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There are many questions about who, what, when and where failure
occurred. Until there is painstaking independent review, we should assume some
failure at all levels. Hurricane Katrina surpassed planning that had been done
and much reform had not been started.
One critic made the point that there was a false sense of security plans
were in place. Several articles have appeared, in some cases quoting Florida
officials, that the federal response was much better there. So naturally,
people in distress wonder why it worked well elsewhere but not here? With most of the focus on New Orleans,
there are still small communities along the coast still without help, although
in Mississippi, they hope to have restored electricity by the end of this
weekend. As suspected from early reports of conflicts between federal, state and
local officials, there were some historical and legal barriers, as well as
symbolism and politics. Here are a
two items I recommend that take a clear-eyed approach to sorting things out. Sunday’s NYT has a longer analysis, titled Disarray Marked the path from Hurricane to Anarchy, which
goes into greater detail. This is the article you want to read if you have
questions about the local and state response, or lack of. It is linked below.
Please contact me if you want a copy to read, 7 pages, 67.5 KB Word, 28 KB
Adobe PDF. kwc 9/11 Commission
chairs see repeat failures with Katrina response America's response to Hurricane Katrina
was hamstrung by well-known system-wide problems that could have been fixed but
went unattended and wound up costing lives, the two men who led an inquiry into
the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks said. Thomas Kean,
the moderate Republican who led the independent panel known informally as the
Sept. 11 commission, and his Democratic vice-chairman Lee Hamilton said the
response was undermined largely by a lack of command. They also cited emergency communications problems and a
failure to target resources at communities facing the greatest risk of natural
or man-made disaster. "The same
mistakes made on 9/11 were made over again, in some cases worse," Kean
said. "Those are system-wide failures
that can be fixed and should have been fixed right away." http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N08203006.htm Political Issues Snarled Plans
for Troop Aid By Eric Lipton, Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker, NYT, Sept. 08, 2005 WASHINGTON - As New Orleans descended into chaos last week
and Louisiana's governor asked for 40,000 soldiers, President Bush's senior
advisers debated whether the president should speed the arrival of active-duty
troops by seizing control of the hurricane relief mission from the governor. For reasons of practicality and politics, officials at the
Justice Department and the Pentagon, and then at the White House, decided not
to urge Mr. Bush to take command of the effort. Instead, the Washington
officials decided to rely on the growing number of National Guard personnel
flowing into Louisiana, who were under Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco's
control. The debate began after officials realized that Hurricane
Katrina had exposed a critical flaw in the national disaster response plans
created after the Sept. 11 attacks. According to the administration's senior domestic
security officials, the plan failed to recognize that local police, fire and
medical personnel might be incapacitated. As criticism of the response to Hurricane Katrina has
mounted, one of the most pointed questions has been why more troops were not
available more quickly to restore order and offer aid. Interviews with
officials in Washington and Louisiana show that as the situation grew worse,
they were wrangling with questions of federal/state authority, weighing the
realities of military logistics and perhaps talking past each other in the
crisis. To seize control of the mission, Mr. Bush would have had to
invoke the Insurrection Act, which
allows the president in times of unrest to command active-duty forces into the
states to perform law enforcement duties. But decision makers in Washington
felt certain that Ms. Blanco would have resisted surrendering control, as Bush
administration officials believe would have been required to deploy active-duty
combat forces before law and order had been re-established. While combat troops can conduct relief missions without the
legal authority of the Insurrection Act, Pentagon and military officials say
that no active-duty forces could have been sent into the chaos of New Orleans
on Wednesday or Thursday without confronting law-and-order challenges. But just as important to the administration were worries
about the message that would have been sent by a president ousting a Southern
governor of another party from command of her National Guard, according to
administration, Pentagon and Justice Department officials. "Can you imagine how
it would have been perceived if a president of the United States of one party
had pre-emptively taken from the female governor of another party the command
and control of her forces, unless the security situation made it completely
clear that she was unable to effectively execute her command authority and that
lawlessness was the inevitable result?" asked one senior
administration official, who spoke anonymously because the talks were
confidential. Officials in Louisiana agree that the governor would not
have given up control over National Guard troops in her state as would have
been required to send large numbers of active-duty soldiers into the area. But
they also say they were desperate and would have welcomed assistance by
active-duty soldiers. "I need everything you have got," Ms. Blanco said
she told Mr. Bush last Monday, after the storm hit. In an interview, she
acknowledged that she did not specify what sorts of soldiers. "Nobody told
me that I had to request that," Ms. Blanco said. "I thought that I
had requested everything they had. We were living in a war zone by
then." By Wednesday, she had
asked for 40,000 soldiers. In the discussions in Washington, also at issue was whether
active-duty troops could respond faster and in larger numbers than the Guard.
