I dedicate this small story to all the men and women who go out and help their neighbors everyday and to those who go in harm’s way for people they’ve never met because it’s the right thing to do. The failure of Katrina must be laid at the feet of those responsible, not those who did (and do) all they could in times of overwhelming chaos and tragedy. - Reed
Author’s Note: Please click ‘View Entire Message’ if your email client has truncated this post!
Prologue
In early 2003, I was wrapping up a year in the Office of Presidential Advance during President George W. Bush’s first term. Advance is a terrific job in your 20s: See the world, get yelled at a lot, meet interesting people, get yelled at a lot, fly home on Air Force One, get yelled at a lot, what more did a young man need?
Advance is logistics. How high is the stage? Where is the cut shot? How will THE PRESIDENT move from the motorcade to the off-stage announce area, to the stage, and back again? Fun, but not good for long-term political prospects. There is no small amount of irony in speaking with the president every week but rarely being at the White House (I traveled 49 weeks in 2002.)
My post-White House posting was to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. I joined on March 1, 2003, the same day FEMA was officially enveloped within the hulking new Department of Homeland Security.
Despite DHS being an agency of cops, FEMA personnel being small in number, and having Continuity of Government (COG) responsibilities far beyond natural disasters, the little agency of 5,000 was rolled into the bulky and badged result of post-9/11 “we must do something mania.”
For the first time in my career, I was working on policy, rather than politics. To the best of my understanding, there was little-to-no pre-planning for a department with the size and scope of DHS to simply come alive one winter’s morning. We were housed in old brick buildings at Nebraska Avenue that had variously been a seminary, owned by the US Navy, and ultimately repurposed to hold DHS executive staff.
FEMA Director Mike Brown, my colleagues, and I were only at DHS HQ for a couple of months before we were packed off back to FEMA’s headquarters at C Street, SW, crunched in behind the Department of Education and sharing a ground floor with McDonalds. We didn’t want to be within DHS, and DHS didn’t want us (thanks, Judd Gregg.)
I’ll tell the story of those early FEMA/DHS days another time, but needless to say we spent most of our time sitting in meetings with high-priced management consultants (reviewing a PowerPoint they must have sold 1,000 times) and fending off greedy DHS senior staff wanting to get their hands on FEMA’s most sensitive assets (mentioned above) and refusing to admit that natural disasters killed more people and damaged more property on an annual basis than terrorism (a fact that is still true to this day.)
My tenure as a prime-FEMA defender was short-lived, however. I went to work in March and by July, 2003, I’d been recalled to the Bush-Cheney ‘04 reelection effort to serve as Director of Scheduling and Advance; a job that’s akin to being Secretary of the Army: You have all the money and all the people, but somone else (the White House in this case) decides how it all gets done.
Aside: I used to judge my days at BC ‘04 by how many times I’d been yelled at before lunch (either by my boss for spending too much money or by the White House for not giving them enough.) I got yelled at a lot…
The Day Before
I left Washington, DC for San Francisco, California after Bush’s reelection. Given my resume was filled with two names: George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney, the job offers didn’t come fast and furious.
When I was asked to do an advance in Coronado, California, for the White House as President Bush would be visiting the US Navy base there, I jumped at the chance to get off my couch and turn off the Star Trek: The Next Generation reruns.
The date of his visit was August 30th, 2005; about 36 hours after Hurricane Katrina made landfall. This visit would have passed into obscurity, like most other presidential events, but for the fact that our press advance rep walked the White House pool through a backstage area. In that moment, this photo was taken:
You should read Holly Bailey’s narrative from 2015 for a broader story of the early days of Katrina and the unfolding natural and political disaster.
If the above photo was bad, Air Force One flying low over a flooded and flooding New Orleans at about 2,000 feet was worse.
I got home and called my friends, senior staff at FEMA, and asked how I could help. They told me to buy a plane ticket to Baton Rouge and come down to help coordinate still-Director Mike Brown’s schedule and movements. Done and done, I said.
Author’s Note: Many of my friends from the Bush administration as well as my father, Rich, flew down to help in those early days. I don’t recall any of us receiving an actual order, or authorization to do what we were doing. We were there for one week.
