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Wrath of Rita Unleashed on Erath, Louisiana; Realities of Evacuation Planning

Aired September 26, 2005 - 13:33   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

TONY HARRIS, CNN ANCHOR: The wrath of Rita unleashed undiluted on tiny Erath, Louisiana in Vermilion Parish, maybe 10 miles west of New Iberia. Erath was ravaged in the wee hours of Saturday, and two days later the devastation is only that much more apparent.
CNN's Ed Henry is there.

And, Ed, just how bad is it?

ED LAVANDERA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Tony, we're here on the main street of Erath. And you can see the here the red brick building. You probably get the best idea of where the water levels once were. So the water levels here are receding quite a bit, about three feet here so far. And just yesterday, this entire area where we're standing on, if you look back over this way, this is the railroad tracks that kind of cut through town, and all of this was under water yesterday. So a significant drop in the amount of water in this area. You can see all of the debris, and everything and junk that has been left behind by the floodwaters.

We're also seeing a lot more people coming home to check out their homes and their businesses and to see what is left. What is significant about this area, it didn't sustain a lot of storm damage. The homes are pretty much left intact. So there aren't a lot of downed power lines and trees and that sort of thing, but what people are discovering, and it is still emotional for them, is to discover their homes flooded out.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CONNIE MASON, ERATH, LA. RESIDENT: My little grand daughter was surprised, when she kept saying, well, momma, we can go back in the boat and everything is going to be fine. And when she got there it was, like, just a sample, how are we going to walk? How are we going to get to school? You tell them there's not going to be any school for right now.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

LAVANDERA: There are a lot of residents that feel just like Connie Mason, who you just heard from, who walked into her house to find the floor covered in sludge, and she thinks her home is a total loss. A city council member here in Erath says that 90 percent of this city was underwater, and there are also other communities, Delta (ph), just down Highway 14 as well. There's another town, Henry, just south of here, and also as you get close to the Gulf Coast, all of the floodwaters kind of receding back out that way, so it's still going to take time -- Tony.

HARRIS: And, Ed, it's difficult for folks to realize how difficult it is. I could tell in that soundbyte there to reconnect to the infrastructure of their lives, of their city. We're talking about schools, the banking system, getting stores open, it's just going to take a while, isn't it?

LAVANDERA: Well, it is. In fact, I've had a lot of young people come up to me, students at the high school here, who really that want to know what condition their high school is in and that sort of thing, but more importantly, we talked to a lot of students who also say -- especially seniors. You know, actually what has really struck with me are seniors who kind of feel like their senior year in high school has really been just kind of disheveled completely. They had hoped for one nice, smooth year, to enjoy themselves, and right now, they're not really sure when they're going to be going back to class.

HARRIS: Boy. Ed Lavandera for us in Erath, Louisiana Ed, thank you.

Well, after the wrath of Hurricane Katrina, many thousands of Houston residents didn't wait to be told twice to evacuate ahead of Hurricane Rita, and here's what happened, massive traffic jams, people running out of gas and abandoning their cars on the side of the road, others who saw this madness just gave up and hunkered down at home.

In this case, it didn't much matter, but what if it did? What if it was a sudden emergency, not something that you could see coming for days ahead of time.

CNN security analyst Richard Falkenrath joins me talk about the realities of evacuation planning. Could you get you if you really had to?

Richard, good to talk with you.

RICHARD FALKENRATH, CNN SECURITY ANALYST: Hi, Tony.

HARRIS: Hey, know, when talking about evacuating in this case, let's talk about big cities. It really comes down to, you were telling us earlier, time and geography, and in the case of hurricanes, it's actually easier to prepare for those.

FALKENRATH: That's right, Tony.

Those are the two big variables to whether you can successfully evacuate a large urban area, time and geography. Here we had time. We saw that it was a cat-five hurricane out in the Gulf, three days before landfall, and so people really took heed and started the evacuation process early on.

There might even have been too many people evacuated, from too large an area, and too many people hitting the roads, causing all that congestion that you have been reporting.

HARRIS: I've got to ask you, The attacks of 9/11 robbed everyone of time. And I'm wondering, what happens? What happens now? How prepared are we four years after 9/11, and let's go out general, wide, and talk about big cities, and then get a little more specific. How prepared are we in the event of a terror attack that robs everyone of time?

