Hurricanes and the accompanying flooding, earthquakes, tornadoes, disease pan-epidemics, and the like are natural occurrences that always have been there and with which mankind always has had to deal. How we deal with them, however, can make them easier or harder. We know that the Black Death — bubonic plague — in Medieval times was caused by rats, but we also know that superstitions and silly religious beliefs made epidemics worse.

People thought that cats were evil. People slept with their farm animals, allowing fleas to enter their homes and bedding. Those who used herbs to heal were called witches and were burned at the stake. Or consider the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii in AD 79. Scientists of the day had warned that the mountain could explode, but people enjoyed their fertile gardens and the view of the Bay of Naples.

Where are the parallels today? One need look no further than the building booms along the barrier islands of the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts to see that disastrous calamities are in the making. When I interviewed Neil Frank, then director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami, back in the 1980s, he warned of the disasters to come. Residential and commercial interests build in harm's way, then expect the government and the insurance industry — that's the rest of us, the tax- and premium-payers — to bail them out when their homes and businesses blow or wash away.

There also are worldwide factors that contribute to disasters. Plague spread because rats got on ships that were sailing from port to port; today's diseases such as SARS or flu spread because people travel from continent to continent, although some of the spread also is through migrating birds. We cannot very easily prevent that.

We know that our lifestyles, our use of fossil fuels and the like, contribute to global warming, and global warming contributes to melting ice caps and glaciers, raising the sea level and making the oceans warmer, creating larger and more hazardous storms. Could our political attitudes, our gas-guzzling SUVs and pickups, our attitudes against using nuclear energy, wind, and hydroelectric power, be making disasters worse? When the best science has to offer is rejected by a large portion of the nation as being anti-religious falsehood, it is a bit like 12th century peasants' being afraid of cats because they thought that cats represented the devil, or declaring Galileo Galilei a heretic for discovering that the world ain't flat.

Think back to the television coverage of the New Orleans disaster, and what did we see? Hundreds of thousands of poor black people, many elderly and many newborn, and every one telling of diseases, primarily diabetes. There are two separate problems here. One is burgeoning populations of poverty-stricken, unemployed single-mothers with multiple children and no responsible male parent in evidence. The other is the vast number of adults on expensive medications for a disease that is largely preventable. It all made the disaster that much worse.

Preparedness

After Hurricane Andrew, we learned that the Federal Emergency Management Administration had done diddly-squat to help the victims in South Dade County for nearly two weeks, and when they finally did arrive, their actions were haphazard, inefficient, and overly expensive. Of course, our insurance industry did not do much better, but at least we were on the scene sooner.

Now it is a decade later, and FEMA had several days to prepare for what those of us who watch the Weather Channel or any cable news network knew was coming: a Category 4 or 5 storm, aimed directly at the central Gulf Coast. Did FEMA have its trucks with ready-to-eat meals and bottled water packed and on the road to the target area? Nope. They were waiting to be “invited.” Then FEMA's director, Michael Brown, said that he had not known that people were stranded in the Super Dome until the following Thursday. What the hell had he been watching on television? The Cartoon Network?

Responsibility for action lies first with local and state authorities. A few of the local police ran away, but the rest did the best they could under the circumstances. “The First Platoon [of the New Orleans Fire Department] was held over to remain in quarters with the on-duty Third Platoon,” reported Harvey Eisner in the October issue of Firehouse. “Each district [battalion] moved apparatus out of the fire stations to higher ground or a safe place of refuge. Downtown units went to a hotel loading dock and companies in outlying areas parked at condominiums.”

What else could they have done in preparation for the storm? Did the Governor have the Louisiana National Guard respond? No, because they were off in Iraq. Guard units had to come from hundreds of miles away to assist the New Orleans police in what was nearly anarchy. FEMA could not get in, they said. Well, how did CNN and NBC and Fox News and ABC and CBS and the BBC get there? They did not swim in.

