US forewarned about Katrina

2006-01-24 11:52

Washington - The federal homeland security department was warned a day before Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf of Mexico's northern coast that the storm's surge could breach levees and leave New Orleans, Louisiana, flooded for weeks or months, documents show.

An August 28 report by the department's national infrastructure simulation and analysis centre concluded that a Category 4 or 5 hurricane would cause severe damage in the city, including power outages and a direct economic hit of up to $10bn for the first week.

"Overall, the impacts described herein are conservative," stated the report, which was sent to homeland security's office for infrastructure protection.

"Any storm rated Category 4 or greater... will likely lead to severe flooding and/or levee breaching, leaving the New Orleans metro area submerged for weeks or months," said the report. The document was released on Monday by a Senate panel examining the government's breakdown in responding to Katrina.

Latest indication

The documents are the latest indication that the federal government knew beforehand of catastrophic damage likely from a storm of Katrina's magnitude.

Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast as a Category 4 storm on August 29 2005. Some weather experts believe it had decreased to a Category 3 or even Category 2 storm by the time it reached New Orleans.

In 2004, Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency ran an exercise called "Hurricane Pam" that provided a dire prediction about the result should a Category 3 hurricane hit New Orleans. It found, among other things, that flood waters would surge over levees, create "a catastrophic mass casualty/mass evacuation" and leave drainage pumps crippled for up to six months.

Lacklustre response

President George W Bush's administration has been lambasted for its lacklustre response to Katrina and its aftermath, including criticism that the government should have known that a hurricane of that strength posed a danger to the area's levees and was unprepared to cope with it. Most of New Orleans is below sea level.

Homeland security spokesperson Russ Knocke said he was unfamiliar with the documents, but that the levees situation probably was one reason the government urged an evacuation of New Orleans before the storm hit.

"We're in the process of participating in a large after-action report," Knocke said. "We're deeply committed to finding out what worked and didn't work, and apply those lessons learned going forward."

Shortly after the disaster, Bush said, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." He later clarified his remarks, saying his comment was meant to suggest that there had been a false sense of relief that the levees had held when the storm passed, only to break a few hours later.

- AP