Photo: FEMA, Win Henderson

Disaster:
Hurricane Katrina and The Failure of Homeland Security

By Christopher Cooper and Robert Block of The Wall Street Journal.

When Hurricane Katrina roared ashore on the morning of August 29, 2005,
federal and state officials were not prepared for the devastation it would
bring-despite all the drills, exercises, and warnings. In this troubling
exposé of what went wrong, Christopher Cooper and Robert Block of The Wall
Street Journal show that the flaws go much deeper than out-of-touch federal
bureaucrats or overwhelmed local politicians.

Drawing on exclusive interviews with federal, state, and local officials,
Cooper and Block take readers inside the Federal Emergency Management Agency
and the Department of Homeland Security to reveal the inexcusable
mismanagement during Hurricane Katrina-the bad decisions that were made, the
facts that were ignored, the individuals who saw that the system was broken
but were unable to fix it. America's top emergency response officials had
long known that a calamitous hurricane was likely to hit New Orleans, but
that seems to have had little effect on planning or execution.

Disaster demonstrates that the incompetent response to Hurricane Katrina is
a wake-up call to all Americans, wherever they live, about how distressingly
vulnerable we remain. Washington is ill equipped to handle large-scale
emergencies, be they floods or fires, natural events or terrorist attacks,
and Cooper and Block make a strong case for overhauling of the nation's
emergency response system. This is a book that no American can afford to
ignore.

The first review of the book came from the publishing industry's bible, Publishers Weekly:

The fatal inundation of New Orleans was no natural disaster, argues this
hard-hitting investigative report. Wall Street Journal reporters Cooper
and Block finger two very man-made causes of the tragedy. The first was
the decades-long failure of local officials and the Army Corps of
Engineers to fix New Orleans' poorly designed and constructed levees and
floodwalls, which collapsed under moderate hurricane conditions. The
second and more spectacular was the breakdown of the Federal Emergency
Management Agency after its incorporation into the Department of
Homeland Security, which cut FEMA's funding and authority and reoriented
it toward the national obsession with terrorism. The result, when the
flood came, was a bumbling federal response hobbled by complacent
planning, miscommunication, red tape (even recovery of the dead was
delayed by paperwork) and an inability to deliver promised supplies and
transportation. The authors' exhaustively researched account slogs
through the intricacies of this bureaucratic nightmare and goes beyond
the usual pillorying of FEMA head Michael Brown to criticize higher
officials in the White House and, especially, DHS. Cooper and Block
manage to thread a readable, coherent story through the morass of detail
and acronyms, with disquieting implications about the government's
ability to cope with catastrophe.
     --Publishers Weekly

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