Here is a timeline from Knight Ridder Newspapers. It seems like plenty of people made mistakes.
HURRICANE KATRINA: THE AFTERMATH
Lessons from a tragedy
Along Gulf Coast, slow response raises concerns over what went wrong and why; failures went far beyond the levees
By Knight Ridder Newspapers
The collapse in New Orleans' 17th Street canal levee occurred as early as 3 a.m., hours before Hurricane Katrina battered its way onto the Gulf Coast Aug. 29.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, in charge of the 350 miles of earthen and concrete walls protecting the city, got its first inkling about two hours later on that Monday morning. There's a break, a civilian called in. A state policeman had told him.
By early afternoon, the corps had confirmed it. Federal Emergency Management Agency officials waiting in Baton Rouge, La., also were notified. The mayor, too, was informed of the ugly truth creeping toward his downtown emergency command post.
Yet no alarm about the incoming water was sounded until Tuesday morning.
That's but one example of why, two weeks later, it's clear that Katrina was a bureaucratic disaster as well as a natural one. An extensive Knight Ridder review of the days just before and after Katrina's landfall reveals that both local and federal underestimation of what was coming contributed to the deaths of hundreds and the suffering of thousands.
Among the problems:
-The mayor lost 15 crucial hours before calling for a mandatory evacuation the day before the storm hit New Orleans.
-The governors of Louisiana and Mississippi underestimated the need for National Guardsmen and for plans to get people without cars out of the danger zone.
- The Department of Homeland Security failed to issue a crucial disaster declaration for more than 36 hours after Katrina passed.
- The Pentagon didn?t mobilize serious response efforts for days after the storm.
- The White House never appointed a coordinator to monitor disaster developments.
Some agencies performed splendidly, even heroically: The Coast Guard, also under the Homeland Security umbrella, launched rescue efforts as soon as weather permitted, saving 9,500 victims; the region's Veterans Administration hospitals evacuated their patients early and efficiently; and many local emergency personnel worked night and day, knowing that their own homes and families were hurt.
But the 'blame game' - as President Bush and others in his administration decry it - for what happened or didn't happen in that first week has begun. A final accounting will take months, perhaps longer, but what follows is what's known so far.
Friday, Aug. 26
By 10 p.m. the National Hurricane Center in Miami seemed to draw the bull's-eye on New Orleans, and officials reacted quickly, at least in terms of saying all the necessary words.
That night, Gov. Kathleen Blanco declared a state of emergency in Louisiana. Gov. Haley Barbour did the same in Mississippi the next day. But neither governor grasped the size of the storm headed their way when they issued their first National Guard call-ups.
Barbour summoned only 2,000 troops. That number was consistent with what the state had needed 36 years earlier after Camille, but it would turn out to be inadequate given the gambling-fueled boom that had brought tens of thousands of new residents to the coast.
Blanco's contingent was larger - 4,000 - but eventually more than six times that number would be deployed.
In Washington, at the Katrina headquarters FEMA had set up, there was little activity. Leo Bosner, a longtime FEMA emergency specialist and employee union leader, later recalled that everyone nodded when someone suggested, "We should be getting buses and getting people out of there."
"We could see it coming," he told The New York Times. "We, as staff members of the agency, felt helpless. We knew that major steps needed to be taken fast, but, for whatever reasons, they were not taken."
Saturday, Aug. 27
National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield made a round of worried phone calls to top state and local officials.
He wanted to impress on them the severity of what was about to happen. He wanted to be able to sleep that night knowing that he'd done everything in his power to save lives.
One of his calls went to New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who was having dinner at home with his wife and 6-year-old daughter.
Earlier in the day, the mayor's office had made preparations, moving to the Hyatt Regency hotel a few blocks from City Hall, assuming it would have better power sources and amenities.
The mayor had asked residents to leave. But his order was voluntary, not mandatory, and residents understood the distinction. Worried about such matters as the city's liability in ordering hotels and other businesses to shut down, Nagin had been reluctant to take the next step.
Mayfield told Nagin that this was the worst hurricane he'd ever seen and that public officials ought to do everything in their power to get people out.
"It scared the crap out of me," Nagin recalled. "I immediately said, 'My God, I have to call a mandatory evacuation.'"
Still, he hesitated. About 130,000 New Orleans residents lived below the poverty line, and he knew that he didn?t have enough public transportation to move them all or enough police to roust out the stubborn.
