Dry run for Katrina

Editorial - The Boston Globe: "BEFORE THERE was Hurricane Katrina, there was Hurricane Pam. You won't find it on any of the lists of storms that have struck in the past. Pam was a 2004 simulation exercise with federal, state, and local officials to estimate the impact of a major hurricane on New Orleans. It predicted that the levees would be swamped. One million people from the area would be evacuated in time, but 300,000 or so residents, mostly the poor without transportation, would be left behind.

Pam was the alarm bell that should have alerted the Bush administration that its preference for tax cuts and defense spending over necessary domestic projects could have disastrous consequences. One government official who rang the alarm, Assistant Secretary of the Army Michael Parker, was fired for accusing the Bush administration of shortchanging the Corps of Engineers, the agency responsible for the levees in New Orleans. Parker, a former Republican congressman from Mississippi, was an unlikely martyr to the cause of big government.

But from Washington's failure to maintain the levees to its long-term neglect of the wetlands and barrier islands that protect the Gulf Coast, Katrina has proven that much of government is like keeping a roof in good repair: You pay now or you pay much more later. This time, the price was in lives as well.

Looking back at ''Hurricane Pam" is also useful because it shreds the defense for the federal government's poor response made by both President Bush and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that no one foresaw the cataclysm that struck last week. The New Orleans newspaper the Times-Picayune published a series in 2002 on the danger posed to the city by the failure to strengthen the levee system and the long-term degradation of the coast's natural defenses. A 2001 article in Scientific American by Mark Fischetti also predicted the city's flooding.

As planning exercises go, Pam was inadequate. Participants' suggestion for helping those left behind was that members of churches locate fellow congregants without cars and help them escape. This could certainly have helped but would not have solved the evacuation problem entirely. Nor was it ever followed through.

Planners should have insisted that local or federal government ensure there were sufficient buses identified beforehand and organized to go into neighborhoods and help residents escape. Churches will undoubtedly have a role in helping Katrina's victims. But only public officials whose views of government's role have been stunted by decades of antigovernment hectoring could have failed to see that a safe, swift evacuation was a job for government, not God. "