Karl Rove Shifts Gears
After a day of a ridiculous CYA operation which showed the Directors of Homeland Security and FEMA practically bragging about their incompetence, Karl Rove gave Bush new marching orders:
Several hours later, President Bush headed to the devastated region to survey the damage. As he was leaving the White House, Bush told reporters that he believes the relief operations so far "are not acceptable."
A day late and a dollar short Mr. President . . .
New Orleans Officials Blast Feds
Unvarnished:
Mr. Compass said the federal government had taken too long to send in the thousands of troops - as well as the supplies, fuel, vehicles, water and food - needed to stabilize his now "very, very tenuous" city. Col. Terry Ebbert, director of homeland security for New Orleans, concurred and he was particularly pungent in his criticism. Asserting that the whole recovery operation had been "carried on the backs of the little guys for four goddamn days," he said "the rest of the goddamn nation can't get us any resources for security."
"We are like little birds with our mouths open and you don't have to be very smart to know where to drop the worm," Colonel Ebbert said. "It's criminal within the confines of the United States that within one hour of the hurricane they weren't force-feeding us. It's like FEMA has never been to a hurricane." FEMA is the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
More in extended.
A Lack of Preparedness and Foresight
The failure at the federal level has been one of many years:
The accumulation of 40 years of compromises of that sort resulted in a mixture of grief, frustration and defensiveness from the corps, which has long been given a mission far broader than its budget. Ultimately, the corps is directed, along with 15 other agencies, by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. "It is FEMA who is really calling the shots and setting priorities here," General Strock said.
. . . Alfred C. Naomi, a senior project manager in the New Orleans district of the corps, said the New Orleans protection system was a vexing mix. It met the standards that were agreed on long ago, but was known to be inadequate. "This storm was much greater than protection we were authorized to provide," Mr. Naomi said.
. . . Since 1965, when the first large federal project was started to bolster New Orleans's levees and other defenses, there has been a tug of war over how sturdy, and expensive, to make a system that might, or might not, be needed. Most aspects of the $732 million Lake Pontchartrain project have been completed, but the project remains behind schedule and underfinanced. Although Congress appropriated more than $4.7 billion for the Corps of Engineers this year, the spending on New Orleans levees was relatively small. The Pontchartrain project drew about $5.7 million, almost $2 million more than what was earmarked for it in President Bush's budget. For five years, Congress has repeatedly increased the sum for New Orleans levees over Mr. Bush's requests, Senate Republicans' figures show. The White House on Thursday referred budget questions to the Office of Management and Budget, where officials did not return calls for comment.
From the project's early days, there were vivid reasons to push for the greatest level of protection. One was Hurricane Betsy, a midgrade storm that swamped much of New Orleans in 1965. In 1969, Hurricane Camille, the second-most-powerful Atlantic storm recorded, passed within 60 miles and demolished the Mississippi coast.
The initial plan was deemed robust, yet affordable, General Strock said. Government engineers and budget officials settled on designing for what meteorologists calculated would be a once-in-200-year event, he said. That would mean a storm like Hurricane Betsy, a Category 3 storm on the five-step intensity scale. General Strock said tradeoffs between costs and protection levels were a result of a "complex process involving the intersection of a lot of people from the local, state and national level." Adam Hughes, an analyst at OMB Watch, said such tradeoffs erred far too often on the side of serving short-term needs and discounting long-term risks. Now, Mr. Hughes said, the devastation in New Orleans made an earlier investment in bigger berms and other protections all part of that gray universe of what bureaucrats call infrastructure look like a bargain. "This is a classic example of what underfunding infrastructure can do," Mr. Hughes said.
And also a failure of recent vintage:
Disaster officials, who had drawn up dozens of plans and conducted preparedness drills for years, had long known that the low-lying city was especially vulnerable. But despite all the warnings, Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed the very government agencies that had rehearsed for such a calamity. On Thursday, as the flooded city descended into near-anarchy, frantic local officials blasted the federal and state emergency response as woefully sluggish and confused. "We're in our fifth day and adequate help to quell the situation has not arrived yet," said Edwin P. Compass III, the New Orleans police superintendent.
The response will be dissected for years. But on Thursday, disaster experts and frustrated officials said a crucial shortcoming may have been the failure to predict that the levees keeping Lake Pontchartrain out of the city would be breached, not just overflow. They also said that evacuation measures were inadequate, leaving far too many city residents behind to suffer severe hardships and, in some cases, join marauding gangs.
