The Perfect Storm
 
The perfect storm is as predictable as it is inexorable. Born in the Atlantic Ocean, it hits Puerto Rico and Hispaniola and Cuba, and it grows bigger as it moves through the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Though there is plenty of time to flee, many residents along the Gulf Coast stay put. And just as predicted, this storm makes a straight track for the tiny camp town of Grand Isle, Louisiana, obliterates it, and moves north toward New Orleans.
 
The hurricane moves upriver for nearly sixty miles, leaving catastrophe in its wake. It passes right over New Orleans, and as it does, the storm tilts nearby Lake Pontchartrain like a teacup and dumps it into the city. A quick rush of brackish water drenches New Orleans and leaves it sitting in as much as twenty feet of water. And then the hurricane is gone, and everything lies in ruins.
 
The perfect storm is big enough to make New Orleans a certain kind of hell, but not so big that it makes first responders throw their hands up in despair. The floodwater is the worst of it—it collects in the lower parts of the city and takes weeks to pump out. As it sits, the water becomes a thick and fetid mash of household chemicals and dead things and gasoline that bubbles from the tanks of thousands of submerged automobiles and service stations. The water makes some people ill, but the worst is the complication it adds to the rescue efforts.
 
All told, the water and wind brought by the hurricane damage some 250,000 homes and turn a million residents into vagabonds, many of whom are now utterly dependent on the government for food and shelter. The storm kills tens of thousands of people outright and leaves the city virtually uninhabitable, downing all communications systems and paralyzing the infrastructure. After the storm passes, looting breaks out. And thousands of dazed and dying survivors sit on their roofs in the semitropical sun awaiting rescue. Though the tales of heroic rescue are numerous and inspiring, many people perish, waiting for help that doesn’t come.
 
Some call Hurricane Katrina the perfect storm. It wasn’t. The perfect storm, which the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) calls Hurricane Pam, exists only on a computer screen, the creation of a small federal contractor located in a nondescript office park on the outskirts of Baton Rouge. Developed in the spring of 2004 over a period of fifty-three days and at a cost of $800,000, Hurricane Pam is a low-tech affair, nothing more than a simulated computer storm surge that plays out on a monitor accompanied by a stack of descriptive documents that catalog the damage the storm wrought when it made its fictitious landfall.
 
Hurricane Pam is a training exercise, designed to get local and federal disaster responders thinking about how they might deal with the aftereffects of a catastrophic storm that hit New Orleans. Louisiana is lousy with emergency disaster plans, and its various government agencies have invested millions of dollars cooking them up. The city of New Orleans has one specifically for hurricanes, as do all of the parishes (counties) along the coast. Inland, the rest of the state’s sixty-four parishes have created generic plans to deal with a wide variety of calamities, natural and man-made. Not to be outdone, about twenty state agencies have disaster plans. Some have several.
 
The federal government, as well, has dumped hurricane plans on the state over the years, and they are all hundreds of pages long, thick with appendixes and crammed with dense, jargon-filled prose. Most of them were cooked up in Washington by small teams of bureaucrats; a few were created without any local input at all. Most sit unread in disaster offices throughout southern Louisiana. In the office of Jesse St. Amant, the longtime emergency preparedness director for Plaquemines Parish, the collection of disaster plans on his long, low bookshelf stretches for several feet.
 
St. Amant’s favorite federal plan is Response 95. Unveiled by FEMA in May 1995, the plan’s debut was spoiled when a wandering rainstorm dumped twenty inches of water on the city of New Orleans as the exercise was taking place. This rainfall “of biblical proportions,” as the local newspaper described it, swamped the city in waist-high stormwater. Though FEMA struggled mightily to fill a hotel ballroom downtown with local disaster planners, it was forced to cancel the event when the area’s first responders phoned in hasty regrets. “I told FEMA that real life always trumps an exercise,” St. Amant said with a chuckle.
 
As the head disaster planner for what is unarguably Louisiana’s most vulnerable parish—Plaquemines juts eighty miles into the Gulf of Mexico and is completely surrounded by low-lying marsh—St. Amant believes Response 95 may have been the biggest bust of all, since any potential readership it might have achieved was washed out with the spring rain in New Orleans. But nearly all of the scores of state and FEMA training documents met a similar fate: The common practice among governmental bodies in Louisiana was to accept such studies without comment, agree to adopt them by unanimous vote, and store them on a shelf, along with the budget books and other effluvia of local bureaucracy. “Nobody ever actually reads them,” St. Amant said.
 
But the Hurricane Pam scenario was a plan with a twist. Officially called the Southeast Louisiana Catastrophic Hurricane Plan, the Pam exercise made the readers—local emergency responders—authors as well. Instead of sitting first responders down in a ballroom and playing a cookie-cutter “wargame” scripted by some Washington contractor, Pam took a bottom-up approach, inviting the participants to take a crack at writing their own game plan for coping with the “Big One,” down to the grittiest detail. Though guided by FEMA, the plan was created by the men who would wear the hip waders and man the flatboats, the medics and doctors who would operate the triage centers, and the cops and city workers who would be out on the street in a real disaster. Pam was what is known in the emergency response business as a planning exercise, where participants are fully briefed about a catastrophe and then draw up a blueprint for how they would cope. The rules were simple: Players can only make plans with the resources they possessed at the moment. For example, if a firehouse had five engines but two were always rotated out of service for maintenance, then the firefighters could only plan to respond with three. Anything else was unrealistic and destined to fail.
 
Although Pam was billed as part of a new drive by Washington for “catastrophic planning” in a bad new world of international terrorism, the impetus for the exercise was really Hurricane Georges, a rather puny hurricane when it hit the Gulf Coast in September 1998. Though small, Georges killed beyond expectations, taking some 600 lives as it rampaged through a procession of Caribbean islands before tacking into the Gulf of Mexico and taking dead aim at New Orleans. But just before making landfall, Georges defied forecasters and swung sharply to the east, veering into Biloxi, Mississippi, and causing scattered damage from New Orleans to...