And what about hospitals? He and the city's lawyers wrestled with the issues through the night.
Nagin wasn't alone in his hesitancy. In Harrison County, Miss., where Biloxi is located, Civil Defense Director Joe Spraggins, in his job less than a month, also declined to order an evacuation on Saturday, saying he wanted to wait to see what the storm did.
The military also was watching the storm. Maj. Gen. Richard Rowe said the military's Northern Command planners expected it to be one of the worst ever to hit the United States.
"I knew there was an excellent chance of flooding," he said.
And FEMA thought it had everything well in hand. Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley said he offered emergency and medical assistance Sunday night, but FEMA accepted only a tanker truck. The American Ambulance Association tried to send 300 emergency vehicles to the area, but the offer was bounced from the General Services Administration to FEMA. They weren't sent.
Sunday, Aug. 28
The winds were picking up. At 10:11 a.m., the National Weather Service issued a warning that Katrina, by then a Category 5 storm - the most severe, with winds of 155 mph or more ? would make most of southeast Louisiana 'uninhabitable for weeks, perhaps longer.' The forecast predicted "human suffering incredible by modern standards."
Only a few minutes earlier, Nagin had gone on television to issue the mandatory evacuation order. People who couldn't get out on their own could board city buses at 12 locations for transport to the Louisiana Superdome, the shelter of last resort, he said.
In Mississippi, the mandatory evacuation came as well, but the state?s emergency management director, Bob Latham, worried that residents wouldn't evacuate because of false alarms in the past.
To speed evacuation, both Louisiana and Mississippi successfully employed so-called contra-flow plans that turned major highways into one-way routes out of the coastal area.
President Bush, on vacation in Crawford, Texas, had been briefed repeatedly on the storm's progress and had declared a state of emergency in the states. But apparently, no member of the White House staff was assigned to track federal actions.
By bus and by foot, as many as 25,000 people streamed to the Superdome, where neither the state of Louisiana nor the city of New Orleans had planned to stock food or water.
According to Art Jones, division chief of the disaster recovery division of the Louisiana Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, the idea was that the Superdome should be the shelter of last resort, not a place where people would stay.
FEMA Director Michael Brown flew into Baton Rouge, where he would ride out the storm at the state operations center, confident that adequate preparations had been made.
His agency had pre-positioned ice, water and Meals Ready to Eat in the storm zone, in adjacent states, and at logistical centers in Atlanta and in Denton, Texas. Also, one-fourth of the search-and-rescue teams at his disposal were ready to go.
Monday, Aug. 29
The hurricane had not hit land yet, but the supercharged winds that swept over the city made that point moot.
At the on-site headquarters of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers - a bunker near Tulane University in central New Orleans - the 5 a.m. phone call warned of a broken levee, not along Lake Pontchartrain to the north, but in one of the big canals that normally drains city water into the lake.
With the eye of the storm still about an hour away, there was no way to get to the levee, which serves as a boundary between the Orleans and East Jefferson parishes.
It didn't really matter. The corps had no stockpile of materials for plugging a levee leak or any way to get heavy equipment quickly to the site.
Within an hour, St. Bernard Parish to the east had suffered a catastrophic and sudden surge. Waves poured over levees from Lake Pontchartrain to the north and Lake Borgne to the east.
As a final, fatal insult, a barge had ripped loose from its mooring, breaking the levee wall on the Industrial Canal to the west. It chose a point near the key Florida Avenue pumping station, knocking it out.
Some said the water rose a foot a minute. Residents scrambled to attics and took to boats. It was in this area that perhaps 30 occupants of a nursing home died.
At 3 p.m., the corps engineers ventured out to see if they could drive to the 17th Street canal across town and confirm the damage. They soon found water 10 to 15 feet deep.
"My first reaction was, 'Wow, we are in trouble,'" said Col. Richard Wagenaar, the corps' district commander. "I knew that amount of water should not be at that location that fast. At that point, we considered it confirmed."
About the same time, Marty Bahamonde, a FEMA spokesman, told the mayor what he'd seen from a Coast Guard helicopter. He described the surge of water as "surprising in its intensity."
"The mayor was devastated," Bahamonde said. "He knew his city was damaged beyond what they'd realized. - It was a very emotional meeting."
Why the news didn't produce a bigger response baffled Ivor van Heerden. As the head of a hurricane center at Louisiana State University, he oversaw a simulation last year, known as 'Hurricane Pam,' in which a slow-moving Category 3 storm swamped the city.
