The Storm

Hurricane Katrina was a wakeup call for America, not only as a possible harbinger of a new age of super storms, but also as a pointed demonstration of our inability to respond to such disasters. As day after day went by following Katrina's landfall, Americans asked why New Orleans wasn't evacuated sooner? Why were so many of the poor left behind? Where was FEMA, the U.S. Army, the National Guard? This entry in the acclaimed PBS Frontline series attempts to look beyond the finger pointing to find out where communications and planning failed (the idea of New Orleans as ground zero for hurricane disasters isn't new—earlier destructive storms included Carla (1961), Betsy (1965), and Camille (1969), and asks whether decades of relative inactivity lulled officials into a false sense of security. Combining archival footage and stills with interviews, The Storm reviews the circumstances that led to FEMA's creation in 1979, noting that the agency quickly became a patronage haven for political allies during the administrations of Reagan and the first President Bush (Bush's loss of the 1992 election after the government's slow response to Hurricane Andrew was often cited as a factor in that contest). President Clinton, always politically astute, learned from that lesson and built FEMA into a model of government efficiency and prompt response, but things began to slide again after George W. Bush took office. Although the viewer can sense the anger beneath the documentary's surface, it's scrupulously fair in giving citizens, FEMA officials, and national guardsmen a voice in what went wrong. In fact, the most memorable scene occurs at the end, when a guardsman jokes about some poor soul caught in the rising floodwaters, suggesting that in addition to racial and socioeconomic bias, one of the biggest problems may well be our inability to simply care enough about our fellow humans. Recommended. Aud: H, C, P. (S. Rees)