News Article/Dallas Morning News
By MICHELLE MITTELSTADT / The Dallas Morning News

September 11, 2005

WASHINGTON – Four years after the Sept. 11 attacks shattered America's sense of invulnerability, the federal government has spent more than $175 billion to secure the homeland and reshaped itself in the biggest transformation since World War II.

Yet in recent days, Hurricane Katrina has badly rattled Americans' belief that the government is any better prepared to confront catastrophe – whether natural or terrorist – than it was on that September morning in 2001.

The images of bloated bodies in the streets and of people trapped by floodwaters and the heart-breaking tales of suffering so foreign to the American experience have cast a harsh glare on the nation's disaster relief system.

Though federal, state and local politicians are bickering over culpability, the botched early response to the Gulf Coast devastation has led to the inescapable conclusion that the system failed – and absent repair, it will fail again.

"Hurricane Katrina was in one sense the most significant test of the new national emergency preparedness and response system that was created after 9-11, and it obviously did not pass that test," said Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn.

Experts offer a range of explanations for the flawed response: bureaucratic red tape; miscues between local, state and federal officials; a weakened Federal Emergency Management Agency; and the lack of preparation despite countless studies warning of dire results from a direct hurricane hit on New Orleans.

The fumbles are all the more perplexing because, after Sept. 11, federal authorities rewrote disaster relief plans, created a National Incident Management System to bring the resources of a far-flung bureaucracy under a unified command, and conducted multiagency disaster drills. One drill carried out in New Orleans over the last year, dubbed Hurricane Pam, foretold with chilling accuracy the damage that Katrina would wreak.

While Congress readies hearings on the disaster relief effort, state executives and emergency management experts say they're afraid of what would happen if tragedy lands at their doorstep.

"One of the unfortunate lessons from Katrina is that states cannot always count on the federal government for prompt disaster response and assistance," California state Sen. Nell Soto wrote Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, urging better disaster preparation for the earthquake-prone state.

Asked if the U.S. is better positioned now than before 9-11 to mobilize for a major disaster, George Haddow, a FEMA deputy director in the Clinton administration, offered a crisp answer: "We are worse off."

He blames fragmentation of FEMA's mission, with major budget cuts before 9-11 and the agency's absorption into a new Homeland Security Department in 2003. With the department's white-hot focus on terrorism, the emergency preparedness mission has atrophied, he and other disaster relief specialists say.

Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke says the criticism is off base.

"We have significantly improved preparedness capabilities for natural disasters and for acts of terror since 9-11," he said. "We are an all-hazards department and FEMA does benefit significantly from being a part of the department."

Mr. Knocke points to the fact that the Coast Guard, which is part of Homeland Security, had 40 helicopters in the air less than two hours after Katrina hit New Orleans, eventually rescuing more than 30,000 people.

But much of the federal presence, including thousands of active-duty troops, military ships and transport vehicles, didn't arrive until days later.

"We were begging for more resources, and you know, eventually we got enough resources, it just took more days than we wanted it to take," said Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco.

Parallels to Andrew

Defenders of the federal response say any assessment has to take into account the sheer magnitude of what Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff refers to as an "ultra-catastrophe."

The hurricane rampaged over a 90,000-square-mile swath, leaving emergency responders to struggle with countless disaster scenes. In New Orleans, it wiped out roads, power and phone lines and was followed by uncontrolled flooding.

For Claire Rubin, a Virginia-based emergency management expert, Katrina has uncanny parallels to Hurricane Andrew, the 1992 Florida disaster to which the federal government was also slow to arrive on the scene and hamstrung by an uncoordinated response.

"The sad part is 13, 14 years later, we don't seem to have gotten much smarter," said Ms. Rubin, who participated in an influential after-action Andrew critique. "If anything, we've lost traction."

She, like others, offers several explanations: FEMA leaders untrained in emergency management, confusion over command-and-control, and a disaster relief mission subsumed by a bigger anti-terrorism portfolio.

The terrorism focus is clear. In the last four years, $11.3 billion in federal grants have been doled out to state and local emergency responders, with three of every four dollars geared to terrorism capabilities, congressional investigators say.

"They give them money for gas masks but not for how are you going to mitigate for a natural disaster," said Susan Cutter, director of the Hazards Research Lab at the University of South Carolina.

Already, some in Congress are pushing to restore FEMA's independent status, but Homeland Security officials say now is not the time to debate government reorganization.

"Our undivided attention is placed on the victims of this catastrophe and seeing that they get the help that they desperately need," Mr. Knocke said. "There is going to be a time and a place for the government and no doubt for Congress and the administration to really take a careful look at where the missteps were and assign blame."

