A Post-Katrina Public Flaying
The first reviews are in on Washington's response to the storm--and they're scathing
On Wednesday morning, August 31, roughly 48 hours after Hurricane Katrina had pasted New Orleans, Federal Emergency Management Agency official Philip Parr and the Louisiana National Guard were prepared to evacuate the wretched men, women, and children huddling in the Superdome, using Chinook and Black Hawk helicopters. They had worked through the night finalizing the plan, but just hours before they were set to begin, they were told to stop. The Guard had learned that active-duty troops, under the command of Gen. Russel Honore, were planning to airlift the evacuees out of the dome. Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco had requested Honore's help; neither thought to tell FEMA about the plan. The result: The miserable people in the dome would have to wait an additional 24 hours before the evacuation began.
This was just one of many accounts of mishaps and mangled communications that emerged last week from the Republican-dominated House committee that's been examining Washington's star-crossed response to Katrina. The report was entitled "A Failure of Initiative." And how. It called the response a "litany of mistakes, misjudgments, lapses, and absurdities."
And that's just the start of it. More tough reviews are in the offing. Two major reports on Katrina failures--one from a Senate committee and another from White House homeland security adviser Frances Townsend--are due out in the next few weeks. And the Government Accountability Office, which issued a critical salvo of "preliminary observations"earlier this month, has promised its own assessment. The atmosphere has many in Washington wondering whether Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff--who was savaged last week on Capitol Hill--can save his job. But the larger question is how the government's disaster response might be improved and whether the Bush administration--or any administration--can tame the hydra-headed bureaucracy and make it function more smoothly.
Clearly, there's much work to be done. One of the most perplexing failures was Washington's utter lack of preparedness--especially galling because the threat to New Orleans was so well understood. "This crisis was not only predictable," said the House report, "it was predicted." The report lambastes Blanco for not issuing a mandatory evacuation order earlier. Once the order was issued, much of the evacuation proceeded smoothly, the report says, but evacuation plans fell short for the poor and the sick. The failure to completely evacuate those who couldn't do so themselves, said the report, "led to preventable deaths."
Consequences. The report also cites multiple communications breakdowns that "paralyzed" effective response. Chertoff was getting his information from the Homeland Security Operations Center, a sprawling emergency communications hub in Washington. By 2 p.m. the day Katrina made landfall, reports from the Coast Guard described breaches in New Orleans's 17th Street levee. By 6 that evening, a FEMA official confirmed the report. Homeland Security's operations center didn't declare the reports "confirmed," however, until the next morning. Faster DHS and White House awareness, the House report said, "could have spurred earlier evacuation." The report went on to document how Homeland Security officials failed to get trucks with communications equipment into the city because some weren't effectively waterproofed, and National Guardsmen had to literally run messages to each other because they lacked proper equipment. "Catastrophic disasters may have many unpredictable consequences," the report concluded, "but losing power and the dependent communications systems ... should not be one of them."
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