Lack of supplies at Convention Center at issue
Wednesday, February 01, 2006
By Bruce Alpert
Washington bureau
WASHINGTON -- New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin is expected to face
questioning from a Senate committee today on why he was
unable to get food and water to the Ernest N. Morial
Convention Center for 48 hours after he opened it to
Hurricane Katrina evacuees.
Documents released Tuesday night by the Senate Committee
on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs show that
the city opened the Convention Center a day after the
hurricane slammed the city Aug. 29 and that the
Superdome became more and more uncomfortable because of
failing sanitation and no air conditioning. Thousands of
people from flooded New Orleans neighborhoods and
downtown hotels looking for shelter eventually made
their way to the Convention Center.
A Sept. 1 memo from Nagin's communications director,
Sally Forman, reported "numbers growing, no food or
water" at the center.
But Forman told investigators that city officials
thought they had no choice but to open the Convention
Center for the thousands of people who had no other
shelter.
"We had been stopped by large populations of people
walking together who had been put out of hotels, where
hotel staff had said 'leave, you can't stay anymore' and
these were wandering people who didn't have anywhere to
go and as the water filled up around the Dome they could
not gain access to the Superdome. . . . At least the
Convention Center provided a roof over their heads,"
Forman said, according to a transcript of a committee
interview with her Jan. 10.
Forman said city officials also were getting reports
that State Police and National Guard personnel who were
supposed to help provide security at the Convention
Center were leaving out of concern for their own safety.
Offers of help rejected
Communication and coordination breakdowns by government
agencies are among the many problems the Senate
committee has highlighted.
At the panel's hearing Tuesday, testimony was offered
that Louisiana officials rejected an offer for federal
help to evacuate patients from hospitals and nursing
homes and separately that a state transportation
official did little to complete an assignment to develop
a state plan to evacuate the poor, sick and elderly.
Jimmy Guidry, medical director and state health officer
with the state Department of Health and Hospitals,
defended the decision by another state health official
to pass up the offer for help in evacuating patients,
saying officials knew only too well that the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services didn't have
transportation assets to move patients. He said that
when the help was requested after the hurricane struck,
the federal agency couldn't come up with the assistance
the state needed to transport people from hospitals and
nursing homes.
But Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman, the top Democrat
on the committee, said he found the rejection of help,
made two days before Katrina made landfall, inexcusable
and one of many opportunities missed to ease the
suffering in New Orleans.
The panel's chairwoman, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine,
said she could only conclude that the response to
Katrina was marked by "government complacency and, at
times, by utter dereliction of duty."
"The result was incomprehensible and unnecessary
suffering, deprivation and death," Collins said. "It
produced those appalling televised images that shocked
the world."
Incomplete evacuation
State Transportation and Development Secretary Johnny
Bradberry told the Senate committee that he had been
assigned the task in April, a little more than four
months before Katrina struck, of developing plans to
evacuate people with no cars from New Orleans. He
conceded that his agency had done nothing to complete
the task.
"Although this new protocol was viewed by most in state
government as a transitional plan that had not been
fully vetted, discussed or implemented, I should have
charged my people with ensuring that officials on the
local and/or federal levels were performing that
function if we were not prepared to fully execute that
duty," Bradberry said.
Bradberry said he worked mostly in the months before
Katrina on developing a traffic flow plan to help the
evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people in cars.
That effort was mostly successful and saved thousands of
lives, he said.
Walter Maestri, Jefferson Parish's emergency management
director, said the inability to evacuate people without
cars shouldn't have been a surprise to officials in
state, federal and local governments because studies
dating to 1994 had pointed that out.
Nursing home failures
Joseph Donchess, executive director of the Louisiana
Nursing Home Association, said he never got the sense
that evacuating nursing home patients was a priority
during the rescue process, citing the state government's
decision to cancel the association's access to
Louisiana's E-team system of disseminating priority
rescue requests four days into the rescue efforts. After
that, he said, the agency had to secure the permission
of top state health officials to use the system, which
delayed the dissemination of important information about
nursing home patients still needing rescue.
Lieberman said the nursing homes can't escape all
responsibility, because too many did not evacuate before
the hurricane despite warnings three days before Katrina
struck that the "big storm" everyone had feared was
heading toward Louisiana.
Terry Ebbert, New Orleans' homeland security director,
told senators that the U.S. Defense Department is the
only organization with the command-and-control
capability, equipment and training to respond to a
massive disaster such as Katrina and immediately should
be utilized in future disasters.
Sen. John Warner, R-Va., chair of the Senate Armed
Services Committee and a member of the Homeland Security
and Governmental Affairs Committee, said Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is looking into how to do
exactly that and work around the current restrictions
that bar the military from engaging in law enforcement
functions.
. . . . . . .
Bruce Alpert can be reached at bruce.alpert@newhouse.com
or (202) 383-7861.