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In New Orleans,
the warnings
weren’t heeded

In Hawaii, 4,200 miles from New Orleans, our most famous civil defense director, Big Island Mayor Harry Kim, summed it up best: "It is a failure of us as a government."

Kim was talking about the human, environmental, economic and political tragedy left in the wake of Hurricane Katrina's pummeling of the Gulf Coast.

With CNN broadcasting reports of rats gnawing on bodies, battle-hardened photographers too shaken to photograph a gun battle between New Orleans police and looters, and doctors looking into television cameras to plead, "Please bring help," how can anyone argue that the local, state and federal governments were anything but at fault?

This is not supposed to happen in America. That it happened in a city that is 67 percent African American, where almost a third of its citizens live below the poverty level, gives rise to questions of why this tragedy occurred.

New Orleans, one of the oldest cities in America, has always been an August hurricane target. Yes, it was a dumb place to build a city, but who could resist building a city at the mouth of the Mississippi River?

Yes, officials knew the city was vulnerable. Two years ago the valiant New Orleans Times-Picayune, in "Washing Away: How south Louisiana is growing more vulnerable to a catastrophic hurricane," said someday a hurricane would flood the city, at least 100,000 would be trapped, removing the flood waters would take months and it would still be filled with disease and toxins.

Popular Mechanics, not an alarmist publication, predicted in 2001, "The city could be inundated with water blocking all streets in and out for days ... Many also could die."

National Geographic envisioned a nightmare where "It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead."

Louisiana State University boasts an entire institute on the public health impact of hurricanes, with most of the research about New Orleans.

Nothing was hidden, the dangers were known, but when planners got to the hard questions there were no answers.

So it is staggering to hear President Bush first say, "We didn't know the levees would not hold." And it is appalling to listen to Michael Brown, Federal Emergency Management Agency director, say part of the loss of life was because of "a lot of people who did not heed the advance warnings."

Kim, who directed relief operations for floods, blizzards, volcanic eruptions and storm surges during his time as civil defense director, called the suffering in New Orleans the result of "incomplete hazard and risk assessment."

President Bush declared the results of relief operations "unacceptable." The nation, however, may judge that it was our leaders, not the relief effort, that are unacceptable.

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