"[A] tightly crafted, very readable book . . . the best in-depth contemporary analysis we are going to get." ―Stephen Flynn, The Washington Post When Hurricane Katrina roared ashore on August 29, 2005, federal and state officials were not prepared for the devastation it would bring. In this searing indictment of what went wrong, Christopher Cooper and Robert Block take readers inside FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security to reveal the inexcusable mismanagement during the crisis―the bad decisions that were made, the facts that were ignored, and the individuals who saw that the system was broken but did nothing to fix it. In this award-winning and critically acclaimed book, Cooper and Block reconstruct the crucial days before and after the storm hit, laying bare the government's inability to respond to the most elemental needs. They also demonstrate how the Bush administration's obsessive focus on terrorist threats fatally undermined the government's ability to respond to natural disasters. The incompetent response to Hurricane Katrina is a wake-up call to all Americans, wherever they live, about how distressingly vulnerable we remain. Christopher Cooper is a national political correspondent for The Wall Street Journal , where he has also been a White House correspondent, and a former political reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune . Robert Block covers the Department of Homeland Security for The Wall Street Journal and is a former foreign correspondent who has reported from Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. He lives in Washington, D.C. Disaster Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security By Christopher Cooper Owl Books (NY) Copyright © 2007 Christopher Cooper All right reserved. ISBN: 9780805086508 Chapter One   The Perfect Storm   The perfect storm is as predictable as it is inexorable. Born in the Atlantic Ocean, it hits Puerto Rico and Hispaniola and Cuba, and it grows bigger as it moves through the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Though there is plenty of time to flee, many residents along the Gulf Coast stay put. And just as predicted, this storm makes a straight track for the tiny camp town of Grand Isle, Louisiana, obliterates it, and moves north toward New Orleans.   The hurricane moves upriver for nearly sixty miles, leaving catastrophe in its wake. It passes right over New Orleans, and as it does, the storm tilts nearby Lake Pontchartrain like a teacup and dumps it into the city. A quick rush of brackish water drenches New Orleans and leaves it sitting in as much as twenty feet of water. And then the hurricane is gone, and everything lies in ruins.   The perfect storm is big enough to make New Orleans a certain kind of hell, but not so big that it makes first responders throw their hands up in despair. The floodwater is the worst of it—it collects in the lower parts of the city and takes weeks to pump out. As it sits, the water becomes a thick and fetid mash of household chemicals and dead things and gasoline that bubbles from the tanks of thousands of submerged automobiles and service stations. The water makes some people ill, but the worst is the complication it adds to the rescue efforts.   All told, the water and wind brought by the hurricane damage some 250,000 homes and turn a million residents into vagabonds, many of whom are now utterly dependent on the government for food and shelter. The storm kills tens of thousands of people outright and leaves the city virtually uninhabitable, downing all communications systems and paralyzing the infrastructure. After the storm passes, looting breaks out. And thousands of dazed and dying survivors sit on their roofs in the semitropical sun awaiting rescue. Though the tales of heroic rescue are numerous and inspiring, many people perish, waiting for help that doesn’t come.   Some call Hurricane Katrina the perfect storm. It wasn’t. The perfect storm, which the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) calls Hurricane Pam, exists only on a computer screen, the creation of a small federal contractor located in a nondescript office park on the outskirts of Baton Rouge. Developed in the spring of 2004 over a period of fifty-three days and at a cost of $800,000, Hurricane Pam is a low-tech affair, nothing more than a simulated computer storm surge that plays out on a monitor accompanied by a stack of descriptive documents that catalog the damage the storm wrought when it made its fictitious landfall.   Hurricane Pam is a training exercise, designed to get local and federal disaster responders thinking about how they might deal with the aftereffects of a catastrophic storm that hit New Orleans. Louisiana is lousy with emergency disaster plans, and its various government agencies have invested millions of dollars cooking them up. The city of New Orleans has one specifically for hurricanes, as do all of the parishes (counties) along the coast. Inland, the rest of the state’s sixty-four parishes hav