Landfall
I connected through Dallas, and the flight onto Louisiana was packed with volunteers, first responders and an entire team dedicated to finding and rescuing lost pets. By their looks, this wasn’t their first emergency. Spacetime twists in strange ways near disaster areas. In the heart of the crisis, it’s all consuming. Just a few dozen miles away, I was able to hail a cab at the airport and have him take me to the state’s Emergency Operations Center.
Tech Note: It’s hard to imagine now, but 2005 was pre-iPhone. I had a small silver flip-phone I’d inherited from the Bush campaign, and a brand-new Blackberry I was convinced was necessary to allow for instant receipt of emails. Emails!
I climbed out of the cab and into a scene from Apocalypse Now. People were running in every direction. Helicopters were taking off and landing. The press roamed freely; no one had thought to corral or contain them so they were interviewing anyone and everyone who would stop to talk to them. Cops love to talk.
FEMA had procured and fitted-out gigantic End-of-Days trailers, never meant to be seen (or used) unless most of the world was already gone. Work stations, laptops and televisions were arrayed around a large, central conference table. There at the head sat Director Brown, he of “You’re doin a heckuva job, Brownie.”
At an early sit down, Brown complained that he’d planned on announcing his resignation on September 15th, just two weeks hence, and this had thrown his plan into disarray. For a group already buried under the weight of a flooded city, the level of selfishness and self-pity only put us deeper into a psychological hole.
Brown has taken a lot of warranted criticism over the years for FEMA’s response. But his failure was downstream of multiple policy, logistical, political, and bureacuratic disasters. Putting FEMA inside another agency meant the Director no longer had direct access to the White House - the President, the Chief of Staff, or the National Command Authority. Everything had to be routed through the Secretary (then Michael Chertoff.)
Chertoff was neither a cop nor an emergency manager by training or practice. Prior to near-unanimous confirmation as DHS Secretary, he’d been a US Attorney, a Federal Judge and co-author of the PATRIOT ACT. Nothing in his background, despite long government service, prepared him for Katrina. After 20+ years, it’s hard to see DHS as anything other than a knee-jerk reaction that has resulted in myriad bad decisions, reorganizations, and, for Donald Trump, a place to build his homegrown Stasi.
There have been plenty of articles written about the actions of now deceased Governor Kathleen Blanco and disgraced New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin so I won’t reitterate them here. However, the governor wouldn’t move without the counsel of her husband, “Coach” and Nagin was hiding on the upper floor a New Orleans hotel until a team of people fetched him back to Louis Armstrong Airport.
All Hazards
FEMA reacts to ‘all hazards’ be they manmade or natural. Per NOAA, since 1999, “the US has sustained 403 weather and climate disasters where overall damages/costs reached or exceeded $1 billion…The total cost of these events is $2.915 TRILLION (emphasis mine.)
That’s roughly the annual GDP of France.
Author’s note: When I went to the NOAA website, I found this darling little note from the Trump administration:
When you hear trillions of dollars in damage, it’s hard to imagine. Here are a few photos of New Orleans during my week there.
Small Wins, Stupid Losses
Disaster areas spawn horrific loss and unimaginable tragedy. They also spawn inexplicable events. I was sitting in the End-of-Days Trailer when my small silver flipphone rang. The number carried a Louisiana area code (it might have been 504 but I don’t recall.) A woman asked if it I was “Reed Galen.” “Yes, ma’am.”
The woman related that she and her sons lived in Metarie, Louisiana, just a few miles outside New Orleans, and separated by the 17th Street Canal. She told me that their house was flooding and they didn’t want to stay anymore. With two grown and developmentally disabled sons, she was understandably worried.
“We don’t want to be here anymore.”
I took down her name, phone number, and address and handed it off to two colonels in the National Guard who were our military and law enforcement liaisons. A few hours later, one of them let me know that the Louisiana State Police had rescued the family from their home and gotten them to safety.
In the midst of catastrophe, small victories can make all the difference.
Murphy’s Law is never far away, though. I receieved another call, this one from a pastor in Shreveport. He and his congregation had space for 500 evacuees from the Houston Astrodome. If we could supply the buses to get the people from Texas to Shreveport, they had families ready to take them in.
This transport would require about 10 55-passenger buses (the kind you see tour groups debarking from all the time.) I called the Transportation Section and asked for authorization to line up a bus company in Houston, get them to the Astrodome, and coordinate with people on the ground there to get folks out of the largely-unused stadium.
