Today is the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, one of the darkest days in Louisiana history. Bob Mann was the communications director for Governor Kathleen Blanco; and at first, they thought Katrina only produced wind damage. But then, reports came in of rising water.
“Mid-morning to late morning, the reports started just pouring in that the water was pouring into New Orleans. Every couple of minutes brought a new report of a levee break somewhere,” Mann said.
Katrina produced catastrophic flooding, not only in New Orleans, but also in Jefferson, Plaquemines and St. Bernard parishes. Once the storm passed, the mission was to get thousands of stranded people, some of them living on rooftops, out of the flooded waters and onto dry land. Mann says the federal government was not much help.
“So we had to start scrambling and Governor Blanco had to assemble her own fleet of buses, state buses to go in there because the federal buses, when they finally showed up, it was really too late,” Mann said.
Blanco took a lot of criticism for the state’s response to Katrina. It was a major factor in her decision not to run for re-election. Mann says there was certainly failures at all levels of government, but FEMA’s role was to provide federal resources to states dealing with a disaster, but that didn’t happen.
“Really frustrating to a lot of people who were involved in the state and local aspect of this that the resources that they were told, ahead of time, would be sent into a state like Louisiana and Mississippi. We’re not sent in,” Mann said.
