This morning we have a series of post-mortem articles in the MSM on the Katrina disaster in New Orleans. None of the articles discusses the rest of the Gulf Coast.
What they tell is a story of local officials quickly overwhelmed, a chain of command at state and federal levels that didn’t work, FEMA which was managed by people who were over their heads, had not properly planned for the disaster, did not know what resources they had and did not seem to realize that when normal communications failed they had to get them working again before anything could be coordinated, and a White House that failed to recognize how bad the situation was and then could not assigned effective responsibliity to “Fix It!” in a timely manner.
Because the initial planning was so poor and FEMA communications, propositioning of resource and general management was so bad, everyone at all levels was improvising on the spot. The lack of experienced and trained emergency managers in FEMA showed in their iability to make their improvizations work effectively.
I start with Eleanor Clift’s editorial because she pegged what I think is the “heart of the problem.”
Hurricane Politics in Newsweek by Eleanor Clift.
“With gas prices spiraling and an unnecessary war draining millions from the Treasury, Bush’s inadequacies are glaringly obvious, from incompetence to insensitivity. The credibility gap that emerged on Iraq has widened to a chasm with the hurricane aftermath. The media has turned a corner as well, with reporters on the scene in New Orleans liberated to say the emperor has no clothes.
At the heart of the problem is Bush’s disdain for government. “
New York Times: “Breakdowns Marked Path From Hurricane to Anarchy”
“the crisis in New Orleans deepened because of a virtual standoff between hesitant federal officials and besieged authorities in Louisiana, interviews with dozens of officials show.
Federal Emergency Management Agency officials expected the state and city to direct their own efforts and ask for help as needed. Leaders in Louisiana and New Orleans, though, were so overwhelmed by the scale of the storm that they were not only unable to manage the crisis, but they were not always exactly sure what they needed. While local officials assumed that Washington would provide rapid and considerable aid, federal officials, weighing legalities and logistics, proceeded at a deliberate pace.
FEMA appears to have underestimated the storm, despite an extraordinary warning from the National Hurricane Center that it could cause “human suffering incredible by modern standards.” The agency dispatched only 7 of its 28 urban search and rescue teams to the area before the storm hit and sent no workers at all into New Orleans until after the hurricane passed on Monday, Aug. 29.”
Washington Post: “The Steady Buildup to a City’s Chaos”
“Federal, state and local officials failed to heed forecasts of disaster from hurricane experts. Evacuation plans, never practical, were scrapped entirely for New Orleans’s poorest and least able. And once floodwaters rose, as had been long predicted, the rescue teams, medical personnel and emergency power necessary to fight back were nowhere to be found.
Compounding the natural catastrophe was a man-made one: the inability of the federal, state and local governments to work together in the face of a disaster long foretold.
In many cases, resources that were available were not used, whether Amtrak trains that could have taken evacuees to safety before the storm or the U.S. military’s 82nd Airborne division, which spent days on standby waiting for orders that never came.
Communications were so impossible the Army Corps of Engineers was unable to inform the rest of the government for crucial hours that levees in New Orleans had been breached.”
The federal disaster response plan hinges on transportation and communication, but National Guard officials in Louisiana and Mississippi had no contingency plan if they were disrupted; they had only one satellite phone for the entire Mississippi coast, because the others were in Iraq.
The massive rescue effort that resulted was a fugue of improvisation, by fleets of small boats that set sail off highway underpasses and angry airport directors and daredevil helicopter pilots.
Tuesday, Aug 30. Blanco ordered the Superdome evacuated, but Col. Jeff Smith, Louisiana’s emergency preparedness chief, grew frustrated at FEMA’s inability to send buses to move people out. “We’d call and say: ‘Where are the buses?’ ” he recalled, shaking his head. “They have a tracking system and they’d say: ‘We sent 349.’ But we didn’t see them.”
Thursday, Sept 1. At the convention center, thousands had gathered by Thursday without supplies. There were no buses and none on the way. Nagin, almost in tears, issued a “desperate SOS.”
But official Washington seemed not to be watching the televised chaos. Bush was still insisting the storm and catastrophic flooding his own government had foretold was a surprise. “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees,” he said.
Later, in another television interview, Brown insisted that everything was “under control.” And though the crowds had started to flock to the convention center two days earlier, Brown said: “We learned about the convention center today.”
Los Angeles Times: “THE RESPONSE Put to Katrina’s Test”
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.
- 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.
“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.
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.”
“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.”
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.
Newsweek: “How Bush blew it.” It does as much damage to Bush’s image as a decisive leader as Katrina did to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.
how the president of the United States could have even less “situational awareness,” as they say in the military, than the average American about the worst natural disaster in a century–is one of the more perplexing and troubling chapters in a story that, despite moments of heroism and acts of great generosity, ranks as a national disgrace.
President George W. Bush has always trusted his gut. He prides himself in ignoring the distracting chatter, the caterwauling of the media elites, the Washington political buzz machine. He has boasted that he doesn’t read the papers. His doggedness is often admirable. It is easy for presidents to overreact to the noise around them.
But it is not clear what President Bush does read or watch, aside from the occasional biography and an hour or two of ESPN here and there. Bush can be petulant about dissent; he equates disagreement with disloyalty. After five years in office, he is surrounded largely by people who agree with him. Bush can ask tough questions, but it’s mostly a one-way street. Most presidents keep a devil’s advocate around. Lyndon Johnson had George Ball on Vietnam; President Ronald Reagan and Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush, grudgingly listened to the arguments of Budget Director Richard Darman, who told them what they didn’t wish to hear: that they would have to raise taxes. When Hurricane Katrina struck, it appears there was no one to tell President Bush the plain truth: that the state and local governments had been overwhelmed, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was not up to the job and that the military, the only institution with the resources to cope, couldn’t act without a declaration from the president overriding all other authority.
The failure of the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina worked like a power blackout. Problems cascaded and compounded; each mistake made the next mistake worse. The foe in this battle was a monster; Katrina flattened the Gulf Coast with the strength of a vengeful god. But human beings, beginning with the elected officials of the City of New Orleans, failed to anticipate and react in time.
Late last week, Bush was, by some accounts, down and angry. But another Bush aide described the atmosphere inside the White House as “strangely surreal and almost detached.” At one meeting described by this insider, officials were oddly self-congratulatory, perhaps in an effort to buck each other up. Life inside a bunker can be strange, especially in defeat.
