From atticus (about Katrina) II

Army Corps officials were trying to close the gaps in the levees, but their hurried efforts to stem the flow were hampered by a lack of supplies. They could not find 10-ton sandbags or the slings they needed to drop the bags from helicopters; most of their personnel had evacuated, and so had their local contractors. "We didn’t expect any breaches," Dan Hitchings of the agency’s Mississippi Valley Division later explained. "We didn’t think we were going to have a wall down." The corps tried to drop smaller sandbags into the 17th Street breach, but they simply floated away with the current.

FEMA managed to deliver 65,000 meals to the Superdome, but by the end of the day, water was rising so fast that the agency was unable to unload five more truckloads of food and water. That evening, in a belated bow to televised reality, Chertoff declared the unfolding disaster an "incident of national significance," triggering the government’s highest level of response for the first time since the new post-9/11 system had been designed. He did not publicly announce the move until the next day.

Aug. 31: Coming to grips with the calamity at hand

Dawn found a handful of buses outside the Superdome, and an estimated 23,000 people clamoring for a ride. FEMA had promised hundreds of buses, but they were arriving, Louisiana’s Smith recalled, "in a trickle." And unbeknownst to FEMA, a new circle of hell was opening downtown, as the New Orleans convention center filled with an estimated 25,000 evacuees, many of them unable to get to the flooded area around the Superdome. There was no food, no water and no feds. A spree of robbery, looting and gunfire erupted inside as police dispatched to the center stayed almost exclusively on the perimeter, according to police and witnesses, outnumbered and unable to quell the mayhem.

New Orleans as a city had all but ceased to exist. Nagin spoke of "thousands" dead. Blanco publicly pleaded for 40,000 National Guard troops. In a conference call with Guard officials in the region, Blum asked if they had what they needed. They said no.

"They said that this is bigger than anything we’ve ever seen or imagined," Blum recalled. "This had touched them personally. Even at that time they didn’t have a full sense of what they were dealing with." Blum immediately arranged a videoconference with every adjutant general around the country, and 3,000 Guard troops streamed into New Orleans over the next 24 hours, enough to replace the entire city police force. By Saturday, the Guard would have 30,000 troops in the region.

Examining the damage done

Bush, winging his way back from vacation, paused to swoop low over the prostrate city on Air Force One. Back in Washington, he convened a stunned Cabinet.

Bush came in with a "sense of urgency in his tone" after his aerial tour, recalled Mike Leavitt, the secretary of health and human services. "It was, ‘Has anybody thought of that, who’s doing this? I want you to do this and this and this.’ " But the scale of the problem seemed inexplicably massive, and the plans they drew up that day would take agonizing days to carry out. Leavitt, for example, declared a federal health emergency throughout the Gulf Coast, calling for 2,500 additional hospital beds in the region by Friday, and another 2,500 in the 72 hours after that. "We had to scramble the jets," he said.

At the interagency coordination meetings, gargantuan new proposals were being discussed, such as housing the estimated million-plus newly homeless in tent cities, mobile home parks and even federalized cruise ships. At Northcom, officials were still waiting for a call requesting active-duty troops. The Navy dispatched three aid ships from Norfolk; they were due to arrive Sept. 4.

But assistance that was available was often blocked. In the Gulf, not 100 miles away from New Orleans, sat the 844-foot USS Bataan, equipped with six operating rooms and beds for 600 patients. Starting Wednesday, Amtrak offered to run a twice-a-day shuttle for as many as 600 evacuees from a rail yard west of New Orleans to Lafayette, La. The first run was not organized until Saturday. Officials then told Amtrak they would not require any more trains.

Raging debate behind closed doors

Out of public view, the White House was considering an outright federal takeover of the emergency efforts, escalating a partisan feud with the Democratic governor as Bush aides questioned her ability to manage the crisis. Despite days of pleading, the White House argued that her plea for more troops had come in only at 7:21 that morning. Amid the reports of looting and general lawlessness, the White House instructed lawyers in the Justice Department and other agencies to investigate invoking the Insurrection Act, last used during the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

But a fierce debate erupted, said an administration official who participated in the meetings and who spoke on the condition of anonymity, centering on whether Bush could order a federal takeover of the relief effort with or without Blanco’s approval. White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr., recalled from his Maine vacation, broached the question with Blanco, a senior White House official said. Later, the president called from the Oval Office to press the same idea. Both times, Blanco balked.