The simulation had estimated that a million persons would be displaced and 2,000 buses would be needed, far more than New Orleans could muster for an evacuation.
The corps has conceded some of its levees had sunk below the 15-foot 'design protection.' After all, the whole city is sinking steadily.
Federal budget shortfalls in recent years had prevented the massive engineering undertaking from being addressed.
"What's very obvious," van Heerden said, "is that the powers that be either didn?t recognize how bad the flooding would be from breached levees or totally misunderstood what the impacts would be."
In the days after Katrina, Homeland Security director Michael Chertoff said, "the collapse of a significant portion of the levee leading to the fast flooding of the city was not envisioned."
Mayfield, at the hurricane center, said Chertoff, Brown and others had been told two days earlier that Katrina's wave surge was likely to do just that.
And Joe Allbaugh, the previous head of FEMA and a former Bush campaign manager, said a New Orleans disaster was what had worried him the most - after another terrorist attack.
Local and federal officials had spent two years working on a hurricane response plan for Louisiana. It was still unfinished, especially regarding what to do with an estimated 100,000 residents without cars. Another question with no answer was how to maintain law and order.
The beginning of three days of looting broke out along Canal Street.
Chaos was already descending on the Superdome as well and spreading to the convention center, also crowded with those who had not evacuated.
On Monday, Bush, while flying from his ranch to California, made major emergency disaster declarations to free up federal funds. Blanco said she told him, "I'm going to need everything you've got."
Other key officials were nowhere near the scene. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld took in a night baseball game in San Diego, and Vice President Dick Cheney did not leave his Wyoming ranch until late in the week.
Tuesday, Aug. 30
As morning broke over the city, residents learned that rising water had reached the Hyatt and other downtown buildings.
Isolation had crept in even faster. The hotel's power was now out. Land lines were down and cell towers knocked over. The older-model satellite phones the cash-strapped city had for backup had quickly run out of battery power and could not be recharged. Municipal communication was limited to hand-held police radios, and both the city and police often were trying to use the same frequency.
FEMA officials would later point to the municipal officials as the source of the initial missteps.
"Did the city have the situational awareness of what was going on within its borders?" one unnamed source asked The Washington Post. "The answer is no."
But the same could be said of FEMA officials. Bill Lokey, agency coordinator, underplayed the levee break in a Baton Rouge news conference.
"I don't want to alarm everybody that, you know, New Orleans is filling up like a bowl. That's just not happening."
Meanwhile in Biloxi, Brown was assuring Barbour that FEMA had had lots of hurricane-relief practice in Florida.
"I don't think you've seen anything like this," Barbour responded. "We're talking nuclear devastation."
FEMA reported that it was deploying 10 additional medical assistance teams, each with 35 members, that it had sent emergency crews to check out possible oil spills, and that it was working with the Department of Agriculture to provide food and with Health and Human Services to supply doctors and medicine.
What wasn't being reported were the foul-ups.
Distributing supplies was clearly daunting with all the road damage and flooding.
But contractors later complained of supply trucks being held up and of no one being assigned to unload them. New Orleans doctors said they sent patients to promised field hospitals that did not even get set up. FEMA turned away truckloads of Wal-Mart water, prevented the Coast Guard from delivering diesel fuel and held up communications gear packed by a defense agency, according to other published reports.
Federal officials, accustomed to serving a supportive but not commanding role in a disaster, say they waited for specific requests from state and local officials.
But local officials, such as Nagin, were overwhelmed, trapped by the devastation around them, and unable to survey the damage or communicate requests.
The Homeland Security department had a procedure for just such a muddle, a declaration of 'an incident of national significance' -- the trigger for federal officials to move emergency assets without waiting for requests from local governments.
Sometime late Tuesday, Chertoff issued the never-before-used declaration, but no public announcement was made for several hours.
Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said an avalanche of problems, rather than a specific event, triggered the decision.
"There are extraordinary frustrations within the department," he said.
FEMA's initial request for military help also came Tuesday, according to a Defense Department official.
It was for two helicopters for flyovers.
In Mississippi, Adjutant Gen. Harold Cross, commander of the state's National Guard, made his own survey and got permission to call up the remainder of the state's Guard troops. That would give him 15,000 in all. He wasn?t sure it would be enough.
