America's Great Storm

Leading through Hurricane Katrina

Haley Barbour, Jere Nash

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781496805072
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

When Hurricane Katrina hit Mississippi on August 29, 2005, it unleashed the costliest natural disaster in American history, and the third deadliest. Haley Barbour had been Mississippi's governor for only twenty months when he assumed responsibility for guiding his pummeled, stricken state's recovery and rebuilding efforts. America's Great Storm is not only a personal memoir of his role in that recovery, but also a sifting of the many lessons he learned about leadership in a time of massive crisis. For the book, the authors interviewed more than forty-five key people involved in helping Mississippi recover, including local, state, and federal officials as well as private citizens who played pivotal roles in the weeks and months following Katrina's landfall. In addition to covering in detail the events of September and October 2005, chapters focus on the special legislative session that allowed casinos to build on shore; the role of the recovery commission chaired by Jim Barksdale; a behind-the-scenes description of working with Congress to pass an unprecedented, multi-billion-dollar emergency disaster assistance appropriation; and the enormous roles played by volunteers in rebuilding the entire housing, transportation, and education infrastructure of South Mississippi and the Gulf Coast. A final chapter analyzes the leadership skills and strategies Barbour employed on behalf of the people of his state, observations that will be valuable to anyone tasked with managing in a crisis.

CHAPTER 1

Before Landfall

FOR MISSISSIPPIANS in the summer of 2005, Hurricane Camille was our definition of the worst natural disaster possible. When it came across the Mississippi Gulf Coast on August 17, 1969, Camille became one of only three Category 5 hurricanes to hit the United States. Its 190-mph winds left near-total destruction along its path.

A few days after Camille hit, I drove a Yazoo City dump truck to the Coast. My oldest brother, Jeppie, was mayor of Yazoo City, Mississippi, our hometown, and he recruited me to drive one of three city dump trucks filled, in my case, with bedding, mattresses, box springs, pillows and sheets, for people who had lost their homes. Once on the Coast, our little convoy crossed the CSX railroad, the bed of which is elevated several feet above natural ground on a berm that has the effect of a levee several blocks inland from the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi Sound. Though the roadway had been cleared to both sides of the street, there were enormous piles of debris—wood, shingles, refrigerators, tree limbs, and much more—that had been caught by the levee as the winds had roared through. I could not believe my eyes, much less imagine how anything would ever be worse than what I was seeing. Thirty-six years later, I was proven wrong.

The Beginning

Hurricane Katrina began as a tropical wave off the west coast of Africa on August 11, merged with what was left of a tropical depression around the Leeward Islands on August 18, and was first noticed by satellites on August 22 when it was just east of the Turks and Caicos Islands near Cuba. It became an official tropical depression when the National Hurricane Center assigned it number 12 the next day, when it was about 175 miles southeast of the Bahamas.

Robert Latham, Mike Womack, and their colleagues at the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency (MEMA) took note and published their first report describing the gathering storm on Tuesday, August 23. Gen. Harold Cross and his command staff of the Mississippi National Guard began to track the storm’s path, putting their operational plans into action, and reaching out to adjutant generals in other states to let them know he might need some backup. Anthony Topazi, Bobby Kerley, and their team at Mississippi Power Company, the electric utility serving the Coast, southeast, and east-central Mississippi, started making contact with companies across the country, putting them on notice that crews might be needed. Ricky Mathews and his staff at the Biloxi Sun Herald, the longest active newspaper on the Coast, had conversations with their corporate headquarters about publishing the newspaper in the days following landfall if they lost power in Biloxi. Butch Brown and his project managers at the Mississippi Department of Transportation held their first group of meetings to allocate employees to the Coast. Similar conversations were taking place among many other state and local officials as well as business leaders across the Coast.

With hundreds of plans being put in place, a process was unfolding that I didn’t even know to appreciate until I became Governor. What I came to learn was that emergency management agencies, utilities, and major corporations spend months and countless man hours getting ready for hurricanes, planning for all kinds of contingencies, thinking through different scenarios, and actually rehearsing those plans. They would all plan for a worst case, and that worst case was Camille. No one ever considered the possibility that Mississippi could sustain damages worse than those from Camille.