By last Wednesday, Pentagon officials said even the 82nd Airborne, which has a brigade on standby to move out
within 18 hours, could not arrive any faster than 7,000 National Guard troops, which are specially
trained and equipped for civilian law enforcement duties. In the end, the flow of thousands of National Guard
soldiers, especially military police, was accelerated from other states. "I was there. I saw what needed to
be done," Lt. Gen. H Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, said
in an interview. "They were the fastest, best-capable, most appropriate
force to get there in the time allowed. And that's what it's all about." But one senior Army officer expressed puzzlement that
active-duty troops were not summoned sooner, saying 82nd Airborne troops were
ready to move out from Fort Bragg, N.C., on Sunday, the day before the
hurricane hit. The call never came,
administration officials said, in part because military officials believed
Guard troops would get to the stricken region faster and because administration
civilians worried that there could be political fallout if federal troops were
forced to shoot looters. Louisiana officials were furious that there was not more of
a show of force, in terms of relief supplies and troops, from the federal
government in the middle of last week. As the water was rising in New Orleans,
the governor repeatedly questioned whether Washington had started its promised surge
of federal resources. "We needed equipment," Ms. Blanco said in an
interview. "Helicopters. We got isolated." Aides to Ms. Blanco said she was prepared to accept the
deployment of active-duty military officials in her state. But she and other
state officials balked at giving up control of the Guard as Justice Department
officials said would have been required by the Insurrection Act if those combat
troops were to be sent in before order was restored. In a separate discussion last weekend, the governor also
rejected a more modest proposal for a hybrid
command structure in which both the Guard and active-duty troops
would be under the command of an active-duty, three-star general - but only after he had been sworn into the Louisiana
National Guard. Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, director of operations for the
military's Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the Pentagon in August streamlined
a rigid, decades-old system of deployment orders to allow the military's
Northern Command to dispatch liaisons to work with local officials before an
approaching hurricane. The Pentagon is reviewing events from the time Hurricane
Katrina reached full strength and bore down on New Orleans and five days later
when Mr. Bush ordered 7,200 active-duty soldiers and marines to the scene. After the hurricane passed New Orleans and the levees broke,
flooding the city, it became increasingly evident that disaster-response
efforts were badly bogged down. Justice Department lawyers, who were receiving harrowing
reports from the area, considered whether active-duty military units could be
brought into relief operations even if state authorities gave their consent -
or even if they refused. The issue of federalizing the
response was one of several legal issues considered in a flurry of meetings at
the Justice Department, the White House and other agencies, administration
officials said. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales urged Justice
Department lawyers to interpret the federal law creatively to help local
authorities, those officials said. For example, federal prosecutors prepared to
expand their enforcement of some criminal statutes like anti-carjacking laws
that can be prosecuted by either state or federal authorities. On the issue of whether the military could be deployed
without the invitation of state officials, the Office of Legal Counsel, the unit within the Justice
Department that provides legal advice to federal agencies, concluded that the
federal government had authority to move in even over the objection of local
officials. This act was last invoked in 1992 for the Los Angeles riots,
but at the request of Gov. Pete Wilson of California, and has not been invoked over a governor's objections
since the civil rights era - and before that, to the time of the
Civil War, administration officials said. Bush administration, Pentagon and
senior military officials warned that such an extreme measure would have
serious legal and political implications. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said deployment of
National Guard soldiers to Iraq, including a brigade from Louisiana, did not
affect the relief mission, but Ms. Blanco disagreed. "Over the last year,
we have had about 5,000 out, at one time," she said. "They are on
active duty, serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. That certainly is a factor."
By Friday, National Guard reinforcements had arrived, and a
truck convoy of 1,000 Guard soldiers brought relief supplies - and order - to
the convention center area. Officials from the Department
of Homeland Security say the experience with Hurricane Katrina has
demonstrated flaws in the nation's plans to handle disaster. "This
event has exposed, perhaps ultimately to our benefit, a deficiency in terms of
replacing first responders who tragically may be the first casualties,"
Paul McHale, the assistant secretary of defense for domestic security, said. Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, has
suggested that active-duty troops be trained and equipped to intervene if
front-line emergency personnel are stricken. But the Pentagon's leadership
remains unconvinced that this plan is sound, suggesting instead that the National Emergency Response Plan be revised to draw reinforcements initially
from civilian police, firefighters, medical personnel and hazardous-waste
experts in other states not affected by a disaster. The federal government rewrote its national emergency
response plan after the Sept. 11 attacks, but it relied on local officials to
manage any crisis in its opening days. But Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed local
"first responders," including civilian police and the National Guard. At a news conference on Saturday, Mr. Chertoff said,
"The unusual set of challenges of conducting a massive evacuation in the
context of a still dangerous flood requires us to basically break the
traditional model and create a new model, one for what you might call kind of
an ultra-catastrophe."" Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker reported from Washington for
this article, and Eric Lipton from Baton Rouge, La. David Johnston contributed reporting. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/09/national/nationalspecial/09military.html? Disarray Marked The Path From
Hurricane To Anarchy http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/national/nationalspecial/11response.html |
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