Back in New Orleans, Nagin, huddling with staffers at the Hyatt, fretted that the corps seemed to be making little progress on fixing the broken levees. A little after midnight, Nagin's band made contact with the outside world again, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Wednesday, Aug. 31
The Pentagon's Task Force Katrina, based at Camp Shelby, Miss., under Army Lt. Gen. Russell Honore, finally was activated. Rumsfeld ordered the move based on the Homeland Security "national significance" declaration.
But the military did not reach for the closest soldiers, who were at Fort Polk, La., only four hours away from New Orleans. Instead, they would deploy soldiers from Fort Hood, Texas, and Fort Bragg, N.C., which would delay their arrival by at least a day.
Even then they hesitated to have combat troops take on a domestic police role. The way the Constitution works, Rumsfeld said, is "state and local officials are the first responders."
A shortage of helicopters persisted, both for plucking survivors off rooftops and for dropping materials into the levee breach. The Pentagon began shifting 50 more helicopters into the area.
Mississippi had food, water and ice stockpiles left over from Hurricane Dennis in July. The National Guard distributed them until they ran out. Cross asked for more supplies from FEMA and was told that nothing would be immediately available.
"There were people waving signs on roofs that said, 'Send Food,'"he said.
Cross contacted Northern Command. The military responded, airlifting Meals Ready to Eat into Gulfport the next day.
In New Orleans, food was running out at the convention center, too.
At the humid, smelly Superdome, people lined up for buses that never came. Although officials had tried to round up transportation, talk of violence in the city had frightened many drivers away.
That evening, a call came into the patchwork phones set up at the Hyatt conference room. It was the president in Air Force One, cutting his vacation short and flying back to Washington. Nagin later said he told the president of 'an incredible crisis.'
Thursday, Sept. 1
It appears that few read the fine print of the federal emergency plan, which advises local managers not to expect help for 72 to 96 hours and therefore to be ready to be self-sufficient until then.
But after 72 hours, the different agencies were still just learning how bad the situation was.
"This is a national disgrace. FEMA has been here three days, yet there is no command and control," said Terry Ebbert, New Orleans homeland security chief.
"You don't have to be a genius to know when the storm hits, you're going to need water, food, diesel, gasoline, evacuation needs, helicopters, boats, medicine. So why does someone call me up when I don't have any communications and ask me, 'What do I need?' The system needed to go into automatic."
"We haven't gotten the supplies we need at times," said Robert Latham, who runs the Emergency Management Agency in the more Republican Mississippi. "We've been getting 10 to 15 percent of what we have been requesting (from FEMA)."
At the Hyatt, the band of city officials, hearing that looters intended to hit the hotel, moved from the fourth floor conference rooms to the 27th floor, limiting communications once more. Nagin issued his "desperate S.O.S." for more help.
Chertoff and Brown seemed not to know that there were thousands of people at the New Orleans convention center, desperate for sustenance and protection, until television showed the scene and the dead bodies.
At times, state officials also seemed to stand in the way of relief measures.
Jefferson Parish officials pleaded for private citizens to truck in water and food, while Blanco's edict was to stay out of the affected areas.
The Red Cross begged to be allowed to distribute aid at the convention center, but was apparently blocked by Louisiana officials. National director Marty Evans made a personal plea to Blanco, the governor. But state officials said to wait for better conditions.
Friday, Sept. 2
Finally, the long-sought reinforcements arrived, led by a military convoy that plowed through the waters to the convention center.
More than 6,500 National Guardsmen began to spread out across New Orleans. Twice that number were deployed elsewhere in Louisiana and in Mississippi.
The Superdome began to empty, and commercial airliners began to fly people out of the city.
Another Homeland Security barrier had been the need to gather air marshals and baggage scanners for the flights. That, however, could never top the story of firefighters held up in Atlanta for training on community relations and sexual harassment issues before being allowed to move in to help, according to a Dallas Morning News account.
The airport itself was a testament to poor planning. Many of those evacuated too late from hospitals and nursing homes were stretched out on cots, baggage conveyors and the floor. Concourse D became a makeshift morgue for those who did not survive the ordeal.
Bush flew into Mobile, Ala., where he praised the work of Brown, and then to New Orleans for what Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu called a photo op on the 17th Street levee "with a single, lonely piece of equipment."
A week later, after criticisms of the effort escalated, he would remove Brown as the on-site coordinator of the federal response.
Saturday, Sept. 3
In his weekly radio address, Bush spoke of 'strained state and local capabilities.'
"The result is that many of our citizens simply are not getting the help they need, especially in New Orleans. And that is unacceptable."
