multiple congressional investigations, dozens of books, hundreds of reports, and thousands of studies have parsed every minute of the Katrina response, all to determine what went wrong and why. The answer can largely be summarized as: decades of policy decisions made at all levels of government, including underinvestment in infrastructure, racist housing policies, backroom development deals, and ill-advised post-9/11 changes to emergency management collided with incompetence, bad communication, and poor planning to create catastrophe.
