In hindsight, it’s always easy to craft a narrative for any disaster: to see all the signs stacking up like dominoes, if only we’d been paying attention. But that’s not what happened with Hurricane Katrina. It was that most unusual of fiascoes: almost nothing was a surprise. “This was not a comet hitting us,” says Stephen Leatherman, director of the International Hurricane Research Center in Miami. “This is Hurricane Alley.” Leatherman has studied hurricanes for thirty years. In 2002, he wrote a paper warning that Louisiana had lost many of its natural defenses against storms and New Orleans
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