Religions > Atheism > OT: After 9/11, a master plan for disasters was drawn. It didn't weather the storm.
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"stoney" |
| Date: |
11 Sep 2005 07:29:46 PM |
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OT: After 9/11, a master plan for disasters was drawn. It didn't weather the storm. |
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-plan11sep11,0,2153804.story?track=hpmostemailedlink
THE RESPONSE
Put to Katrina's Test
After 9/11, a master plan for disasters was drawn. It didn't weather
the storm.
From Times Staff Writers
September 11, 2005
WASHINGTON It was conceived as the solution to confusion and
bureaucratic logjams that hampered responses to the Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks a 426-page master plan to coordinate government agencies in
a disaster.
When it was unveiled amid fanfare in January, the Department of
Homeland Security's National Response Plan promised "vastly improved
coordination among federal, state, local and tribal organizations to
help save lives" from storms, floods, earthquakes or terrorist
assaults.
Hurricane Katrina turned out to be its first real-world test but the
plan broke down soon after the monster winds blew in.
Its failures raise unsettling questions about the federal government's
readiness to deal with future crippling disasters. An examination of
how the plan was administered during the crucial early hours of this
natural disaster reveal more confusion than coordination and repeated
failures of leadership.
The plan on paper was not always apparent on the ground. Cooperation
among government agencies faltered at almost every level, right up to
the White House.
For example:
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, responsible for
supervising relief and rescue operations, failed to position adequate
equipment to carry out the dual assignments. FEMA was especially short
of helicopters from the outset. It was forced to concentrate on rescue
missions and gave short shrift to ferrying supplies to trapped
evacuees.
Coordination with private relief agencies broke down and led to
maddening delays. Water, food, clothing and medical supplies backed up
in distant warehouses.
More than 50 civilian aircraft responding to separate requests for
evacuations from hospitals and other agencies swarmed to the area a
day after Katrina hit, but FEMA blocked their efforts. Aircraft
operators complained that FEMA waved off a number of evacuation
attempts, saying the rescuers were not authorized. "Many planes and
helicopters simply sat idle," said Thomas Judge, president of the
Assn. of Air Medical Services.
Military cooperation was stymied. In advance of the storm, New
Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson offered the governor of Louisiana hundreds
of National Guard troops. They were poised to fly into Louisiana on
Monday, Aug. 29, just as the levees were about to give way. Instead,
red tape and paperwork at National Guard headquarters in Washington
delayed their arrival until Friday. Deployment orders had not been not
properly filled out, the New Mexico National Guard was told.
Telephones and radios failed everywhere, complicating efforts to
monitor field conditions and coordinate response. FEMA officials were
caught by surprise. Better communications was supposed to be a
highlight of the plan, but it took up to six days to get working
telephones to some FEMA employees on the ground.
In the face of rising criticism, FEMA officials pointed to bright
spots. "There's the perception that we didn't do anything. But we had
a life-saving mission, which we met, and we had a life-sustaining
mission, which we met," said Marty Bahamonde, who helped coordinate a
FEMA emergency response team.
Before the Storm
In the calm before the storm, preparations got off to a promising
start. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff convened
interagency meetings, created an operations center in Baton Rouge,
La., and dispatched FEMA Director Michael D. Brown as his
representative on the ground.
Food, water, blankets and personnel were pre-positioned on the fringes
of the expected severe-impact zone.
President Bush activated the National Response Plan on Saturday, Aug.
27, two days before the hurricane struck, when he declared a federal
emergency in Louisiana. Under the plan, this made the Department of
Homeland Security "responsible for coordinating federal resources
utilized in response to major disasters."
Then, on Monday, 140-mph winds slammed into New Orleans, a storm so
fierce that no amount of planning was likely to prevent flooding,
deaths and substantial destruction.
That day, Bush declared the region a federal disaster area, releasing
more federal funds and resources.
And on Tuesday, more than 24 hours after surging waters breeched
levees in New Orleans, Chertoff declared Katrina the nation's first
"incident of national significance" as outlined in the response plan.
This committed the federal government to a major and long-term relief
effort.