HURRICANE KATRINA: THE AFTERMATH
Lessons from a tragedy
Along Gulf Coast, slow response raises concerns over what went wrong and why; failures went far beyond the levees
By Knight Ridder Newspapers
The collapse in New Orleans' 17th Street canal levee occurred as early as 3 a.m., hours before Hurricane Katrina battered its way onto the Gulf Coast Aug. 29.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, in charge of the 350 miles of earthen and concrete walls protecting the city, got its first inkling about two hours later on that Monday morning. There's a break, a civilian called in. A state policeman had told him.
By early afternoon, the corps had confirmed it. Federal Emergency Management Agency officials waiting in Baton Rouge, La., also were notified. The mayor, too, was informed of the ugly truth creeping toward his downtown emergency command post.
Yet no alarm about the incoming water was sounded until Tuesday morning.
That's but one example of why, two weeks later, it's clear that Katrina was a bureaucratic disaster as well as a natural one. An extensive Knight Ridder review of the days just before and after Katrina's landfall reveals that both local and federal underestimation of what was coming contributed to the deaths of hundreds and the suffering of thousands.
Among the problems:
-The mayor lost 15 crucial hours before calling for a mandatory evacuation the day before the storm hit New Orleans.
-The governors of Louisiana and Mississippi underestimated the need for National Guardsmen and for plans to get people without cars out of the danger zone.
- The Department of Homeland Security failed to issue a crucial disaster declaration for more than 36 hours after Katrina passed.
- The Pentagon didn?t mobilize serious response efforts for days after the storm.
- The White House never appointed a coordinator to monitor disaster developments.
Some agencies performed splendidly, even heroically: The Coast Guard, also under the Homeland Security umbrella, launched rescue efforts as soon as weather permitted, saving 9,500 victims; the region's Veterans Administration hospitals evacuated their patients early and efficiently; and many local emergency personnel worked night and day, knowing that their own homes and families were hurt.
But the 'blame game' - as President Bush and others in his administration decry it - for what happened or didn't happen in that first week has begun. A final accounting will take months, perhaps longer, but what follows is what's known so far.
Friday, Aug. 26
By 10 p.m. the National Hurricane Center in Miami seemed to draw the bull's-eye on New Orleans, and officials reacted quickly, at least in terms of saying all the necessary words.
That night, Gov. Kathleen Blanco declared a state of emergency in Louisiana. Gov. Haley Barbour did the same in Mississippi the next day. But neither governor grasped the size of the storm headed their way when they issued their first National Guard call-ups.
Barbour summoned only 2,000 troops. That number was consistent with what the state had needed 36 years earlier after Camille, but it would turn out to be inadequate given the gambling-fueled boom that had brought tens of thousands of new residents to the coast.
Blanco's contingent was larger - 4,000 - but eventually more than six times that number would be deployed.
In Washington, at the Katrina headquarters FEMA had set up, there was little activity. Leo Bosner, a longtime FEMA emergency specialist and employee union leader, later recalled that everyone nodded when someone suggested, "We should be getting buses and getting people out of there."
"We could see it coming," he told The New York Times. "We, as staff members of the agency, felt helpless. We knew that major steps needed to be taken fast, but, for whatever reasons, they were not taken."
Saturday, Aug. 27
National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield made a round of worried phone calls to top state and local officials.
He wanted to impress on them the severity of what was about to happen. He wanted to be able to sleep that night knowing that he'd done everything in his power to save lives.
One of his calls went to New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who was having dinner at home with his wife and 6-year-old daughter.
Earlier in the day, the mayor's office had made preparations, moving to the Hyatt Regency hotel a few blocks from City Hall, assuming it would have better power sources and amenities.
The mayor had asked residents to leave. But his order was voluntary, not mandatory, and residents understood the distinction. Worried about such matters as the city's liability in ordering hotels and other businesses to shut down, Nagin had been reluctant to take the next step.
Mayfield told Nagin that this was the worst hurricane he'd ever seen and that public officials ought to do everything in their power to get people out.
"It scared the crap out of me," Nagin recalled. "I immediately said, 'My God, I have to call a mandatory evacuation.'"
Still, he hesitated. About 130,000 New Orleans residents lived below the poverty line, and he knew that he didn?t have enough public transportation to move them all or enough police to roust out the stubborn.
And what about hospitals? He and the city's lawyers wrestled with the issues through the night.
