'The Big Uneasy' Documentary Explores How Hurricane Katrina Could Have Been Prevented

Hurricane Katrina is often referred to as a "natural disaster," one of the deadliest and most costly in our nation's history. Though the hurricane was natural, the destruction it caused was not, argues a new documentary film directed by actor, comedian, activist and New Orleans resident Harry Shearer.

"The Big Uneasy," analyzes the federal and state governments' failed response to Katrina, and how the crisis that ensued could have been prevented.

Shearer doesn't want to just point fingers, however. A critical point made in the film is a warning: many of the same problems made the first time around are being repeated in the rebuilding process, by many of the same people.

Among the most controversial accusations made in the film is levied against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, arguing that they ignored warning signs of a potential storm of Katrina's size, and covered up their negligence, all while insisting that the damage caused by the hurricane couldn't have been prevented.

WATCH the trailer:

"The Big Uneasy" will screen on one night only in select cities on Monday, Aug. 30 -- the day after the five year anniversary of the breach of the levees.

Comments

[CPNASH]

09:23 PM on 08/11/2010

Another baffling thing at the time was, my family in Australia told me that immediately hearing of the New Orleans tragedy they (Australians), along with other countries sent planes with supplies with the intent to relieve the flood victims, but were turned away, while people were without food, water and blankets etc. What? Due to National security? It was like no one in charge had these people's interest at heart or a clue what to do at the time.

[Mark Knudsen]

10:48 PM on 08/07/2010

I think some of the comments made here indacate too much sun and not enougb hydration hunt ffor some shade tho old viking

[roger37]

12:11 AM on 08/08/2010

Spellcheck. Just a suggestion.

[Mark Knudsen]

10:36 PM on 08/07/2010

There was in BC times a socciety off the coast of Greece that you were judged by what a good lier you were, their society failed.... see anything similiar going on around you today,not just in the higher up but also thoses aspiring to the higher levels,,, it has alway been the lower levels that make them posable by providing their needs..... we are the ones at falt for their success cut um off or pay the consequances how many times do you need to hear it the pagan Viking

[Mark Knudsen]

03:33 PM on 08/07/2010

I am coming to the conclusion, if I lied to the government as much as they lie to me and with the same severity the government would open up Alcatraz and through me in as a threat to society

[land2341]

01:45 PM on 08/07/2010

Try the book Path Of Destruction. Good detailed look at the historic man made decisions that set up NOLA to this disaster and then details in stunning specificity who dropped what ball and when and why they dropped it. The NOLA people were not helpless, had they been many more would have died, many of the rescued were saved by their neighbors.

The point is that most if not all of the problems are simply being replicated now and the chain of command is not much clearer now than it was then. A more volatile climate is sure to make this area more vulnerable. But, most are banking on the odds that since it got hit once it will be OK for a century or two......

[roger37]

12:29 AM on 08/08/2010

Well, the last time we got a direct hit or even a close hit was Betsy, in 1965. Yes, a number of hurricanes have passed by, and we get deluged with rain, but what most people don't know is that we can handle heavy weather better than anybody in the country.

We have an underground pumping system that can pump out 1 1/2 inches of rainfall PER HOUR. Back when it was built 100 years ago, it was considered a world-class engineering achievement. We designed and built the pumps here at Tulane University, and Tulane and city Water people consulted for the Dutch in redoing their system.

The levees, on the other hand, have been built and maintained by the Federal Government since the Hoover Administration (as is the rest of the nation's levees). This was in response to the Great Mississippi Floods of 1927. Yes, NOLA didn't push the Army Corps of Engineers hard enough for proper maintenance, but I'm pretty sure that, as messed up NOLA can be, we would have been better at dealing with our own protection.

We know that we can expect more frequency in hurricanes, but people seem to think we get a direct hit every few years, and we don't. We're ready right now for everything up to (but not including) a direct hit Cat. 5.

[showme54]

11:18 PM on 08/06/2010

freelancerighter, first off, if the federal levees had not failed, the New Orleans area catastrophe would not have happened. Second, I don't know what extensive timeline you were referring to If you are speaking of Hurricane Pam exercise...it was never completed to the point of where and how a total evacuation of the city's population would happen or the cost analysis of a mandatory evacuation in coordination with the feds (fema) because, I believe the budget ran out before it could be completely planned. As far as 'time versus responsibility'- it was obvious to the records that Louisiana followed proper procedure...had the repubs in charge had not had a bunch of cronies running the show and had followed proper procedure in the days immediately after the disaster and left out the 'POLITICS', the situation probably would have had a less catastrophic outcome. There are many myths that keep getting repeated and are still repeated that were nothing more than lies used as political talking points for repubs to cover their butts and/or rile up their base and some were baseless rumors started by some media reports during that time. Just a few that were debunked fairly quickly can be found at http://thinkprogress.org/2005/09/13/katrin-myths-debunked/

[showme54]

11:36 PM on 08/06/2010

Sorry, meant as a reply. One other point, my remarks on the fed response in no way is to lessen the heroic efforts of the Coast Guard who immediately followed the storm in and were rescuing people day and night even though they had suffered losses also. Though they are federal, they were able to self-deploy and not have to wait for the approval of Brownie who had ordered everyone (volunteers and rescue agencies) to stand down until he gave the word. Thank goodness many rescuers didn't wait for him to start the process.