Survivors were already waving for help from rooftops and increasingly
restless residents displaced without food or water were demanding help
outside the Superdome, where they had sought safety before Katrina
struck. As the emergency response floundered on television screens
around the world, some White House aides suggested state and local
officials were to blame. By then, however, it had become a federal
problem.
"The moment the president declared a federal disaster, it became a
federal responsibility," said Jane Bullock, who spent 22 years at FEMA
under presidents of both parties. FEMA and Homeland Security officials
faced what Chertoff soon characterized as "kind of an
ultra-catastrophe."
Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke called it "a nightmare
scenario" and said, "No one is satisfied with [the response]."
The hurricane's advance up the Gulf of Mexico was closely monitored
and its wind velocity constantly recorded. In the age of satellites,
it could not sneak up on the Gulf Coast.
And its potential flood menace to New Orleans should have been no
surprise, either.
Besides years of published warnings, there was the voice of Max
Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami. As
Katrina approached, he warned in a series of briefings and bulletins
that disaster was coming, that the storm surge was especially
dangerous, and that low-lying New Orleans could face massive flooding.
On Sunday, Aug. 28, Mayfield briefed senior government officials. The
president listened in during a video conference beamed to the Bush
ranch near Crawford, Texas.
Mayfield said he told his high-level audience about the effects of a
storm surge the sudden rise in the water level as a hurricane comes
ashore.
The hurricane center director said he could not remember whether he
specifically mentioned the menace to levees, but that concern about
flooding was on his mind. "There's no doubt about that," he said.
At FEMA headquarters, longtime disaster specialists also watched the
satellite images of Katrina. Alarm grew.
"This gigantic hurricane is headed like a bullet right toward New
Orleans, and we wondered why isn't there a more organized effort to
get people out of the city," said Leo V. Bosner, an emergency
management specialist with FEMA and an employee union president.
"We're saying, 'What's the plan? What's happening?' "
In particular, Bosner said he and colleagues wondered why more buses
weren't being provided from nearby states and why the federal
government wasn't pushing the regional officials to get people out
sooner.
Bosner said FEMA began responding in the days before Katrina reached
landfall by sending urban search-and-rescue teams, medical teams, ice,
water and other commodities to the region and putting their employees
on a state of preparedness. But that, he said, was typical of what the
agency does for "an ordinary disaster."
"We could see that this [preparation] was not going to be enough,"
said Bosner, a 26-year FEMA veteran. "Somewhere between 20,000 and
30,000 stuck there in the city are going to be in this thing's path."
The floods came Monday, Aug. 29.
According to the plan, private relief agencies like the Red Cross
would play a key role along with first-responders to "sustain life,
reduce physical and emotional distress and promote recovery
when
assistance is not available from other sources."
But federal and state officials hesitated, and blocked the Red Cross
from taking food and other supplies to stranded victims.
Devorah Goldburg, a spokeswoman for the relief agency, said Louisiana
officials argued that an influx of food and other supplies might make
it harder to persuade residents to evacuate. "Every day we were in
touch with state officials offering to go in," she said. "They said
they don't want us in there."
The plan also expected all levels of government to work closely with
local healthcare facilities. But days after the Katrina hit, Charity
Hospital of New Orleans was still desperate for help evacuating 250
patients from rooms without electricity or running water.
"The military didn't help; the state government didn't help and the
federal government didn't help," complained Dr. Norman McSwain who
said his calls to officials went unheeded.
"We asked for the cavalry to come and the cavalry didn't show up. I
was mad. I was mad as I could be," he said.
Fading Bravado at FEMA
At first, there was a hint of swagger in the attitude of Brown, the
FEMA director, toward Hurricane Katrina. The day the storm tore into
the Gulf Coast, Brown told a television interviewer: "We were so ready
for this
. We've planned for this kind of disaster for many years
because we've always known about New Orleans and the situation. We
actually did catastrophic disaster planning for this two years ago."
His bravado faded in the days that followed.
Despite pre-positioning of some manpower and supplies, FEMA had failed
to provide sufficient emergency aircraft, boats and vehicles to get
residents out of New Orleans and to deliver enough food, water and
medical supplies to those who were stranded.
Moreover, it did not have adequate backup communications available
when the storm knocked out power lines and telecommunications systems.