Thanks to a combination of weather-related phenomena, the system got itself organized and became a tropical storm on August 24 around the central Bahamas, when it was named Katrina by the National Hurricane Center. The same day, I returned from a three-week economic development trip to Asia.

Atmospheric conditions caused the storm to strengthen into hurricane status and move westward, where it hit the southeastern coast of Florida on Thursday, August 25, and then traveled out into the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The same day MEMA held its first executive planning meeting in preparation for a possible Katrina landfall. Thursday morning’s Sun Herald reported that “meteorologists believe the storm could take a turn to the north and possibly hit the Florida Panhandle by Monday afternoon, but the cone of error extends from southeastern Louisiana to South Carolina.”

By this time, Bill Carwile, Bob Fenton, and others, knowing that hurricane trajectories were difficult to predict this far out, were headed to Mississippi from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) headquarters in Washington and from other locations around the country. Carwile’s title was federal coordinating officer and as such was Mississippi’s top liaison to FEMA; Fenton was his operations chief. As it turned out, this core group of FEMA officials had a dedication to their job and a commitment to the people of Mississippi that would be of singular importance to our rescue and recovery efforts in the days, weeks, and months following landfall.

As the storm gathered strength, trying to decide which way it would head, I cancelled a Southern Governor’s Association trip to Georgia on Friday after talking with Latham about Katrina’s latest movements. At his request, I issued an executive order declaring a state of emergency and a separate executive order authorizing the mobilization of the National Guard. MEMA activated its State Emergency Operations Center in Jackson and its State Emergency Response Team for deployment to Camp Shelby, just south of Hattiesburg and more than halfway to the Coast from Jackson, and sent county liaisons to the six coastal counties (three actually on the Coast and the three just above them). A National Guard element with vehicles capable of high-water rescue was also prepositioned at each of the three coastal county emergency operation centers. The emergency order authorized MEMA to incur costs and deploy state assets that would have to be covered with a legislative appropriation or federal reimbursement after the fact. And until General Cross received the order directed at the Guard, he was limited in his ability to use all of the soldiers, equipment, and logistical support available to his command.

General Cross and his team had planned for many types of disasters, thinking through how many soldiers and support staff would be needed to do search and rescue, distribute supplies, and handle security as well as where they would be stationed before landfall, how they would travel, and the logistics needed to support that kind of operation. Responding to a Camille-type calamity, a worst-case scenario, would require a force of about 3,200 people, and Cross knew he could put that many in position, in spite of the more than 3,000 who were on active duty in Iraq or Afghanistan. With an enlistment of some 10,000 men and women, Mississippi’s Guard was one of the largest in the country and was seeing plenty of action in the Middle East. As a consequence, General Cross made the point of telling me that our soldiers had become highly trained and had been given loads of experience overseas in the years following 9/11. They would soon be called upon to put that training to work in their home state like never before.

These declarations, conversations, and movements had ripple effects throughout state and local government, especially as we approached what would have been a big summer tourism weekend on the Gulf Coast. Local emergency officials convened meetings in their hometowns and connected with MEMA. Government employees, emergency staff, and volunteers were assembled to make preparations. Supplies were checked, vehicles were topped with fuel and moved to high ground, generators were tested, water and food were stored, and logistical manuals were pulled off the shelves. Thousands of details were worked through. As a number of emergency officials had told me, you cannot ramp up the process too often or people will become immune to calls for action.

Just a month earlier, Hurricane Dennis had threatened the Coast, forcing us to call for evacuations. At the last minute Dennis veered east and made landfall over the western Florida Panhandle near Navarre Beach. The previous year we had followed four major hurricanes, with Ivan hitting Gulf Shores, Alabama, in early September with 120-mph winds. Three other major hurricanes—Jeanne, Frances, and Charley—had hit parts of southern and eastern Florida.

