Michael Chertoff today clarified his take on the government's response to Hurricane Katrina. In a word, it was, "unacceptable."
The Department of Homeland Security fell far short in its response to Hurricane Katrina, Secretary Michael Chertoff acknowledged today. But he said the department is moving fast to improve its capabilities, and he denied that natural disasters take second place to terrorism on the agency's agenda.
"We have to take steps to boost operational effectiveness for routine disasters and for the truly exceptional catastrophe," Mr. Chertoff told the midyear conference of the National Emergency Management Association in Alexandria, Va., where he announced several changes intended to bolster the department and in particular its Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has been severely criticized for its performance during the hurricane and subsequent flooding.
"As the president said, the results of our response to Katrina were unacceptable," Mr. Chertoff said. "Some things worked well, but some things which should have worked well did not."
Mr. Chertoff said steps were under way to improve communications within his department and with other agencies, that the "outdated" computer and technology systems of the Federal Emergency Management Agency will be revamped, and that FEMA will develop "a highly trained nucleus of permanent employees" as the core of its work force in the event of disaster.
Another important step, Mr. Chertoff said, is the installation of "a 21st-century logistics management system" so the authorities can track shipments of supplies and equipment at every step from origin to the people affected by disasters -- much as companies or individuals can now follow the progress of a package or letter by computer.
Mr. Chertoff and other top emergency officials have already conceded that the response of government at all levels was inadequate for Katrina and its subsequent flooding, a combined disaster that is recognized as one of the worst in American history. Moreover, serious questions have been raised recently about whether the Bush administration could have reacted to the catastrophe more quickly in view of evidence that the extent of the damage in New Orleans was known more quickly than had been earlier reported.
Michael D. Brown, who headed FEMA at the time of the hurricane and flood and, rightly or wrongly, became the human face of FEMA's shortcomings, told a Senate panel recently that the White House knew far earlier than it has let on about the extent of flooding in New Orleans. Mr. Brown also asserted that FEMA's effectiveness had been greatly reduced when it was absorbed into the Department of Homeland Security, which was created in response to the 2001 terrorist attacks.
Although Mr. Chertoff did not mention Mr. Brown by name, he rejected any suggestion that FEMA had become a secondary agency within the department. "FEMA's been a vital part of our nation's emergency response community since 1979, and it is very much part of the DNA of the Department of Homeland Security," Mr. Chertoff said.
Even as Mr. Chertoff was speaking in Virginia, the Senate Homeland Security Committee was hearing testimony about fraud and inefficiency that hobbled government response to the catastrophe. Moreover, a special panel of House Republicans is expected to harshly criticize, in a report this week, the administration's response to the suffering in New Orleans. Finally, the Justice Department said today that 212 people face fraud, theft and other charges related to federal money distributed in the aftermath of Katrina.
Numerous examples of fraudulent or wasteful spending have been cited in the nearly half-year since the Gulf Coast calamity. Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine and the head of the homeland security panel, said today that most aid money had gone to people truly in need.
"However, some of the money, far too much of the money desperately needed by victims has gone to people who were nowhere near Hurricane Katrina and were in no way harmed by it," she said. The senator said investigators for the Government Accountability Office had uncovered instances in which federal money had been used to pay for "a tattoo, gambling, traffic fines and a diamond ring."
Gregory D. Kutz of the G.A.O. told the committee that his agency had found cases in which several individuals working together had used dozens of Social Security numbers to unlawfully receive housing assistance -- as much as $122,000 in one instance.
"In another case, eight individuals used 30 different Social Security numbers to receive $92,000," Mr. Kutz said. "Twenty-two of the properties for this case were in Texas. I visited Texas in January, and guess what? All 22 of these addresses are bogus."
(In New Orleans, a federal judge said today that the federal government could drop about 12,000 families made homeless by the storms from a program that has been putting them at hotels across the country. The ruling by Judge Stanwood Duval means that FEMA will no longer pay for the hotels directly, though evacuees will still receive federal assistance that they can use toward housing.)
Mr. Chertoff did not specifically address those matters today. While saying that he and other department leaders "have engaged in our own soul-searching" and that he accepted criticism and responsibility for what went wrong, Mr. Chertoff emphatically denied that planning for natural disasters had somehow become less important within his department than responding to terrorism.
"I want to warn the press to take their pens out and their pads out, so they don't miss what I have to say," Mr. Chertoff said. "I want to tell you unequivocally and strongly reject this attempt to drive a wedge between our concerns about terrorism and our concerns about natural disasters."
Such a demarcation would not only be inappropriate, but it would probably be impossible, Mr. Chertoff suggested. "We all know that a lot of times we face a disaster, and we don't know whether it's man-made or natural," he said. "And because we're not going to know, our concept of operations has to be seamlessly built so that it operates whether we are dealing with a terrorist act or an act of nature."