Mayor's aide writes insider tale of Katrina

0 Comments | Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Aug 26, 2007 | by Mary Foster Associated Press

NEW ORLEANS -- After Hurricane Katrina inundated his city, as Mayor Ray Nagin surveyed what was already being called the nation's worst natural disaster, press secretary Sally Forman asked if he was OK, she writes in a new book on the man and the post-storm chaos.

"This was God's plan for me, Sally," Nagin said.

"What was?" she asked.

"To rebuild New Orleans."

Forman's book, "Eye of the Storm, Inside City Hall During Katrina," being released this week, details the problems, politics and bureaucracy that hindered efforts to save the city.

Forman, who left the Nagin administration when her husband ran for mayor last year, said that when she told Nagin about the book's release a few days ago, he said he didn't mind -- as long as it was truthful.

On Saturday, Nagin's current spokeswoman, Ceeon D. Quiett, said the administration and the mayor were not contacted before publication to verify any facts or anecdotes. "Therefore, we will not, after final publication, validate or invalidate the content of this publication," Quiett said in an e-mail.

Nagin took office promising a new day in government, more transparency and an end to the corruption that has long plagued politics here. But Forman says the business executive-turned- mayor's distrust of politicians, his outsider status, and his sense he was on a mission from God, hurt the city after Hurricane Katrina.

When Katrina hit on Aug. 29, 2005, he was nearly finished with his first term, disillusioned with police chief Eddie Compass, who he later fired, and navigating a rocky relationship with Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, Forman writes.

Though government at all levels seemed to pull together before Katrina, just days into the disaster communications and cooperation had broken down, she says.

With communications limited and misinformation rampant, Nagin met with military leaders and others.

FEMA's Phil Parr said the agency was "here to head up command and control," and warned that all FEMA guidelines would have to be followed.

"His words thudded down like sandbags as he rattled off technicalities that made me wonder if FEMA's motto was 'Just say no,"' Forman wrote.

Later, Parr said in a meeting with Nagin that if the mayor continued to evacuate New Orleans, FEMA couldn't provide food to people left in the city.

Help had arrived, Forman says, but "bureaucracy was still tightening like a noose around our necks."

Looking back, she sees how "partisan bickering, senseless bureaucracy and failures within government, including my own, may have delayed our recovery and stopped many from coming home."

It hasn't killed New Orleans, Forman writes. But the city's medical and tourism sectors and its infrastructure took hits, and the murder rate has again begun to soar.

"Topping it off, slow moving and disjointed planning efforts have made new Orleans a case study in how to recklessly rebuild a major American city," she writes.