PBS: Think Tank: Transcript for "After Katrina, Part One"

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After Katrina, Part One

WATTENBERG: I’m Ben Wattenberg for Think Tank. Our topic today is that remarkable perfect storm called Katrina. Our two guests on my left are Irwin Redlener, Columbia University, who is in the public health field, and Don Boudreaux at George Mason University which is a fine university in Virginia.
Gentlemen -- and we’re just going to call ourselves by our first names, as we always do on Think Tank –- why don’t we start with you Irwin. What happened?
IRWIN: Well, the situation in the gulf related to this terrible storm was quite remarkable and unprecedented as has become the cliché. But a couple of facts about it I think are important to know. The very, very large Hurricane Andrew, which struck south Florida in 1992, encompassed an area of about three hundred square miles. Hurricane Katrina hit an area of almost one hundred thousand square miles. So first of all, we’re starting off with a serious storm with a gigantic geographic -–
WATTENBERG: Let me ask you a question: I read somewhere that it was said that it was supposed to come once every hundred years, like the San Andreas fault, but that there were four others storm systems that all mixed in together that nobody -– is that accurate, do you know?
IRWIN: That caused the –-
WATTENBERG: Katrina?
IRWIN: It wasn’t so much that there was an intermixing of storms, but it was a very unusual storm pattern, which allowed it to be very diffusely dispersed over this entire gulf region. And then the problem of course was, in addition to the devastation of the winds, was the collapse of these levies that were protecting New Orleans that failed when it counted. So we ended up having two of the poorest states in the United States be bearing the brunt of one of the worst storms (they’ll ever) face, plus this engineering collapse.
I recall the headline in the New York Times the morning after Katrina hit, and it said something like “New Orleans Escapes the Bullet.” Or, “New Orleans Dodges the Bullet.” And it was that very day that the 17th Street Canal breeched. And because I’m from New Orleans, I had the radio on and I was paying special attention, and I kept hearing these reporters talking about how the water kept rising and you can hear their voices were frantic. And at the time, no one knew what was happening. Then within a matter of 24 hours, 48 hours, it became clear this was a major catastrophe. And so I think it’s –- people have said it but I agree, the real killer was the breech of the levies and no so much the storm itself. Of course –
WATTENBERG: Let me give you a word about my background and earlier carnation, which might be relevant. When I got out of the air force, I worked for a trade magazine called Water Transport Economics and I rode the tow boats up and down the Missouri, Ohio, Mississippi system (unintelligible) Tom Bigby, and the corps of engineers did the cost benefit relationships, recreation and slack water pools and lochs and damns, and the cheapest way to move goods is to float it obviously. Not much of a secret. Abraham Lincoln knew that. And they were regarded as the best game in town. That they were not corruptible, that they were in service, they really gave you a good fair shake. Now, whether that was just publicity that I believe or not, I don’t know.
IRWIN: I remember when I was growing up, I went to school, I went to elementary school about an half mile from the river, on the west bank of the river from New Orleans. At the time I didn’t think much of it because it’s just what things were like down there. We would go outside for recess, and we would look toward the river and look up and see the ships. And at the time it seemed normal. That’s how things were. Now I think it was kind of odd. You see the ships -- and the attitude of my family, my friends, everyone I knew, regarding the Army Corps, because we all knew that the Army Corps constructed these levies and maintained them, was very high. Just confirming the opinion that you had. The Army Corps had a sterling reputation. And obviously Katrina has sullied it.
WATTENBERG: Was the federal government supposed to be the agency on top of this sort of thing and if so, did they do their job, or did they not? Or is a state responsibility, or a city responsibility, or?
DON: It always starts local, and then it goes to state and then it goes to federal. And the prescription for getting from one level to the next is fairly well understood, except that in this case, not any of the levels performed as they should have and they clearly did not call in the troops at the appropriate times. And when you’re getting a storm that big bearing down on a city, the federal responsibility and the call to action of the federal government needs to take place in a sense in advance of the storm actually making land fall. And then when they did finally call the feds, the feds were grotesquely ill prepared to deal with the crisis at hand. And I think there we had multiple collapses of various systems trying to respond.
WATTENBERG: Has there ever been a head of FEMA, Federal Emergency Management Agency that has not been a political crony of the President?
DON: James Lee Witt was a spectacular (one). It became -– FEMA was the international model of a national preparedness agency. Countries from all over the world were coming regularly, repeatedly -– they had to set up an office to receive foreign visitors -–
WATTENBERG: He was Clinton’s -–
IRWIN: Yeah -– trying to model national programs from other countries based on what James Lee Witt had done. It was quite remarkable. And that has gone clearly down the tubes and we have now is shambles of what was there before.
WATTENBERG: And of course all of the politicians want to get into it and say it’s the other guys fault.
