another agency that would submerge it. And third, that it would be adequately funded. Well, I thought that that’d be a permanent commitment. But, as you know, all three of those provisions have been violated in recent years and obviously there were deep problems at the local and the state level and at the federal level, so I think now is the best time not to look at blaming about Katrina, but to try to correct the defects that have evolved in recent years and make sure they’re not repeated.”34

  President Carter was barely able to get FEMA off the ground before leaving the White House. The incoming Reagan administration saw the outfit as a feel-good liberal money drain, a cousin to HUD and HEW. And, although Carter wasn’t complicit, by 1981, the agency already smacked of patronage. For a president, appointing a person as director was akin to giving a donor or friend the ambassadorship to Luxembourg—a cushy, largely honorary post. When Hurricane Hugo slammed into the Carolinas during President George H. W. Bush’s watch in 1989, FEMA was roundly criticized for being a bureaucratic joke, a disaster relief organization with no clout. Senator Fritz Hollings, a South Carolina Democrat, lambasted FEMA employees as “the sorriest bunch of jackasses I’ve ever known.”35 Under President Bill Clinton’s leadership, FEMA was run by Arkansan James Lee Witt, a true emergency management expert.* The agency professionalized its response times and fine-tuned its preparation models. Then came George W. Bush.

  As Texas governor, Bush had learned to rely on his chief of staff, Joseph Allbaugh, who would also be his campaign manager during the 2000 presidential election. Allbaugh knew how to raise funds and troubleshoot, but he knew absolutely nothing about disaster relief. He was rewarded for his election effort by being named director of FEMA. When Allbaugh retired from the post in 2002, owing to FEMA’s absorption into the new Department of Homeland Security, his job went to Michael Brown, his old college friend. To give Brown credit, he performed ably in Florida during the series of hurricanes there in 2004. From August 13 to September 26, two Category 3 storms (Charley and Frances) and two Category 4 storms (Ivan and Jeanne) walloped the state. They were a relentless quartet, leaving 124 people dead and a fifth of all homes with at least some damage.36 The aid to ravaged areas was delivered in above-average time. It was a good show. However, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel later went on the attack: while Brown had turned a blind eye, FEMA had given millions of dollars in aid to counties that had virtually no hurricane damage. It was an embarrassing scene, as Brown was at the center of a costly controversy. In blistering language, the Sun-Sentinel—along with Democratic Congressman Robert Wexler—demanded that Brown resign at once.37

  Whatever the circumstances the year before, Brown was still very much on the job on August 29, 2005. He was head of the U.S. government response to Katrina. The White House took its cues from him. Brown sent e-mails that would become permanent monuments to a detached Washington mind-set, out of touch with the needs of everyday Americans. One politician who was onto Brown’s ineffectiveness early on was Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour. After Katrina decimated the Gulf Coast, Brown assured Barbour that the disaster would soon be handily addressed. “FEMA,” Brown boasted, “had lots of hurricane practice in Florida.” A gruff, blunt Barbour wasn’t impressed. “I don’t think you’ve seen anything like this,
” he snapped. “We’re talking nuclear devastation.”38

  During 2004, Brown’s first full year as director, FEMA had responded to the four big hurricanes in Florida. The state of Florida had been well prepared, though. And with the 2004 presidential election approaching, so was President George W. Bush’s financial response. FEMA was conspicuously generous in its open-checkbook response, taking criticism afterward only for handing out too much money. Over $100 million went to people and businesses that hadn’t sustained any damage at all.

