More on Katrina

We sort of knew this already, though some of the details are fresh. To my way of thinking, there can only be two explanations for this: either Bush is a liar or incompetent. I recognize I might have a little bias here, so if anyone would like to enlighten me as to other alternatives, I'm listening.

Also, I note the WH says Bush was "displeased" with the Katrina prep as a defense, but who was in charge of doing the prep?

"Officer, I'm really sorry about that family I just killed, but you see, I'm displeased with how my car handled. Who could have forseen that I wouldn't be able to make that corner going 85? And besides, you people are the one who inspected my vehicle and gave the OK for it to be on the street... and who could have predicted that family would be right in the way of my skid? So you see, it's not really my fault."

Party of Responsibility indeed.

 

January 25, 2006
White House Declines to Provide Storm Papers
By ERIC LIPTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/25/p...27663-KlyNU1zL+RW7wBTPz7HN/Q&pagewanted=print

WASHINGTON, Jan. 24 - The Bush administration, citing the confidentiality of executive branch communications, said Tuesday that it did not plan to turn over certain documents about Hurricane Katrina or make senior White House officials available for sworn testimony before two Congressional committees investigating the storm response.

The White House this week also formally notified Representative Richard H. Baker, Republican of Louisiana, that it would not support his legislation creating a federally financed reconstruction program for the state that would bail out homeowners and mortgage lenders. Many Louisiana officials consider the bill crucial to recovery, but administration officials said the state would have to use community development money appropriated by Congress.

The White House's stance on storm-related documents, along with slow or incomplete responses by other agencies, threatens to undermine efforts to identify what went wrong, Democrats on the committees said Tuesday.

"There has been a near total lack of cooperation that has made it impossible, in my opinion, for us to do the thorough investigation that we have a responsibility to do," Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, said at Tuesday's hearing of the Senate committee investigating the response. His spokeswoman said he would ask for a subpoena for documents and testimony if the White House did not comply.

In response to questions later from a reporter, the deputy White House spokesman, Trent Duffy, said the administration had declined requests to provide testimony by Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff; Mr. Card's deputy, Joe Hagin; Frances Fragos Townsend, the domestic security adviser; and her deputy, Ken Rapuano.

Mr. Duffy said the administration had also declined to provide storm-related e-mail correspondence and other communications involving White House staff members. Mr. Rapuano has given briefings to the committees, but the sessions were closed to the public and were not considered formal testimony.

"The White House and the administration are cooperating with both the House and Senate," Mr. Duffy said. "But we have also maintained the president's ability to get advice and have conversations with his top advisers that remain confidential."

Yet even Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, objected when administration officials who were not part of the president's staff said they could not testify about communications with the White House.

"I completely disagree with that practice," Ms. Collins, chairwoman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said in an interview Tuesday.

According to Mr. Lieberman, Michael D. Brown, the former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, cited such a restriction on Monday, as agency lawyers had advised him not to say whether he had spoken to President Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney or to comment on the substance of any conversations with any other high-level White House officials.

Nevertheless, both Ms. Collins and Representative Thomas M. Davis III, a Virginia Republican who is leading the House inquiry, said that despite some frustration with the administration's response, they remained confident that the investigations would produce meaningful results.

Other members of the committees said the executive branch communications were essential because it had become apparent that one of the most significant failures was the apparent lack of complete engagement by the White House and the federal government in the days immediately before and after the storm.

"When you have a natural disaster, the president needs to be hands-on, and if anyone in his staff gets in the way, he needs to push them away," said Representative Christopher Shays, a Connecticut Republican and member of the House investigating committee. "The response was pathetic."

Even before the House and Senate investigations began, Democrats called for the appointment of an independent commission, like the one set up after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to investigate the response to the most costly natural disaster in United States history. The 9/11 Commission, after extensive negotiations, questioned Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney and received sworn testimony from Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser.

"Our fears are turning out to be accurate," Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, said Tuesday. "The Bush administration is stonewalling the Congress."

Mr. Duffy, along with officials from the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, said that although not every request had been met, the administration had provided an enormous amount of detailed information about nearly every aspect of the federal response to Hurricane Katrina.

The Department of Defense, for example, has provided 18 officials for testimony, and 57 others have been interviewed by Congressional staff members, said Maj. Paul Swiergosz, a Pentagon spokesman. It has also turned over an estimated 240,000 pages of documents.