“We did not know that the levees would break,” the officials explained. C'mon, guys! There was even a fictional movie made about what would happen when it happened. I saw it years ago. It's like the movie Towering Inferno; the government begged the producer to add a disclaimer that the situations portrayed in the movie could not really happen. He refused. Since the World Trade Towers fell, we know that they can, and will again. Fire department ladders cannot reach beyond the seventh floor of high-rises.

After the city flooded, I heard a number of people ask, “Why didn't they bring in amphibious vehicles or small boats? Surely there had to be a lot of small boats in New Orleans that could have rescued people from their homes as the water rose.” All we saw on television was a pile of expensive yachts smashed together in a heap. So where were the smaller boats? Did evacuees take them with them when they fled?

Finally, there was interagency communication, or, rather, the lack of such. A lesson that ought to have been learned from Sept. 11, 2001, is that all agencies need to have communication systems whereby one agency can talk to another on the same radio frequency. Again, in Katrina, this was a problem. Someone explained to me that half the agencies had digital equipment, and the other half analog. Supposedly, new standard equipment was not in the budget. Why cannot emergency radio systems be designed with various channels, so that during multi-agency responses, federal, state, and local authorities can talk to each other? In this day and age of interplanetary communication, what could possibly be so difficult about simple radio frequencies? If digital and analog are so complicated to coordinate, how come the rest of the world seems able to do it?

Infrastructure

Oh, brother. This will take a while. A similar devastating flood of the Lower Mississippi Valley in 1927 that did kill thousands at least stirred Congress to create a flood control program, although it took decades. During that flood, the citizens of New Orleans saw that a wall of water was headed for them. They dynamited the levees above the city, allowing the torrent to flood into Lake Pontchartrain, inundating St. Bernard Parish.

Prior to that, western states had been trying to get a conservative Congress to pass a bill creating flood control on the Colorado River, but southern senators were opposed, just as western senators had been opposed to flood control on the Mississippi. The Great Flood resulted in a compromise between the two political forces, allowing the creation of the Army Corps of Engineers and the construction of Hoover Dam.

Before Katrina struck, we knew the levees and the flood-walls along the canals were weak. The Corps of Engineers had been begging for a billion or so to strengthen them for years. As with Amtrak, the administration budgeted peanuts, hoping that the problem would disappear.

It disappeared, all right. And what is it going to cost now to make the proper repairs? Our government is penny-wise and pound foolish, as old Ben Franklin might say.

Then, I heard the army general in charge of the corps tell a reporter that even if they had received the money that they had requested, repairs to the levees that broke were last on their list, and probably would not have been repaired in time anyway. What?!! Repairs of the weakest parts were to be left for last? Kyrie eleison.

Commercial infrastructure — gas and oil pipelines, refineries, oil platforms, docks, and warehouses — fared somewhat better in the wake of Katrina, but one refinery blew up, a tank farm was ruined, and the nation can ill afford to lose the oil. We have built no new refineries in a decade or more, and that is shameful, given our known dependence on oil and gasoline.

Industry has used the excuse, “Well, people don't want refineries in their back yards.” Oh, bull. Do these executives never travel? There are lots of open areas near nobody's back yard where refineries could be built. They do not need to build on expensive urban real estate. With modernization, fewer employees are needed to run such facilities, so they do not need to be near large urban areas at all.

What about the railroads? The Gulf Coast is served by several major lines, including CSX from the east, Kansas City Southern, Canadian National and Norfolk Southern from the north, and BNSF and Union Pacific from the west and northwest. Amtrak operates four main routes from the city, northward to Chicago and New York, eastward to Orlando, and westward to Texas and Los Angeles.

The Bush Administration wants to kill these trains, because they cost more to run than they produce in revenue. They serve many small towns, however, that have no other means of transportation, so Congress keeps them poor and barely alive. Suppose, given the roughly three day's notice that a storm would hit the Gulf somewhere between Pensacola and New Orleans, 200 coaches had been backed into these towns to assist with evacuations? At, say, 60 people per coach, that's 12,000 people who could have been evacuated per trip and, over two days, a dozen or more trips could have been operated. Of course, where would evacuees have been dumped? Probably the same places they wound up anyway.

