Federal Emergency Management Agency
Hurricane Katrina FEMA Response Failure
Estimated impact: $125B in damage; 1,833 deaths; 1 million displaced
FEMA's response to Hurricane Katrina was catastrophically slow and disorganized. Director Michael Brown had no emergency management experience. Pre-positioned supplies were inadequate, communications failed, and the Superdome became a humanitarian crisis. 1,833 people died.
Decision context
Whether FEMA's pre-hurricane preparations and post-landfall response were adequate for a Category 5 hurricane hitting a major city below sea level, given that this exact scenario had been wargamed in Hurricane Pam exercise.
Decision anatomy
Red = risk factor present · Green = protective factor present
Biases present in the decision
★ Primary driver · Severity estimated from bias type and decision outcome
Toxic combinations
Reference class base rates
Across all 143 curated case studies in our library:
Lessons learned
- The Hurricane Pam exercise in 2004 predicted the exact Katrina scenario, but its recommendations were unfunded — planning without resources is theater
- Optimism bias: FEMA assumed state and local governments could handle the initial response, despite evidence that New Orleans lacked capacity
- Hindsight bias after Katrina obscured that the failure was predicted and documented before it happened
Source: U.S. House Select Bipartisan Committee, "A Failure of Initiative" (2006); White House Federal Response to Katrina Report (2006) (Post Mortem)
We caught these patterns in Federal Emergency Management Agency's own record — before the outcome.
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Workflows that fire on decisions like Federal Emergency Management Agency’s
The same Recognition-Rigor Framework that documents this case audits memos in the same shape — before the outcome forces the lesson.