'Hurricane Pam' exercise offered glimpse of Katrina misery
Friday, 6 p.m.

By John McQuaid
Staff writer
Times Picayune
The document's cover page reads: "Southeast Louisiana Catastrophic Hurricane Functional Plan."

"It maps out detailed instructions for emergency managers responding to a deadly hurricane that floods all of New Orleans, killing more than 60,000: how to rescue and evacuate hundreds of thousands of people stranded on rooftops or trapped by rising waters; how to quickly mobilize federal, state and local agencies; how to drain water laced with toxic sludge and clean up a ruined city.

But officials never put this plan into action. It wasn't an official disaster playbook but an experiment, the product of a weeklong simulation done last year in which emergency managers confronted a fictional Hurricane Pam.

The halting emergency response to Hurricane Katrina's aftermath left thousands of people stranded in New Orleans and adjacent areas for days without food and water, with many vulnerable to roaming gangs of outlaws. Flaws in communications and coordination between government agencies at the federal, state and local levels apparently slowed the response, though exactly what went wrong has yet to be determined.

The 109-page report on Pam, dated Sept. 20, 2004, and provided by a participant in the exercise, addresses many of these issues.

The simulation imagined a grim scenario even worse than Katrina: A slow-moving Category 3 hurricane strikes the New Orleans area, overtopping levees and causing 10-12 feet of flooding in New Orleans and the entire east bank metro area.

Katrina's flood waters spared most of Jefferson Parish and parts of New Orleans.

In the simulation, 61,290 people die, including 24,250 in New Orleans. An additional 384,000 are injured or fall ill.

The exercise grew out of an initiative at the Federal Emergency Management Agency started early in the Bush presidency to develop plans for the worst possible disasters that could hit the United States..."

And ignored by state, city and local officials.