Hurricane Katrina roared ashore in late August 2005, doing more than physically devastating New Orleans and the entire Gulf Coast. Katrina also exposed layers of systemic failures - in infrastructure, planning, intergovernmental coordination, communications and, ultimately, in leadership at all levels.
In the months and years following, the nation embarked on a frantic search for accountability. The face most frequently attached to this tragedy in search of blame became me, then director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
This cascading chain of failure began decades before I became the undersecretary of Homeland Security and director of FEMA.
Engineering experts warned that the Army Corps of Engineers' levees and flood protection infrastructure were inadequate, poorly maintained and prone to catastrophic failure. Pressured by limited funding and a culture of underestimating risk, they built systems designed for a "fast-moving Category 3 hurricane," not a storm of Katrina's size.
The result was tragically predictable: Hours after Katrina's landfall, the levees breached, immediately creating unprecedented logistical and humanitarian challenges.
Preparation and planning formed the second link in the chain of systemic failures. Despite countless risk assessments and emergency exercises over decades, state, local and federal agencies failed to update or coordinate disaster-response plans. Inadequate planning equals inadequate responses.
Evacuation protocols were incomplete. Communication channels were outdated. Critical resources, including transportation for those without the means to leave, were not mobilized in time. As the waters rose, the Superdome quickly filled with souls, leaving thousands stranded in an inadequate last-ditch shelter.
The third and perhaps most consequential systemic failure emerged when the levees failed and the city began to drown: a breakdown in communication and coordination among agencies. Federal, state and local officials relied on contradictory and oftentimes false information. Incompatible chains of command precluded swift, unified action.
FEMA, recently absorbed into the Department of Homeland Security and stripped of most of its autonomy and funding, found itself largely powerless to act.
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Only when the scale of the disaster became undeniable did President George W. Bush realize he should have landed Air Force One and tell the world, especially his Cabinet, that all available resources must be provided to me when requested.
Every hour counted, but bureaucratic confusion persisted. My requests for necessities - food, water, medical supplies, even buses for evacuation - became mired in paperwork. Some requests were never accounted for in the bureaucratic morass of the DHS.
State and local officials, FEMA, DHS and even the military branches struggled and occasionally refused to overcome bureaucratic obstacles and jurisdictional disputes.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld apparently delayed deployment of military equipment and personnel because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff admitted on national television, despite constant communications, that he was unaware of the breach of the levees.
White House Chief of Staff Andy Card, despite my protestations, failed to recognize the chain of command had broken and instead cut off my direct communication with the president. Direct communication is essential in a disaster response. One phone call and it disappeared.
Years of political neglect, structural misalignment and a national lack of imagination about disaster preparedness crippled the Katrina response. I had inherited a weakened FEMA, its authority diluted and its focus redirected away from an all-hazards approach toward counterterrorism. The agency simply was not equipped, institutionally or managerially, to handle a catastrophe on Katrina's scale.
Leaders at city, state and federal levels justly share the blame for many operational failures. Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin waited too long to order a full evacuation; they struggled to marshal their resources or cede control to the federal government.
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Secretary Chertoff acknowledged that he was not fully aware of the true severity of the situation in New Orleans at critical moments.
In the chaotic aftermath, with the nation reeling and the 24-hour news cycle searching for targets, I became the personification of failure, even as systemic causes of the disaster went unexamined. The bipartisan congressional postmortem, "A Failure of Initiative," concluded that failures were pervasive, "at all levels of government."
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I failed to bluntly and publicly shout through the channels of the news media that I was not getting the personnel, equipment and logistical support so desperately needed to respond. I waited too long, even as I knew the system was collapsing around me. I deeply regret not walking to a microphone, calling out the systemic failures and embarrassing the administration into waking up and responding.
History demands more honesty than scapegoating provides. The lesson from Katrina is the need for an objective, clear-eyed assessment of why all of us failed - me, mayors, governors, Cabinet secretaries and, yes, presidents - to lead us to contemporary reforms worthy of those who suffered and lost.
We owe that to future disaster victims who continue to suffer from the same systemic failures 20 years later.
Michael Brown served as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) from 2003 to 2005.
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