IF THERE is a smoking gun in the Gulf Coast wreckage, it is the hurricane warning issued by the New Orleans office of the US National Weather Service soon after 10am on August 28, the eve of Katrina’s arrival.

“Devastating damage expected,” the warning stated. “Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks . . . All gabled roofs will fail . . . All wood-framed low rising apartment buildings will be destroyed . . . Power outages will last for weeks . . . Water shortages will make human suffering incredible by modern standards . . . Trees will be snapped or uprooted. Only the heartiest will remain standing.”

Another forecast, issued six hours later by the National Hurricane Centre in Florida, said that the levees in New Orleans could be “overtopped”, and predicted the precise depth of flooding that would result.

A day later the city drowned. Hundreds, if not thousands, have died in the chaos. Some casualties were inevitable but many were not, and this much is clear about those in authority who might have minimised the losses: they had been warned.

Of all the warnings issued on Katrina, the National Weather Service bulletin of the August 28 was uniquely detailed and strongly worded. Why? “Because the people down here are somewhat complacent,” Leonard Bucklin, a veteran forecaster at the service’s New Orleans office, told The Times.

“There are those who have survived previous storms and think ‘I lived through that and I can live through this’. We were trying to tell them that this was bigger, slower moving and with greater winds even than Hurricane Betsy in 1965.”

Mr Bucklin was on duty that morning. He would not take credit for the warning but called it “a pretty good product” — a product distributed without delay to Louisiana’s state and parish emergency preparedness offices, the Governor’s office and the media. “They all have access to this data,” he said.

It is hard not to conclude that the complacency which Mr Bucklin attributes to individuals also paralysed government agencies on at least five levels, whose initial responses to the worst natural disaster in US history have been shown to be late, inadequate and hopelessly confused.

Tragedy, at times, has descended into farce. As looters arrived to haunt the French Quarter, up to 200 New Orleans emergency personnel turned in their badges to help their families. As the city ran dry of drinking water, lorry- loads of it were turned back by police. On Tuesday, when 180 evacuees boarded a plane to Charleston, South Carolina, they were mistakenly flown to Charleston, West Virginia.

With hindsight, it is clear that the seeds of what one Republican senator called yesterday the “woeful” government response were sown with shoddy planning. Despite decades of lobbying by local politicians and media for stronger levees, those that ruptured on the night of August 29 had been built by the Army Corps of Engineers to withstand only a Category 3 hurricane. Katrina was a Category 4.

Despite calls since the September 11 attacks for a comprehensive new evacuation plan for New Orleans, the one in place last week had last been updated in 2000, according to the Louisiana Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.

The vaguely worded plan stated that “the primary means of hurricane evacuation will be personal vehicles” even though an estimated 100,000 residents did not own their own cars. It was also implemented by Ray Nagin, the Mayor, too late for buses to reach those without cars, or to prepare the Superdome to receive them.

By the time he did, on August 28, it was clear from the National Hurricane Centre’s flood warnings that federal assistance would be needed swiftly and on a huge scale. Yet it took four days to materialise, largely because of the inertia of the Federal Emergency Management Administration (Fema).

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