FEMA workers waited days to receive working satellite phones.
And FEMA created logjams with its own bureaucracy.
On the day the levees failed, the FEMA chief issued a news release
urging fire and emergency services departments outside the area "not
to respond" to calls for help from counties and states affected by the
hurricane "without being requested and lawfully dispatched by state
and local authorities under mutual aid agreements."
There were also coordination problems.
A sense of chaos spread from the ground in Louisiana to FEMA
headquarters in Washington, which was "a zoo" at the height of the
disaster, recalled a longtime FEMA official in the agency's Washington
office.
"Everything is being done by the seat of the pants," said the
official, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to
speak to the media. "It's like reinventing the wheel. We're starting
from scratch as though no planning had even been done before."
But Knocke, the Homeland Security spokesman, insisted that the federal
response to Hurricane Katrina relied on long-standing plans and had
been much smoother than the response to the Sept. 11 attacks. He said
there were no turf wars "about who's in charge."
Because of the National Response Plan, Knocke said, "there is no
confusion, no chaos, there's just immediate action and results."
But that's not how it looked on the ground.
The Superdome, and later the New Orleans Convention Center, became
familiar symbols of FEMA failures and shortcomings.
Homeland Security
When FEMA faltered, the next line of defense should have been its
parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security.
Chertoff, 51, knows something about responding to major disasters. The
former prosecutor was running the Justice Department's criminal
division when the World Trade Center and Pentagon were attacked on
Sept. 11, 2001. He lost friends in the attack, which he said spurred
him to help craft the government's aggressive pursuit of terrorists.
Chertoff gave up a lifetime appointment as a federal judge when he
took over the young Cabinet department in February. He oversees
180,000 employees operating within 22 agencies, focused heavily on
terrorist threats.
Under the National Response Plan, the Homeland Security secretary is
deemed the "principal federal official" the overall manager for
all major natural disasters.
He became a familiar figure in shirtsleeves in the disaster zone. But
at times he has seemed a step behind events.
New Orleans began to flood on Monday. It was a day later when Chertoff
described the situation as urgent. By then, the city was 80%
underwater.
"We're racing the clock in terms of possible injury," he said. "We're
racing the clock in terms of illness, and we're racing the clock to
get them food and water."
Yet, it wasn't until after 5 p.m. that evening that Chertoff declared
the hurricane an "incident of national significance" a decision that
triggered a heightened response and committed the government to a
long-term rescue and relief effort.
Chertoff later said he belatedly had learned the levees had broken.
"It was midday Tuesday that I became aware of the fact that there was
no possibility of plugging the gap and that essentially the lake was
going to drain into the city," he told NBC's "Meet the Press." He said
the breakdowns in communications would be scrutinized after rescue
missions have been completed.
Chertoff sometimes seemed out of touch to some reporters and TV
viewers. Two days after the levees failed and amid a rising tide of
public criticism over disaster victims who needed water and food, he
declared in Washington that he was "extremely pleased with the
response that every element of the federal government, all of our
federal partners, have made to this terrible tragedy."
On Thursday, he assured the public that everything was under control
in New Orleans. As he spoke, CNN and Fox News split their screens to
show him simultaneously with live scenes from the city with survivors
chanting for help, shouting angrily into the cameras or staring
listlessly.
"Everybody is confident of the ability to maintain order," he said.
"The fact of the matter is the Superdome is secure."
TV reports followed his statement with more scenes of exhausted
evacuees and images of dead bodies on the street.
That afternoon, National Public Radio asked Chertoff about the
thousands of people camped around New Orleans' Convention Center who
said no food or supplies had arrived.
Chertoff said that sounded to him like nothing more than a rumor. "I
have not heard a report of thousands of people in the convention
center who do not have food and water," he said.
Chertoff subsequently blamed his lack of awareness on local officials.
"It was disturbing to me when I learned about it, which came as a
surprise," he said on CNN. "You know, the very day that this emerged
in the press, I was on a video conference with all the officials,
including state and local officials. And nobody, none of the state and
local officials or anybody else, was talking about a convention
center."
Chertoff's aide, Knocke, said his boss was asking very pointed
questions about the response. "He was appalled at the situation at the
Superdome," he said.
