In "DISASTER: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security," authors Christopher Cooper and Robert Block shed light on the series of actions that led to the government's woeful response to the catastrophe.
Among the passages in an extended exerpt published in the Wall Street Journal, the authors write:
"Federal officials had a single test for determining whether to treat the storm as an average disaster or as the catastrophic doomsday scenario everyone had long feared: Had the levees been breached by Katrina's storm surge, or had the water simply flooded over the top? Unfortunately, these were questions that state and local officials -- and even FEMA's senior staff -- never fully understood they had to answer."
[Editor's note: Although this article is only available to WSJ subscribers, it is available to Planetizen readers for free through the link below for a period of seven days.]
FULL STORY: Behind the Katrina Imbroglio
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