Large numbers of National Guard troops should have been deployed on flooded streets early in the disaster to keep order, the critics said. And some questioned whether the federal government's intense focus on terrorism had distracted from planning practical steps to cope with a major natural disaster.
While some in New Orleans fault FEMA - Terry Ebbert, homeland security director for New Orleans, called it a "hamstrung" bureaucracy - others say any blame should be more widely spread. Local, state and federal officials, for example, have cooperated on disaster planning. In 2000, they studied the impact of a fictional "Hurricane Zebra"; last year they drilled with "Hurricane Pam." Neither exercise expected the levees to fail. In an interview Thursday on "Good Morning America," President Bush said, "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." He added, "Now we're having to deal with it, and will."
That, is incompetence at a mind boggling scale.
Some lapses may have occurred because of budget cuts. For example, Mr. Tolbert, the former FEMA official, said that "funding dried up" for follow-up to the 2004 Hurricane Pam exercise, cutting off work on plans to shelter thousands of survivors. Brian Wolshon, an engineering professor at Louisiana State University who served as a consultant on the state's evacuation plan, said little attention was paid to moving out New Orleans's "low-mobility" population - the elderly, the infirm and the poor without cars or other means of fleeing the city, about 100,000 people. At disaster planning meetings, he said, "the answer was often silence."
Disgraceful. Left to die.
Though [Katrina's] path remained uncertain, the Gulf Coast was clearly threatened, with New Orleans a possible target. Officials from the Pentagon, the National Guard, the Army Corps of Engineers, FEMA and the Homeland Security Department said they were taking steps to prepare for the hurricane's arrival.
Army Corps personnel, in charge of maintaining the levees in New Orleans, started to secure the locks, floodgates and other equipment, said Greg Breerwood, deputy district engineer for project management at the Army Corps of Engineers. "We knew if it was going to be a Category 5, some levees and some flood walls would be overtopped," he said. "We never did think they would actually be breached." The uncertainty of the storm's course affected Pentagon planning.
This boggles the mind. You don't prepare for what you think will happen, but for what MIGHT happen. Worst case. The Corps of Engineeers really fucked up.
Fingerpointing
It would have been up to local officials, a FEMA spokeswoman said, to hire buses to move people without transportation out of the city. Rodney Braxton, the chief lobbyist for New Orleans, said many of the city's poorest "had nowhere to go outside the region and no way to get there." He added: "And there wasn't enough police power to go to each house to say, 'You have to go, come with me.'"
And to me, the ultimate unforgivable failures . . .
AFTER Katrina Passed
Before it made landfall on Monday, the storm turned slightly to the east, avoiding a direct hit on New Orleans. The winds had eased slightly to 140 miles per hour, reducing Katrina's strength to Category 4, and officials counted themselves lucky.
But on Tuesday, when the levees breached, a desperate situation became catastrophic. There was no fast way to fix them, Mr. Breerwood of the Army Corps said, because delivery of heavy-duty equipment was hindered by the destruction. The National Guard was having similar troubles. While troops were stationed in the region, they could not move quickly into the New Orleans area. And in Mississippi, the zone of destruction was so widespread, it was difficult to cover it all quickly, officials said.
. . . Some military analysts criticized the Pentagon's response. "Is the problem that they are only just now beginning to understand how serious the damage was?" said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity .org, a national security policy group in Washington. "Did they not have a contingency for a disaster of this magnitude?"
The chaotic response came despite repeated efforts over many years to plan a coordinated defense if the worst should occur. As recently as July 2004, federal, state and local officials cooperated on the Hurricane Pam drill, which predicted 10 to 15 feet of water in parts of the city and the evacuation of one million people. Martha Madden, who was the Louisiana secretary of environmental quality from 1987-1988, said that the potential for disaster was always obvious and that "FEMA has known this for 20 years." "Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent, in studies, training and contingency plans, scenarios, all of that," said Ms. Madden, now a consultant in strategic planning.
The Army Corps, she said, should have had arrangements in place with contractors who had emergency supplies at hand, like sandbags or concrete barriers, the way that environmental planners have contracts to handle oil spills.
And finally, the ultimate in incompetence:
While his agency is facing harsh criticism, Patrick Rhode, FEMA's deputy director, defended its performance as "probably one of the most efficient and effective responses in the country's history." He recalled that after Mr. Brown, his boss, returned from his tsunami tour, he asked if the United States was better prepared for a disaster than the ravaged countries he had visited. "We felt relatively comfortable that this country could mobilize the response necessary," he said.
Most efficient? My Gawd man, turn in your badge today. Fire him. Now. Fire them all.