In the tight-knit emergency management community, many are reluctant to apportion blame, saying the full story has yet to emerge.

"Could the response have been quicker and the planning better? Yes," said Joseph Myers, a former Florida emergency management director. "But it's a layered approach, and that's what was missing here. You can't have the city and the state saying 'It's not our fault. It's FEMA's fault.' "

Preparing response

Still, an uncoordinated response wasn't supposed to happen.

Federal officials spent more than two years writing a blueprint to handle catastrophes in a seamless capacity that weaves together local, federal and state assets.

When then-Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge released the 426-page National Response Plan in January he described it as the playbook for the quarterback.

The discordant response during the first use of the National Response Plan forces the question: Was the playbook flawed or did the team botch the plays?

Some emergency management experts say the failing wasn't with the plan.

"It looks to me like we just never crossed the gap between planning and reality," said David McIntyre, director of Texas A&M University's Integrative Center for Homeland Security.

He and others fault the lack of a cooperative relationship between New Orleans, Louisiana and federal officials that led to early, costly stumbles – and a system that by law and tradition requires federal authorities to wait for state executives to ask for help.

"It's the greatest challenge of homeland security," said Randy Larsen, head of the Institute for Homeland Security. "We are not structured for operational activities that involve state, local and federal governments working together."

The National Response Plan isn't a point-by-point handbook to cope with individual disasters. But it sets responsibilities for the federal agencies involved in relief operations, designating leaders for different missions.

The plan pushes responsibility for disaster management to the lowest level: local and state governments, who handle the lion's share of the more than 2,000 disasters that occur in the U.S. each year. But it allows governors to request federal help if they believe their resources will be overwhelmed. And, it permits the federal government to pre-deploy assets and personnel – and ultimately to elbow aside outmanned state and local authorities in catastrophic incidents.

In this case, many question whether the feds waited too late to take control. It was only after New Orleans was underwater that the Homeland Security Department declared the disaster an "incident of national significance" – essentially federalizing the relief operation.

Mr. Chertoff concedes that planning for major disasters may have to be retooled.

"We may have to break the model that we have used for dealing with catastrophes, at least in the case of ultra-catastrophes," he said.

The National Response Plan makes clear that a unified federal command may not be on the ground for 48 to 96 hours after the disaster, requiring state and local emergency managers to be self-sufficient during that period.

"Short of breaking up the federalist form of government, you are going to have the federal response in support of state and local authorities," said Frank Cilluffo, a former White House homeland security official.

Self-reliance

The need for self-reliance has been hammered home by Katrina. In recent days, state and local planners have been re-evaluating their preparedness plans.

"The base assumption for everyone is you're on your own for 72 hours," said Larry Klein, chair of the California Seismic Safety Commission.

Asked if he was confident of a swift federal response to a major earthquake, Mr. Klein said: "I don't know. They'll eventually show up at your front door."

The public has developed unrealistic expectations about the federal response, said Ms. Rubin, who has spent 27 years in emergency management. "It used to be nothing for it to be a week, 10 days before you got your federal assistance. Now, somehow, people expect a federal official to be at their doorstep the minute something happens. It's a very, very high degree of expectation and frankly entitlement."

But Americans horrified by the suffering, chaos and lawlessness inside the Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Center are asking why federal troops weren't dispatched far earlier – particularly since it was clear early on that the Police Department and local responders were badly overwhelmed.

Ms. Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin are receiving their share of criticism, chiefly over the failure to have a functional evacuation plan and to pre-stage adequate food, water and medical supplies at the Superdome, long identified as the city's main shelter.

And it's clear they struggled with federal authorities over control of the operation and the National Guard in the early days.

Mr. Nagin alluded to the friction in a CNN interview, recounting a conversation he had with Mr. Bush and Ms. Blanco aboard Air Force One. "I said, 'Mr. President, Madam Governor, you two have to get in sync. If you don't get in sync, more people are going to die.' "

The president, who deemed the early federal response inadequate, has acknowledged that friction between layers of government may be where the problem lies. He has pledged an internal investigation.

Some are hopeful that the deadly failings exposed by Katrina will force major change in Washington, state capitals and city halls.

"We've got to fix the system," said Ms. Cutter, the South Carolina disaster expert. "We can't let this happen again."

Staff writer Andrew Becker in Berkeley, Calif., and Michelle DeArmond, a staff writer at the Press-Enterprise in Riverside, Calif., contributed to this report.