Russ Knocke, a spokesman for the Homeland Security Department, said his agency, which oversees FEMA, had been similarly responsive, providing 60 officials as witnesses and producing 300,000 pages of documents.

But the White House and other federal agencies have been less helpful, members of the investigating committees said, particularly the Pentagon and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, who is the subject of the sole subpoena issued so far.

"We have been trying - without success - to obtain Secretary Rumsfeld's cooperation for months," Representative Charlie Melancon, Democrat of Louisiana, said in a letter to Representative Davis on Monday. "The situation is not acceptable."

Mr. Davis, in a written response to Mr. Melancon on Tuesday, said he felt that the Pentagon, after the subpoena, had largely honored the committee's requests.

The Congressional investigations began in September, shortly after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, flooding New Orleans, devastating much of the rest of the region and causing more than $100 billion in damage.

Both of the committees are rushing to try to complete their investigations - the House by Feb. 15, and the Senate by the middle of March - in part because of the approaching Atlantic hurricane season, which starts on June 1.

The separate action this week by the Bush administration to oppose an effort to create what would have been called the Louisiana Recovery Corporation evoked great disappointment among state officials.

Mr. Baker's bill would have bought out owners of ruined homes, offering them at least 60 percent of their pre-storm equity, while also giving mortgage companies 60 percent of their loans on damaged properties. The bonds needed for the project would have been paid off by selling developers federally acquired land.

"The Baker bill as a tool was very efficient in terms of helping people sell out, or clear title to the land," said Sean Reilly, a member of the Louisiana Recovery Authority. "We're going to have to go back to the drawing board and do the best with the tools we have."

Donald E. Powell, the Bush administration's Gulf Coast recovery coordinator, said in a statement that the government was prepared to help victims in other ways.

"We share the common vision, the common objective of Congressman Baker, to assist uninsured homeowners outside the flood plain," Mr. Powell said.

Mr. Powell's spokeswoman, D. J. Nordquist, said the administration was open to discussion if the community development money turned out to be insufficient.

 

OK, let's talk about a few things (and excuse the ramblings and disjointedness.. hard to put together coherent thoughts with youngsters running around)...

In the 1960's and early 70's, the agencies responsible for combating wildland fire started thinking about the best way to respond to multi-jurisdictional emergencies. The result of that planning effort is the Incident Command System (ICS), adopted by the Forest Service, Park Service, BLM, BIA, and FWS to manage incidents of all types and complexities.

The most amazing thing about ICS is that there is no relation between what you as an individual do during an emergency and what you do at your regular desk job.

For instance, a GS-9 ($35-40k per year)Range Technician can become a Type I Incident Commander and be responsible for hundreds of people and millions of dollars for two weeks and then go back to his regular job working with ranchers and cows. It is not uncommon for people to show up on fires and find themselves working for people they supervise at the home unit. Everyone understands that the positions we work at on an incident are solely determined by our experience and training and the fire agencies have bought into the idea that the best qualified person for an emergency job may not be the highest paid or the one with the grandest title.

Yes, we make mistakes... but they are rarely mistakes that stem from agency turf battles, petty jealousies, or personality conflicts because everyone buys into the system. (I'm talking emergencies only... we screw a lot of things up in our regular jobs.)

What kills me is that FEMA and other agencies responding to Katrina have never figured out (or had the leadership to act upon) the idea that the best people for making decisions in a stressful, dynamic environment where people's lives are at stake are not necessarily the ones with the titles. Skills and personalities that allow you to climb the bureaucracy and rule the conference rooms are often counter-productive in emergency situations.

After 9-11, Homeland Security adopted the ICS and then put so many layers of advisory groups and upper-level involvement to make sure that all departments and concerns had a say at the levels above the responders that it is no surprise the command structure for the response is non-existent or at least severely weakened.

For example, in an incident the size of Katrina, the "Command" structure includes the following according to the National Response Plan:

>Homeland Security Council/National Security Council

>Policy Coordination Committees (White House)

>Interagency Incident Management Group (Core Group = 23 Departments/agencies and the Red Cross... then there is "Subject Matter Expert Augmentation)

>Homeland Security Operations Center with Representatives from 18 Departments or agencies, Red Cross, and State and Local govt.)

