Federal Response to the Calamity in New Orleans

This report examines the chain of decisions that slowed federal response to the calamity in New Orleans, government's failure to protect thousands of Americans from a natural disaster that long had been predicted, and the state of America's disaster-response system four years after 9/11.

Correspondent and producer Martin Smith chronicles the disaster and the decision-making and relief efforts, drawing on footage of the devastation and suffering in New Orleans and interviews with key government officials from New Orleans to Washington. The interviews include former Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown -- in his first televised interview since he resigned -- Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and former Deputy Secretary James Loy.

Brown tells Smith that he misled the public in his televised statements during the crisis in order to quell panic: "I'm not going to go on television and publicly say that I think that the mayor and the governor are not doing their job … they don't have the sense of urgency," says Brown. "I'm not going to say that publicly." Privately, he thought Governor Blanco's requests for help were vague and confused. But Blanco remembers it differently: "Nobody ever told me the kinds of things that they could give me. … I wanted whatever assets they had."

But the mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, tells FRONTLINE that valuable time was lost negotiating over who should take charge and talks about some of the frustrating meetings. "I didn't care who got the job done, whether it was a state or whether the feds," says Nagin. "In my sense, there was a dance going on about who had ultimate authority."

In examining the Katrina story, FRONTLINE looks at the rocky history of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, and how in the wake of