The Military
New Orleans needed four things: communications, transportation,
supplies and people to deliver them. And, increasingly, as its police
force struggled to maintain order under desperate circumstances, it
needed someone to enforce the law. In most major disasters, components
of the U.S. military step in to fill some or all of those roles most
often, National Guard units, which report to the governor of each
state but frequently active-duty military forces as well.
This time for a variety of reasons the troops were held up. The
troops were ready, but a combination of confusion at the local level
and hesitance and indecision at the federal level blocked the military
units from coming to the city's rescue.
The National Response Plan designates National Guard troops as the
military's first responders to a crisis, with active duty troops
available if state and agencies become overwhelmed. As the storm bore
down on the Gulf Coast, the governors of Louisiana and Mississippi
mobilized about 6,500 Guard members and planned to send them to the
hardest-hit areas immediately after the storm passed through. The
National Guard stockpiled humanitarian supplies at Camp Beauregard,
north of New Orleans.
When the New Orleans levees broke, Louisiana's small National Guard
force was quickly overwhelmed. The storm incapacitated and depleted
local police, fire crews and medical staff. The undermanned Guard
troops endured shortages of trucks and military policemen as they
tried to rescue survivors from the floodwaters and deliver
humanitarian supplies.
Supplies stopped arriving in the city. The 18-wheel trucks designated
for the relief effort couldn't drive along the flooded highways.
"We couldn't get things in. I knew the New Orleans Police Department
was there but I didn't know how [much] manpower they had," said Lt.
Col. William J. Doran III, who runs the Louisiana Emergency Operations
Center.
Doran defended the size of the National Guard force mobilized for the
hurricane, and said the state didn't initially ask for support from
active duty military forces because they didn't realize until
Saturday, Aug. 27, that the fast-moving storm would hit New Orleans.
They expected to "see it come near us, but not a direct hit."
Then it was too late.
After the levees broke, governors from around the country pledged
their National Guard troops for the relief mission, yet their efforts
were occasionally ensnared in bureaucracy.
On Aug. 29, when Katrina hit, Richardson, the New Mexico governor,
telephoned Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, and asked if
there was anything his state could provide.
"She said, 'We need truck drivers and National Guard,' " Richardson
recalled. He told her, "I'll get moving on it."
Richardson said he immediately authorized his Guard commander to send
200 troops to Louisiana. Then "red tape and paperwork" intervened,
Richardson said. Instead of hours, it took four days.
"My National Guard commander
tried to get approval from the Guard
bureau in Washington, and it wasn't until Thursday night that he got
it," he said. "They kept saying they needed a definition of the
mission in their orders. I said how about, 'Helping people.' I kept
bumping into my National Guard commander and he kept saying, 'No, they
haven't left yet.' "
A spokesman for the National Guard bureau in Washington declined to
address Richardson's allegation. He said there are specific, formal
procedures in place that governors have to follow to send National
Guard troops to other states.
And Top Pentagon officials denied that the Iraq war had any impact on
the ability of the National Guard to respond to the disaster.
"That's just flat wrong. Anyone who's saying that doesn't understand
the situation," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said last week.
But when the hurricane hit, nearly 35% of Louisiana's Guard forces and
40% of Mississippi's were deployed in Iraq. Two brigades, Louisiana's
256th Infantry and Mississippi's 155th Armored, each contain hundreds
of troops in what the military calls "combat support" roles
engineers, truck drivers, and logisticians who specialize in the
tasks used regularly in disaster relief.
As the situation worsened and local officials appeared incapable of
organizing an effective response, senior officials gathered at the
White House on Wednesday night, Aug. 31, to discuss the possibility of
"federalizing" the relief effort, which would have given the Pentagon
command over the National Guard troops in the affected states.
Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales suggested that Bush invoke the 1878
Insurrection Act, which gives the president the authority to use the
military to maintain law and order in national emergencies, Pentagon
sources said.
At that meeting and later sessions, Rumsfeld expressed misgivings
about such a draconian measure, and argued that federalizing the
National Guard would not speed up the flow of troops into the area.
Pentagon officials said they were confident that by week's end,
approximately 40,000 National Guard troops from dozens of states would
be in the disaster region.
