Cutting through the blame

Everyone says the disastrous flooding of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina could have been predicted, and everyone is right. Yet everyone also professes to be astonished at the equally disastrous response on the part of the authorities. They should not be. The one was no less predictable than the other.

In the furious war of recriminations that broke out almost coincident with the flood, most of the attention has focused on the alleged incompetence of particular individuals, Democrats blaming the (Republican) president, Republicans blaming the (Democratic) mayor and governor. Ideologues of the right and left, meanwhile, soon traced the breakdown to its source: it was either too much government, or too little.

But what looks like incompetence is more usually explained by systemic failings. And while the centralized decision-making and perverse incentives of big government make it especially prone to these, in this case big government is all we’ve got: there is no market solution to disaster relief.

What we can do is identify the worst organizational gaps exposed by the faltering relief effort. Of these, the very worst seem to have been not so much within each organization as between them: at the interface between state and local government, between federal and state, between public and private agencies, and so on. The sheer number of different organizations with responsibility for the relief effort, and the resulting confusion in lines of authority, must surely take much of the blame when all of this is sorted out.

Some background. As everyone now knows, New Orleans is a city built in defiance of common sense: a monument either to man’s ingenuity or man’s folly, set in a flood plain many feet below sea level, the surrounding waters held back by a series of levees, and the whole thing smack in the middle of hurricane alley. So the first failure of planning was right there.

The levees, indeed, were as much the problem as the solution: instead of allowing the Mississippi River to deposit its silt as it arrived at the Gulf, which was what created the flood plain in the first place, the levees diverted the river and the silt past the city and out to sea. So the city slowly sank under its own weight, and the levees with them, meaning they provided less and less protection over time. And hovering over all this was the statistical inevitability that one day a hurricane would strike the city with sufficient force to overcome the barriers.

It’s not true to say that nothing was done to prevent this, but not enough was done -- a failure that goes back decades, embracing all levels of government and both parties. (For all the abuse that the Bush administration has sustained over this, the Washington Post reports that Louisiana has received more federal funding for civil works projects in the last five years than any other state. But while “much of that Louisiana money was spent to try to keep low-lying New Orleans dry ... hundreds of millions of dollars have gone to unrelated water projects demanded by the state's congressional delegation.”)

No one seemed willing to spend the billions of dollars it would take to insulate New Orleans from a hurricane-inspired deluge, which after all might not happen while they were in office. Instead, the plan was to evacuate the city. Problem: hurricanes typically give little advance warning, and even one that seems to have the city in its sights may as easily veer to one side at the last moment. So any evacuation order was likely either to be a false alarm, or to be too late to do any good.

Small wonder that, over the years, many of New Orleans’ citizens had come to ignore these. On top of which, given the city’s well-known demographics, many more were unable to get out of town if they wanted to. Even that might have been overcome: the city’s emergency plan speaks vaguely of using buses to transport the indigent and the disabled. But the city failed to use the buses it had. As revealed in photos posted by Internet bloggers, hundreds of them were left in their depots.

Evacuation having failed, the issue became relief of the survivors. As the crisis spread and the services of different organizations were engaged, failure piled upon failure. The city’s famously decrepit police force soon disintegrated, hundreds of officers proving either unable or unwilling to report for duty. Yet the National Guard did not immediately take their place, in part because the governor hesitated to call them in, refusing either to invoke the help of neighbouring states or to allow the President to federalize the Guard.

Survivors were encouraged to shelter in the Superdome, though this had been the scene of disorder in previous evacuations, and though it was anticipated it would quickly become uninhabitable. The justification was that it was to be strictly a temporary refuge, a staging point on the way out of town -- to the point that state officials prevented the Red Cross from making deliveries of food and water to the inhabitants, for fear that this would encourage them to stay. Yet when some tried to leave the city, they were blocked by police from neighbouring jurisdictions.

The stories of overlap and confusion, of conflicting orders or their total absence, multiply from there: the doctors from Oregon who were forbidden from assisting for lack of in-state certification; the firemen from out of state who were first diverted to Atlanta for sexual harassment training; the Walmart trucks who were prevented from delivering water; the tales go on and on.

Everyone wants to pin the blame on one level of government or another. But no one government could have created this mess. It took the combined efforts of all of them.