  Brown, whom the President nicknamed “Brownie,” served the administration fairly well. If a rash of deadly disasters can ever be said to have “gone well,” the 2004 Florida hurricane season had met the criteria. State officials in Tallahassee, in fact, knew days before each hurricane made landfall exactly what recovery funding and rescue operations they might need, and Brown was given a blank check with which to satisfy their robust requests. With the help of state officials and relief workers, FEMA moved displaced victims into hotels and produced fleets of trailers for the homeless. A political lesson had been learned, one that unfortunately wouldn’t help the Gulf South in 2005: it’s best to have a natural diaster in the heat of campaign season, when your state is up for grabs during a presidential election year. “FEMA’s often invisible and incompetent reaction to the devastation in New Orleans stands in sharp contrast to the way the relief agency and the entire Bush administration sprang into action last summer as a series of deadly hurricanes—Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne—battered the crucial swing state of Florida just weeks before election day,” editorialized Eric Boehlert of Salon.com. “Partisan politics were certainly in the air during the busy [2004] hurricane season.”39

  On a less cynical note, Florida had a distinct advantage over Louisiana. Once the Florida hurricanes were over, they were over. Damage assessment teams could file reports and begin the arduous cleanup processes, including blue-tarping houses with damaged roofs and offering trailers to the victims. Before insurance companies could deliver on their contractual obligations, they needed to enter the vast hurricane devastation zone and make damage assessments. In Greater New Orleans, however, the hurricane disaster was followed by the flood disaster, which was followed by human disasters—the Great Deluge broke down relief efforts on every level. It was one thing for FEMA to help 20,000 seriously distressed people in Florida, and quite another to provide relief for 400,000 in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.

  By Monday afternoon, with New Orleans streets full of water and the entire Gulf South region full of victims in need of rescue, FEMA was being tugged on by thousands of disparate entities. At the Baton Rouge EOC out of which FEMA was working, Louisiana Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu, for example, was handed a list of dire necessities by A. J. “Junior” Rodriguez, the president of St. Bernard Parish. A distraught Rodriguez, recognizing already that FEMA was MIA, lamented that his parish had “no body bags, no ice.” There was an immediate demand for medical equipment, chlorine bleach, cleaning supplies, inoculations, tents, food, and boats. Rodriguez also asked Landrieu for generators, lots of them—to be dropped off at the Chalmette slip.40 This list was indicative of the first wave of materials needed from FEMA by all the parishes in Louisiana and the counties in Alabama and Mississippi.

  Inundated with dozens, if not hundreds of such lists, Brown needed the multifaceted imagination of General George C. Marshall, Paul Hoffman, and Jean Monnet to meet the plethora of Louisiana and Mississippi relief requests. All that he possessed, however, were the routine skills of a quartermaster—a linear bureaucratic breed for whom creativity or improvisation was decidedly a detriment. For individuals of Brown’s mind-set, there was only the “recovery plan,” which was to be executed as fastidiously as possible. Any deviations from this plan could lead, so the mind-set believes, only to prolonged lawsuits, distribution glitches, and chronic heartburn. Most seasoned rescue and recovery experts, however, understood that improvisation was the fundamental modus operandi in a disaster, flexibility being the true guiding principle. At headquarters in Washington, D.C., Leo Bosner, a watch officer in FEMA’s National Response Coordination Center and the person who wrote the “national situation updates,” seethed at Brown’s thumb-twirling slowness, later telling PBS’s Frontline that his boss was “out of his depth” during the debacle.41

  Within hours of the hurricane, an astonishing array of offers of help had been made to FEMA, from Amtrak, faith-based groups, small businesses, and large companies like Marriott, Home Depot, and Continental Airlines. Over the ensuing days, those would be followed by offers from foreign governments, such as Cuba (Cuban medical brigade), Germany (military planes with fifteen tons of military rations), and Kuwait ($100 million in cash plus $400 million in oil products). Far-flung American communities galloped to give all they could, volunteer firefighters from Houston, doctors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and five hundred airboats from Florida. What angered Bosner and other relief professionals at FEMA was how Brown delayed the deployment of all such offers of aid, insisting that they wait until a chain of command could be established. FEMA “will not authorize the airboats to enter New Orleans,” a FEMA report stated. “Without that permission, they would be subject to arrest and would not receive security and supply services.”42 Then there were the inquiries from standard FEMA contractors, who couldn’t understand why they were still awaiting orders. For example, Cool Express, an ice company in Blue River, Wisconsin, had a standing contract for ice deliveries in disaster situations. Yet the company didn’t receive permission to send trucks to the region until 4 P.M. on Monday. By that time, the ice wouldn’t even reach the staging area in Dallas until late Tuesday.43 After that, it would require an eight-hour drive to southern Louisiana.