"There was already a significant flow of Guard troops. Changing the
nature of the operation wasn't going to get people there any faster,"
said Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita.
There were political hurdles as well. Both governors Blanco of
Louisiana, a Democrat, and Gov. Haley Barbour or Mississippi, a
Republican, opposed federalizing the Guard. Not since the civil rights
era had a president invoked the Insurrection Act over the objections
of a sitting governor.
By Friday, senior U.S. officials agreed it could be perceived as a
federal invasion of two U.S. states. But it was getting late.
"It was three or four days past D-Day. The worst had already happened.
People who were going to die were dead," said William Banks, a
national security expert at Syracuse law school.
Even without federalizing the Guard, the Pentagon had the authority to
dispatch active duty troops to carry out non-law enforcement missions.
These troops fall under the authority of U.S. Northern Command, or
Northcom, a military headquarters established after the Sept. 11
attacks to coordinate the military's response to domestic emergencies.
Two days before the storm struck, Northcom put liaison officers inside
emergency headquarters of the Gulf Coast states, and ordered the
Bataan, a Navy amphibious assault ship, to sail behind the storm so
that it could move in with supplies right after Katrina blew through.
Military commanders throughout the country were told to "lean forward"
in preparing their units for possible deployment. On Aug. 30, a day
after Katrina arrived, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard B. Myers
told the rest of the joint chiefs to work directly with Northern
Command to get troops, ships and helicopters to the Gulf Coast a
measure intended to cut through layers of bureaucracy.
The next day, active duty troops from the 82nd Airborne Division and
1st Cavalry Division were put on alert. Yet the deployment order never
came. Adm. Timothy J. Keating, Northcom's commanding officer, decided
that more active duty troops wouldn't be useful, Pentagon officials
said.
The argument against sending more active duty troops, officials said,
was to avoid flooding the local relief effort with soldiers
ill-equipped and unauthorized to handle the most essential missions:
search and rescue, restoration of law and order and delivery of
humanitarian aid.
"You drop in the 82nd Airborne, and you have a bunch of guys on the
ground waiting for their equipment to show up," Pentagon spokesman
DiRita said.
At the same time, bureaucracy rendered some active duty military units
inside Louisiana powerless to help in the storm's immediate aftermath.
At Ft. Polk in Leesville, a helicopter detachment waited on the tarmac
from Monday until Wednesday for approval to fly rescue missions.
"We were packed and ready to go," said Chief Warrant Officer Clint
Gessner, a helicopter pilot with the Ft. Polk unit. "We never got the
call. It's just a sad story, man."
As Gessner and his fellow pilots watched National Guard helicopters
conduct search-and-rescue missions, he said the active duty pilots
were unable to fly because commanders wouldn't sign off on their
missions.
"We could have been the first responders," he said. "It's easier to
beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission."
The Pentagon also decided not to dispatch another unit based at Ft.
Polk, a brigade of the Army's 10th Mountain Division, which has the
mission of training units about to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan.
On Friday, Sept. 2, Keating, the Northcom commander, and Rumsfeld had
discussions throughout the day about whether to deploy more active
duty troops to the Gulf Coast. Keating argued against it, officials
said, saying he was pleased with the flow of National Guard troops in
the disaster area.
But public criticism of federal relief efforts continued to mount. The
next morning, six days after Katrina came ashore, Rumsfeld overruled
his Northcom commander, telling aides he would recommend that the
president dispatch troops to the region as a ready reserve force.
Hours later, in his weekly radio address, Bush announced deployment of
7,200 active duty soldiers and Marines.
The White House
Ultimately, the National Response Plan says the president is in charge
during a national emergency, but it leaves it up to the White House to
decide how to fulfill that duty. "The president leads the nation in
responding effectively and ensuring the necessary resources are
applied quickly and efficiently," the plan says.
Bush has always prided himself on his leadership style, which he has
described as akin to a corporate CEO: delegating maximum
responsibility to subordinates, but demanding accountability for their
performance.
Some officials have grumbled that White House Chief of Staff Andrew H.
Card Jr., a canny bureaucratic warrior, and chief political advisor
Karl Rove, an assertive policy kibitzer, don't delegate enough.