But her aides said she had no reason to believe the federal government would start rising to the occasion. They also said that the president never asked her directly about federalizing the state’s troops. "We wouldn’t have turned down federal troops," one Blanco aide said. "We were asking for them."

Sept. 1: ‘They didn’t come to look’

At 4 a.m., 550 tired, hungry, frightened evacuees from the Superdome filed into Houston’s Astrodome. Soon there would be thousands. Now, Houston had to figure out how to absorb not 25,000 but as many as 250,000 Louisianans.

Within hours, it was clear that many of the evacuees required urgent medical care, including 50 children from a hospital and helicopters full of soaking-wet adults.

And while initial plans had called for sheltering the entire evacuation at the Astrodome, "we found out that while you could put 23,000 people in the Dome, you wouldn’t want to," as Eckels recalled. By evening, buses were being sent elsewhere.

Meanwhile, St. Bernard Parish was still marooned. Out of 28,000 structures in the parish, only 52 were undamaged, and as many as 5,000 were simply gone. Every day since the storm, Ingargiola had waited for the federal government to bring food, water, electricity, anything. "They didn’t hear from me for four days, and they didn’t come to look for us," Ingargiola recalled. "Did they think we were okay?"

Anger was also rising at federal officials, who often seemed to be getting in the way. At Louis Armstrong International Airport, commercial airlines had been flying in supplies and taking out evacuees since Monday. But on Thursday, after FEMA took over the evacuation, aviation director Roy A. Williams complained that "we arepacked with evacuees and the planes are not being loaded and there are gaps of two or three hours when no planes are arriving." Eventually, he started fielding "calls from various airlines saying, ‘Well, we are being told by FEMA that you don’t need any planes.’ And of course we need planes. I had thousands of people on the concourses."

Mayor issues a ‘desperate SOS’

At the convention center, thousands had gathered by Thursday without supplies. There were no buses and none on the way. Nagin, almost in tears, issued a "desperate SOS."

But official Washington seemed not to be watching the televised chaos. Bush was still insisting the storm and catastrophic flooding his own government had foretold was a surprise. "I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees," he said.

Later, in another television interview, Brown insisted that everything was "under control." And though the crowds had started to flock to the convention center two days earlier, Brown said: "We learned about the convention center today."

In private, Bush had reached a "tipping point" Thursday, a senior aide said, when he watched images from the convention center. But the debate inside his administration still raged over whether to federalize the Guard and take overall control of New Orleans.

At Northcom, they were still awaiting orders. That day, Rowe said, the planners had come up with another military option — a logistical force to back up the overtaxed relief effort on the ground. The idea was to send as many as 1,500 troops each to Louisiana and Mississippi. At Fort Bragg, N.C., the 82nd Airborne was on standby to deploy, so was the First Cavalry Division at Fort Hood, Tex., and Marine bases on both coasts.

Bush discussed the idea with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that day, but still held back on deciding. The cavalry would have to wait.

Sept. 2: ‘The results are not acceptable’

At 7 a.m., Bush called his generals to the White House, along with Rumsfeld and Chertoff. They discussed final terms of Bush’s plan — by nightfall, he would demand that Blanco hand over control of National Guard troops. And they hashed out the idea of sending in the active-duty military, though troops from the 82nd Airborne and 1st Cavalry would not get their orders until the next day.

Then Bush left for the stricken region.

Before boarding his helicopter, the president had a terse comment about his government’s performance. "The results are not acceptable." But shortly after they touched down in Alabama, the president’s tone changed. He turned to Brown, the focus of much of the criticism from state and local officials, and declared: "Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job."

Later in the tour, Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff visited Jefferson Parish, and told Maestri he was doing a wonderful job. "Where are the resources?" Maestri asked.

"He said: ‘It’s coming, it’s coming,’ " Maestri recalled. "Yeah, well, Christmas is coming, too."
© 2005 The Washington Post Company