Commuter trains in cities such as Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, or Boston carry far more than that every morning and every evening. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said that he had wanted to run a passenger train to Baton Rouge; his request was declined. Although it could have saved lives, 200 coaches were not available. Amtrak probably had no coaches in New Orleans.

Our rail passenger service is part of our nation's infrastructure. If federal money can support the infrastructure of Mississippi and the Tennessee-Tombigbee navigation, operate the Federal Aviation Administration's programs for airlines, and the Interstate Highway System for buses and trucks, why pick on inter-city rail passenger service and starve it to death when, in the event of a terrorist attack or Hurricane Katrina, such rail service might be absolutely necessary, and the only way to get out of town?

Evacuation

The folks who could afford to leave apparently did so. They are to be congratulated. Some refused to leave even if they could have afforded it. They did not want to leave their pets. As this is being written, those folks still are in the morgue, waiting for some dentist to identify them from whatever records may be available. For the vast number of poor who could not afford to evacuate and who stuck it out in the Super Dome or in their homes with no food or water, many of them have lost everything. And that is a national shame.

Those folks probably would have lost everything anyway, but there ought to have been some way to get them evacuated within at least 36 hours of the storm's passing. Instead, it took a week. “The buses are coming!” they were told. Holy Moses, Houston is only 362 miles west of New Orleans. At 55 miles per hour, that is only six and a half hours.

Hence, my suggested D+ grade: A+ for those who left before the storm hit, F- for the government planners, both state and federal, who piddled around till the levees broke and flooded the place. True, some evacuation routes had inbound lanes changed to outbound, but even that was not universal, leaving the good students who did leave town sitting in monumental traffic jams, running out of fuel.

Response

Aid workers from southeastern states were directed by FEMA to military bases where, instead of organizing help, they were given several days of lectures on dealing with diverse cultures. More than a month later, we learned that FEMA was paying millions of dollars a day to house evacuees in hotels, ignoring a glut of available apartments in southern and southeastern cities that could have been used to help evacuees start over. The squabble over flood versus wind insurance issues will rage on for years, much of it in the courts. I anticipate that folks who had $500,000 mortgages and $250,000 federal flood insurance policies who lost their homes but still owe their banks $250,000 will find good lawyers and sue insurance agents who could have told them excess flood insurance was available on the market for a price. Enough said. Response gets an F-.

To its credit, the nation (and maybe Congress) did react, although reaction through local, state, and federal governments was terrible. Churches and other aid organizations chipped in to send food, water, clothing, infant supplies, and other items as quickly as possible. By the time this is published, the needs will still be there, and may well have grown. What will the grade be then? Will we have forgotten all about Katrina and her victims?

There will be a need for new homes, new schools and hospitals, new jobs for those who lost those things in the storm and flood. There will be cities to be rebuilt from the ruins of New Orleans, Biloxi, Gulfport, and other devastated communities. There will be economic repercussions from delays in shipping, costlier fuel, and additional hurricanes. Pensacola, more than a year after their disastrous hit, is still recovering. Response remains an open question.

We cannot fool ourselves into thinking that we can go back to a pre-Katrina world any more than we can return to the 20th century before Sept. 11, 2001. We must learn from Katrina how to prepare better, to prevent, to make infrastructure our primary concern, to elect politicians who will lead and not just stand by and wring hands, saying “We're doing the best we can.” It was too late to be “doing;” the work needed to have been done well in advance.

What effect Professor Katrina will have on the insurance industry is not yet clear. Supposedly, around 40 percent of New Orleans homes had flood insurance. One wonders how many of those flooded homes where the poor resided were rental properties, perhaps owned by slumlords. Those with only wind coverage will get nothing, but probably less than half the loss was insured anyway. The industry is predicting a $25-billion insurance cost. How much of that may be lost to fraud and mismanagement is anyone's guess. Reinsurance bills will rise; if epidemics follow, as may well occur, medical insurance costs will rise. Definitely, our taxes will rise. Let's hope that even though we deserve a failing grade, we will not be forced to repeat the lesson.

Ken Brownlee, CPCU, is a former adjuster and risk manager, based in Atlanta. He now authors and edits claim adjusting textbooks.