Nagin wasn't alone in his hesitancy. In Harrison County, Miss., where Biloxi is located, Civil Defense Director Joe Spraggins, in his job less than a month, also declined to order an evacuation on Saturday, saying he wanted to wait to see what the storm did.
The military also was watching the storm. Maj. Gen. Richard Rowe said the military's Northern Command planners expected it to be one of the worst ever to hit the United States.
"I knew there was an excellent chance of flooding," he said.
And FEMA thought it had everything well in hand. Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley said he offered emergency and medical assistance Sunday night, but FEMA accepted only a tanker truck. The American Ambulance Association tried to send 300 emergency vehicles to the area, but the offer was bounced from the General Services Administration to FEMA. They weren't sent.
Sunday, Aug. 28
The winds were picking up. At 10:11 a.m., the National Weather Service issued a warning that Katrina, by then a Category 5 storm - the most severe, with winds of 155 mph or more ? would make most of southeast Louisiana 'uninhabitable for weeks, perhaps longer.' The forecast predicted "human suffering incredible by modern standards."
Only a few minutes earlier, Nagin had gone on television to issue the mandatory evacuation order. People who couldn't get out on their own could board city buses at 12 locations for transport to the Louisiana Superdome, the shelter of last resort, he said.
In Mississippi, the mandatory evacuation came as well, but the state?s emergency management director, Bob Latham, worried that residents wouldn't evacuate because of false alarms in the past.
To speed evacuation, both Louisiana and Mississippi successfully employed so-called contra-flow plans that turned major highways into one-way routes out of the coastal area.
President Bush, on vacation in Crawford, Texas, had been briefed repeatedly on the storm's progress and had declared a state of emergency in the states. But apparently, no member of the White House staff was assigned to track federal actions.
By bus and by foot, as many as 25,000 people streamed to the Superdome, where neither the state of Louisiana nor the city of New Orleans had planned to stock food or water.
According to Art Jones, division chief of the disaster recovery division of the Louisiana Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, the idea was that the Superdome should be the shelter of last resort, not a place where people would stay.
FEMA Director Michael Brown flew into Baton Rouge, where he would ride out the storm at the state operations center, confident that adequate preparations had been made.
His agency had pre-positioned ice, water and Meals Ready to Eat in the storm zone, in adjacent states, and at logistical centers in Atlanta and in Denton, Texas. Also, one-fourth of the search-and-rescue teams at his disposal were ready to go.
Monday, Aug. 29
The hurricane had not hit land yet, but the supercharged winds that swept over the city made that point moot.
At the on-site headquarters of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers - a bunker near Tulane University in central New Orleans - the 5 a.m. phone call warned of a broken levee, not along Lake Pontchartrain to the north, but in one of the big canals that normally drains city water into the lake.
With the eye of the storm still about an hour away, there was no way to get to the levee, which serves as a boundary between the Orleans and East Jefferson parishes.
It didn't really matter. The corps had no stockpile of materials for plugging a levee leak or any way to get heavy equipment quickly to the site.
Within an hour, St. Bernard Parish to the east had suffered a catastrophic and sudden surge. Waves poured over levees from Lake Pontchartrain to the north and Lake Borgne to the east.
As a final, fatal insult, a barge had ripped loose from its mooring, breaking the levee wall on the Industrial Canal to the west. It chose a point near the key Florida Avenue pumping station, knocking it out.
Some said the water rose a foot a minute. Residents scrambled to attics and took to boats. It was in this area that perhaps 30 occupants of a nursing home died.
At 3 p.m., the corps engineers ventured out to see if they could drive to the 17th Street canal across town and confirm the damage. They soon found water 10 to 15 feet deep.
"My first reaction was, 'Wow, we are in trouble,'" said Col. Richard Wagenaar, the corps' district commander. "I knew that amount of water should not be at that location that fast. At that point, we considered it confirmed."
About the same time, Marty Bahamonde, a FEMA spokesman, told the mayor what he'd seen from a Coast Guard helicopter. He described the surge of water as "surprising in its intensity."
"The mayor was devastated," Bahamonde said. "He knew his city was damaged beyond what they'd realized. - It was a very emotional meeting."
Why the news didn't produce a bigger response baffled Ivor van Heerden. As the head of a hurricane center at Louisiana State University, he oversaw a simulation last year, known as 'Hurricane Pam,' in which a slow-moving Category 3 storm swamped the city.