  Most FEMA employees were mortified by such failures, for they prided themselves on helping those in distress, not turning a cold shoulder or fumbling as if the football was greased. According to Bosner, top FEMA officials, furious at Brown, were saying, “My God, why aren’t we doing more? Why aren’t we getting the orders? Why isn’t this being treated like a real emergency? People were just lost.”44

  For the insurance companies, it was not as if New Orleans were dead, but there had been a massive stroke. The recovery process would be hard and slow, and the victim never quite the same again. After hurricanes, insurance companies usually rush to set up “catastrophe centers,” to help with the losses, but in New Orleans, due to Mayor Nagin’s decision not to evacuate hotels before the storm, State Farm had no place to lodge its team of damage assessors. “Katrina was odd,” David A. Ross, claims manager for Louisiana, recalled. “They wouldn’t even let us into New Orleans to help out. But at various blockades, we’d flash our State Farm badge and the police would let us through.” Eventually State Farm took over a building in the Warehouse District and began to assess the widespread damage. “We Indian-traded our way around,” Ross said. “I swapped a bunch of generators to a hotel in exchange for eighty rooms.”45 In Louisiana alone, State Farm would eventually pay out more than $3 billion in claims to homeowners and over $300 million in automobile claims.

  V

  Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer and America’s biggest private employer, stepped up to the plate by offering vast warehouses full of essential supplies to those stricken by the Great Deluge. Under the lightning-quick leadership of CEO Lee Scott, Wal-Mart used its muscle to meet the needs of the victims in the three ravaged Gulf Coast states, donating emergency supplies ranging from Strawberry Pop-Tarts to Hanes underwear. The company also opened its stores to emergency workers, who were allowed to take the supplies they needed. “Wal-Mart was our FEMA,” said Warren Riley of the New Orleans Police Department.46 For a company often criticized as a money-grubbing monolith hell-bent on destroying small Main Street businesses, the relief effort was a masterstroke of public relations. As FEMA sputtered, Wal-Mart filled the void, offering provisions to officials, giving cash advances to employees forced to relocat
e from the Gulf Coast, and even guaranteeing employees jobs. As the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review noted, Wal-Mart “stepped over or around the confused, floundering and sluggish bodies of federal, state and local government relief agencies and sprang into action.”47Fortune magazine praised Wal-Mart for having its own in-house meteorologist who recommended, six days before Katrina made landfall, that the company prepare itself to rush into the projected destruction zone. “The Red Cross and FEMA,” Bay St. Louis Mayor Eddie Favre suggested, “should take classes on logistics, mobilization and compassion from Wal-Mart. They opened up their Waveland store and gave us whatever they needed. It was awesome.”48

  At that Waveland Wal-Mart, in fact, CEO Scott directed that a Wal-Mart Express be opened, a smaller version of the discount department store, specifically created to cater to the post-Katrina needs of the Mississippi residents. And the philanthropy kept coming: the chain donated $15 million to the Red Cross and other Katrina-related funds. The Walton Family Foundation, the charitable legacy of founder Sam Walton, gave an additional $8 million. Critics of the massive company charged that even those sums were piffling—chump change for a corporate giant that in 2004 earned $285 billion in revenues and $10.3 billion in profits—but the fact remains that all across the Gulf Coast, Wal-Mart brought relief during the first hours and days of the recovery effort.

  Within a day of the hurricane, Coca-Cola had assigned an incident management team at its headquarters in Atlanta to coordinate a relief effort on behalf of the company and its hundreds of independent bottlers. The next day, the company gave $5 million to the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, and other charities. A portion was dedicated to assistance for Coca-Cola employees in the affected region. The Coca-Cola example was a reminder that it was one thing to donate food or supplies, and quite another to distribute them. In many cases, relief agencies look on donations of materials as a burden, since they cannot move or track them. Coca-Cola had the means to deliver its goods—with its own trucks—and the foresight to do so.