For the next few weeks, right through the end of September, the only thing on the news was Katrina, Katrina, Katrina. The destruction was simply mind-numbing. While the photos of New Orleans under 20 feet of water were riveting, vastly more damage was actually done to coastal communities from Florida to Texas. In most of these towns and cities everything man-made was destroyed! Ninety-plus percent of the homes were gone, and the remaining ones were condemned. Ditto businesses; ditto ditto every church, school, hospital, clinic, police and fire station, etc. Every bridge was washed out, every road was cut, and every telephone pole and power line was down. Every single road was blocked by hundreds of trees. There was no electric, phone, or cell service, and every single transformer and substation was blown. Every radio, television, and cell tower had toppled. We could bring in every spare piece of equipment from around the nation and it still wouldn't be sufficient. Refugees in the millions were displaced, more than during the Dustbowl of the Great Depression. If John Steinbeck was still alive and was writing The New Grapes of Wrath, the Joads would live in Pass Christian, Mississippi, and would move to a trailer park in Beaumont, Texas, the day before Rita hit.
To add insult to injury, roughly a month after Katrina, Hurricane Rita slammed into the northeast Texas coast. Prior to Katrina, Rita would have been an unimaginable disaster in its own right. Compared to Katrina, Rita was small potatoes, and never got the press it truly deserved. Many of the repairs underway in Louisiana were destroyed, and worst of all, many of the refugees had been relocated to eastern Texas, and now went through it all over again. Thousands of people were suffering from post-traumatic stress, the same as some soldiers did after combat. Mike Brown had returned to Washington after a couple of weeks in Louisiana; when Rita was announced, he simply hopped on a plane and flew to Texas without prompting. He earned his paycheck that fall, in spades!
The good news was that by being proactive at the start and forcing the mandatory evacuation early, we managed to minimize the loss of life. Rather than the almost 2,000 dead that I knew could have happened, we lost just under 250. It was still too damn many, but a lot of people had been saved, and rescue operations had been much better coordinated and quicker than they could have been. I didn't need to fire Michael Brown, for instance, and he and John McCain got a lot of very favorable press for how they had handled things. I was content to let them, since John was going to need some help when he announced he was going to run for my job.
There was a weird dynamic going on, to my way of thinking. I knew how much better this had been handled than before, but it was still a disaster by any heretofore known standard. While the governors of Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Texas all hailed Mike Brown and John McCain for the work they had done and the leadership they had shown, since they were all Republicans it was treated as partisan politics. Meanwhile, Kathleen Blanco, the Governor of Louisiana, and Ray Nagin, the Mayor of New Orleans, were loudly complaining how we had all made everything worse, and how they would have done it so much better. Governor Blanco was still smarting at our overruling her on a half dozen different measures (for instance, she had refused to order the state fish and game department to rescue people; their boss ordered them in on his own, overriding her) and wanted to take back control of the National Guard and kick everybody else out – just send her the money and she would fix the problem! Meanwhile, Ray Nagin, who had been detained and dumped at the Superdome, was back and telling the residents of his city that I had personally taken my finger out of the dike, and thus flooded the city. He began a city by city tour of various refugee areas, telling them how I was personally delaying the recovery of the city (send him the money, not the Governor!) and that New Orleans would be rebuilt again as a 'Chocolate City', throwing racial tensions into the mix. Then it came out that in 2004, during a mock emergency meeting to simulate a hurricane hitting the city, nobody from either the Governor's staff nor the Mayor's staff bothered to show up. Congressional hearings were promised. Awkward!
Meanwhile, I began taking massive heat from the hard right wing of my own party. At least a half dozen televangelists began claiming that the reason 2005 had been such a deadly year for hurricanes was that America's leader (me!) had brought on God's wrath. I wasn't conservative enough, Republican enough, or Christian enough to properly lead America back to the path of righteousness. Among my many sins were my toleration of gays, immigrants, Jews, Papists (I had to tell Marilyn that I would need to divorce her to cure that particular sin; she was not amused!), and anybody else the preacher deemed unfavorable. Especially amusing was when Pat Robertson announced that when I had flown to New Orleans and Mobile, I had been on a recon flight for Satan. When Will Brucis was asked his thoughts about this at the next press briefing, he replied that he was simply incapable of understanding that kind of thinking.
The right wingers were also not amused when, in an interview after the storm, I was asked if I thought man-made global warming was to blame. "I think there is a link to climate change, though to what extent I am not sure. You can't tell me that seven billion plus people on this planet aren't having some sort of effect! That's not realistic."
"Are you saying that you believe in global warming?", asked an incredulous reporter. This was going against the entire Republican Party and conservative platform.
I nodded. "Yes, I would have to say I do. Now, we can argue about the extent and causes of it, but it's a scientific fact, and I say that as a mathematician and a scientist. The evidence is quite clear, and scientific opinion is overwhelmingly one-sided. That doesn't mean we know how to fix the problem yet, or what it will cost, or what the final long term effects will be, but the science is there."
This did not help with my standing in the Republican Party, which further dropped when Al Gore climbed up on his soapbox and loudly proclaimed how finally a Republican leader was joining him in his crusade. Wonderful! His name was anathema to the Republican Party, and the asshole was linking me to him. Just wonderful! Brewster McRiley told me bluntly that this would hurt campaign contributions from energy companies across the board in 2006 and 2008. Just fucking wonderful!
In the real world we had both good news and bad news. The bad news was very, very simple. The devastation was beyond calculating. Early estimates of the damage were in the $30 to $40 billion range, and were climbing by the day. Some estimates were topping out at over $100 billion. Adding in the damage from Hurricane Rita a few weeks later, which mangled East Texas, and screwed up the recovery efforts in Louisiana, and we were well over $125 billion. It was going to take years to rebuild the levees and clean up the mess, and in some places, there was nothing left to rebuild. The Good Lord had taken everything in the path of the storms! Worse was going to be the effect on the national economy. Building materials prices were already skyrocketing, as was the price of fuel. Almost a quarter of the nation's refining capacity had been shut down because of the storms, and gas prices were shooting up, and we were seeing gas lines again for the first time since the Seventies. If I had wanted a recession to take the heat off the economy, I was about to get it in spades.