Latham and I recognized the need for caution, but we also recognized people needed time to prepare, store supplies, and, if needed, to evacuate. Quite frankly, I never did want to take any chances.

As Friday turned from morning to afternoon, meteorologists began to tell us of shifts in Katrina’s flow and a change of direction. Mississippi was now probably in play. Latham told the media that the National Hurricane Center had adjusted the hurricane’s projected path to the west and “as of now, landfall would be west of the Mississippi-Alabama state line in Jackson County.” Based on the latest measurements, Latham estimated tropical storm winds should reach the Coast about three o’clock Monday morning, and Katrina would be at least Category 3 and possibly a 4. The question now was whether to order evacuations.

City and county officials agreed to meet on Saturday to make final decisions about evacuations. We thought waiting on the evacuation orders was worth the extra time primarily because Gulf Coast residents suffered from “hurricane fatigue”—that is, they had become weary of leaving without anything really happening, as Latham admitted to a Sun Herald reporter later that day: “Based on a survey conducted after Dennis, it appeared the general public is very tired and weary of evacuations. We are worried many people will not evacuate.”

That being said, as we were going to bed Friday night, the National Hurricane Center was predicting Hurricane Katrina would strike the town of Buras-Triumph, Louisiana, sixty-six miles southeast of New Orleans. That put Mississippi to the northeast of the hurricane’s eye, which we all knew contained the most powerful winds.

At the time, ten years ago, my question was: how strong would the winds be? We now know that wind speed, as used to determine the category ranking of a hurricane, can be very deceiving. We didn’t think about factoring in the size of the storm surge and the amount of rain a hurricane would bring with it, nor did we consider the breadth of the storm. Katrina was fundamentally different from Camille: while the winds in Camille were stronger; Katrina’s storm surge was much greater, the amount of rain was much greater, and the sheer size was much greater. That’s why Camille turned out to be such a poor benchmark.

Saturday, August 27, 2005

Overnight, the computers got a better fix on Katrina—her winds extended 280 miles across (or about 140 miles from the center), and the storm appeared to be headed straight for us. To put that in perspective, the length of the Mississippi shoreline is about seventy miles. The headline in the Sun Herald was “Fear the Worst” and, as Latham told the newspaper, “I don’t think the scenario could be any worse for us.” Saturday morning’s Clarion-Ledger, the largest-circulation newspaper in the state, published in Jackson, delivered a similar message to a statewide audience: “This is a tremendously dangerous storm. Everyone needs to prepare to evacuate in the coastal counties.” Latham headed to the Coast to meet personally with local officials and advise them to order mandatory evacuations.

Although I had the legal authority to order mandatory evacuations, governors have traditionally allowed local governments to issue evacuation orders so as to improve the chances for compliance. On the Coast, these decisions are made by local emergency officials, including mayors and county supervisors, acting in concert with MEMA and other state agencies. More recently, the Mississippi Gaming Commission has been an integral component of that decision making process too. In addition to the prospect of “crying wolf” too often, evacuations exact a toll that all of us had to consider. Businesses shut down. Wages and revenue are lost. People have to leave and find housing elsewhere. Shelters have to open north of the Coast.

But as the day wore on, I was fully prepared to exert my executive authority and order evacuations if the local officials had not intervened. Regardless of where the storm might make landfall, the sheer size of Katrina meant we were in for a rough ride. I was on the phone all day, talking with local officials, checking in with MEMA, urging business leaders to support the call for evacuations. A local businessman’s response was typical of what I was hearing: “They’re trying to make us evacuate Zone B, and it’s never flooded.” “We’ve got to err on the side of safety,” I would say. “Well, we just don’t need to be doing this,” is typically what I would hear back.

Mississippi Power’s Bobby Kerley remembered on Saturday:

Our weather specialist came to see Anthony and me and told us, “This one was going to be the worst that he had ever seen, including worse than Camille. Bobby, you live two blocks from the beach. The water’s going to be 20 feet at your house.” I said, “Ain’t no way. When Camille came ashore, it didn’t get within a block of my house.” “I’m telling you,” he said, “This one’s going to be the worst.”

