Poll: US No Better Prepared 5 Years After Katrina

(Aug. 26) -- Most Americans feel the country is no better prepared for natural disasters than it was in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and left more than 1,300 dead, according to a new poll by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

"The results are telling," Carroll Doherty, associate director at the center, told AOL News. "There is a skepticism about whether the government is better equipped to handle these things than it was five years ago."

Fifty-seven percent of respondents said the U.S. is not better prepared, and that skepticism is broad-based, cutting across political and racial lines. A majority of Republicans, Democrats and independents said the U.S. is no better prepared, as did solid majorities among whites and blacks.

Only among college graduates was the number of respondents who thought the nation is better prepared (46 percent) almost the same as those who felt it is not (49 percent).

Many across America were stunned by the seeming lack of preparation for Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, which left 80 percent of the city underwater and as many as 100,000 people stranded on rooftops, inside the Superdome and in the city's convention center.

Levees and canals failed around the city, and violence and looting grew to be serious problems, drawing resources away from relief work.

President George W. Bush drew harsh criticism when he told Michael Brown, then director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, that he was doing "a heck of a job."

FEMA spokeswoman Rachel Racusen said the agency has taken aggressive steps to improve disaster preparedness, including positioning commodities in strategic locations and improving coordination with local officials.

"Under the leadership of Administrator Craig Fugate, FEMA has taken aggressive steps to proactively prepare as a nation for hurricanes and other emergencies," Racusen told AOL News in e-mailed comments.

Fugate took over as FEMA administrator in May 2009.

Today, public attitudes about New Orleans seem to have improved. The Pew survey found that 69 percent of Americans said that "some" or "a lot" of progress has been made rebuilding the city. Seventy-five percent of Republicans held this view, compared with 63 percent of Democrats.

"The results are very positive, with most people saying at least some progress has been made rebuilding New Orleans and the Gulf Coast," Doherty said.

The feelings were stronger in the South, including the Gulf Coast, where 75 percent said at least some progress has been made.

Lt. Col. Jerry Sneed, New Orleans' deputy mayor for public safety, conceded that when Katrina hit, "the city did not have an adequate plan to evacuated our citizens that needed help most."

But officials have learned from those mistakes, he said.

"We've got our lessons learned from Hurricane Katrina and for five years now have worked hard to better prepare ourselves specifically for a hurricane," Sneed told AOL News. "We've thought long and hard about it and many people have worked to better prepare themselves for it.

"The city of New Orleans is better prepared because Hurricane Katrina is very vivid in our memory."

A new documentary, "The Big Uneasy," deals with the inadequate preparation for and flawed response to the Katrina disaster. Director Harry Shearer said a key flaw in response to natural disasters is that emergency services are often unable to communicate when disaster strikes, as systems such as phone lines and electricity crash.

"The communications web is not as robust as it needs to be," Shearer, a voice artist on "The Simpsons," told AOL News. "When emergencies hit, emergency responders aren't really able to talk to each other as quickly and easy as they should be."

The poll is based on interviews with 1,003 adults conducted between Aug. 19 and Aug. 22, and the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico may have played a role in attitudes toward the government's ability to cope with a disaster. BP's ruptured Macondo well spewed out millions of gallons of crude into the gulf for nearly three months before workers were finally able to halt the flow.

"It's probably in people's minds," Doherty said. "The inability of anyone to stop the leak factors into people's views into what would happen if a major hurricane hit."