(Update, 10:25 AM EDT
I received a letter in response to this slightly revised post, which I've published with my response at the end of the post.)
President Bush has called for an investigation about the handling of the Katrina crisis but not right now and he won't say when.
"One of the things that people want us to do here is to play a blame game," said Bush. "There'll be ample time for people to figure out what went right and what went wrong."
Okay. Now. Who's gonna be the one to tell that high pressure system building off the Atlantic coast that the President of the United States has ordered hurricane season to come to a halt while the federal government deals with the task at hand?
For the love of survival, hurricane season in the Western hemisphere doesn't fully end until November.
Earth calling President Bush: Fixing blame is not the issue. We need to immediately discover the exact points of breakdowns in communication between Homeland Security, FEMA, the administrations in states hit by Katrina, and the military. Then, even if it takes emergency sessions of legislatures and special legislation, we need to get the breakdowns resolved, yesterday.
Given the state of things in Mississippi, Florida (just recovering from Katrina's first strike), Alabama and Louisiana, it wouldn't even take a hurricane to completely overwhelm present response efforts in those states. A tropical storm would do it.
That's not even talking about what would happen, if FEMA had to deal with another hurricane taking a path up the eastern coast or hitting the Gulf region again during the next few weeks.
Given that FEMA has authority over the US military's part in any storm response efforts, state and local authorities can't afford to wait until after the Katrina response is under control before finding and correcting breakdowns in communication.
Pundita applauds Bush's distaste for politicizing critical relief efforts and I appreciate his reluctance to fix blame on individuals at this time. Yet I venture he's looking at the 'people' aspect of the situation at the expense of the system aspect.
Wanting to delay an inquiry is akin to holding off asking why the electrical grid system failed parts of the East Coast in 2003, so as not to divert attention from fixing the grid. First they had to find out where the system failed before they could fix it.
Disaster response at the interlocked city, state and federal level is not only a bunch of people. It's also a complex system. Moreover, you can't plan for everything that goes wrong with response, so that has to be factored in when asking where a system can fail.
In other words, you need a red button Plan B if Plan A goes kabooey. You can heap blame all you want on the Louisiana governor and New Orleans mayor but that's not going to stave off another mega-disaster piled on top of a disaster. You need to know what to do, if you suddenly discover idiots are in charge while a disaster bears down.
Doesn't the military have a manual to cover this kind of situation? You can't just throw up your hands if a state governor gets territorial when asked why 100,000 people haven't been evacuated yet from the path of a doomsday hurricane.
Same with FEMA. If the agency has an inbuilt problem that will take several months to fix it via the legislative route, find a duct-tape solution for now.
Once all of New Orleans' pumping stations are running they can move water at a rate of 29 billion gallons a day and lower the water level a half-inch per hour, or about a foot per day. But by late Tuesday afternoon, Army Corps officials said only three of New Orleans' normal contingent of 148 drainage pumps were operating.
Under normal conditions, with all the pumps in order, New Orleans floods from just one inch of rain. So for the rest of this hurricane season, the early phase of recovery efforts in the city is under constant threat. This observation extends to the entire region.
Katrina sank hundreds of barges in the Mississippi, which is preventing cargo ships from docking. There are overturned cargo trains in creeks and rivers; some of those carriers contain highly toxic, caustic or flammable materials. Katrina also put out of commission countless big cranes -- the very cranes needed for recovery efforts.
So things are very dicey right now across a wide spectrum of situations. And some FEMA officials have already admitted that they have been overwhelmed by the scope and complexity of the recovery and rescue tasks. The latter now spans 30 states because the New Orleans evacuees were dispersed.
I think that situation implies that states in the hurricane track need to review their emergency response measures in light of FEMA's limitations.
Certainly, a Goat Commission can wait until the crisis has been bridged. What we do need right now is an ad hoc committee of governors and mayors who've had extensive experience dealing with FEMA and disaster response in their states. Ex-officials such as Rudy Giuliani and Gray Davis should be drafted if they're available. Their task should be to go through Louisiana's emergency response manual and the FEMA guidelines, pinpoint where the system broke down and/or deviated from the plan, and make recommendations.
Reportedly President Bush wants to lead the investigation he plans to launch at some point in the future; if that is true it's understandable because he's an ex-governor with considerable experience at overseeing disaster response preparations for a hurricane. But I don't think it makes sense to involve him in the kind of investigation that needs to be done immediately.