The answer was an unqaulified “No.” You may not, I was told, authorize any expenditure on behalf of the Federal government for unapproved transportation. I don’t recall my exact reaction, but it was something akin to, “We’re going to spend billions on this and I’m asked for a few thousand dollars.” My entreaties to higher-ups went unanswered.
If I’d been a little bit older, a little bit braver, and had a credit card with a higher limit, I’d have just ordered the goddamned buses on my own. I was ashamed to have to tell the pastor that neither the buses nor the survivors were coming.
“We don’t want to be here anymore.”
St. Bernard Parrish
We were alerted that St. Bernard Parrish, which had been hit with a 25 foot wall of water, needed additional attention from senior leadership. This cooincided with Mike Brown doing an interview with Fox News’ Bill Hemmer. We lifted off in a DHS Blackhawk helicopter and headed south over the city. Watching a dying city in 24 Frames was bad enough. The smell, however, will never leave me. The mix of oil, sewage, and fetid water was unforgettable.
The devastation was unimaginable, so I’ll let a couple of the photos I took tell the story.
A friend of ours who worked for a large high-tech company had a portable cell-phone system flown in to assist the local responders and leaders with communications. It was another small addition to the effort by folks who were in a place to help, doing so.
Time to Go Home
It was of no suprise to anyone when we heard Brown was likely to be removed. As soon as anyone in Washington declares your job is safe, it’s time to polish your resume and prepare to spend more time with your family.
We’d originally heard that President Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew Card, would be flying down to tell Brown personally. Then someone looked at the org chart and decided that having the West Wing do the dirty work was neither advisable, nor bureaucratically appropriate.
By then, FEMA’s operations had moved from the trailers to an abandoned…something, shopping mall maybe? Whatever, it was a large, empty, ugly building with enough open space for responders as well as enough closed door offices. I was sitting outside one of those offices as I watched Secretary Chertoff, hands clasped atop his head, deliver the coup de grace to Director Michael Brown.
With Brown gone, another group of Washington insiders would arrive to take over. General Russell Honore had already arrived to do practically what no one else could do formally: Provide a single person in charge.
Author’s note: Honore is an Army General out of central casting. If they’d asked me to describe someone with stars on their shoulders that instantly instilled both respect and fear in everyone around them, it would be him.
Looking Back, Looking Forward
I’d return to New Orleans several years later, for another disaster: The BP Oil Spill. That time, I spent a week driving up and down the Gulf Coast listening to residents and politicians describe the oil was doing, and would do to their cities, states, business, and restaurants. That experience, also about a week long, is for another time. (Even today, there is something that warms my heart about watching residents of Plaquemines Parrish taking arrogant, stuffed-shirt BP executives to task.)
New Orleans and its people define resilience and kindness. It is the most unique city in America. It’s culture, accents, food, and community are like nowhere else in the country. I always look forward to going back; and when I do, I hope it will be for fun.
As for FEMA, and federal emergency response, the Trump Administration has made it clear they have no desire to help Americans in need: Be it a natural, manmade, or political disaster. Along with the National Hurricane Center, NOAA, and the National Weather Service, FEMA and its public servants dedicate their careers to ensuring, to the extent anyone can, our safety.
When disaster strikes, their collective expertise is crucial, if often insufficient, to responding and recovering. I’ve had the privilege of serving alongside them. They are among the best of America.
This is so heartbreaking and inspiring all at once. My late Uncle Jack was a FEMA volunteer and worked so many of these terrible disasters. Everyone who helps to make someone else's life a bit easier is ok in my book, but our selfless emergency workers, fema workers, first responders, firefighters, nurses, journalists, and everyone who helps in these great times of need, deserve all of our appreciation and support! Thank you Reed!
Lisa- San Diego
Thanks for sharing this experience, Reed. It brought back all my memories of the Day of Katrina. The inaction of the Louisiana Governor to the lack of buses to get people out of New Orleans all came back to me. I feel your pain on that bus situation. As I read your piece, I began remembering all of those that went down to help rescue not only the residents, but dogs, cats and wildlife. This reflected who were as a nation. These past 20 years FEMA has been there to help. Now this administration doesn't care a wit about any of us. In spite of politics and the screwing up of FEMA, I think remembering Katina is a good reminder of who we were and are. If it gets done, it is up to us. Thanks again, Reed. Take care.