Remembering Katrina: 20 Years Later

Twenty years on, it would be easy, quick, and clean to reduce Hurricane Katrina, the worst natural disaster in American history, to a story of numbers:

But while the national media may concentrate on statistics on this landmark anniversary of the Aug. 29, 2005, storm, nationally recognized emergency services expert Robert Ditch, a Civil Air Patrol lieutenant colonel, is quick to remind a simple truth:

“All disasters are local.”

That’s true for human conflict and for natural disaster. Ditch has been on the ground for both wars and storms.

After Katrina made landfall. CAP was on the ground in force. Some 1,800 members from 17 wings went to work, logging more than 50,000 volunteer hours. Personnel provided air and ground search and rescue, critical aerial photography, transportation, and evacuation.

CAP crews flew more than 1,000 sorties, according to the U.S. Air Force.

CAP Maj. Gerry Creager, a meteorologist, has seen his share of disasters, like Katrina and Hurricane Rita right after Katrina and the 2013 EF-5 tornado that flattened much of Moore, Oklahoma, and claimed 24 lives.

While neither was a member of Civil Air Patrol when Katrina battered the Gulf Coast — Ditch joined in October 2007, Creager in April 2013 — both have a story to tell about the massive storm and offer counsel about how the Air Force auxiliary should respond to future cataclysmic events.

A Harbinger of Things to ComeFor Ditch, director of CAP’s National Emergency Services Academy – Mobile Training Team and Rocky Mountain Region emergency services, his Katrina story began in 2004 and ended after 45 days on the ground as a responder in the devastation.

Then a faculty member at Louisiana State University’s National Center for Biomedical Research and Training in Baton Rouge, Ditch participated in exercise “Hurricane Pam,” which demonstrated what would happen if a Katrina-like event struck the New Orleans area.

In February 2005, six months before Katrina, Ditch was invited to facilitate an executive seminar, hosted by the University of New Orleans and city officials, for New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and the presidents and sheriffs of the five surrounding parishes, the FBI, and immigration and Coast Guard officials. 

The program outlined the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s then-new Natonal Incident Management System and Natonal Response Plan, helping the leadership develop a response strategy, again for a Katrina-like event — “an incident of national significance,” as described in the National Response Plan called

After the seminar, officials held a news conference, signed a proclamation, and posed for pictures, all the while ensuring the media they were working to protect the public.

Ditch said, though, that “the bottom line is that the meeting ended, and they did nothing until the landfall of Hurricane Katrina.”

In the run-up to landfall, Ditch was again in Baton Rouge and almost decided to visit New Orleans for the weekend. But a flip of the coin took him to Dallas instead. A different turn and he would have been in the snarl of Katrina evacuation traffic.

“I’ve dodged a lot of bullets in my life,” he said. ”This was one of them.”

But post-landfall, Ditch returned to the ravaged coast — to Picayune, Mississippi, where 65% of the local hospital was damaged by Katrina, and later to St. Bernard Parish in Louisiana, where he helped lead establishment of a MASH-type units, known as a Disaster Medical Assistance Team or DMATs, at a local high school football stadium.

Ditch described the scene at both locations.

“The devastation was everywhere,” he said. “Picayune was far enough north of I-10 that you didn’t see the catastrophic nature of the flooding, but you did see what the winds did. We were on islands within devastation.”

As for the work of the DMATS, “They deploy these DMATS in the parking lot and decompress the [patient] surge that’s going on,” Ditch said. “It was not just about surgeries and hospitalizations, but you can’t cut back on the taking care of the injuries and health issues that people have that become exacerbated by infections and other things that come about during disasters.”

The FEMA DMATS gave the local health care system a chance to “catch its breath” in the wake of a disaster by providing needed care to the public, Ditch said.

An Unexpected TrackContrary to what many documentarians have alleged, no one saw Katrina’s Louisiana landfall follow the course it did. In fact, most models tracked it into Florida’s bend, or into the Panhandle.