>Joint Field Office

>and then, Emergency Response personnel and Teams (the folks on the ground)

And exactly how many of the higher levels have people trained in this sort of stuff? How is a decision going to be made? How are resources and responses going to be coordinated? Did you know the Interagency Incident Management Group met the Friday before the hurricane hit? (I know this because immediately afterwards the fire agencies created a report that showed how many crews and aircraft we had available for immediate response. We had people ready to go on Sat. morning, but only a handful of folks were called and as far as I can tell, none of our helicopters were requested the first week except by some of the fire folks on the scene. Now, Fire helicopters are not trained to pluck people off of roofs, but we could have certainly slung equipment, fresh water, and supplies wherever they need to go and freed up the Coast Guard and other trained ships for the rescue work. Still, the fact that some resources were called puts the lie to the idea that DHS/FEMA couldn't order resources before certain papers were signed.)

Saying you follow ICS doesn't mean a thing unless you empower people, and that is something this administration is loathe to do. Even if you do empower people, it's tough for them to act without logistical support, which takes coordination and planning.

(By the way, the one agency outside the fire community that bought into ICS in a big way is the Coast Guard. As near as I can tell, they were head and shoulders above everyone else in the response... you listen to the pilots interviewed and you can tell they had a command structure and they had at least the rudiments of a plan. That's no accident. The Coast Guard, made fun of by the other services and rarely given credit by press and public, are the ones doing what they are trained to do and saving lives.)

As already implied, the other critical part of ICS is to always have a plan and to base that plan on the best information possible. The plan encompasses both the strategic long-term and the tactical short-term and everyone who works on the incident is aware of what they are working on that day and how it fits into the larger picture.

In the fire community, we also do pre-planning for fires we know will happen some day. For instance, there are plans for Yosemite, Flagstaff, and Santa Fe that detail things like communications frequencies, staging areas, evacuation plans, resources needed, etc. Now, within the first half hour, your plan is going to go to hell, but by having gone through the exercise, you know what needs to be done and how you're going to communicate and what the command structure will be.

I know the challenges created by Katrina and the flood are immense, but they are not at all unexpected and resources should have been there within 24 hours if not sooner and they should have arrived with a plan and command.

It is not surprising this didn't happen. In the response to the FL hurricanes of 2004, every wildland fire person who went to help came back with disgust at the lack of planning, coordination, and command inherent in that operation. People and resources were just sent out to do "work" with no structure and no instructions. FEMA kept releasing press releases that said "We spent X millions in County Y" but they couldn't tell you how that money was spent or what good it did. We're saw the same scattershot approach here with people touting the gallons of water or the number of MREs or whatnot. It doesn't matter how many you distribute... what matters is how many you need to distribute and it's clear the folks running this thing had no idea what those numbers were.

And also, the sphere of responsibility for FEMA/Homeland Security does include an incident such as this... one that didn't take Nostradamus or some genius to predict. The idea that DHS/FEMA didn't have any responsibility until the affected state signs it over is just plain wrong according to the National Response Plan and everything I know about the subject. It was completely within the power of DHS/FEMA to start mobilizing resources days before the hurricane hit regardless of what paper they had from state or local authorities. This is exactly the kind of thing DHS/FEMA should be planning for ... instead, we know they sent contracts out to politically connected firms to do the planning for them and got little if anything in return except, perhaps, some kickbacks to the GOP fundraising apparatus.

The problem is that this WH always wants to run things from the West Wing and doesn't trust people because they only see things through the political lens. I'm guessing the reason why DHS/FEMA didn't respond like the National Response Plan allows them to is because every WH decision maker was on vacation and they were afraid to do anything on their own. If you're going to deal with emergencies you have to trust people to do their job.

Yes, the flood caused tremendous devestation and hampered relief efforts but you know what... it was all foreseen and could have been planned for and dealt with so much more effectively. You expect the state and locals guys to be overwhelmed at times, but the Feds should be there to pick up the slack. This time, they were not and I am absolutely ashamed of that.

If a couple of backwater federal agencies, the State of New Mexico, and a handful of local fire departments can put together a plan to both fight fire and evacuate 50,000 Santa Feans at the same time, FEMA should be able to pull together something similar on a larger scale.

This whole thing in the Gulf States is infuriating to me as a guy with experience in emergency operations and even more so as an American. We could do better.