Saturday was a long day, pushing everyone to understand the seriousness of the coming storm and the need to leave the Coast. As the day wore on, the National Hurricane Center began to predict a direct hit on New Orleans, though the hurricane warning extended from Morgan City, Louisiana, to the Alabama–Florida border.

Slowly, though, we were making progress. The Mississippi Gaming Commission ordered all casinos to shut down and evacuate as of five o’clock Saturday afternoon, and we urged the officials in Hancock, Harrison, and Jackson Counties to order mandatory evacuations for all the flood-prone areas. As New Orleans officials began to issue evacuation orders, the Louisiana–Mississippi traffic contraflow agreement went into effect at four o’clock that Saturday afternoon, enforcing northbound one-way traffic in all lanes for vehicles exiting greater New Orleans and Louisiana’s surrounding areas on interstates 55 and 59.

By Saturday churches were opening as shelters, meetings on the Coast were being cancelled, folks from the Coast and from New Orleans were finding their way to places in Mississippi, colleges in Jackson began taking in students from New Orleans, and hotels were filling up.

As some point during the day, we had a FEMA-initiated call with people from all over the southern region, checking plans, ordering supplies, and seeing where we could share personnel depending on where Katrina finally made landfall. As I discuss in more detail later, one of the problems with FEMA or at least those who were running the day-to-day at the national FEMA headquarters—was not that they were inattentive; they just failed to execute their logistical operation. Like all of us, they would ultimately become completely overwhelmed by the magnitude of the damage and the near-total breakdown of their supply system. But in the days leading up to landfall, MEMA had placed our water, ice, food, tarps, and other supply orders with FEMA, indicating what we thought we would need. FEMA had contracts with a number of vendors to supply these provisions in the days leading up to an emergency, and we all assumed what we ordered and needed would be available. We also assumed we could reach everyone quickly after landfall and that the damage would be primarily limited to the coastal counties. All of these assumptions turned out to be far too optimistic.

As for the calls we were making during the day, Latham and his team would stay in touch with state agency personnel and local emergency officials. I would call local sheriffs, mayors, supervisors, and business owners, backing up the message Latham was delivering but also gaining valuable information about activities on the ground.

Let me pause just for a moment and say a word about MEMA.

As a state agency, MEMA has a very small staff whose role is to plan for emergencies, to use the resources of other state agencies to respond to those emergencies, and to coordinate our emergency response with local officials and FEMA. FEMA is organized in much the same way; it does planning and training and acts as a cash register to pay for supplies and services. Once the governor issues the emergency declaration, MEMA can incur expenses, and it can also require other state agencies to send personnel to its emergency operations center and to respond to requests for assistance from the MEMA director. The idea is to put all of state government under one roof during times of natural disasters or other emergencies. What I came to realize and really appreciate is that all of those people engage in training exercises almost year-round. Those exercises range from tornadoes to terrorist attacks to a failure at the Grand Gulf Nuclear facility. They don’t walk through the door and ask, “What do I do now?”

That being said, Robert Latham and Bill Carwile, FEMA’s coordinating officer for Mississippi in this emergency, put something into place that had never been done before. They created a joint state and federal command group, merging the MEMA and FEMA operations into one coordinated operation, a unified command as they called it. As Latham said, “We look to see if the state can do it; if the state can’t do it, then we look to see if the federal government can do it or we go get the assets from the private sector.”...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Before Landfall
• Chapter 2 Landfall, Monday, August 29, 2005
• Chapter 3 The Four Days after Landfall: Search and Rescue
• Chapter 4 Volunteers, Housing, and Recovery
• Chapter 5 Special Legislative Session and Gaming
• Chapter 6 The Barksdale Commission
• Chapter 7 Congress and Recovery
• Chapter 8 Christmas 2005
• Chapter 9 The New Year
• Chapter 10 Lessons Learned: A Personal Reflection
• Epilogue
• Sources
• Index