But Creager, an expert in tropical cyclones working at Texas A&M at the time and later at the University of Oklahoma with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Severe Storms Laboratory, said Katrina was different than most major storms. The week before it made landfall, he was in Washington as part of the investigators working group for a project called the SURA (Southeast Universities Research Association) Coastal Ocean Observing Project.

Creager recently retired as a computational scientist for the NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory. Among his many CAP responsibilities is leading its Weather Support Team.

“I was the only meteorologist and the only weather modeler in that gaggle of investigators,” he said. “We were sitting in D.C., and Katrina popped up around the Bahamas and we started watching it through the week.”

On that Friday, Aug. 26, the researchers started a betting pool on when and where the monster storm would make landfall. Most bet on Florida. 

Most were wrong, but not Creager and colleague Rick Leuttich.

“We started looking at upper air currents, and we forecast pretty accurately where it was going to go in around Grand Isle, Louisiana,” Creager said. “And we had a pretty good idea of the rapid intensification of that storm. We did something novel and silly.

“We looked at sea surface temperatures and some of the bathymetry data from oil rigs and saw how deep warm water went, where Katrina was hanging out for about 20 hours. We forecasted rapid intensification of that storm pretty much ahead of the [National] Hurricane Center. We put [Katrina] going in somewhere between the mouth of the Mississippi and Grand Isle.”

The original forecast models predicted Katrina would start recurving off the Florida Keys and heading north, where shallow waters would deprive the storm of its energy source — warm, deep Gulf waters. But again, most forecasters missed the mark.

For Creager, Katrina wasn’t the first storm he’d seen with a larger than expected wind field. But it was the most dramatic.

“It was the first storm that in the public’s eye, where we started saying out loud, ‘These storms are getting bigger than they were 10 years ago,’” Creager said. “There’s something about this storm that’s different. No one was willing to call it the effects of global warming or climate change at that point.

“But in the back of our minds, that’s what we were thinking. We believe now that’s been verified.”

It seems every storm now, Creager said, has a 200-to-400-mile wind radius, just like the recent Hurricane Erin.

Another lesson, he said, involved evacuation.

Anecdotally, as he passed through New Orleans on the way to the Washington meeting, he ran into a friend, Bill Proenza, who was the Southeast Region director for the National Weather Service. Proenza was coming to meet Nagin and then-Gov. Kathleen Blanco and planned to urge evacuation, something he did daily in the run-up to landfall.

They rejected his pleas, expecting a Category 3 storm, not the massive Category 5 that punched Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.

The lesson? “Paying attention when someone actually says, ‘Get out of there now,’ The fact is the NHC’s forecast of a move to the west was way too late to evacuate New Orleans,” Creager said.

Katrina’s Lessons and Legacy for CAPFor organizations like Civil Air Patrol, one word comes to mind.

“The word is ‘agility,’” Ditch said. “You can exercise, you can anticipate … But things are going to come up … You have to be agile, and call audibles when things present in a way you didn’t expect.”

He added, “Many organizations have a propensity for not being agile enough. They have to learn how to be more agile in its response and in their capabilities.”

“They need to be training and exercising with more rigor, less artificialities, less simulations, but as realistically as possible, so that when they do encounter the unexpected situations that come up, they can navigate around them,” Ditch said. “The more you train, the more agile you are going to be. We have to be very agile in times of extremis.”

From a weather perspective, Creager said, CAP needs to be more involved earlier in events of national significance.

“We can provide input that will be valuable to the incident commander and to the planning team, and we’re CAP already, so we know what the capabilities are for our organization. So we can help tailor that information,” he said.

In a post-9-11 world, Katrina jolted emergency services organizations into what Ditch called “an all-hazards environment,” where natural disasters, like terrorism, are part of the homeland security dynamic.

“Katrina slapped the nation back into reality and said, ‘Hey look, it’s not just about terrorism.’ For four years, everyone forgot about natural disasters. … Nature still has a vote in what happens on this planet.

“It took Katrina and Rita to snap this nation back on track,” he said. “It was a wake-up call for the nation that nature is still around and has a voice.”_____Paul SouthContributing Writer