In the first detailed attempt to explain what went so wrong with FEMA's management of the crisis, The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, Sept. 6, examined, among other things, the 2003 creation of the Department of Homeland Security, which absorbed FEMA. Homeland Security defanged the agency, the Journal and others have noted, scaling back its mission and reducing its status from a Cabinet-level organization answering directly to the president to one of dozens inside Homeland Security, where the emphasis on disaster response has been almost exclusively on terrorism. Bill Waugh, an expert on emergency management at Georgia State University, told the Journal: "What the events of the last week have shown is that over the last few years since 9/11 we have slowly disassembled our national emergency response system and put in its place something far inferior."
Still unexplained, however, is why somebody with authority last week didn't do something about what the world saw on TV, bureaucracy or no.
Wednesday, Aug. 31: President Bush saw the devastation during a flyby on Air Force One while en route to the White House.
(Susan Walsh / Associated Press) |
Mark Wilson/Getty Images
Thursday, Sept. 1: Relatives anguish over an 89-year-old woman who is near death at the Ernest M. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans.
Details
Katrina
MOSSBACK
Duck and cover-up: Seattle could be next, and obviously we have work to do. By Knute Berger MORE
Yahoo! Full Coverage • FEMA • Ready.gov
SEND HELP TO THE GULF COAST
Resources for donating money, goods, and your time, including fundraising events.
Related Content
More About
As this week began, you would have thought that the federal government finally got it. But even as late as Monday, Sept. 5, the days-long delay of rescue was being downplayed. Adm. Timothy Keating, commander of the U.S. Northern Command—the full-time military inside the homeland—told reporters: "From our perspective, aid was moving before the storm hit. From the perspective of those folks who were without food and water for a couple of hours, maybe overnight into the next day, in Louisiana and Mississippi, that's a long time." A couple of hours? The next day? Astonishingly, another government official without cable TV.
In his Sunday column, Sept. 4, Seattle Times executive editor Michael Fancher correctly called the reporters who covered the Katrina aftermath unsung first responders, and he singled out The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, which had to relocate and published for a couple of days only on the Web. The paper's journalists joined the national correspondents and bloggers who couldn't believe what they were seeing— an unresponsive U.S. government, which supposedly knows how to help people on a massive scale when disaster strikes. An editorial titled "An Open Letter to the President" summed up the nagging disconnect that remains unexplained more than a week after the storm: "Despite the city's multiple points of entry, our nation's bureaucrats spent days after last week's hurricane wringing their hands, lamenting the fact that they could neither rescue the city's stranded victims nor bring them food, water and medical supplies.
"Meanwhile there were journalists, including some who work for The Times-Picayune, going in and out of the city. . . . Yet, the people trained to protect our nation, the people whose job it is to quickly bring in aid, were absent. Those who should have been deploying troops were singing a sad song about how our city was impossible to reach."
Bob Schieffer on CBS's Face the Nation addressed the disconnect from the perspective of the Beltway: "As scenes of horror that seemed to be coming from some Third World country flashed before us, official Washington was like a dog watching television. It saw the lights and images but did not seem to comprehend their meaning or see any link to reality. As the floodwaters rose, local officials in New Orleans ordered the city evacuated. They might as well have told their citizens to fly to the moon. How do you evacuate when you don't have a car? No hint of intelligent design in any of this. This was just survival of the richest."
He wasn't to blame, but President Bush is responsible for it all. His hands-off handling of Katrina has been every bit as dumb as Bill Clinton's handling of Monica. The difference is Monica didn't kill anybody. Wrote Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik: "George W. Bush is known for never admitting his mistakes. Consequently, he never learns from his mistakes. The chances are dismal that he will learn from this one. We're on our own."
Just like the people of New Orleans.
But wait—this just in from the White House: "What I intend to do is to lead an investigation to find out what went right and what went wrong," Bush said Tuesday, Sept. 6.
It's going to be a long 40 months until the president leaves office, for him and us.
ctaylor@seattleweekly.com