[showme54]

11:51 PM on 08/06/2010

should be http://thinkprogress.org/2005/09/13/katrina-myths-debunked/

[roger37]

11:06 PM on 08/06/2010

Two things that are seldom mentioned:

1. On the Friday before Katrina made landfall (Monday 8/29), NOLA was in the TWO PERCENT probability "cone" that the NOAA publishes. That percentage increased on Saturday, but it wasn't until late Saturday 8/27 that it looked like we were probably going to get hit.

2. Beginning with the Voluntary Evacuation on 8/27 and the Mandatory Evacuation on 8/28, we moved 1.2 MILLION people out of this metro area. The 100 K that were left are NOT representative of the total NOLA population, as the great majority of them were over 65 years of age. Many older folks refused to evacuate, and they made a bad decision.

By comparison, Houston had people sitting in the same spot on an expressway for as long as 24 hours when Rita passed by a couple of weeks later.
-------------
Yes, our response was screwed up, at the fed AND local/state levels. But the people of NOLA were NOT helpless. I left at 4 PM on Sunday the 28th, after boarding up my house and helping an old couple in the neighborhood, and I got to Baton Rouge in 6 hours, with slow but steady movement on I-10.

It's amazing to me how often this is overlooked, which just encourages the "experts" with their blame-the-victim narrative.

[unimatrix0]

11:18 PM on 08/06/2010

The thing that really irked me about this storm was that almost all of our national guard soliders were over seas, or resting from prolonged stays there. This is what they are for, and protecting our borders. Increase the military, and leave our national guard to tend to home disasters. The other issue was funding. We had 3rd world nations giving $10K to us, when that would immunize so many of their children. The wars cost us more than just a surplus of funds, honor, but also self respect. We could not even care for our own people.

[Jerome Healy]

12:40 AM on 08/06/2010

Spring of 1979 I was taking a geology course at the University of New Orleans. The grad student teaching the course gave her take on how New Orleans was going to "get it". A storm wouldn't even have to hit directly, just come around to the East and pump enough water into Lake Pontchartrain to back up in the canals and break the levees. And that's exactly what happened.

[RepugsOut08]

05:54 AM on 08/06/2010

Sorry. That is not "exactly what happened."
If you'd like to know exactly what happened, there is a great source of info for you to read. The ILIT and Team Louisiana Reports will answer all your questions, and dispel all the misinformation and incorrect "teaching" you may have encountered along the way.

[papapj]

11:50 AM on 08/06/2010

Pray do correct him...your assertion is pretty vacuous, otherwise...

[WTFbush]

11:31 PM on 08/05/2010

The 82nd Airborn Division, located at Fort Bragg, North Carolina can go anywhere in the world and be on he ground in 18 hours.....except of course Northern Louisiana, where field hopitals and tent cities could have been set up WAY before the hurricane ever made land fall. People coud have been move to Fort Polk as well, or Florida or......

President Bush just had to give it the green light, but in fairness to him, he was learning to tie his shoes for those weeks leading up to the disaster.

[freelancerighter]

11:45 AM on 08/06/2010

So you'd send them in when a hurricane is about to hit, hm? Brilliant.

[WTFbush]

02:41 PM on 08/06/2010

No, the point was that they could set up tent cities anywhere and move a division size population to it...in 18 hours.

They could have moved the entire population of New Orleans into your gated community, for example.

[land2341]

01:41 PM on 08/07/2010

freelance, what WTF is talking about is "staging" of emergency response materials, something that was totally screwed in the days before and after Katrina hit. This kind of staging is done frequently and with great success, and the Ft Bragg people coulda shoulda been allowed to do their thing. The number and level of incompetence displayed at the higher levels where permission was needed and coordination was wanted was appalling. The people who could have done great things were simply hamstrung by the gov't from doing what they were supposed to do.

[SPAIN62]

07:31 PM on 08/05/2010

Wow! What amazing and powerful photo.

[luvVB]

05:50 PM on 08/05/2010

Make no mistake. The people in charge during hurricane Katrina believe the people in NOLA are second class citizens.

This was NEVER about failure to act/failure of duty, its simply a perspective these people have.