In response to Hurricane Katrina, Bush and his aides left most of the
management to FEMA, and stepped in to correct problems only after they
had a full-blown political crisis on their hands.
When Katrina was heading to the Gulf Coast, most of the top White
House staff was on vacation, taking advantage of the president's
five-week stay at his ranch near Crawford, Texas, to get time off from
their normally hectic jobs.
Card, a veteran crisis manager who managed the federal response to
hurricanes for the president's father, was relaxing at his lakefront
summer home in Maine.
Vice President ***** Cheney, who acted as the administration's top
crisis manager on Sept. 11, 2001, was at his ranch in Wyoming.
Frances Townsend, the White House coordinator for homeland security,
was vacationing, too. After Katrina struck, she attended several
meetings in Washington, then left on a previously scheduled trip for
Saudi Arabia to work on joint counterterrorism projects.
Bush urged Townsend to make the trip despite the crisis at home as a
"signal to
the enemy" that the hurricane had not distracted his
attention from terrorists, one aide said.
White House spokesmen declined to say who was in charge of preparing
for the hurricane in Washington. They maintain that Bush and his aides
can run the government just as well from their summer homes.
"Andy Card is the chief of staff, and he was in close contact with
everyone," spokesman Scott McClellan said. "And the president is the
one who's in charge at the White House."
Bush and his aides knew that Katrina would be trouble. The president
had been briefed by Brown, the FEMA director; and the president
monitored an interagency update on the storm via video screen from his
conference room at the Texas ranch.
On Saturday, Aug. 27, he declared a federal emergency in Louisiana,
before the storm hit.
On Sunday, Aug. 28, he telephoned Blanco to urge her to evacuate New
Orleans, McClellan said. And Bush read a brief statement to reporters
noting that Katrina had swollen to become a Category 5 hurricane.
"I urge all citizens to put their own safety and the safety of their
families first by moving to safe ground," he said. "Please listen
carefully to instructions provided by state and local officials."
But after Katrina struck on Monday morning, Aug. 29, Bush stuck to his
existing schedule for two full days, making visits to Arizona and
California for speeches on Medicare and a commemoration of the end of
World War II.
By Tuesday morning, Aug. 30, it was clear to the White House that
Katrina was "one of the most devastating storms in our nation's
history," in McClellan's words. But not until Thursday, Sept. 1, with
New Orleans underwater and refugees suffering on the streets of New
Orleans, some of whom were dying, did Bush return to Washington with
a brief detour to view the devastation along the Gulf Coast from the
windows of Air Force One.
"It was a sluggish response, almost a White House in slow motion,"
said David Gergen, a former advisor to Presidents Reagan and Clinton.
"Americans expect not only to see their president on the scene, but a
firm hand on the tiller. That wasn't there. There was nobody in
charge."
White House officials offered no explanation for the delay, although
Bush later said he wanted to give his Cabinet members a chance to get
on top of the situation first.
"I started organizing on Tuesday when we realized the extent of the
storm," Bush said in a television interview. "[I] said 'Look, when I
get back to Washington on Wednesday afternoon, I want to have a report
on my desk and a Cabinet meeting for you to tell me exactly what your
departments are going to do.' "
Once he returned to Washington, Bush stood in the White House Rose
Garden and read a speech that aides later admitted was not the best of
his presidency; it had been stitched together in haste, largely from
FEMA fact sheets.
Bush described everything the federal government was doing or
thought it was doing to help the victims, listing items that had
been pre-positioned in the disaster zone without noting that much of
it had not yet been delivered to those who needed them.
"Right now the days seem awfully dark for those affected," he said. "I
understand that. But I'm confident that, with time, you can get your
life back in order, new communities will flourish, the great city of
New Orleans will be back on its feet, and America will be a stronger
place for it. The country stands with you. We'll do all in our power
to help you."
But the images on Americans' television screens flooded streets,
stranded people, dehydrated and hungry victims seemed to conflict
with the president's upbeat words.
Behind the scenes, Bush and his aides knew they had problems. On
Wednesday, Card telephoned Blanco and urged her to invite the federal
government to take command of the National Guard. Card's message, a
senior official said: "Instead of having three chains of command,
let's have a single chain of command."