The simulation had estimated that a million persons would be displaced and 2,000 buses would be needed, far more than New Orleans could muster for an evacuation.
The corps has conceded some of its levees had sunk below the 15-foot 'design protection.' After all, the whole city is sinking steadily.
Federal budget shortfalls in recent years had prevented the massive engineering undertaking from being addressed.
"What's very obvious," van Heerden said, "is that the powers that be either didn?t recognize how bad the flooding would be from breached levees or totally misunderstood what the impacts would be."
In the days after Katrina, Homeland Security director Michael Chertoff said, "the collapse of a significant portion of the levee leading to the fast flooding of the city was not envisioned."
Mayfield, at the hurricane center, said Chertoff, Brown and others had been told two days earlier that Katrina's wave surge was likely to do just that.
And Joe Allbaugh, the previous head of FEMA and a former Bush campaign manager, said a New Orleans disaster was what had worried him the most - after another terrorist attack.
Local and federal officials had spent two years working on a hurricane response plan for Louisiana. It was still unfinished, especially regarding what to do with an estimated 100,000 residents without cars. Another question with no answer was how to maintain law and order.
The beginning of three days of looting broke out along Canal Street.
Chaos was already descending on the Superdome as well and spreading to the convention center, also crowded with those who had not evacuated.
On Monday, Bush, while flying from his ranch to California, made major emergency disaster declarations to free up federal funds. Blanco said she told him, "I'm going to need everything you've got."
Other key officials were nowhere near the scene. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld took in a night baseball game in San Diego, and Vice President Dick Cheney did not leave his Wyoming ranch until late in the week.
Tuesday, Aug. 30
As morning broke over the city, residents learned that rising water had reached the Hyatt and other downtown buildings.
Isolation had crept in even faster. The hotel's power was now out. Land lines were down and cell towers knocked over. The older-model satellite phones the cash-strapped city had for backup had quickly run out of battery power and could not be recharged. Municipal communication was limited to hand-held police radios, and both the city and police often were trying to use the same frequency.
FEMA officials would later point to the municipal officials as the source of the initial missteps.
"Did the city have the situational awareness of what was going on within its borders?" one unnamed source asked The Washington Post. "The answer is no."
But the same could be said of FEMA officials. Bill Lokey, agency coordinator, underplayed the levee break in a Baton Rouge news conference.
"I don't want to alarm everybody that, you know, New Orleans is filling up like a bowl. That's just not happening."
Meanwhile in Biloxi, Brown was assuring Barbour that FEMA had had lots of hurricane-relief practice in Florida.
"I don't think you've seen anything like this," Barbour responded. "We're talking nuclear devastation."
FEMA reported that it was deploying 10 additional medical assistance teams, each with 35 members, that it had sent emergency crews to check out possible oil spills, and that it was working with the Department of Agriculture to provide food and with Health and Human Services to supply doctors and medicine.
What wasn't being reported were the foul-ups.
Distributing supplies was clearly daunting with all the road damage and flooding.
But contractors later complained of supply trucks being held up and of no one being assigned to unload them. New Orleans doctors said they sent patients to promised field hospitals that did not even get set up. FEMA turned away truckloads of Wal-Mart water, prevented the Coast Guard from delivering diesel fuel and held up communications gear packed by a defense agency, according to other published reports.
Federal officials, accustomed to serving a supportive but not commanding role in a disaster, say they waited for specific requests from state and local officials.
But local officials, such as Nagin, were overwhelmed, trapped by the devastation around them, and unable to survey the damage or communicate requests.
The Homeland Security department had a procedure for just such a muddle, a declaration of 'an incident of national significance' -- the trigger for federal officials to move emergency assets without waiting for requests from local governments.
Sometime late Tuesday, Chertoff issued the never-before-used declaration, but no public announcement was made for several hours.
Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said an avalanche of problems, rather than a specific event, triggered the decision.
"There are extraordinary frustrations within the department," he said.
FEMA's initial request for military help also came Tuesday, according to a Defense Department official.
It was for two helicopters for flyovers.
In Mississippi, Adjutant Gen. Harold Cross, commander of the state's National Guard, made his own survey and got permission to call up the remainder of the state's Guard troops. That would give him 15,000 in all. He wasn?t sure it would be enough.