"What didn't go right?'"
–President Bush, as quoted by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), after she urged him to fire FEMA Director Michael Brown "because of all that went wrong, of all that didn't go right" in the Hurricane Katrina relief effort

"so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway so this (chuckle) – this is working very well for them."
––Former First Lady Barbara Bush, on the hurricane evacuees at the Astrodome in Houston, Sept. 5, 2005

"Now tell me the truth boys, is this kind of fun?"
–House Majority Leader Tom Delay (R-TX), to three young hurricane evacuees from New Orleans at the Astrodome in Houston, Sept. 9, 2005

[WTFbush]

11:25 PM on 08/05/2010

"heck of a job, Brownie"

[Frustrated in PA]

04:43 PM on 08/05/2010

I just knew the tr0lls would come out in force on this one. Pie in the sky forbid that we acknowledge that this was absolutely a manmade disaster resulting from the systematic failure from the Federal govt. to the state govt. right on down to ole Mayor Nagin's office.

The predictability of the tr0ll talking points of "They should have evacuated." "It is their fault they didn't leave." You have a city that has a decent level of poverty, not only poverty but you also have generations of people that were born there, relatives stayed there and no one really leaves.

Where did you want them to go? How were they going to pay for alternate housing since no alternatives but "fend for yourself" were provided? Did you provide them with transporation and somewhere to go? Many people didn't even have a credit card to pay for gas or motel room....besides the fact that RAMPANT price gouging was going on leading up to the storm and during it. Relatives were in the city with them so many did not have a relative they could stay with and, if they did, they did not have a means to get there or pay for it.

Sanctimonious, self-righteous tr0lls that cannot look at the larger picture truly lack common sense and a vast intellect.

[PatriotPaul]

10:44 PM on 08/05/2010

Not only did you have the poverty but many of us could not evacuate because the Airport, Amtrak, and Greyhound all shut down 2 days prior to the storm and a day before the mandatory evacuation. I and many others chose between hitchhiking or staying in the Superdome. Not only that but the total rate of evacuation before the levee failures was considered by many experts to be much higher than many of other large cities in the past. Many of my conservative friends after realizing this and educating themselves have become more compassionate towards the NOLA citizenry, but years too late. ;-(

Paul Harris
Author, "Diary From the Dome, Reflections on Fear and Privilege During Katrina"

[Mark Knudsen]

10:25 PM on 08/07/2010

Yah and this is a real hub of christianity, God bless you and all that but we had to dispatch a group to make sure the money that was sent was going to where it was supposed to go rah rah rah for those God fearing people in leadership positions. the Pagan Viking

[0311Marine]

04:21 PM on 08/05/2010

In hindsight, you can always see how a tragedy could have been prevented... ZZZZzZZzZZzZz....

[creole-girl]

04:57 PM on 08/05/2010

Yes, indeed, and if we are able to learn from it all the better

[Mark Knudsen]

03:42 PM on 08/07/2010

It have been proven through history we adults are retards when it comes to learning from past experiences, ... If our kids preformed as we adults do with all our superior education we would ground them and take their black berries away from them for a week the old Viking

[drumz]

06:04 PM on 08/05/2010

Great, dig a hole. Good now fill it up. Now dig a hole again and fill it up and don't ever question why and you'll make a good soldier, er lemming. Oh but you get to carry a gun and kill colored people for the corporations...

[ChangeurMind]

04:10 PM on 08/05/2010

We know, we know... Saw it in the BP spill also. GOVT is worthless when it comes to disaster. It involves "welfare" "handouts' and "free lunches" and we know how the USA loathes that.

[freelancerighter]

05:21 PM on 08/06/2010

Don't talk unless you know what you're talking about. The Feds mobilized immediately. Who do you think plucked the survivors off that rig? It was the Coast Guard. There's a timeline available for both events and includes who did what and when.

What did you do to help but criticize?

[prodemlib]

04:07 PM on 08/05/2010

The levees were inadequate then, and are inadequate now. We need to follow the lead of the Dutch. They have the most effective, state of the art water control system in the world.

[neverdeadned]

04:39 PM on 08/05/2010

And they have awesome wooden clogs

[prodemlib]

04:47 PM on 08/05/2010

and good cheese....and tulips....and chocolate.....and liberal pot laws (had to include that)

[lotus321]

05:52 PM on 08/05/2010

and they had great slave ships, too...just kidding people

[jacqmac]

07:27 PM on 08/05/2010

W. and Co. TURNED DOWN offers from the Dutch to help rebuild the levees/dykes into something to be absolutely PROUD of . And W. & Co. TURNED DOWN offers of free OIL from Venezuela because they didn't like Hugo Chavez or his POLITICS. And Bush & Co. turned down MEDICAL AID from CUBA-in the form of a PLATOON of DOCTORS and NURSES, because they were---oh horrors!! CUBANS!! Instead-we were all encouraged to go shopping and spend money we didn't have because that way the $$$ would TRICKLE DOWN to New Orleans!
Oh and WHO could POSSIBLY forget the President's MOTHER talking about evacuees in the THIRD PERSON and not wanting to clutter her "beautiful mind' with them??

[prodemlib]

08:09 PM on 08/05/2010

absolutely! The Bush Administration & family acted in a shameful, disgusting manner before, during and after Katrina.