"They did anticipate breaching of the levees, that the pumps wouldn't work," said Natural Hazards Center Director Kathleen Tierney. Louisiana and New Orleans "couldn't get the federal assistance they needed. They knew they were living on a time bomb."
Disaster experts said the chaos after Katrina also should have been anticipated, particularly considering the absence of a local or state government plan to completely evacuate the city.
"There was no plan to get the poor out. They issued an evacuation order, fine. But 20% of New Orleans lives below the poverty line," said Vincent T. Gawronski, who studies the politics of disasters and is an assistant political science professor at Birmingham-Southern College in Alabama. "Do they all have cars? Did they give them buses to get out? No, they gave them the Superdome."
The Superdome was pressed into use as a shelter last year during Hurricane Ivan, but that storm did not hit the city with full force. Gawronski noted that Katrina damaged the huge structure when it hit as a Category 4 hurricane. "What would have happened to those people if it had hit as a Category 5, as it could have?" he asked.
Tierney said that some cities, including Los Angeles, designated schools as shelters for the Red Cross to run. "Nothing of the sort was planned for a major hurricane in New Orleans," she said.
"The plan was simply to get some people out and the rest to the Superdome," Tierney said. "A network of shelters was never part of the plan, even though it was recognized that the city is a bowl and would be filled with water, that there would be no electricity."
