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With the new videos out containing the briefings that the government gave before Hurricane Katrina, there's a lot of people saying a lot of things. Let's get a few things straight. The tale of Katrina is one of myriad failures. Let's explore some of them.

Failure of the Levees
This is the most obvious. The levees didn't hold. Who's to blame for that? This can only go on the local governments of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana.

Prior to Katrina, the last major hurricane to hit New Orleans was Hurricane Betsy in 1965. Water poured over the Lake Pontchartrain levees and flooded much of the city, especially the Ninth Ward, residents had to live in trailers for long periods of time, and at the time it was the costliest storm in history. Sound familiar? Check out the Wikipedia article on it. This had happened before, and the improvements made to the levees saved the city from similar results with 1969's Hurricane Camille.

Ever since Camille though, the levees were not properly fortified. There were 36 years between Camille and Katrina to work on them and strengthen them and it did not happen. The blame for the levees goes on every New Orleans mayor and Louisiana state and federal senator and representative since the '70s for failing to secure federal support for fortifying the levees. The senators from Wyoming aren't going to bring the subject up, that's the Louisiana legislators' jobs. It's not just Nagin and Blanco, it's all of them. They are the most at fault, but also the largest group so no one gives them the blame they deserve. Plus its impolite to kick someone when they're down.

A Failure of Evacuation
This one also is fairly broad. The locals once again get most of the blame.

A simply survey of the census information on New Orleans makes it obvious that many of the city's poor have no personal vehicles. The state's official policy on evacuation is for people to take care of it themselves. People without personal vehicles cannot evacuate on their own. Somehow, the New Orleans government couldn't put these facts together at any point in the past 36 years and never had a plan for evacuating those who couldn't do it themself.

It is now a infamous fact that the city's hundreds of school buses were left in the depot when they could have been used to get people out. It also would create a logistical problem of finding drivers to operate them all and figure out where they would go once they got out of the city. That's a planning issue though, and apparently no one planned for Katrina to happen. The city was very fortunate that Houston had the vacant Astrodome nearby to put people up in, because most cities demolish old stadiums when new ones are built (the Houston Astros got a new stadium in 2000, originally called Enron Field of all things, but I digress).

So there was no plan to help the helpless in getting out, and there also wasn't a plan to help them find real shelter in the city. They said use the Superdome as a shelter of last resort, but provided no other options for people to use. Some people found their way to the convention center, a possibility no one anticipated either which resulted in conditions worse than in the dome in many ways.

Failure of Prediction
It's hard to fault the forecasters. Some storms will turn at the last minute or do loops, like 2004's Charley and Jeanne. Plus, computer models as early as 3 days before the storm hit Louisiana had it directly hitting New Orleans.

I don't know the criteria for taking things and making it the official forecast track. I can say that the morning after Katrina went through South Florida and was already strengthening in the gulf, the official track had it hitting Pensacola as a category 3. I remember it well because I have family in Pensacola, and they had already had Ivan the previous year and Dennis.

Now, I have lived in Florida all 20 of my years and seen many hurricanes come and go and when you been around them you get a feel for what they will do. Nothing psychic or anything, but certain things really jump out at you. After passing across the southern part of the state as a category 1 and later a tropical storm, it took Katrina just 4 hours to return to hurricane status. That's insane. Hurrican Andrew hit South Florida as a 5, and couldn't get past weak category 3 afterwards before it hit Louisiana. I told some of my friends about the back-to-hurricane-in-4-hours fact, and without prompting most responded with something similar to, "Wow! That's crazy. Do you think it will become a 5?"

I did, and I could tell from the radar loop that it wasn't going to hit the panhandle either. Apparently the hurricane center knew this too with its models, but it stuck with an older track for too long. This may not seem like a big deal, but people don't start evacuating until they're in the forecast cone. It's too much of a hassle otherwise. People have to see the track of the storm going for them and even then be told over and over to get out as early as possible so as not to get caught in the fuel, food, and water shortages.

The Failure of the Response
This is where the videos come in. They had the warnings from the hurricane center, they had the Hurrican Pam simulation, they had the fiasco of Hurricane Georges and they had years of projections of what would happen. Any statements of ignorance to the threats is ridiculous.

In the end, the same thing happened to the federal government as the local for so many years. They thought it wouldn't happen, that it'd turn away like Camille or Georges, and that somehow the levees would hold. Initial reports said that they were overtopped but did hold. They in fact were breached, but it was difficult to tell early on. People initially thought Andrew wasn't that bad until the choppers went up and they found basically the entire community of Homestead destroyed. People let up a bit in their intensity because those early reports confirmed what they believed would happen anyway. They never recovered.

In the end, it is a bit unfair that former FEMA director Michael Brown had to be the scapegoat, when he is heard on the leaked videos telling people to cut through red tape and bend rules to help people and that he'd deal with Congress about it later. After such a poor job though in all of the response, heads had to roll and his was the most obvious. The response to Andrew also was very slow initially, but there was no flood so there were not people stranded on rooftops and it was far easier to redouble efforts so no one lost their jobs. When Katrina hit, the government should have basically shut down and focused on the region, since Mississippi especially and Alabama to a lesser extent were devastated too. Nearly all of Biloxi, MS was wiped out, particularly the areas right on the gulf. It was (hopefully) a once-in-a-lifetime event but Washington conducted business as usual. The local governments in New Orleans and Louisiana are fully culpable for being too complacent for too many years, and the federal government is guilty of the same for too many days. That's the long and short of it.