Back in New Orleans, Nagin, huddling with staffers at the Hyatt, fretted that the corps seemed to be making little progress on fixing the broken levees. A little after midnight, Nagin's band made contact with the outside world again, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Wednesday, Aug. 31
The Pentagon's Task Force Katrina, based at Camp Shelby, Miss., under Army Lt. Gen. Russell Honore, finally was activated. Rumsfeld ordered the move based on the Homeland Security "national significance" declaration.
But the military did not reach for the closest soldiers, who were at Fort Polk, La., only four hours away from New Orleans. Instead, they would deploy soldiers from Fort Hood, Texas, and Fort Bragg, N.C., which would delay their arrival by at least a day.
Even then they hesitated to have combat troops take on a domestic police role. The way the Constitution works, Rumsfeld said, is "state and local officials are the first responders."
A shortage of helicopters persisted, both for plucking survivors off rooftops and for dropping materials into the levee breach. The Pentagon began shifting 50 more helicopters into the area.
Mississippi had food, water and ice stockpiles left over from Hurricane Dennis in July. The National Guard distributed them until they ran out. Cross asked for more supplies from FEMA and was told that nothing would be immediately available.
"There were people waving signs on roofs that said, 'Send Food,'"he said.
Cross contacted Northern Command. The military responded, airlifting Meals Ready to Eat into Gulfport the next day.
In New Orleans, food was running out at the convention center, too.
At the humid, smelly Superdome, people lined up for buses that never came. Although officials had tried to round up transportation, talk of violence in the city had frightened many drivers away.
That evening, a call came into the patchwork phones set up at the Hyatt conference room. It was the president in Air Force One, cutting his vacation short and flying back to Washington. Nagin later said he told the president of 'an incredible crisis.'
Thursday, Sept. 1
It appears that few read the fine print of the federal emergency plan, which advises local managers not to expect help for 72 to 96 hours and therefore to be ready to be self-sufficient until then.
But after 72 hours, the different agencies were still just learning how bad the situation was.
"This is a national disgrace. FEMA has been here three days, yet there is no command and control," said Terry Ebbert, New Orleans homeland security chief.
"You don't have to be a genius to know when the storm hits, you're going to need water, food, diesel, gasoline, evacuation needs, helicopters, boats, medicine. So why does someone call me up when I don't have any communications and ask me, 'What do I need?' The system needed to go into automatic."
"We haven't gotten the supplies we need at times," said Robert Latham, who runs the Emergency Management Agency in the more Republican Mississippi. "We've been getting 10 to 15 percent of what we have been requesting (from FEMA)."
At the Hyatt, the band of city officials, hearing that looters intended to hit the hotel, moved from the fourth floor conference rooms to the 27th floor, limiting communications once more. Nagin issued his "desperate S.O.S." for more help.
Chertoff and Brown seemed not to know that there were thousands of people at the New Orleans convention center, desperate for sustenance and protection, until television showed the scene and the dead bodies.
At times, state officials also seemed to stand in the way of relief measures.
Jefferson Parish officials pleaded for private citizens to truck in water and food, while Blanco's edict was to stay out of the affected areas.
The Red Cross begged to be allowed to distribute aid at the convention center, but was apparently blocked by Louisiana officials. National director Marty Evans made a personal plea to Blanco, the governor. But state officials said to wait for better conditions.
Friday, Sept. 2
Finally, the long-sought reinforcements arrived, led by a military convoy that plowed through the waters to the convention center.
More than 6,500 National Guardsmen began to spread out across New Orleans. Twice that number were deployed elsewhere in Louisiana and in Mississippi.
The Superdome began to empty, and commercial airliners began to fly people out of the city.
Another Homeland Security barrier had been the need to gather air marshals and baggage scanners for the flights. That, however, could never top the story of firefighters held up in Atlanta for training on community relations and sexual harassment issues before being allowed to move in to help, according to a Dallas Morning News account.
The airport itself was a testament to poor planning. Many of those evacuated too late from hospitals and nursing homes were stretched out on cots, baggage conveyors and the floor. Concourse D became a makeshift morgue for those who did not survive the ordeal.
Bush flew into Mobile, Ala., where he praised the work of Brown, and then to New Orleans for what Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu called a photo op on the 17th Street levee "with a single, lonely piece of equipment."
A week later, after criticisms of the effort escalated, he would remove Brown as the on-site coordinator of the federal response.
Saturday, Sept. 3
In his weekly radio address, Bush spoke of 'strained state and local capabilities.'
"The result is that many of our citizens simply are not getting the help they need, especially in New Orleans. And that is unacceptable."
