Criticism of government response to Hurricane Katrina

Criticism of the government response to Hurricane Katrin consisted primarily of condemnations of mismanagement and lack of preparation in the relief effort in response to Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Specifically, there was a delayed response to the flooding of New Orleans, Louisiana. Within days of Katrina's August 29, 2005 landfall, public debate arose about the local, state and federal governments' role in the preparations for and response to the storm. Criticism was prompted largely by televised images of visibly shaken and frustrated political leaders, and of residents who remained in New Orleans without water, food or shelter, and the deaths of several citizens by thirst, exhaustion, and violence days after the storm itself had passed. The treatment of people who had evacuated to registered facilities such as the Superdome was also criticized. Criticism from politicians, activists, pundits, and journalists of all stripes has been directed at the local, state and federal governments. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was also criticized for failing to implement his food plan and for ordering residents to a shelter of last resort without any provisions for food, water, security, or sanitary conditions. Perhaps the most important criticism of Nagin is that he delayed his emergency evacuation order until less than a day before landfall, which led to hundreds of deaths of people who (by that time) could not find any way out of the city. Adding to the criticism was the broadcast of school bus parking lots full of yellow school buses which Mayor Nagin refused to be used in evacuation. When asked why the buses were not used to assist evacuations instead of holing up in the Superdome, Nagin cited the lack of insurance liability and shortage of bus drivers. New Orleans has been classified as a non-regime city. Regimes involve governmental and non-governmental cooperation, a specific agenda, a recognized problem and resources to deal with the problem. New Orleans only had a temporary coalition to deal with Hurricane Katrina, which led to ineffective, temporary and inefficient evacuation and provision of resources. Organizations such as the Red Cross attempted to form coalitions, but the various actors could not agree on a specific solution, and this failure to cooperate led to instability and misunderstanding between governmental and non-governmental actors. Evacuation process criticism: New Orleans was already one of the poorest metropolitan areas in the United States in 2005, with the eighth-lowest median income ($30,771). At 24.5 percent, Orleans Parish had the sixth-highest poverty rate among U.S. counties or county equivalents. The 2000 U.S. census revealed that 27% of New Orleans households, amounting to approximately 120,000 people, were without private mobility. Despite these factors preventing many people from being able to evacuate on their own, the mandatory evacuation called on August 28 made no provisions to evacuate homeless, low-income, or sick individuals, nor the city's elderly or infirm residents. Consequently, most of those stranded in the city were the poor, the elderly, and the sick. It has been stated in the evacuation order that, beginning at noon on August 28 and running for several hours, all city buses were redeployed to shuttle local residents to, "refuges of last resort," designated in advance, including the Louisiana Superdome. They also said that the state had prepositioned enough food and water to supply 15,000 citizens with supplies for three days, the anticipated waiting period before FEMA would arrive in force and provide supplies for those still in the city. Later, it was found that FEMA had provided these supplies, but that FEMA Director Michael D. Brown was greatly surprised by the much larger numbers of people who turned up seeking refuge and that the first wave of supplies were quickly depleted. The large number of deaths were a result of the insufficient response and evacuation before Katrina's arrival, primarily due to city and state resistance to issuing an evacuation order and risking "crying wolf" and losing face should the hurricane have left the path of model prediction. Had contra-flow on highways been initiated sooner and more buses begun evacuating families (including the idle school buses that were not used at all) the numbers of stranded New Orleans occupants would have been significantly less making the initial wave of FEMA supplies adequate and even excessive.