Knight Ridder is now suggesting that
DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff was as responsible as FEMA chief Mike
Brown for the slow response to Hurricane Katrina.
The federal official with the power to
mobilize a massive federal response to Hurricane Katrina was Homeland
Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, not the former FEMA chief who was
relieved of his duties and resigned earlier this week, federal
documents reviewed by Knight Ridder show.
Even before the storm struck the Gulf Coast, Chertoff could
have ordered federal agencies into action without any request from
state or local officials. Federal Emergency Management Agency chief
Michael Brown had only limited authority to do so until about 36 hours
after the storm hit, when Chertoff designated him as the "principal
federal official" in charge of the storm.
As thousands of hurricane victims went without food, water and
shelter in the days after Katrina's early morning Aug. 29 landfall,
critics assailed Brown for being responsible for delays that might have
cost hundreds of lives.
But Chertoff - not Brown - was in charge of managing the
national response to a catastrophic disaster, according to the National
Response Plan, the federal government's blueprint for how agencies will
handle major natural disasters or terrorist incidents. An order issued
by President Bush in 2003 also assigned that responsibility to the
homeland security director.
But according to a memo obtained by Knight Ridder, Chertoff
didn't shift that power to Brown until late afternoon or evening on
Aug. 30, about 36 hours after Katrina hit Louisiana and Mississippi.
That same memo suggests that Chertoff may have been confused about his
lead role in disaster response and that of his department.
[....]
White House and homeland security officials wouldn't explain
why Chertoff waited some 36 hours to declare Katrina an incident of
national significance and why he didn't immediately begin to direct the
federal response from the moment on Aug. 27 when the National Hurricane
Center predicted that Katrina would strike the Gulf Coast with
catastrophic force in 48 hours. Nor would they explain why Bush felt
the need to appoint a separate task force.
Chertoff's hesitation and Bush's creation of a task force both
appear to contradict the National Response Plan and previous
presidential directives that specify what the secretary of homeland
security is assigned to do without further presidential orders. The
goal of the National Response Plan is to provide a streamlined
framework for swiftly delivering federal assistance when a disaster -
caused by terrorists or Mother Nature - is too big for local officials
to handle.
[...]
The Chertoff memo indicates that the response to Katrina wasn't
left to disaster professionals, but was run out of the White House,
said George Haddow, a former deputy chief of staff at FEMA during the
Clinton administration and the co-author of an emergency management
textbook.
"It shows that the president is running the disaster, the White
House is running it as opposed to Brown or Chertoff," Haddow said.
Brown "is a convenient fall guy. He's not the problem really. The
problem is a system that was marginalized."
[...]
Chertoff's Aug. 30 memo came on the heels of a memo from Brown,
written several hours after Katrina made landfall, showing that the
FEMA director was waiting for Chertoff's permission to get help from
others within the massive department. In that memo, first obtained by
the Associated Press last week, Brown requested Chertoff's "assistance
to make available DHS employees willing to deploy as soon as possible."
It asked for another 1,000 homeland security workers within two days
and 2,000 within a week.
[...]
Something else went wrong, he suspects. The new National
Response Plan isn't all that different from the previous plan, called
the Federal Response Plan.
"Our history of responding to major disasters has been one
where we've done it well," Byrne said. "We need to figure out why this
one didn't go as well as the others did. It's shocking to me."
The federal official with the power to
mobilize a massive federal response to Hurricane Katrina was Homeland
Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, not the former FEMA chief who was
relieved of his duties and resigned earlier this week, federal
documents reviewed by Knight Ridder show.
