Posted on 09/07/2005 2:27:50 PM PDT by Crackingham
US politicians have called for the head of America's disaster management agency to resign for failing to respond adequately to the New Orleans floods. Michael Brown, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), waited until five hours after Hurricane Katrina had struck before putting out an appeal for staff to help deal with the disaster, it emerged today.
In a memo to his boss Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security Secretary, he proposed that the initial wave of 1,000 emergency workers would not be in place for two days, and that a further 1,000 would take a week to arrive. The delay was while staff were trained. In his letter he describes Katrina - thought to have killed more than three times as many people as the 9/11 terror attacks - merely as a "near catastrophic event". The memo has now been leaked on the internet.
Before the storm, Fema had positioned front-line rescue and communications teams across the Gulf Coast. But officials acknowledged the first department-wide appeal for help came only as the storm raged. On August 29, the day that the hurricane hit land, Mr Brown also warned fire and rescue services outside Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama not to send in emergency workers unless specifically asked for help from local authorities.
In mitigation, a Homeland Security spokesman, Russ Knocke, said that Mr Brown's memo aimed to assemble a taskforce to co-ordinate with victims and community groups. Instead of rescuing people or recovering bodies, these employees would focus on helping victims find the help they needed, he said.
"There will be plenty of time to assess what worked and what didn’t work," said Mr Knocke. "Clearly there will be time for blame to be assigned and to learn from some of the successful efforts."
Mr Knocke said the 48-hour period was to ensure workers had adequate training. "They were training to help the lifesavers."
In another part of his memo that has struck a jarring note with the US public, Mr Brown tells Fema staff that one of their duties is to make the agency look good.
"Convey a positive image of disaster operations to government officials, community organisations and the general public," he writes.
Democratic Senators Barbara Mikulski and Hillary Clinton said that Mr Brown should resign. Mrs Clinton told CBS’s The Early Show that she "would have never appointed such a person" and said that President Bush should have picked someone with more experience.
"would have never appointed such a person"
Yeah, they would have appointed a big campaign contributer.
Katrina's strike wasn't the big problem. Five hours after Katrina struck, New Orleans was in tolerable shape. The catastrophe didn't occur until after the levees broke.
They should have been trained years ago. They should be so well trained that they can go into automatic without thinking. After a crisis is no time to start training.
Katrina's strike and the levee breech.
Exactly. What happens when there is another terror attack? Will everyone need 2 days of training then too?
The thing is, they should have expected the levee to break.
They should have been prepared for it. And even after it broke and the city was flooding, the response was slow.
So, Brown brings any a lot of people pre-hurricane (because you don't want to put a lot of people in the path of the storm) Then after the storm hits sees how bad it is and asks for additional help, seems like the right thing to do. What is the problem?
There needs to be more info about the training. Who was being trained and for what?
Nagin knew the Levee was only designed for a Cat3 storm the City should have been fully evacuated BEFORE the hurricane hit. Nagin failed simple as that.
Yeah. And didn't they kinda need to know just where she struck? I think it sounds like a very fast response.
They've got to wait until the storm passes to assess the damage so they can decide what needs doing, and where it needs to be done.
The only criticism I haven't heard is that they didn't hire Miss Cleo to tell them the exact storm track a week in advance.
I don't know about the "volunteer" aspect, but I read that he was getting people who would need training at least from outside his department.
But even if it were not fully evacuated, if the buses had been used to start an evacuation and parked in other cities as the minutes from the June 5, 2005 NO school board meeting recommended, there would have been 400-500 NO school buses in working order that could have been used to continue the evacuation.
Have any of these articles today specified how many FEMA assets were on the ground Monday and prior. I can't seem to find that info.
I find the article vastly overblown and worthy more of a very low grade tabloid than a serious newspaper. More sloppy journalism from the MSM.
This article does not provide enough info to comment.
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