After Monrovia had calmed down in the fall of 2003, we had brought Bismarck Myrick back from Liberia to a hero's welcome. Colin Powell had awarded him the State Department's Distinguished Service Award, their highest honor, and had given him a nice testimonial dinner. Marilyn and I attended the dinner, as well, and I made sure to make a few nice remarks as well. "Ambassador Myrick, as you undoubtedly learned in both the Army and in the Foreign Service, the reward for a job well done is usually a bigger and tougher job. We haven't quite figured out what that job is yet, but your nation is not through with you. I hope you enjoy your time here at home, but I can promise you that when the time comes, both Secretary Powell and I will be calling on you again." By early 2004 I had sent him to the Middle East as my Special Envoy to the Turks and Kurds with a single order – Make peace!
Meanwhile, we extended the no-fly zone coverage to also ban helicopter flights. One of Bush 41's mistakes after the Gulf War was to limit the no-fly zones only to fixed wing aircraft. He allowed helicopters for humanitarian assistance. Saddam Hussein didn't have a humanitarian bone in his body, so he simply sent in gunships and troop carriers to kill anybody he didn't like. We banned them up north (he could kill all the Shiites he liked, and then take it up with the Iranians!) and backed it up by shooting down a flight of three gunships strafing the Kurdish Peshmerga militia north of Kirkuk. That settled things back down again. Meanwhile, Myrick began shuttle diplomacy between the Kurds and Turkey. The Turks and Kurds hated each other, and Turkey was an ally in NATO, and had a Kurdish extremist problem. Myrick's mandate was to get both sides to calm down and cooperate enough to begin construction of a pipeline carrying Kurdish oil through Turkey. The Turks desperately needed the oil and the jobs, and seemed willing to loosen their restrictions on the Kurdish minority to get the oil. We'd just have to see.
Chapter 159: Katrina
August 23, 2005
Hurricane season officially starts on June 1 and runs through the end of November. Most of the activity is in August and September, but hurricanes in the extremes are not uncommon. Agnes in 1972 was a nasty one, in June, and Sandy in 2012 was in late October and very bad. I knew what was coming, and was not looking forward to it.
It had been a long time, subjectively, since I had witnessed Hurricane Katrina, and while the details were a touch vague, the aftermath was not. Put simply, a massive hurricane blew in off the Gulf of Mexico and took direct aim at New Orleans. Despite all the time in the world to prepare, disaster preparations weren't all that great, and somewhere around two thousand people died! There was plenty of blame to go around, including George W. Bush, who only days into the disaster had publicly praised his FEMA boss, and then fired him just a few days later. Coming on top of the disasters that the two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had become, Hurricane Katrina buried any hope that history would remember George Bush kindly. It stood as a case study in how not to do disasters.
For the last few years I had been beating on Allbaugh and Brown to make FEMA a better agency. While the government is too large for me to actually oversee each and every little operation, I could demand accountability and request realistic and periodic updates. One thing I stressed to them was that they needed to run frequent and realistic dry runs. Get together with the state of California and the city of Los Angeles and practice what you would do during a major earthquake. Go to the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma, and pick a city to practice a tornado disaster in, and then go to that town and practice what you would do. Go find a city on the Mississippi and practice what would happen when the levees break and it floods.
This stuff happens all the time, and while you can never predict it will happen in any particular place, you can definitely predict it will happen somewhere on a regular timeline. Flooding in Dubuque will be different than flooding in Duluth, but a flood is a flood, and what you learn in one place will be useable in another. The same went for tornadoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, forest fires, and so forth. Furthermore, if you handle it right, the practice sessions get a huge amount of positive publicity.
As part of this, the agency had prepared a list of the Top 10 Cities for various disasters. For floods that was mostly cities along the Mississippi, for hurricanes it was cities along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, for earthquakes there was a different list, and so forth. Then each city was provided a grant to determine the best ways to evacuate the city as needed, and exercises were planned around these lists. New Orleans landed on two lists, hurricanes and flooding. For real fun, they played a game in New Orleans called Beat the Feds. We would provide them a grant to study the problem, half the money would disappear, they would dust off the previous study and retype it, and report that they needed more money for another study. Actual preparation was secondary at best.
One of the overwhelming concerns I had was that Hurricane Katrina was going to smash into quite probably the single most unready city in the country. If New Orleans didn't exist, we'd have had to invent it! It is easily the most corrupt city in the nation! Per capita it has one of the highest murder rates. The police in New Orleans have a national reputation for graft and corruption, and more than a few of those murders are committed by cops killing for hire. Other crimes weren't far behind. Physically the city itself is mostly below sea level, and protected by a system of levees and pumps. Since an incredibly corrupt city and state government handled the contracts for most of this stuff, it was questionable whether it would function even in good times. As for the government, New Orleans had a black Mayor and a white Governor, neither of whom really cared much for the other one, and they were both Democrats and neither of them liked me.
In good times, the city had a certain reputation for fun. 'Laissez les bons temps rouler!' – Let the good times roll! – is the city's slogan. Mardi gras is just an excuse for a gigantic party, and it seems like there is always a party. It's a fun place for visitors.
In bad times, the place turns to shit!
Being informed of weather events takes up about 60 seconds in the morning when I get my daily brief. Most of the time it is fairly quiet and normal. In a nation the size of America, it is always raining somewhere, it is always hot and sunny somewhere, and it is always snowing somewhere. I am informed when things start going bad, but you can also always figure it's going to go bad somewhere. There are certain criteria that need to be met to declare someplace a disaster area, and you can count on the appropriate Congressman or Senator to call me asking for Federal assistance. As a general rule, you pretty much rubberstamp the requests for assistance. After all, dealing with disasters is really the job of any government. You normally don't say no.
Katrina became an official storm on Tuesday, August 23, though it was just a Tropical Depression in the Bahamas at that time. It was given a name, Katrina, the next day. By then it was obvious that this was a storm that was going to hit the United States somewhere, and not veer right and head into the middle of the Atlantic. I was informed that morning that we had a possible hurricane level event in the offing, named Tropical Storm Katrina. As soon as I heard that name, I knew I had to get involved.
Shortly after my briefing, and my early morning staff meeting, I called Michael Brown. "Michael, it's Carl Buckman. How are you doing this morning?"
"I'm fine, Mister President. How can I help you this morning?"