But Blanco resisted an immediate federal takeover, according to
officials in both the White House and the governor's office.
Bush himself called the governor on Wednesday, but couldn't sway her.
For three days, White House aides negotiated with the governor, but
the two sides never reached agreement. In the end, the problem was
solved in practice by Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honore, the officer
dispatched by Northcom to command its active duty troops, "by sheer
force of personality," the official said. A key factor: Honore is an
old friend of Maj. Gen. Bennett Landreneau, commander of the Louisiana
National Guard, who works for Blanco.
The White House had another major problem, one aide acknowledged
later: It was relying principally on FEMA for its information.
Bush and his aides were getting daily updates from Brown, the FEMA
director. But Brown was having a hard time keeping up with information
from the disaster area and, according to this aide, his reports were
determinedly optimistic and can-do. As a result, Bush appeared to know
less than television viewers did about what was going on in New
Orleans.
In a hastily arranged television interview Thursday morning, Sept. 1,
Bush's message remained: Help is on the way. Then came a blunder. "I
don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees," he said.
That was at odds with decades of explicit warnings. (His spokesman,
McClellan, sought to explain the statement by saying Bush was
referring to initial reports that Katrina had done little damage, even
though Bush's words gave no hint of that meaning.)
Rove and other aides recognized that the discrepancy was a problem.
They were beginning to hear from Republican members of Congress that
the president's message wasn't playing well. On Thursday afternoon,
House Republican leaders held a conference call with their members,
and got "an earful" about FEMA's shortcomings, congressional sources
said.
All day Thursday, CNN had broadcast horrifying images of the New
Orleans Convention Center; that afternoon, both Brown and Chertoff
admitted publicly that they didn't know about the problem. Some
members of Congress were beginning to worry that they might pay a
price for inadequate disaster relief at the polls in November of 2006.
Senior officials put the blame on the collapse of communications in
the disaster area. "The inability to get good information on the
ground in New Orleans" was a major problem, one said. "You can't make
good decisions without good information. We were getting conflicting
information on almost an hourly basis about the Superdome and the
convention center. When you have three levels of government that can't
speak to each other, that's a serious problem."
But the horrifying reports from the convention center, they said,
produced an outburst of anger from Bush about the federal response to
the crisis.
"This was a surprise to us, to the president," said one senior
official. "What that did was demonstrate that things weren't working
the way they were supposed to .... That obviously was the tipping
point for the president, as it was for many Americans."
"He got Chertoff on the phone and asked: 'What are you doing about
this?' Chertoff said he knew about it and was on the case."
On Friday, Sept. 2, four days after the storm, Bush headed for the
disaster area on a presidential trip designed to show leadership and
concern.
At a meeting that morning, one aide said, the president expressed
anger about the convention center. Say that in public, one aide
reportedly urged. So Bush went out to the Rose Garden and grimly
acknowledged for the first time that all was not well. "The results
are not acceptable," he said.
But the president appeared uncomfortable even with that much
self-criticism. A few hours later, in Biloxi, he softened the message.
He said he believed the federal government had done everything it
could, only to be overwhelmed by nature.
"I am satisfied with the [federal] response," Bush said. "I'm not
satisfied with all the results.
I'm certainly not denigrating the
efforts of anybody. But the results can be better."
And Bush, who instinctively defends any aide who has been criticized
in the media, made a point of praising FEMA chief Brown.
"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job," he said.
Behind the scenes Friday, though, Bush and his aides were looking for
a way to fix a system that appeared broken.
They called Blanco to ask her to put all National Guard units in
Louisiana under federal control; the Democratic governor refused,
perceiving probably correctly that the media and the public would
view such a surrender of authority as an admission of failure.
White House aides were angry, and told several newspapers, in the kind
of anonymous leak the president often decries, that Blanco was at
fault for some of the relief bottlenecks. Bush himself even offered a
veiled swipe, saying that the reason aid wasn't getting through was
"strained state and local capabilities."
When Bush returned to Louisiana on Monday, Sept. 5, the White House
didn't inform Blanco of the visit until that morning; the governor's
aides said she had to scramble to join the president at one of his
events in her state.
