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What about the cell phone? Katy Reckdahl figured that should work. So in the middle of her pitch-black hospital room in the middle of pitch-black Touro Infirmary, her boyfriend Merv held the light of the phone up to her nipple to help coax their son—born the morning Katrina blasted through New Orleans—to latch on.

Following the storm only a small section of Touro had air conditioning. Reckdahl’s son Hector was so hot he couldn’t sleep, and she feared dehydration would set in. Muggings and thefts were common down on the first floor of the hospital, and with rations running low, a battalion of new dads was sent to a nearby A&P where the owner was letting people take whatever they needed.

Three days after the storm a doctor informed the new mother that she was too healthy to stay. Forced to evacuate Touro, Reckdahl, her son and boyfriend hitched a ride with a nurse who was driving to Baton Rouge.

“Coming into Baton Rouge from New Orleans is not the prettiest site,” Reckdahl says of her exodus. “But then it looked amazing, like Oz or something.”

Reckdahl is an investigative reporter who contributes regularly to Gambit and The Times-Picayune. Her experience surviving Katrina with her newborn son attracted the attention of Washington D.C.’s Center for Public Integrity. The nonprofit watchdog group hired Reckdahl and five other seasoned reporters to research and write chapters for City

Adrift: New Orleans Before and After Katrina, in stores this month.

Making its argument in a mere 184 pages, the book is a succinct and astounding piece of reportage that places topics like emergency preparedness, health care, the levees, and politics in its crosshairs and shows exactly how each failed to do its job to protect the citizens of New Orleans. In the New Orleans area alone, more than 1,000 people died and more than 100,000 homes were severely damaged or destroyed by the hurricane and its hellish aftermath.

Now, with the second hurricane season since Katrina beginning this month, people are still asking why.

“What shocked me wasn’t the damage—which was horrible—but the fact that it still looked that way six months later, like it had just hit yesterday,” says two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Jenni Bergal, the center’s project manager for City Adrift and a co-writer of the book.

“And the last time I went in November ’06, it wasn’t that much different [from the spring]. I remember thinking, ‘How in 21st Century United States can this happen, how can it still look this bad so long after the storm?’”

City Adrift provides well-documented and resounding affirmation for anyone who has suspected that local, state and federal agencies year-after-year ignored strong warnings in favor of cutting costs, that FEMA is disorganized and ill-prepared to react during large-scale disasters, and the corrupt political sludge of the Big Easy crippled its own defenses and bred the maximum suffering of its own people during the most costly catastrophe in U.S. history.

“Whenever I spoke to anyone else who had been through the storm, everyone had the same questions that had never been resolved,” Reckdahl says. “Reporters on the ground didn’t have the time or the luxury to provide those answers then, but this book allowed us to do just that.”

Co-writer John McQuaid cites independent investigators who report that the Army Corps of Engineers management is faulty and its 1960s models and methods are woefully outdated in light of new scientific findings on storm surges and flooding.

Bergal spent significant time with 26-year-old Dr. Scott Delacroix, a second-year urology resident who found himself taking charge in a chaotic scene at the I-10/Causeway “Cloverleaf.”

“It’s going to take a city in the East or West Coast and not the armpit of Louisiana for people to realize the first-responder system sucks,” Delacroix tells Bergal. “The lesson is: Don’t be sick or old or disabled when a national disaster comes.”

For her part, Reckdahl investigates a heavily bureaucratic American Red Cross that, as is its policy since 1995, evacuated all members from New Orleans to the Northshore. The group then had difficulty getting approval to return from the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.

The main problem with the Red Cross is that workers could not effectively hook up local charities and new volunteers with those who needed help, says John Davies, CEO of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation. BRAF secured 71 grants to fund independent shelters, but the Red Cross would not integrate with any of them. “That just makes no sense,” Davies says. “They did not seem to value local charities like the Boys & Girls club.”

Reckdahl writes that smaller, more autonomous organizations like Common Ground and Second Harvest were able to make quicker decisions and help more people. “It’s worth taking a look at the Red Cross policy [of evacuating before a storm],” Reckdahl says. “But then look at the Salvation Army, they stayed and were trapped.”

City Adrift proposes that the weaknesses Katrina revealed in New Orleans are not unique to the city. Reckdahl calls this the “big misconception.” Consider that many of the mistakes made in New Orleans ran like repeats of what had happened before in other parts of the country. In 2001, tropical storm Allison flooded the basement of a hospital in Houston, cutting power, air conditioning and running water. Those outages resulted in several deaths, and still New Orleans area medical facilities kept their generators and air-conditioning units underground.

“People in other parts of the country can’t just shrug their shoulders and think it couldn’t happen to them,” Bergal says. “That was one of the main points we tried to get across with this book.

Katrina wasn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last.”

City Adrift: New Orleans Before and After Katrina features a foreword by Dan Rather, and is available June 2 from LSU Press. lsu.edu/lsupress.