NEW ORLEANS — Of all the troubles that followed Hurricane Katrina, the continuing turmoil surrounding the bodies of those who died seems like the one that could have been prevented.
Unlike other aspects of the emergency response, dealing with mass casualties was one thing for which state and federal agencies had a fully developed plan. Only a month before, one of the key organizations had held a meeting here to make sure everything was ready.
There was just one problem: When the storm struck, it turned out that no one could agree on who should perform the most basic task of all -- collecting the bodies.
As a result, while police and others recovered some bodies, the organizations that were officially responsible for doing so did not collect the remains of any storm victims for a full week after Katrina and its floodwaters hit the city. Even after the collection process got underway, scores of bodies lay unattended for weeks.
Even now, the failure to recover the dead in a timely way stirs bitterness. On Thursday, New Orleans coroner Frank Minyard called a news conference to complain that the Federal Emergency Management Agency was not pushing hard to identify victims. He said he was deluged with anguished appeals from families unable to get the bodies of relatives released from the temporary federal morgue in St. Gabriel, La. The poor condition of many bodies, the result of their delayed recovery, is complicating the identification process.
On Friday, 15 more bodies were collected, bringing the Louisiana death toll to 1,003.
If the handling of the dead struck the public as one of the most shocking failures in the response to Katrina, it has confronted officials with an equally unsettling lesson for the future: The existence of elaborate plans for dealing with a crisis -- whether a natural disaster, a catastrophic accident or an act of terrorism -- may lull officials into a false sense of security.
What the storm exposed when it came to the handling of mass casualties was that flawed preparation might be just as bad as no preparation at all.
"We worked on [FEMA's] National Response Plan; we worked on incident management systems so that you could have someone in charge and somebody calling the shots," said Jimmy Guidry, Louisiana state health officer. "I think on paper we started working on these things, but in actuality they haven't been very functional."
