Katrina still echoes in New Orleans, says author
Wardlaw-Hartridge alum recounts experience of covering hurricane
BY CHRIS GAETANO Staff Writer

EDISON - A presentation by journalist and author Jed Horne, given before students at Wardlaw-Hartridge School in Edison, portrayed New Orleans as a city racked with confusion and miscommunication during Hurricane Katrina, and facing tough choices about its future in the post-storm rebuilding.

Horne, author of the book "Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City," was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his work as a metro editor at the Times-Picayune during the 2005 storm. The former Wardlaw- Hartridge student returned to his old school to shar e his experiences during an afternoon assembly.

"You honor, whether you mean to or not, New Orleans with your continued attention," said Horne to the students assembled there.

The thrust of Horne's presentation seemed to focus on New Orleans' role as a testing ground - before, during and after the hurricane, even to this day. He said, for example, that response to the disaster was the first real test of the then-4-yearold Department of Homeland Security, which, Horne said, "failed outrageously … almost laughably."

"We had a week, if not a lifetime, to prepare for Katrina. … What happens when it's a dirty bomb and you have not a week but a half-hour to avert Armageddon?" asked Horne.

He also pointed to the incompetence of the leadership at the city level, taking the time to chastise the behavior of Mayor Ray Nagin and the chief of police for portraying the city as a no-man's land racked with roving, pillaging gangs in what Horne said was a misguided attempt to call more attention to the plight of New Orleans.

"They were jittery and scared, and all kinds of crazy stuff happens when people are scared," said Horne.

New Orleans, to Horne, is still undergoing a larger test, even two years after the storm initially broke. Katrina, he said, wiped the slate clean on a lot of government institutions, such as the school and affordable housing systems, that were just not working. The test, then, is how best to rebuild. Many of the decisions being pondered by the municipal government there had much to do with the degree to which things should be restored, versus the degree to which they should be modified. One example, said Horne, would be the decision as to whether the city should implore people to return, which may stretch public resources thin, or to retrench into a more easily defensible position, but at the expense of abandoning the outer neighborhoods.

"So, the mayor is confronted with this terrible conundrum," said Horne.

Similar situations abound, said Horne, concerning whether to restructure the hospital system, the school system, the public housing system, and more. The storm, said Horne, afforded the city a unique opportunity to rebuild the city from the ground up, a prospect many planners have relished.

"It's kind of like sociology on steroids," said Horne.

Another choice was how to balance private and public-sector interests in rebuilding the city. Horne said that Nagin chose the private sector, and "I'm not entirely sure whether he made the right decision."

He also spoke about how the city still lacks adequate flood protections, which he said was a failing at the federal level, because a project to truly defend the city from rising flood waters is so expensive that it could only be funded at the federal level.

"It is simply outrageous that New Orleans does not yet have a full-throated commitment for flood protection," said Horne. He later said that it would cost about $30 billion, or what the government spends every six to eight weeks on Iraq.

Horne said that during the storm, staff at the Times-Picayune suffered from many of the same problems that everyone in the city experienced during the storm, such as an underestimation of the damage the storm would cause, and a lack of communications during its aftermath. The staff in the main office had waited too long to leave the building, said Horne, and it wasn't until water was coming in from under the door that they finally evacuated the building. They all got into the circulation trucks at that point, not knowing how they were going to get out of the city, but knowing that it wasn't safe to stay at those offices.

Horne said that the old paradigm for hurricane coverage had been to tough it out "in your bunker" and wait for the storm to pass before fanning out over the disaster area. This, he said, would not work for Katrina.

"Get out of your bunker, because if you can't get back to it after the storm anyway, you're not going to be able to print your paper from it, so you go out into the bureaus and kind of hedge your bets by having fall-back offices," said Horne. The Internet, he said, helped a lot in this, as did having satellite phones outside the 507 area code.

"All this stuff seems elemental, and it would seem shocking that a newspaper in a city with so much of a hurricane threat hadn't worked this out before, but we had to learn. Everyone had to learn. No one expected it to be that bad," he said.

Horne said the situation in the city, as he sees it, seems to be on the track of "so far, so good." When asked by a student whether he felt things were improving, he said his answer would be a "guardedly optimistic yes."

"There is grounds for optimism … Katrina was so outrageous, and the scandals so offensive … it forced the streamlining of all these little bailiwicks and sinecures that had been the bane of municipal government," said Horne.