FALKENRATH: Well, in general, most of the cities and states in the hurricane belt can evacuate with a few day's notice of the incoming storm. New Orleans was really an exception, and that needs to be studied very closely, but in general, Florida, the other states, all the way through Texas, have had to do this a lot and are good at it.

The real problem is if there's no notice, if it's a sudden situation that requires a rapid evacuation. We had something like that on 9/11 in Manhattan, also something like that in the Northeast when the blackout happened.

But in neither case was there really imminent threat to the life and limb of the people evacuating. And so it's simply a fact that today we are not prepared at any level of government to evacuate thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people quickly under conditions of an imminent threat.

HARRIS: And what is that? Is that just -- what should we think of that, that we're not prepared to handle a threat that you just sort of outlined? What should we be outraged?

FALKENRATH: Yes, there should be a level of outrage here. There should be a demand on all levels of government, because this is a shared responsibility, to get better at conducting very rapid evacuations under very stressful circumstances, more stressful than what we saw over the weekend with Rita.

And I think you're going to see a lot of renewed attention to this at the federal level, where really there hasn't been all that much attention. 9/11 didn't really stress our evacuation system. When New York City was attacked, the Trade Centers collapsed and there was a very localized problem at ground zero. But around that, the city was basically intact.

HARRIS: OK, Richard, who takes the lead? Let's break this down? Who should be taking the lead? What are the agencies? I guess this is at a state level.

FALKENRATH: Right. This -- right now the responsibility for evacuations is basically a state and local responsibility. That's the way our constitution works, it's federalism. This power was never assigned to the federal government. The federal role is to assist state and local agencies when they ask for it, not to supersede them.

Now, there's a question right now, and the president sort of alluded to this, whether that basic balance in our federal compact should be altered in some way. And that's sort of a raging debate right now among the people who are concerned with this.

HARRIS: Well, short of that, shouldn't the federal government, the White House, Congress, all of these bodies, shouldn't they at least be putting pressure on these state agencies to revisit the plans in the aftermath of these two storms and to be very sure that they have plans that can meet the challenges on the ground, not just in the case of a hurricane, but in the case of, say, a dirty bomb attack.

FALKENRATH: Absolutely. And that's a real lesson of Katrina, that we -- the federal government needs to be far more forward leaning with the state and local agencies to make sure that they're ready. Far more forward leaning with technical assistance on how to conduct the planning with computer models and, possibly, with physical and logistical assistance like field trucks and like, so that the state and local agencies really can exercise their responsibilities when they need to.

HARRIS: So, Richard, withhold some money, some grant money, some highway funds, until you get a plan that we deem as being a workable plan?

FALKENRATH: Tony, that's a great idea near and dear to my own heart. I wish that the federal government were able to condition all of its aid to the state and local agencies on having very effective disaster response plans. At the moment, most of our assistance, the money that is handed out to the state and local agencies -- billions and billions of dollars since 9/11 -- is an entitlement. It just goes to them automatically. And there is no conditionality. I personally believe that conditionality should be imposed. So far, the political consensus in Washington does not support that.

HARRIS: The practicalities of practicing. All right, let's say you come up with a plan. Don't you need to practice the plan? When we do fire drills in schools -- and shouldn't you practice the plan to see if it actually can work?

FALKENRATH: Well, do you need to practice the parts of it that you can practice and you do need to conduct exercises on table tops. You can't have a practiced evacuation of the whole city of Houston.

HARRIS: Sure.

FALKENRATH: That's impractical. But you can practice limited parts of it. You know, your local law enforcement agencies can work on closing off the exits and on-ramps and reversing flows on roads. You can build computer models to understand what's happening. You can conduct what we call table top exercises. And that should happen. There is some of that that goes on. There needs to be a lot more of it.

HARRIS: No plan survives contact with the facts on the ground.

FALKENRATH: That's true. And we've learned that -- we learned that in part with Katrina.

HARRIS: That's right. Richard Falkenrath, good stuff. Richard, thank you.

CNN is committed to providing the most reliable coverage of news that affects your security. Stay tuned to CNN for the latest information day and night.

Coming up on LIVE FROM, we'll update you on Rita. The dog, not the hurricane. Find out what happened to the pup found by our own Miles O'Brien this weekend when LIVE FROM returns.