DON: Yeah.
IRWIN: Well, I think there’s a larger systematic problem. Although I think we can all agree that Witt ran FEMA certainly much better than Brown or his successors running FEMA. We have to really think. If a centralized agency is so easily turned within less than ten years from being a model of efficiency and ability to being politically corrupt or politically incompetent, then there’s something wrong with that model. It should be more robust in it’s ability.
DON: The other element of course, that was brought up, was the question of the military. Where there are clear interdictions in terms of the President being (unintelligible) for example put federal assets and troops into a state without the state’s requesting it. The state has control of their own national guard units, the governor does. But the actual U.S. Military is something that is still confusing, I guess.
WATTENBERG: But the President has, as we saw in the civil rights era, has the authority to federalize the National Guard.
DON: I’m not too worried about the typical hurricane or flood or tornadoes running through a state in the mid-west. The problem is, when I get to something that I call mega-disaster level, like a Katrina, like a potential terrorist nuclear detonation in a major American city, we do not have the systems in place at any level of government to really respond adequately to those kinds of problems.
WATTENBERG: And people are willing to live in -– half of California can just disappear. I have a lady friend of mine who just went back there, the whole thing can just collapse. But they do it. Insured, not insured, and that’s a whole other argument as to whether the feds ought to provide that subsidized insurance.
IRWIN: I’m personally against it. I think they should not provide it. I think if people want to live in these disaster-prone areas, they should be free to do so, but then they should pay the corresponding premiums, which would be very high of course to reflect the cost of living there. I have an uncle, who is an insurance agent in New Orleans. And he has a fairly nice home. Fortunately it wasn’t very much damaged. And he just discovered, he had no flood insurance. He’s lived -– he was born and raised in New Orleans, he’s almost 70 years old, he’s not a stupid man, he knows that the city is beneath the sea level. He has flood insurance now, but he bought it after Katrina. And he just told me he just didn’t think it would really happen.
WATTENBERG: Is there any criminal negligence that somebody could take a suit that would last for twenty years?
IRWIN: My knowledge of law isn’t that deep to comment, and I suspect not. But I don’t know for sure.
DON: But there’s such a thing as criminal negligence. Is what I think we’re talking about. You know, we’re reading about the big dig issues up in Boston. If a contractor knew better and simply epoxied, used glue to hold the ceiling panels in the big dig, and didn’t properly install the secondary bolts to make sure it would stay there because he would save money, that would fall into a category that, as far as I’m concerned, should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law and be subject to whatever kind of civil suit would be appropriate.
So I do think there’s a -– this comes to a big question of accountability. Who was accountable when things do not work? And I don’t think we can shrug these things off as “well, stuff happens.” That’s in a way endorsing a level of lack of accountability that we just can’t tolerate in our society.
WATTENBERG: Let me ask you this. There’s been a lot of talk about privatization, some good, some bad. Is it best in something like this to use government agencies, or outsource it?
DON: Well, the private industries do a terrific job, and in fact, some of the private sector NGOs from small church groups -–
WATTENBERG: NGOs, Non-Government Organizations?
DON: Non-Government Organizations to some of the larger institutions, Habitat for Humanity and the Red Cross have done very good work. This is a question of scale really. If you need a hundred thousand houses rebuilt in the gulf for example, Habitat builds in the hundreds. So it’s a question of scale. And when you get to a certain point, it’s not possible for the private sector just because the problem is so big.
WATTENBERG: I mean the other alternative is people will relocate elsewhere.
IRWIN: Move away from the gulf region.
WATTENBERG: And the government pays for relocation expenses and they decided I’d rather live in Oklahoma or Texas, or whatever.
DON: Well, the problem here is that a huge number of the people that were dislocated –- by the way, this was the largest dislocation in the United States of America since the dust bowl. About a million and a half people left their homes to go somewhere else.
WATTENBERG: Dust bowl was the 1930s migration to California, right?
DON: But a lot of the people who were displaced are the evacuees -- we could call them refugees except they didn’t cross international borders –- were very poor. So when they get to Houston, they have not resources, they have no money, they have no jobs and -–
WATTENBERG: Is there anything that either of you are privy to about Katrina that you haven’t heard or seen in the (media anywhere)?
IRWIN: One thing that struck me on my first visit to New Orleans post-Katrina was all the media reports focused on the lower ninth ward, which was a very poor section of New Orleans. And indeed, the lower ninth ward was hit pretty hard. But the Lakeview section -– I’ve seen comments about Lakeview and some of the press -– the Lakeview section is middle income, upper middle income, it was utterly devastated too. I’ll never forget that in the Lakeview section I saw a car, its back wheels were on the ground and the top of the car was propped in a tree. And you see this, and all the grass is dead because of the salt (brackish) water. So the idea that Katrina or the flood waters focused almost exclusively on poor people or black people, I think is mistaken. It’s a pretty wide, equal opportunity destroyer.
