“What happened in New Orleans was a criminal act,” he said, a tragic backhanded slap to poor, black or politically insignificant people. “The levees were a Band-Aid here and a Band-Aid there. In the famous statement of Malcolm X, the chickens came home to roost. Somebody needs to go to jail.”
- Spike Lee

Max Mayfield of the National Hurricane Center warned the mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, that his city was in peril.

For Brinkley, who teaches history at Tulane University in New Orleans, Katrina has a deeply personal edge. One can easily read 'The Great Deluge' as a morality tale, pitting helpless victims, heroic citizens and a few decent politicians against an inept bureaucracy at every link in the chain. This was an avoidable catastrophe, more the fault of man than of nature, Brinkley says, and those responsible must be held to account.

City administrators had done no serious hurricane planning, despite repeated warnings from the scientific community.

Though Nagin 'strongly advised' people to leave, he didn't issue a mandatory evacuation order until the following day. By then, about 20 percent of the 460,000 residents were still in the city.

Buses were supposed to evacuate them, but many of the drivers had fled the city and hardly anyone knew where to go to be picked up. Among the most infamous photos of the Katrina disaster are the ones showing rows of buses sitting idly on flooded ground.

Survivors straggled into the Superdome and the convention center ... Rarely have so many desperate Americans been so completely abandoned by their government.

The White House was remote and unresponsive, viewing natural disaster relief as a distraction from the war on terror. ... In one instance, dozens of first responders -- including firefighters and paramedics -- were diverted from New Orleans to Atlanta 'for training on rules against sexual harassment.'

[The Cajun Navy: rural whites who strapped their boats to their pickups and traveled in caravans to New Orleans. Sweeping through black neighborhoods by day, sleeping in their trucks at night, the Cajuns saved close to 4,000 lives.]

On the local level, Brinkley sees one villain above all. The Ray Nagin we meet in these pages is part coward, part showboat, part Uncle Tom. A pawn of the city's business elite, 'always deferential to whites,' he sold out his race. ... When it comes to poor people, the book suggests, the mayor couldn't have cared less.

It was Nagin who waited too long to order a mandatory evacuation, who left the buses to rot, who turned his back on those who couldn't leave. It was Nagin, 'terrified for his own personal safety,' who rarely visited the frantic throngs at the Superdome and the convention center ...

From NYT Book Review, 9 July 2006

'Hell & High Water' - David Oshinsky (Review of 'The Great Deluge', Douglas Brinkley)

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