What happened
Katrina made landfall on 29 August 2005. FEMA had prepositioned some emergency supplies, but nowhere near enough for a storm of this scale, and the agency's director, Michael Brown, had been appointed on the strength of political connections rather than emergency management credentials — a background that showed. Brown told reporters on 1 September, three days after the storm, that he had only just learned of the crowds of stranded, desperate people at the New Orleans Convention Center, despite continuous television coverage of the scene for days.
Buses to evacuate the tens of thousands sheltering at the Superdome and Convention Center did not arrive for several days. Families trapped on rooftops spray-painted pleas for rescue that went unanswered for days while federal, state, and local officials gave the public conflicting and often simply wrong information about the scale of what was happening.
Subsequent bipartisan congressional investigations, the White House's own after-action review, and independent academic studies all converged on the same conclusion: while the storm itself was a natural disaster, the scale of death and suffering that followed — particularly in the days immediately after landfall — reflected a level of federal disorganisation, delay, and misplaced political appointments that was not inevitable and had been repeatedly flagged as a risk by emergency management professionals before the storm ever formed.