Katrina anniversary

A large percentage of the southeastern seaboard was battered by Katrina in August 2005 but it was Louisiana's largest city, New Orleans, which grabbed the majority of the headlines; first for suffering extensive flooding and then becoming the focus of a national and international outcry as survivors and refugees struggled in the storm's wake.

Katrina, initially a Category 5 storm which was downgraded to Category 3 by the time it hit land on August 29, missed the city itself, hitting the nearby St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes, but the storm surge caused more than 50 breaches in drainage canal levees and navigational canal levees flooding almost 80 percent of New Orleans within two days of landfall.

"In most cases, the water just swept over the levees but some of the levees were breached due to design and constructional flaws," Max Horner, a retired engineering consultant who worked on disaster relief projects with the UN and International Red Cross, told Deutsche Welle. "At least two, and possibly three, of the breaches were caused by water seeping through the soil in which the levee pilings were set in more shallow earth. Those driven down about eight meters survived but those which were in less earth were compromised."

"Some levees failed due to the fact that they had not been designed to deal with such a surge of water. The safety margins on some areas were below the level required to withstand such that amount of water," he said.

Horner believes that there were also failures in maintenance practices and also the construction of the city's flood-control system, which was almost a century old and whose design basically carried water into the city of New Orleans.

Underground systems far away from the city could have prevented a certain amount of the metropolitan flooding, Horner said, while regular maintenance, increased safety margins and structural awareness could have saved more of the levees.

Since Katrina, the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) have been working on getting the levee system of the Lake Ponchartrain Basin Vicinity, which includes New Orleans East and St. Bernard Parish, up to the federal standard of 99 percent protection by the end of 2011. But despite the significant improvements, observers say the US government has still left the standard of protection at dangerously low levels.

Preventing another disaster in the region may be of high importance to future generations but many residents and commentators continue to make the point that the government should be doing more to help the survivors of the 2005 disaster.

Housing problems set to continue, warns FEMA chief

Richard Skinner, the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) inspector general, said only last week that the US government could end up repeating mistakes seen after Hurricane Katrina if it does not improve its plans for housing people after major disasters.

Skinner told the House Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday that the agency still relies too heavily on temporary mobile homes. Such housing is adequate for routine disasters but inadequate to handle widespread housing losses from catastrophic events.

Four years after Katrina hit the southeastern coastline of the US and the Gulf of Mexico, about 3,000 households still remain in federally supplied trailers and mobile homes in the southern states of Louisiana and Mississippi.

While this number is a considerable reduction of the 143,000 who were homeless along the Gulf of Mexico coast in the immediate aftermath of the storms, it still raises questions about the efficiency of the US government's National Response Plan and its post-disaster relief planning in the years since the catastrophe.

A report by the National Science Foundation investigating team, one of three teams analyzing infrastructural failures in the wake of Katrina, stated that, in the state of Louisiana alone, only around 37 percent of the 90,000 displaced families were provided with trailers in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane.

The report said the authorities were overwhelmed by the amount of people in need of housing. Then it showed, in the six months that followed the hurricane, there were more problems arising from the amount of claims for disaster loans from homeowners which just couldn’t be met, meaning tens of thousands of people were still in temporary accommodation waiting for their applications to be processed, again suggesting the authorities were swamped by the unprecedented numbers.

Mismanagement concerns remain

The US government is not only facing on-going questions over policies pertaining to hurricane protection and post-disaster relief. There are continuing concerns over the mismanagement and lack of leadership in the relief efforts in response to the storm and its aftermath, and more specifically the delayed response to the flooding of New Orleans, and the subsequent state of chaos.

Residents remained stranded by flood waters without water, food or shelter while deaths from thirst, exhaustion, and violence, were recorded in the days after the storm had passed. Many of those who escaped the flooding faired only marginally better with a similar lack of provisions being experienced by the 30,000 who crammed into the Louisiana Superdome and the 25,000 who took refuge at the New Orleans Civic Center.

Communication breakdown

Another area in which residents felt let down was the lack of communication and information coming from the authorities in the immediate aftermath.

"Communications to the public about the hurricane, evacuation information and recovery efforts could have been improved," according to Michael Lewis, an engineering consultant with the US law firm, Wiley Rein, and a member of the independent panel charged with investigating communications failures during the crisis. "The Emergency Alert System (EAS) was not fully activated and the information accessible to persons with disabilities and non-English-speaking Americans was limited."

Lewis recommended that in future situations, the authorities should work with federal, state and local agencies to ensure consistent and reliable emergency information through a consolidated and coordinated public information program.

He added that steps must be taken to ensure that persons with disabilities and non-English speaking Americans, especially in cities with a diverse ethnic demographic like New Orleans, receive meaningful emergency information. "State and local emergency agencies should make critical emergency information accessible to persons with disabilities and non-English speaking Americans," he said.

With this year's season approaching and reports of 12 named storms with at least half of those with hurricane potential, residents of the southeastern US coastline are hoping that these lessons have been learned. Those who survived Katrina and tried to return to a normal life in New Orleans will also be hoping that if the city is hit by another major storm, the levees will hold this time - but if they don't, efficient help will come faster than it did in 2005.

Author: Nick Amies
Editor: Rob Mudge