DON: To me, the biggest untold story, Ben, is the aftermath and the fact that we still have tens and tens of thousands of people languishing in this terrible limbo where children aren’t getting access to health care. These are in these FEMA trailer parks and other places. People have no idea when their houses are going to be rebuilt. What communities are going to go to, schools aren’t being repopulated and rebuilt. And we’re losing a large number of children in terms of this younger generation in terms of their access to health care. And many of them having now to repeat a year of school. So we’ve lost a lot and we’re continuing to lose. And I think we haven’t spent enough time talking about that.
WATTENBERG: Gentlemen, as we sort of move toward a sort of conclusion of this thing, if some major tragedy, either of the weather or perhaps more likely of this terrorism that so many of us are still afraid of, have we learned something from Katrina that would make us respond better?
DON: I’d say, hopefully we have learned something. Although they keep talking about 9-11 and Katrina as wake-up calls. To me they’re more like snooze alarms. You know, we kind of get aroused a little bit and we sort of drift back off to sleep. And a lot of times what we think might be a dramatic wake up prompting us into lots of action, ends up being not so impactful at the end of the day. But we’re hoping with Katrina that we have learned some lessons. Especially in terms of how the federal, state, and local governments work together in response to a major disaster. And presumably this is a work in progress. That we are getting better, and that Katrina has taught us something.
IRWIN: I wish I could be as optimistic. I don’t deny the possibility, but I’m just very skeptical of centralized bureaucracies. And certainly FEMA is a centralized bureaucracy. Now even more centralized in homeland security.
WATTENBERG: I mean, the thing that troubles me most, I’m writing about it now, is people who have great (surety) and this is not a world where we have great surety.
DON: That’s fair enough. I just think though that when it comes to dealing with people, Americans, that we owe them certain things.
WATTENBERG: Absolutely.
DON: A fire truck when their house is on fire. We owe them a military to defend the country. We owe them an appropriate and competent response when a major, really major disaster happens. And I don’t think this is going into any kind of political or ideological corner here. We’re just simply saying the basic decent relationship between society and government and the people entails certain responsibilities on both sides. Citizens responsible for what they have to do, but government has some responsibilities as well. And what we’ve seen in these last several years is this really inexplicable, uncomfortable failure of the government to do its part of the bargain after this kind of horrible event in the gulf. And I think it’s appropriate to call it into question and try to understand why that’s happened and see if it can be prevented in future disasters. But in the meantime, what is it that we’re going to do about thirty or forty thousand children who need to go to school and need to get health care? I think somebody has to be thinking about that.
IRWIN: If government has any role, clearly it’s core role is to provide basic public goods, national defense, protecting people from these large collective types of tragedies, I suspect that part of the reason why it’s become so incompetent at doing it is that over the years it has taken on so many other responsibilities that I don’t think government really should do. And so it spreads itself really thin so it becomes less competent at its core responsibilities.
WATTENBERG: We have weather reports, they’re not perfect. We fly planes into the middle of hurricanes, we issue alerts. They’re all subject to flaw. But it’s a whole lot better than people who don’t have any idea of what’s coming next.
IRWIN: I certainly think things have improved along those lines. I’m merely saying that the when the national government takes on -– we’re now centralizing education for example, department of education, “no child left behind,” and we have government involved increasingly in areas of our lives that I think it has no business being in. Taking on responsibilities. And when it tries to do all these things, it becomes less competent. I think almost of necessity becomes less competent at its core responsibilities. And I’m sure there are other things in play. I don’t mean that this is THE explanation. But I certainly would like to see government scaled back.
DON: The department of homeland security has an agency that is responsible for coordinating the disaster response work and prevent and preparedness of the U.S. federal government and private enterprise. (Where there are) twenty five million private businesses in the United States. That agency within homeland security has fifteen people that are working for it that are theoretically responsible for coordinating the private sector’s work on disaster preparedness and response. And by the way, the private sector has a tremendous wealth of assets that could be applied to understanding and solving a lot of these problems. But government, it’s not so much that it’s diluted, it’s more gotten stupid and incompetent. It’s like, if you really wanted to set up an agency to coordinate the assets of twenty five million companies, wouldn’t you put more than fifteen folks in it? Wouldn’t you?
IRWIN: Well, you would, but then I would put the question, why has it become stupid and incompetent? I would say at least part of the reason is that it takes on, increasingly takes on more responsibilities.
WATTENBERG: Okay. On that note, Irwin and Don, thank you very much for joining us. And thank you. Please, remember to join us for the second episode of this special Think Tank discussion about the future of New Orleans. And please, remember to send us you’re comments via email. We think it makes our program better. For Think Tank, I’m Ben Wattenberg.

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