Anatomy of a Disaster
As the Public Affairs Officer for Lt. Gen. Russel Honore and the 1st U.S. Army, I am writing concerning "A Post-Katrina Public Flaying" [February 27], which discusses the recent U.S. House committee report on the response to the Katrina disaster. You discuss an air evacuation plan for the Superdome that FEMA official Philip Parr described during his testimony before the committee.
Mr. Parr's testimony was inaccurate when he testified that General Honore had stopped the FEMA plan and, as a result, delayed the evacuation of the Superdome by 24 hours. At no time before or after General Honore's arrival was there a plan presented to him to evacuate the Superdome using aircraft, nor did he suspend such planning efforts. On the morning of August 31, local, state, and federal officials reviewed with General Honore a plan to evacuate the Superdome using buses supplied by FEMA. The use of aircraft was discussed but quickly discarded as not feasible. That day, General Honore met with Gov. Kathleen Blanco and the Louisiana adjutant general, Maj. Gen. Bennett Landreneau, and requested that the governor mobilize local and state school buses to assist in the evacuation, which she did. The priority of effort on August 31, as established by Mayor Ray Nagin and Governor Blanco, was to use available aircraft to conduct search-and-rescue missions and to evacuate the sick and the elderly. The priority was to save lives, and although the people at the Superdome were miserable, they were in a stable situation compared with those we were pulling off rooftops by helicopter. General Honore has sent a letter to the U.S. House of Representatives Select Bipartisan Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina clarifying the situation and requesting that the statement be entered into the public record.
LT. COL. RICH STEELE
Public Affairs Officer
1st U.S. Army
Fort Gillem, Ga.
Corrections
In "An Old Hand's Ode to Two Loves"[Washington Whispers, March 13], friends of ailing Lyn Nofziger, not the former Reagan aide himself, were responsible for creating the Lyn Nofziger Fellowship in Journalistic Excellence.
The Career Voyages Web address in "Click Here for a New Career" [March 20] should have been listed as
www.careervoyages.gov/careercompass-main.cfm.
This story appears in the March 27, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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