Michael Chertoff admits that three and a half years after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) he heads still falls short of protecting the American national structures from natural disasters.
In a speech last Friday at the Brookings Institution, Chertoff said that while the DHS has made strides in protecting the U.S. against possible terrorist attacks, much is left to be desired in keeping bridges, highways and levees safe from hurricanes, tropical storms and other potential Katrina-esque catastrophes.
“Regrettably, I don’t think we’ve done quite as good a job in protecting our common good assets and common good critical infrastructure against simple wear and tear or threats from Mother Nature,” Chertoff said.
Reflecting upon the reason of said shortcomings, Chertoff says he observes a familiar pattern that continues to repeat itself: “We have failed time and again to devote the energy and the effort and the investment to make sure that these structures can be preserved in the face of a possible very serious natural disaster, or frankly, simply through the ordinary degradation of any physical structure that comes year in and year out.”
Hurricane Katrina, the storm that left most of New Orleans under water after the levees broke on the 17th street canal in 2005, later came to embody the failure of DHS to respond to a national emergency, and Chertoff, the face of DHS, came under heavy criticism.
Since Katrina hit, a steel barrier has been erected to contain the water from entering the canal, and Chertoff said he recently asked himself why this wasn’t done ten years ago. He read the BBC investigation into the matter and discovered the Army Corps of Engineers proposed placing the steel barrier there years ago, but the proposal was shot down because “it was opposed by local residents who thought it would spoil their view of the lake, and environmental groups concerned about its effect on the ecology of the area,” Chertoff said.
The Secretary named this as the chief failure in Katrina and also the principal challenge we face today: prioritizing political, business or other interests above national security.
“We cannot allow ourselves to get sidetracked by the typical pushback from economic interests or aesthetic interests or environmental interests that seeks to stop every major project because parochial concerns will inevitably be stepped on or overridden for the greater good,” he said. “It’s really about putting the common good first when it comes to the issue of our critical infrastructure.”
Chertoff says he sees the same kind of pushback from interest groups that happened in New Orleans ten years ago occur today in Sacramento. The California city’s 100 year-old levees are badly in need of repair, especially because the city is at high risk level for flooding and has a track record of five major floods in the past 46 years.
The impact of a flood in Sacramento would be an “apocalyptic catestrophe,” according to Chertoff, with “human life, human safety [and] economic development” at stake—similar to New Orleans.
In 2006 California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency, rebuilt the levees and enacted flood-control planning with a voter-approved $4 billion bond.
However, what Chertoff is concerned with is the vicious backlash from the local businesses and local county officials, who complain the new flood zones and flood maps are a detriment to economic development. Chertoff views this attitude as one of the primary reasons disasters like Katrina occur.
“It is confronting this kind of pushback, based on peoples’ desire for immediate economic benefits, based on peoples’ desire for immediate gratification, that puts the population of these highly-developed areas at great risk and raises the danger that if we were facing a levee collapse, the consequences might be much graver than if we put into effect those measures which prudence tells us we ought to engage in order to reduce the risk of flooding.”
Another example Chertoff cites of business interest dominating over security concerns is requiring gas stations to have generators in case the power grid goes down so the effort to recover energy is not delayed. Chertoff says he pleaded with oil companies back in 2005 to honor this request because “more is at stake here than just the revenue for the gas station owner or the revenue for the oil company,” but the response has not been even-handed. Only a few states took the request seriously, like Florida which passed a law mandating gas stations have generators to ensure the community could recover quickly should disaster strike.
Although businesses may not want to comply with such efforts, Chertoff said it is his job and the governments obligation to “see to it that people live up to that broader responsibility,” and has enacted a strategy within the DHS to do so.
The strategy, which Chertoff calls a “long term infrastructure protection program,” involves the federal and state governments tiering the risks, similar to the way DHS tiers terrorist risks. The top 500 to 1,000 “high consequence, high risk” assets are identified as top priority, then the maintenance strategy kicks in to reduce vulnerabilities.
The key to making this work, Chertoff says, is the “discipline to withstand some very powerful and very deeply-committed interests who will be interested in developing in those areas, or who will have other uses for the money that we’ll spend on not particularly glamorous things, like bridge repair, or levee repair.”
Chertoff claims patience is the other requirement to implement such a strategy based on longevity. “It’s not going to be done in a week, or a month, or a year, it’s not going to be done during the period of time that we begin the project with enthusiasm, it’s going to require the commitment to follow through over a period of five years, ten years, 20 years; but if we don’t do it, we’re going to get back to that old game of musical chairs, where we simply hope that the music doesn’t stop while we’re in office, and that poor, unlucky guy who is in office when the music stops is going to find himself without a chair and falling to the ground.”
This past week has been an “acid test” to the new strategy given the busy hurricane season, and Chertoff says it is proof the system is working. In preparation for Hurricane Gustav, DHS worked together with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Coast Guard, and Customs and Border Protection to coordinate an evacuation. He calls the evacuation in the Gulf Coast last week imperfect but successful nonetheless.
Chertoff assessed: “The result of that preparation wasn’t a perfect evacuation, but it was something that demonstrated real progress and made life safer for the people in the Gulf Coast region. . .if the test of success is what happens in the real world, I think that we have made a good deal of progress.”
Emily Miller is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.