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HARRIS: And we've got an update on a story we told you about just a few moments ago of the anti-war protests going on in Washington, D.C. That, again, over the weekend. And these are pictures from just outside of the White House. And you see Cindy Sheehan. She is a part of the group that's been marching in Washington, speaking in Washington over the weekend. And we can tell you that she's been arrested.

Now, there was a system put in place where there were lanes open for folks who were protesting to travel down. And you were given warnings if you strayed outside of those lanes. And I believe the system in place was that you were given three warnings before you were arrested. And it looks like Cindy Sheehan and members of her group obviously stepped outside of those boundaries. And we understand that Cindy Sheehan's son Casey was killed last year in Iraq. Has been arrested. And we will continue to follow the story and bring you updates throughout the day.

Same state, different storm. This time it's Louisiana's Vermillion Parish that's swamped by Rita-related flooding. CNN's Anderson Cooper is along, as a local wildlife official rises to the rescue of a family that didn't expect they'd need rescuing.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Keith Dela Husa (ph) starts searching just after dawn. A 20-year veteran of Louisiana's Wildlife and Fisheries Enforcement Department, he's never seen anything like this.

KEITH DELA HUSA, LOUISIANA WILDLIFE AND FISHERIES ENFORCEMENT DEPT.: Bad. I just hope we can make it all the way.

COOPER: Dela Husa is trying to find a family of four, stranded by the storm surge after Hurricane Rita. Several hundred people have already been rescued in Vermilion Parish, but navigating the floodwaters is tricky. This area is normally pastureland.

(on camera): Over here there's a fence. You know, it's one of the hard things, even if you have an address, it's hard getting to it through all these obstacles. We're going to try to go over this fence now.

(voice-over): The boat gets stuck, but not for long. You have to keep a watchful eye. There's plenty of debris and hidden fences under the water.

DELA HUSA: So many different property owners and you have got to go over fences. And it's really, really hard, you know, to get to them by boat.

COOPER: It takes Dela Husa an hour to find the home he's looking for.

DELA HUSA: There's the house.

COOPER: He's just in time, the water has nearly reached the front door. The family's two horses have little room left.

KEVIN HERBERT (ph), RESIDENT: We stayed here through the whole storm. I knew I was elevated, you know, on a pad. And obviously the swamp filled up. All of a sudden the surge just came right over the canal, and I mean everybody was just driving out. And we got blocked in and couldn't drive out with the vehicles because it got so deep.

COOPER: Kevin Herbert's brother, Chad (ph), tried to rescue them in his boat, but his propeller broke.

DIANE HERBERT (ph), RESIDENT: My lord!

COOPER: Their mom, Diane (ph), is ready to leave.

D. HERBERT: We're glad you all are taking us out.

COOPER: Diane Herbert is 63 and says she didn't evacuate because she didn't anticipate the floodwaters.

D. HERBERT: Yes, it rose really quick. Within a matter of 20 minutes, we were with no water in the shop at all and water up to the house, you know, 20, 30 minutes. I said, you know, then we got scared.

COOPER: Diane is worried the saltwater may harm this pastureland. It's already destroyed this family cemetery. The flowers on a tombstone still visible.

D. HERBERT: There's so much beauty in this land, you know, and the way we live out here. And to know that it will be years, if ever, that it comes back to that. That's hard.

COOPER: As soon as the waters recede, however, and the power is restored, Diane and her kids will move back to their land.

D. HERBERT: We all have homes to clean up and dry up, then you start back with your life. You know what else can you do? You just pick up the pieces, start again.

COOPER: For now they'll stay with relatives in Abbeville and Keith Dela Husa will go back on the water. There's still many more people waiting to be evacuated.

DELA HUSA: Yes, I love rescuing people, you know. I mean they need our help and that's what we're here for, you know, we always protect and serve.

COOPER: Anderson Cooper, CNN, Perry, Louisiana. (END VIDEOTAPE)

HARRIS: And now to a different kind of rescue, but to us, no less important. It was effected by LIVE FROM alumnus Miles O'Brien on "LIVE TODAY" this weekend. Miles and CNN producer Dana Garrett were in Lumberton, Texas at the site of a collapsed building. Garrett heard a dog yelping and went to ask nearby police for help. Well, they were busy. So Miles, the superhero that he is, moved in, opened up the cage, pulled out the scared but otherwise OK pooch. That's just Miles being Miles.

The pup is being held for a few days to see if her owners return. If not, Dana Garrett will claim her for her own.

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