Storm that found a nation wanting

Not since the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 has a great American city been so devastated. Even now, Ray Nagin's words send a shiver down the spine.

For the first time, a mayor was ordering the mandatory evacuation of New Orleans, as the winds that heralded the cataclysm began to howl through the streets.

Hurricanes were embedded in city lore, but always, it seemed, the city dodged the bullet.

Now however, that charmed life was about to end, Nagin warned on the morning of August 28, 2005, at the hands of "a storm that most of us have long feared".

That night, Hurricane Katrina duly smashed into the central Gulf Coast.

By many measures, Katrina was the worst disaster ever to befall the United States. More people - an estimated 8000 - may have died in the Galveston hurricane of 1900, when modern communications and weather forecasting scarcely existed. And several more recent hurricanes have been fiercer, not least Camille, with its record winds of 305km/h, which in 1969 followed a path close to Katrina's, but miraculously spared New Orleans.

But from Katrina there was no escape. The storm levelled 160km of coastline. In all, it killed 1800 people in seven states, and caused US$90 billion of damage. It wreaked colossal damage on the region's oil, forestry and tourism industries. More than one million people were left homeless; the result, for a while, was the largest internal diaspora in American history.

But although swathes of Louisiana, Alabama and above all Mississippi were affected, Katrina is about New Orleans.

Not since the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 has a great American city been so devastated. At its height, four-fifths of New Orleans was under water, to a depth of 6m. Today, more than a quarter of the pre-Katrina population of 450,000 have not returned.

Books have been written and films made about the hurricane.

President Barack Obama will be in New Orleans on Monday, and a National Katrina Museum is due to open in a 1115sq m warehouse in the Ninth Ward, the poorest and worst-hit part of the city. Special theatrical events are scheduled in New Orleans and around the country. Some anniversaries are empty ritual, but not this one. Five years later, the impact of Katrina is still being felt.

Storms are acts of nature, but Katrina's deadliness was given a huge helping hand by human beings - even if you don't classify the hurricane as an "extreme weather event" directly caused by man-made global warming.

In November 2009, a federal judge ruled that the US Army Corps of Engineers had displayed "gross negligence" in failing to maintain a navigation channel whose failure led to the flooding. The doctrine of "sovereign immunity" meant the Corps could not be sued - but the inundation was the most spectacular indictment imaginable of the ageing civil infrastructure that plagues the entire country.

Humans, moreover, had contributed to the disaster by destroying the Gulf wetlands that traditionally protected New Orleans, by blunting the storm surges that are the deadliest features of hurricanes.

Katrina's main surge approached 7.5m, a veritable tsunami that overwhelmed the city's antiquated levees.

And not least, the storm laid bare the inadequacies of government, and the shortcomings of a society unable or unwilling to protect its weakest members. Unsurprisingly, its political repercussions were vast and almost immediate.

No single event was as ruinous to the fortunes of George W. Bush, who, just 10 months earlier, had narrowly won a second term in the White House.

Thereafter for Bush, it was downhill all the way. But it was Katrina that sealed the 43rd President's reputation for ineptitude, cronyism and near-complete disconnect from the reality of life for ordinary Americans, especially poor Americans - a reputation that remains.

Shortly after the disaster, Bush claimed that no one could have foreseen that New Orleans' levees would break; in fact, scientists had for years been warning the federal Government of precisely such a threat.

In the fetid waters that had taken over arguably its most beloved and distinctive city, the US saw a profoundly disturbing reflection of itself.

The hurricane raised one uncomfortable question after another. How was it that an America able to send hundreds of thousands of troops halfway round the world to topple a dictator of whom it disapproved could not protect New Orleans?

How could such a Third World disaster happen in the leader of the First World? Why did blacks suffer the most? Would the response have been as botched had a hurricane or earthquake struck Boston or San Francisco?

Maybe it would have been. "We felt we were written off by the government," a black New Orleanian reflected recently. "The real lesson is how cruelly we treat our citizens who have nothing. The middle classes, black and white, were able to leave New Orleans before the storm came. The people who couldn't afford to leave, they were on their own - and that about goes for any city in this country."

Or did "The Big Easy", fatalistic, frivolous and corrupt, simply get what was coming to it? In other words, was New Orleans - whose lack of preparedness for "the big one" was so brutally exposed by the shambles at the Superdome - as much to blame as the Bush Administration? One question followed another. None could be easily answered.

Five years on, the hurricane's impact still reverberates in national, as well as local, politics. With the election in May of Mitch Landrieu, scion of the state's pre-eminent political family, to succeed Nagin, the city has its first white mayor since Mitch's father, Moon, left office in 1978. Paradoxically, the emigration of so many poor blacks to places such as Houston and Atlanta may have shifted the politics of both Louisiana and New Orleans to the right.

Nationally too, in a country with a notoriously short attention span, Katrina is not forgotten. The storm was the headline act of the exceptionally severe Atlantic hurricane season of 2005, that first helped to concentrate minds here on global warming. Three years later, the country elected its first black president, in what perhaps was an effort by voters to look beyond the enduring racial discrimination that Katrina had thrown into especially cruel relief.

As they scramble to avoid a potential drubbing from Republicans in the mid-term elections now barely two months off, Democrats are once again making the Bush legacy a central issue. Along with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the recession and the deficit, the response to Katrina will also surely feature on the charge sheet.

Even more fundamentally, one must wonder whether Americans' lack of trust in the Washington establishment - the dominant theme of this political season, so vividly embodied in the Tea Party movement - stems, in part at least, from Katrina. When a section of the population needed the help of "big government" as rarely before in US history, the federal government establishment failed them.

In fact, much that is good has also happened in Katrina's aftermath. Fatalism breeds not just inertia but also resilience.

Other places, faced with comparable catastrophe, might have simply thrown in the towel. Not, however, New Orleans.

"We are veterans of pain," Mayor Landrieu told public television last month, in a documentary on the city's mood five years on.

But now fatalism has been joined by the demand that after decades of empty talk, the city at last tackles its age-old deficiencies.

The truth is that New Orleans was losing population and business clout to places such as Houston and Atlanta well before Katrina struck. The storm merely accelerated that trend.

If the city is serious about long-term recovery, it must do more than merely strengthen levees that crumbled and replace homes that were washed away.

The levees, we are told, have been fixed, and, albeit fitfully, the homes are being replaced.

In one area, of course, the city is already resurgent. Last February, the beloved Saints won the Super Bowl for the first time, defeating the Indianapolis Colts, watched in the US by 106 million people.

Now, everyone yearns for another comeback, one that would be even more remarkable: the lasting rebirth of the city itself.

- Independent