Looking for answers in the wake of a hurricane

ASK THIS | September 08, 2005

Lisa Getter (Nieman Class of '95), a member of the Miami Herald’s Pulitzer winning team for coverage of Hurricane Andrew in 1992, has some suggestions for reporting the Katrina story.

By Lisa Getter

lgetter@ucg.com

(301) 287-2514

 

Q. Thinking of the deaths in New Orleans: To what extent were they caused by the initial force of the hurricane and flooding, and to what extent by the flawed rescue effort?

 

Q. What happened after FEMA’s chief told the Times Picayune in 2002 that he had ordered aides to come up with a plan on what to do if a major hurricane hit New Orleans?

 

Q. Did legislators cut projects that could have shored up the levees? Did federal money earmarked for levee protection go instead to favored contractors?

 

When Hurricane Andrew tore through South Florida in 1992, I was among the reporters who rode out the storm in the Herald building and then stuck with the story for the rest of the year. It was a hellacious, giddy time. We had never seen so much destruction and we had never felt so needed by our readers. But nothing we saw compares to Hurricane Katrina.

 

Hurricane Andrew was a story about property damage. Katrina is that, too, but it is also and more profoundly a story about death.

 

After Andrew, The Herald assigned a team of investigative reporters to look into the destruction. Our main mission was to figure out what went wrong and why.

 

Initially, we hired an expert to help us determine whether shoddy construction played a part in the hurricane. Those inspections led to several early front page stories.

 

I investigated whether the South Florida Building Code was really the strongest hurricane code in the nation. To do that, I reviewed 35 years of minutes from the board that governed the code, taking the books to the Herald building each night to copy key pages because the county’s copiers could not keep up with   the demands of homeowners who needed building plans. That led to a story that said: “The South Florida Building Code, hailed as the strongest hurricane code in the nation, has eroded in countless ways since its adoption in 1957. Swayed by builders wanting to cut costs and manufacturers pushing new products, Dade County chipped away at a code that was founded on the principle that people's safety is the highest law."

 

But the real question we asked took months to report. We did a computer analysis of storm-damage inspections done by the county, matching it with the property tax roles, the county building master file and the building and zoning database.

 

We wanted to know what was responsible for most of the damage—only the wind, or shoddy construction, faulty design and flimsy materials? We were able to prove that the worst-hit areas were far from the worst winds, and that newer houses fared far worse than older ones. Once we proved that, we dug deeper, showing that lax inspections and the political influence of builders all bore some responsibility for the disaster. We documented the close relationship between building contractors and elected county officials, showing that as those political connections grew, the tough laws homeowners had once counted on to protect them had weakened.

 

The New Orleans Times Picayune has already done a fabulous 2002 series on why the city was so vulnerable to a hurricane.

 

Still, there are plenty of questions that reporters need to be asking: For starters: What caused most of the deaths: The initial force of the hurricane and flooding or the flawed rescue effort? It may be impossible to prove now, but I suspect that one could get a sense of that in the months ahead. We could not have proven our Andrew thesis—that newer homes were disproportionately damaged—in the days after the storm. We had to wait for months until damage assessments were entered into a computer database.

 

Reporters need to be (and are) asking tough questions about FEMA and its funding. Then FEMA director Joe Allbaugh told the Times Picayune in 2002 that he had ordered aides to come up with a plan on what to do if a major hurricane hit New Orleans. "Catastrophic disasters are best defined in that they totally outstrip local and state resources, which is why the federal government needs to play a role," Allbaugh told the paper in 2002. "There are a half-dozen or so contingencies around the nation that cause me great concern, and one of them is right there in your back yard."

 

So what went wrong? Why did FEMA fail to come up with a plan? Who was in charge of the disaster management plan, and what were their qualifications? How much money have they donated to political campaigns?

 

The Army Corps of Engineers knew New Orleans was a ticking bomb. What were Louisiana’s political leaders doing to make sure that their constituents were protected? Did they lobby for more money for the Corps? Did they cut projects that could have saved lives and steered the money instead to favored contractors?

 

What warning signs were ignored? Once the initial crisis is over, and the Gulf Coast starts to rebuild, reporters need to find every report, email and letter they can find in which government officials talk about what it would have taken to prevent such a disaster. And then they need to find out why they ignored them.

 

 

Lisa Getter (Nieman Class of 1995) was a member of the Miami Herald team that won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for public service for its reporting on Hurricane Andrew. She is now editorial director of UCG, a business information publisher in Rockville, Md. E-mail: lgetter@ucg.com

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