with the date they had been searched and the number of bodies discovered inside. I saw a few people wandering around in a daze. Nearby was a pack of mangy dogs scavenging for food, many with bite marks on their bodies. It was a vivid display of the survival-of-the-fittest climate that had overtaken the city.
Touring the destruction Katrina had done to the city.
On September 15, Day Eighteen, I returned to New Orleans to deliver a primetime address to the nation. I decided to give the speech from Jackson Square, named for General Andrew Jackson, who defended New Orleans against the British at the end of the War of 1812. The famous French Quarter landmark had suffered minimal damage during the storm.
I viewed the speech as my opportunity to explain what had gone wrong, promise to fix the problems, and lay out a vision to move the Gulf Coast and the country forward. Abandoned New Orleans was the eeriest setting from which I had ever given a speech. Except for generators, the power was still out in the city. In one of the world’s most vibrant cities, the only people around were a handful of government officials and the soldiers from the 82nd Airborne.
With St. Louis Cathedral bathed in blue light behind me, I began
I laid out a series of specific commitments: to ensure victims received the financial assistance they needed; to help people move out of hotels and shelters and into longer-term housing; to devote federal assets to cleaning up debris and rebuilding roads, bridges, and schools; to provide tax incentives for the return of businesses and the hiring of local workers; and to strengthen New Orleans’s levees to withstand the next big storm. I continued:
I took those promises seriously. Over the coming months, I worked with Congress to secure $126 billion in rebuilding funds, by far the most for any natural disaster in American history. I decided to create a new position to ensure that one person was accountable for coordinating the rebuilding and ensuring the money was spent wisely. Thad Allen held the role at first. When I nominated him to be commandant of the Coast Guard, I asked Don Powell, a fellow Texan and former chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Commission, to take his place.
I told Chief of Staff Andy Card—and later Josh Bolten—that I expected regular progress reports on our initiatives in the Gulf Coast. Top government officials gathered routinely in the Roosevelt Room for detailed briefings on issues such as how many victims had received disaster benefits checks, the number of Gulf Coast schools reopened, and the cubic yardage of debris cleared.
I wanted the people of the Gulf Coast to see firsthand that I was committed to rebuilding, so I made seventeen trips between August 2005 and August 2008. Laura made twenty-four visits in all. We both came away impressed by the determination and spirit of the people we met.
In March 2006, I visited the Industrial Canal levee, which had ruptured and flooded the Lower Ninth Ward. We saw huge piles of debris and trash as we drove to the site, a reminder of how far the neighborhood still had to go. Mayor Nagin and I grabbed our hard hats, climbed to the top of the levee, and watched pile drivers pound pillars seventy feet underground—a solid foundation designed to withstand a Katrina-size storm. Nothing was more important to reassuring New Orleans’s exiled residents that it was safe to return to the city they loved.
At the rebuilding of the Industrial Canal levee.
On the second anniversary of the storm, Laura and I visited the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Charter School for Science and Technology. Two years earlier, the school had been submerged under fifteen feet of water. Thanks in large part to a determined local principal, Doris Hicks, MLK became the first school in the Lower Ninth Ward to reopen. As a former librarian, Laura had been saddened by the number of books destroyed in the storm. She started a private fundraising campaign to help New Orleans schools rebuild their collections. Over the years, her leadership and the generosity of the American people helped send tens of thousands of books to schools across the Gulf Coast.
The story in Mississippi was just as uplifting. In August 2006, I went back to Biloxi, where I visited four days after the storm. Beaches that had been covered with debris a year earlier had been returned to their shimmering white-sand beauty. Seven casinos, supporting hundreds of jobs, had reopened. Church congregations that had been separated were back together again. Few people’s lives had changed more than Lynn Patterson’s. When I met him a year earlier, he was digging cars out of the muck in a neighborhood where all the houses were gone. When I came back to Biloxi, he gave Laura and me a tour of his new home, which had been rebuilt with the help of taxpayer dollars.
In the wake of Katrina, I asked Fran Townsend—a talented former New York City prosecutor who served as my top homeland security adviser in the White House—to study how we could better respond to future disasters. Her report reaffirmed the longstanding principle that state and local officials are best positioned to lead an effective emergency response. It also recommended changes in the federal government’s approach. We devised new ways to help state and local authorities conduct early evacuations, developed backup communications systems, established a National Operations Center to distribute timely situation reports, and set up an orderly process for deploying federal resources—including active-duty troops—in cases where state and local first responders had become overwhelmed.*
The new emergency response system was tested in August 2008, when Hurricane Gustav barreled across the Gulf of Mexico toward New Orleans. I held regular videoconferences with federal, state, and local officials in the days leading up to the storm. Mike Chertoff and the new FEMA director, former Miami-Dade fire chief Dave Paulison, relocated to Baton Rouge to oversee preparations. Shelters were ready and well stocked. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, the talented Republican elected in 2007, worked closely with Mayor Nagin to order a mandatory evacuation. “You need to be scared and you need to get your butts out of New Orleans right now,” the mayor said.
When Gustav made landfall, the first reports were that New Orleans had dodged a direct hit. I had heard that before. This time, though, the levees held and damages in New Orleans were minimal. A few weeks later, Hurricane Ike smashed into Galveston, Texas. Property damage was extensive—only Andrew and Katrina were costlier—but thanks to good preparation at the state level, many lives were spared. For all the devastation Katrina caused, part of the storm’s lasting impact is that it improved the federal government’s ability to support state and local governments in responding to major disasters.
Even when the neighborhoods of New Orleans are restored and the homes of Mississippi are rebuilt, no one who endured Katrina will ever fully recover. That is especially true for the tens of thousands who lost their homes and possessions, and—worst of all—the families of the more than eighteen hundred Americans who died.
In a different way, it is true of me, too. In a national catastrophe, the easiest person to blame is the president. Katrina presented a political opportunity that some critics exploited for years. The aftermath of Katrina —combined with the collapse of Social Security reform and the drumbeat of violence in Iraq—made the fall of 2005 a damaging period in my presidency. Just a year earlier, I had won reelection with more votes than any candidate in history. By the end of 2005, much of my political capital was gone. With my approval ratings plummeting, many Democrats—and some Republicans—concluded they would be better off opposing me than working together. We managed to get important things done, including reauthorizing the AIDS initiative, fully funding our troops, confirming Sam Alito to the Supreme Court, and responding to the financial crisis. But the legacy of fall 2005 lingered for the rest of my time in office.
This is not to suggest that I didn’t make mistakes during Katrina. I should have urged Governor Blanco and
