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Books

After the deluge

A year after Hurricane Katrina, a look at what went wrong, who was to blame and how New Orleans might come back.

By MARGO HAMMOND
Published August 6, 2006

This month marks the first anniversary of a hurricane with a lovely name but a deadly punch. Throughout the past year, several books have appeared to chronicle Katrina's assault on the Gulf Coast and the horrifying days that followed. Each in its own way tries to answer the question New Orleans writer Jason Berry recently posed:

How did the country that put men on the moon fail to rescue survivors in the Superdome?

If size were the only factor, Douglas Brinkley's 700-plus-page doorstopper, The Great Deluge, would win the best Katrina book contest hands down. Providing extensive background on the conditions of the city before the hurricane hit on Aug. 29 and painstakingly recreating, through detailed interviews, the chaotic aftermath, Brinkley, a professor of history at Tulane University, seems to have left no stone or piece of soggy debris unexamined.

His book, which came out in May, does not shrink from finger pointing, holding just about every political official involved in the disaster responsible for mismanagement, from President Bush on down. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin is singled out for particular scorn: Brinkley criticizes him for everything from the city's rescue plan, which the author says favored the rich, to taking too long a shower on Air Force One on the fourth day after Katrina hit.

More readable - and measured in its reproaches - is Jed Horne's account of those shameful days. In Breach of Faith, the metro editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his part in the newspaper's coverage of Katrina, provides both touching stories of survival and harsh facts of failure.

Horne knows and loves his city, and to answer those who despair that New Orleans will ever make a comeback, he points to two success stories: the Dutch who developed a flood defense system after their own disaster in 1953, and the Japanese who rebuilt Kobe after a devastating earthquake in 1995.

In 2002, in a series for the Times-Picayune, John McQuaid and Mark Schleifstein tried to sound the alarm about New Orleans' vulnerability to storm surges. Now in Path of Destruction: The Devastation of New Orleans and the Coming Age of Superstorms, they warn that Katrina won't be the last storm to pose such dangers to their city and others. Despite their own research into the subject, they admit that even they were surprised after Katrina to discover the extent of human culpability in the tragedy.

"Initially it had been easy to blame the destruction of this great American city on Mother Nature," they write. "But the more we investigated, the more obvious it was that man had set the stage."

For Ivor van Heeden, the South African deputy director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, the Army Corps of Engineers holds primary responsibility for setting the city up for ruin. The corps, van Heeden accuses in The Storm, failed to maintain the levees in New Orleans, despite warnings that they would not hold, and had underplayed the dangers hurricanes with the force of Katrina posed. As Katrina moved across the gulf, van Heeden says, it generated the energy equivalent to 100,000 atomic bombs.

Of course, the corps is not the only governmental agency that shares the blame. The city, for example, had no effective plan to evacuate those without transportation. But Christopher Cooper and Robert Block, the authors of Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security, coming out this week, are most concerned about the spectacular failure of the national defense system response.

"If, after four years and billions of dollars spent on preparedness, Homeland Security can't handle a hurricane," say the Wall Street Journal reporters, "it is likely to struggle when faced with any manner of other disasters."

Sure, New Orleans is "uniquely fragile geographically and confusingly exotic culturally," but it is "just an average place in the scale of risk," they stress. Hurricanes are disasters that approach at what the authors call "walking speed, giving federal officials days to plot a counterstrategy," not terrorist acts that arrive unannounced.

In the case of Katrina, no counterstrategy was planned, even though in 2004, the Homeland Security Department itself, according to Cooper and Block, had "included a hurricane strike in New Orleans in its pantheon of most-feared disasters," right up there with a nuclear attack and a sabotage of the food supply.

"The preparation for and response to Hurricane Katrina should disturb all Americans," the authors conclude. "If New Orleans is vulnerable, so are we all."

*   *   *

DISASTER: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security

By Christopher Cooper and Robert Block

Times Books, $26, 333 pp

PATH OF DESTRUCTION: The Devastation of New Orleans and the Coming Age of Superstorms

By John McQuaid and Mark Schleifstein

Little, Brown, $25.99, 384 pp

THE STORM: What Went Wrong and Why During Hurricane Katrina - The Inside Story From One Louisiana Scientist

By Ivor van Heerden

Viking, $25.95, 320 pp

BREACH OF FAITH: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City

By Jed Horne

Random House, $25.95, 384 pp

THE GREAT DELUGE: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast

By Douglas Brinkley

Morrow, $29.95, 716 pp

[Last modified August 4, 2006, 08:48:56]