Let an ad-hoc committee do the groundwork then show the recommendations to Bush. He could then use presidential powers to cut through red tape at Homeland and FEMA and call for state governors to fix any glitches on their end of the disaster response system.
With about two months to go in this year's hurricane season, this nation cannot afford to allow communications breakdowns between agencies to stand. About 50% of Americans live within 50 miles of a coast.
"Pundita:
Local, State, THEN Federal. Where was the mayor? Why did the governor turn away help at first? Remember your civics classes please. The local authorities have the responsibility to respond first, then ask the governor for help who in turn asks for the feds for help.
[Anonymous]"
Dear Reader:
I appreciate your point but this nation can no longer afford to leave idiots in charge when doing so carries a price tag of hundreds of billions of dollars and puts millions of lives at immediate risk.
Governor Blanco has shown us a worst-case scenario when elected officials greatly abuse the spirit of federalism. We cannot allow this kind of situation to continue.
We have other things on our plate, including two more months to go of hurricane season and flu season bearing down. And now with the threat of epidemic added. That's because those NOLA evacuees were dispersed all over US without first being vaccinated against the kind of infectious diseases they were exposed to in the NOLA floodwaters. And hello, there's not enough vaccine available for the kind of immunizations that are needed.
We're not even talking about H5N1, if it decides that this flu season is the season to mutate into a human-to-human transmissible form.
In a perfect world, the states should have great autonomy. But who is screaming loudest about federal slowness to resolve the horrors that Blanco and Nagin's administrations set in motion? Blanco and Nagin.
Governors and mayors can't have it both ways: Hold the feds responsible when a state screw-up punches the entire nation in the gut, while telling the feds to mind their own business when they offer military or other federal assistance to ward off a mega-disaster.
The bottom line is that globalization is very hard on rugged individualism at the state level. If a state is plugged into global trade, they can't be allowed to wander off according to their own devices when their handling of an impending disaster throws the entire nation in an uproar.
We need to standardize disaster response interfaces at the federal, state and local levels. End of story.
11:15 AM EDT update
Regarding the Brown memo:
Now that the memo has surfaced, Bush might want to think about removing Michael Brown immediately, or at least putting someone in at FEMA who is above Brown's head. This is if Bush does not want to spend the rest of his presidency doing damage control.
Anyone who saw Oprah Winfrey's show yesterday knows she is fit to be tied about what happened in NOLA. She is beyond caring if she whips people up. There will be a second show today. I sure hope someone in the White House tunes in.
The question is the replacement for Brown on short notice. If Bush can get Rudy to step in, that would work. Or maybe he can ask Jeb to lend him someone in his administration. Florida probably has more experience dealing with disasters and FEMA than any other state.
If Bush nudges Brown aside he can spin it by saying this is not about people, it's about familiarity with complex systems under extraordinary circumstances. That's a good spin because it's the truth.
The only registry system that FEMA has for the evacuees is an 800 number that evacuees call at their own initiative. Red Cross has only a partial list. Even with full registration, there are not enough vaccines available to immunize people exposed to the kind of infectious diseases the NOLA residents were exposed to. Now those people are scattered across at least 30 states.
The high pressure system has been upgraded to tropical storm that threatens to bring heavy rain to Florida but the storm's path is very erratic.
Right now emphasis should be on giving the military their head, getting someone at FEMA who can chew and walk and giving that person great authority. Later for dealing with Blanco/Nagin. Get that blasted FEMA agency working right, this very day.
For those who haven't seen the news about the memo in question:
By TED BRIDIS, AP
WASHINGTON (Sept. 7) - The government's disaster chief waited until hours after Hurricane Katrina had already struck the Gulf Coast before asking his boss to dispatch 1,000 Homeland Security workers to support rescuers in the region - and gave them two days to arrive, according to internal documents.
Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, sought the approval from Homeland Security Secretary Mike Chertoff roughly five hours after Katrina made landfall on Aug. 29. Brown said that among duties of these employees was to "convey a positive image" about the government's response for victims.Before then, FEMA had positioned smaller rescue and communications teams across the Gulf Coast. But officials acknowledged Tuesday the first department-wide appeal for help came only as the storm raged.Brown's memo to Chertoff described Katrina as "this near catastrophic event" but otherwise lacked any urgent language. The memo politely ended, "Thank you for your consideration in helping us to meet our responsibilities."
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