The true disaster of Hurricane Katrina wasn’t the storm itself but the inept preparation and response of the federal government, a journalist said Wednesday on the Kansas University campus.

“This could happen anywhere, and it doesn’t have to be a hurricane,” said Christopher Cooper, a Wall Street Journal reporter who co-authored a book examining the failed response to the storm. “Don’t think it couldn’t happen to you just because you don’t live in some sub-sea Atlantis.”

Cooper, co-author of the book “Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security,” spoke to a crowd of about 60 people at the Dole Institute of Politics.

He described the premature failure of the city’s levee system – at a storm surge of 8 feet, even though it was rated for 11 feet of water – and listed examples of calls for buses and rescue teams getting bogged down in the bureaucracy of the Department of Homeland Security.

In the Homeland Security mindset, he said, “natural disasters are for pansies, and real men handle the terrorist stuff.” The director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency doesn’t have the president’s ear and, in the case of Katrina, had to go through multiple layers for approval of aid.

“You just need the guy who’s going to be in charge of FEMA to have a direct line to the president,” he said. “That would solve almost all the problems, in my opinion.”

Cooper said the structure created by Congress after Sept. 11 was more to blame than individuals such as Michael “Brownie” Brown, then-head of FEMA.

“I think he (Cooper) was more supportive of ‘Brownie’ than the media have been,” said Lawrence resident Bob Hohn, a retired KU professor of educational psychology.

Brown will tell his side of the story in a program at the Dole Institute on April 4.