In public, Bush was still standing by FEMA chief Brown.
On Tuesday afternoon, Sept. 6, Bush met with congressional leaders to
let them know he would be asking for another $51.8 billion in relief
aid, on top of $10 billion Congress approved the week before. Rep.
Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), the House Democratic leader, said she
urged him to fire FEMA's Brown.
According to Pelosi, Bush replied: "Why would I do that?'
"Because of all that went wrong, of all that didn't go right," the
congresswoman said.
"And he said, 'What didn't go right?' " Pelosi recounted.
Spokesman McClellan said Pelosi's account was inaccurate. "I think the
president just wanted to know
what she was most concerned about," he
said.
But Bush was hearing from Republicans, too, that Brown needed to go.
On Friday, Sept. 9, Chertoff ordered Brown back to Washington and
handed over management of relief operations to Coast Guard Vice Adm.
Thad W. Allen.
Brown was out.
*
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
Anatomy of a disaster
The 426-page National Response Plan outlines how local, state and
federal agencies should respond to a disaster. The plan's basic
premise calls for local and state officials to handle the initial
crisis and for federal assistance to be delivered when regional
resources prove inadequate. A look at how federal agencies performed
when faced with Hurricane Katrina:
*
Agency: White House
Responsibilities:
- Delegates responsibility for disaster response to government
agencies.
- Declares federal emergency to allow for federal aid in hurricane
relief efforts.
Responses:
- President and many top White House staff remain on vacation during
initial stages of crisis.
- White House blames state and local officials for inadequate
response.
- President relies heavily on FEMA's optimistic and can-do
assessments.
- White House considers and rejects federal takeover of National Guard
after Louisiana governor objects.
- President doesn't expect the levee breaches, despite explicit
warnings.
*
Agency: Department of Homeland Security
Responsibilities:
- Coordinates federal resources and organizes disaster relief efforts
in response to major disasters.
- Homeland Security secretary serves as principal federal official and
overall manager.
Responses:
- Ground teams without working telephones or radios. Planes laden with
communications equipment arrive late.
- Due to communication breakdown, department chief unaware of broken
levees in New Orleans for 24 hours, announces highest emergency
declaration two days after first levee breach. Government unable to
respond swiftly to levee damage.
- Chief initially unaware of city's convention center evacuees without
supplies.
*
Agency: Federal Emergency Management Agency
Responsibilities:
- Supervises relief and rescue operations.
- Support state and local emergency management preparation and
response.
Responses:
- Insufficient equipment and supplies for relief and rescue
operations.
- Food, clothing and medical supplies in distant warehouses.
- Shortage of helicopters to conduct rescue missions and ferry
sufficient supplies to trapped evacuees.
- Slow coordinating private relief efforts.
- FEMA blocks aircraft responding to evacuation requests from
hospitals and other agencies.
*
Agency: National Guard
Responsibilities:
- Military's first responders to a domestic crisis.
- Troops ensure order and deliver communications, transportation and
supplies.
Responses:
- Red tape and paperwork delay troop deployment orders.
- Flooding halts flow of relief supplies by truck.
*
Agency: U.S. Military
Responsibilities:
- Active duty troops carry out non-law enforcement missions during
domestic emergencies.
Responses:
- Troops put on alert to respond to hurricane but not sent to disaster
area.
- Several days pass before significant numbers of active duty troops
arrive in New Orleans.
*
Sources: Department of Homeland Security's National Response Plan,
Times reports
Graphics reporting by Brady MacDonald
*
Times staff writers Edwin Chen, Judy Pasternak, Richard A. Serrano and
Warren Vieth in Washington, Scott Gold in New Orleans and researcher
Janet Lundblad in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
--
Contempt of Congress meter reading-offscale.
Hello, theocracy with a fundamentalist US Supreme
Court who will ensure church and state are joined
at the hip like clergy and altar boys.
America 1776-Jan 2001 RIP
"As democracy is perfected, the office of president
represents, more and more closely, the inner soul
of the people. On some great and glorious day the
plain folks of the land will reach their heart's
desire at last and the White House will be adorned
by a downright moron." --- H.L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)
Religion is the original war crime.
-Michelle Malkin (Feb 26, 2005)
.
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