THOMASVILLE — The nation’s response to major hurricanes has improved since Hurricane Katrina, a former FEMA federal coordinating officer told the Thomasville Rotary Club. 

Bill Lokey was part of the federal response to a number of hurricanes in the 1990s and early 2000s, including Opal, Floyd, Isabel and Ivan. But Katrina and its impact was beyond what the planners had envisioned, Lokey said.

“I thought I was pretty good at this,” he said. “Then came Katrina.

“We were not prepared for something this large,” Lokey continued. “The planning that had been done was inadequate for something this large. Our rescuers and capabilities at the local, state, federal and private sector levels were all overwhelmed. We could not communicate very easily and we did not work well together.” 

The federal government, not long before Katrina hit, finished a 500-page national response plan on how to deal with large-scale disasters. However, Lokey said, there wasn’t enough money in the budget to help state and local officials with what was outlined in the plan.

FEMA was roundly criticized for what happened in the Katrina aftermath, and Lokey said much of those attacks were off-base.

“We got a lot of criticism for not having enough stuff staged in New Orleans ahead of time,” he said. “The federal government only has a certain amount of supplies to pre-position and the track was a moving target. We had things prepositioned from Florida to Texas.”

But, Lokey pointed out, the storm’s projected track changed three times in just more than a day, ranging from Tallahassee to Mobile. 

As officials watched hurricane parties on New Orleans’ Bourbon Street, they thought they had dodged a bullet, Lokey said. 

Then the levees failed and the city flooded. More than 1,500 people died as a result of Hurricane Katrina and its effects. 

The size of the disaster area was also overwhelming. Federal planners used Hurricane Andrew, which covered 1,700 square miles of damage, as its model. Katrina’s swath covered 90,000 square miles over several states. Georgia, Lokey noted, is 59,000 square miles in size. 

“It was a lot of territory, more than we ever had to deal with,” he said. “We had people on roofs, elderly abandoned in nursing homes, hospitals that had not been evacuated, power, communications, transportation no longer existed.”

There also were misconceptions among the media and the public about FEMA’s role. Lokey recalled CNN anchor Anderson Cooper saying, “we got hit down here, I wonder where’s FEMA? I thought we’d see them setting up tents and handing out water and food.”

As Lokey acknowledged, that’s not FEMA’s role.“

FEMA doesn’t come down and hand out food,” he said. 

FEMA also has no authority to evacuate anybody, Lokey added.

“That is a prerogative vested in local and state officials,” he said. “There were all sorts of things we are asked to do that we have no authority to do and then we got blamed for it not getting done.”

At the time, FEMA helped states with supplies and reimbursed them for costs.

“It seemed like I would become the governor’s new best friend arriving after the president declared a disaster with a checkbook with a balance couple of billion dollars,” Lokey said.

Under the plan in place then, the Louisiana National Guard was going to distribute supplies. The Guardsmen, though, had been activated and deployed to Iraq. 

“So we had to work with the state and build a distribution network from the ground up, and that took time,” Lokey said. 

One of the results from the Katrina response was better planning for megashelters, which the Superdome had become. When evacuees were moved to the massive stadium, there were no propositioned supplies and the building did not have backup power.

A major mistake early on, Lokey said, was not realizing the world’s attention would be on the Superdome. Since there weren’t enough supplies for every parish in Louisiana, FEMA decided to spread out what it had. The flooding, though, meant the supplies destined for the Superdome and its thousands of evacuees didn’t get there. 

There was also little coordination between state and local officials in Louisiana, Lokey said. At the federal level, those in charge of emergency management now must have a background in it, rather than be political appointees.

“We coordinate the efforts of others. We are not in charge of others,” Lokey said of FEMA’s role. “There was a lot of tension between the media and public officials on all levels. Demands exceeded all the planned assumptions that had been done. People were confused at the local level. It was hard to organize all the groups that showed up to help.”

Even when Lokey secured help from across the border, a search and rescue team from British Columbia, it turned into a public relations nightmare.  

From his days in Washington state, he helped build a team from Vancouver, British Columbia, and they called to offer their assistance. He teamed them with the Louisiana Department of  Wildlife and Fisheries.

Put to work in St. Bernard Parish, the Canadians got more than 250 people out of the water on their first day. But the headlines the next day, Lokey said, were that the Mounties got there before FEMA did. 

“We started to get things organized,” he said. “Even when we did get things right, we seemed to get blasted by the media.”

Though the efforts at first were faltering, Lokey said he thought the response improved. FEMA teams rescued 6,700 people, searched more than 20,000 structures, cleared more than 22,000 unanswered 911 calls and moved 2,500 patients left in hospitals to safety around the country.

“In the first six days after landfall, we moved more food, water, baby formula, toilet paper into Louisiana than in the whole eight weeks of hurricanes in Florida in 2004,” Lokey said. “In less than four days we built a bus system bigger than Greyhound and moved 75,000 people to safe shelter around the country.

“I was proud of what my people did and what they were able to do, but it wasn’t enough for political and public expectations.”

The lack of relationships at state and local levels in Louisiana hindered operations, according to Lokey. 

“There was a toxic relationship between the locals and state that we got caught in the middle of,” he said.

Planning and coordination have improved in the post-Katrina era, Lokey said, and there is now a greater threat from more and larger storms. Ocean temperatures and sea levels seem to be rising, he said, and cruise ships are making their way through the Northwest Passage. 

For hurricanes to develop, the water needs to be at 80 degrees Fahrenheit and there needs to be 165 feet in depth of water. 

“The earth’s climate has been heating and cooling for eons. There have been greenhouse and icehouse times,” Lokey said. “In the last 150 years, I believe there is good data that the ocean temperatures have risen 1.7 degrees. One degree can increase a hurricane’s wind speed from 15 to 20 mph. 

“As the oceans get warmer, it will provide more energy for the storms.” 

The key, Lokey acknowledged, is to make citizens and communities more resilient and sustainable. Since Katrina, federal, state and local officials have improved their planning and preparedness for such disasters, he said.

“I do believe things have gotten better,” Lokey said. “There will be continued to be lessons learned and there will be improvements to our response efforts. We’ve gotten better at response and it’s something we have to get better at.”

Editor Pat Donahue can be reached at (229) 226-2400 ext. 1806.