So it looks like Brownie was doing a heck of a job after all. The release of videos showing that former FEMA chief Michael Brown knew Katrina was going to be a beast, and that he told everyone he could, makes it a little easier to understand why he was so pissed off last fall when the administration made him into a scapegoat for it disastrous handling of the emergency.
But so what?
The video only deepens the outrage about how poorly the federal government performed, and makes even more horrifying the silence that came out of the White House in the weeks after the tragedy began to unfold. Warned that the levees might fail, Brownie speculated that evacuating people to the Superdome might result in a “catastrophe within a catastrophe." He was right. The White House response is that the quiet, non-questioning, confident president you see on the tapes was in fact deeply invested in Brown's predictions.
Says White House spokesman Trent Duffy, of the president who comes across on the tape as quietly disengaged: "He received multiple briefings from multiple officials, and he was completely engaged at all times."
Whatever. A whole lot of good it did, and all that the tapes are likely to do, have already done, is to reprise the round of I-told-you-so recriminations and finger-pointing that have been the hallmark of the post-Katrina debate. "This administration was told what Louisiana already knew: that our federally constructed levees could certainly fail . . . but these concerns, and others made by disaster relief experts, fell on deaf ears," said Sen. Mary Landrieu.
What is most amazing, however, is that six months after the storm, three months before the start of a new hurricane season, Katrina could happen again and the only reason the government response may be better is that there will be less to respond to – at least in New Orleans, which remains today a city suspended between the living and the dead.
While the French Quarter and huge sections of Uptown and the Garden District came back to life for the recent Mardi Gras, the story is altogether different in the black neighborhoods to the east, along Interstate 10. They are empty, quiet, and stuck in the same place they were five months ago when the water receded. They have no power, no water, and, consequently, no people. They are like ruins of a lost civilization. Last week, walking through the streets of the Lower Ninth Ward, I watched as tourists took pictures of the devastation. That neighborhood, and the ones east and west of it, is as it was in the days after the storm -- completely desolate. Houses sit in the middle of streets, shifted off of their foundations. Tile floors and concrete porches lay flat, like gravestones in memory of the homes and lives that were once attached to them.
So while it may be true that the new Katrina video, in the words of Sen. Harry Reid, "confirms what we have suspected all along, that this Administration did anything they can to hide what really happened," it may hardly matter. The circumstances remain painfully dire, acutely unimproved.
In a couple of weeks FEMA, which to some people in New Orleans stands for “Fix Everything My Ass,” is expected to hand down a new map that will answer the burning questions about which parts of the debilitated city can be rebuilt. Hundreds of thousands of people have been living with that increasingly burdensome uncertainty for six months. And whether they are in Houston or Dallas, Uptown in a trailer or with relatives in Baton Rouge, the suspense has become more and more difficult to bear. Over and over, I heard how people felt abandoned by the federal government; and even the most optimistic among them say it'll take five to ten years just to clean up their city. So what the president knew, and when he knew it, is of little interest to them. They want to know if and when they can go home.
So as we do the rewind on Katrina, logging blame here and there, pointing a finger at the mayor or the governor or the president or the Army Corps of Engineers, remember that people in New Orleans are already looking to the future, when the new hurricane season begins in a mere three months. Katrina is a conversation worth having, but the focus should be clear. The worst is not behind us. It is no time for a post-mortem. The suffering continues, and more danger lies ahead. The levees are not rebuilt, though that is supposed to happen by June 1. The bodies may have all been collected, but the specter of death hangs over a lot of New Orleans, particularly its black neighborhoods.
Who needs the briefing on that?
Terence Samuel is a political writer in Washington, D.C.
