New York Times sez..... [Re: bush preoccupation with costly iraq war left us / fema unprepared for katrina in new orleans]

[Surprisingly fair and balanced article from the NYT!  dsp]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/02/politics/02bush.html
-------------------------------------------------------------

The President:
Democrats and Others Criticize White House's Response to Disaster

By ELISABETH BUMILLER
Published: September 2, 2005

WASHINGTON, Sept. 1 - A political furor intensified on Thursday over President Bush's handling of Hurricane Katrina as Democrats, local officials and members of an increasingly bewildered public accused the president of a slow response to the flood that has plunged New Orleans into chaos.
Skip to next paragraph
Doug Mills/The New York Times

President Bush met with former Presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush Thursday in the Oval Office to discuss hurricane relief.

Mr. Bush, in a rare morning television interview, fought back.

"I hope people don't play politics during this period of time," Mr. Bush told Diane Sawyer of ABC's "Good Morning America" in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. "This is a natural disaster, the likes of which our country may have never seen before."

But the politics of natural disaster were close to the surface as Democrats said that the crisis had become a political catastrophe as daylong images on television showed refugees desperate for food and water in the richest nation on earth.

Representative Harold E. Ford Jr., Democrat of Tennessee, said in a statement that he was struck by Mr. Bush's "cavalier attitude toward the plight of poor people across Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama" and added that "now is not the time in the face of pain, anguish and death to be weak and uncertain."

Terry Ebbert, the head of homeland security in New Orleans, bitterly complained on Thursday that the Federal Emergency Management Agency was not offering enough help.

"This is a national emergency," Mr. Ebbert told The Associated Press. "This is a national disgrace. FEMA has been here three days, yet there is no command and control. We can send massive amounts of aid to tsunami victims, but we can't bail out the city of New Orleans."

Other Democrats cast Mr. Bush's first survey of the damage, from his window on Air Force One two days after the hurricane hit, as an imperial act removed from the suffering of the people below.

"It was not enough for the president to bank his plane and look at the window and say, 'Oh, what a devastating site,' " Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, said in a statement on Thursday. "Instead of looking out the window of an airplane, he should have been on the ground giving the people devastated by this hurricane hope."

White House officials, already sensitive that Mr. Bush is suffering the lowest approval ratings of his presidency and under pressure to manage a catastrophe of what they called biblical proportions, reacted with frustration.

"Seventy-two hours into this, to be openly posturing about this, to be attacking the president, is not only despicable and wrong, it's not politically smart," said one White House official who asked not to be named because he did not want to be seen as talking about the crisis in political terms. "Normal people at home understand that it's not the president who's responsible for this, it's the hurricane. This will get better, hour by hour and day by day."

Publicly, the White House moved swiftly on many fronts to respond. Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, announced that Mr. Bush would spend Friday touring the devastation on the Gulf Coast and in New Orleans, and that former Presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush would lead a private fund-raising effort for the flood and hurricane victims, similar to what they did after the Asian tsunami last December.

Mr. Clinton, who has become politically close to the Bush family in the last year, was the most prominent Democrat to defend Mr. Bush against the accusations of slowness.

Asked about the federal response in an interview on CNN, Mr. Clinton said that he understood why the refugees living in "hellacious conditions" in the New Orleans Superdome felt the way they did, "but the people that put them there did it because they thought they were saving their lives, and then when the problems showed up, they had a lot of other people to save."

Former Senator John B. Breaux, a Louisiana Democrat who is close to the White House, said in an interview Thursday that people in New Orleans were mad at politicians at all levels. "They're mad at the governor, they're mad at the mayor, and if I was in office, they'd get mad at me," he said. "They don't care if you're an elephant or a donkey. You've got to be on top of it. You've got to be aggressive. You've got to show that something is being done."

The White House battled a chorus of criticism throughout the day as bloggers made much of the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, vacationing in New York during the disaster, where she was spotted at a Broadway show and was to attend the U.S. Open. By Thursday evening, Ms. Rice had cut short her vacation and returned to Washington, where she headed to a staff meeting to discuss ways of coordinating offers of foreign assistance from more than 30 countries and organizations.

Bloggers also circulated a picture of Mr. Bush playing a guitar at an event in California on Tuesday to imply that he was fiddling while New Orleans drowned. In fact, the picture was taken when the country singer Mark Wills presented Mr. Bush with a guitar backstage at North Island Naval Air Station in Coronado, Calif., after Mr. Bush gave a speech marking the 60th anniversary of the Japanese surrender in World War II.

Later that day, as floodwaters poured into New Orleans, Mr. Bush returned to his ranch in Texas, then left from his ranch for Washington on Wednesday morning.

Ed Koch, the former mayor of New York who learned that it was essential to respond quickly to city disasters, said that Mr. Bush had not moved swiftly enough to express sympathy for the victims.

"I learned that people want you out there, they want you to suffer a little with them, they want you to convince them that you will protect them as part of your family, they want you to be an extension of them," Mr. Koch said.

Mr. Koch, who supported Mr. Bush on the war in Iraq, said that "it's fair game for the Democrats to attack the president at this time. They want to win the House next year."

-------------------------------------------------------------

escalera brothers wrote:

 Posted on Thu, Sep. 01, 2005



CAUGHT UNPREPARED?

DISASTER EXPERTS BLAME NEW FOCUS ON TERRORISM

By Seth Borenstein

Knight Ridder


WASHINGTON - With its focus on terrorism, the federal government was
unprepared for Hurricane Katrina and so far has bungled the job of
quickly helping the multitudes of hungry, thirsty and desperate
victims, former top disaster officials said Wednesday.

The experts, including a former Bush administration emergency-response
manager, told Knight Ridder that the government was not prepared, had
scrimped on storm spending and shifted its attention from dealing with
natural disasters to fighting terrorism. Deep budget cuts for flood
control and hurricane preparation also have compounded the magnitude of
the disaster.

At the center of the relief effort is the Federal Emergency Management
Agency (FEMA), which was enveloped by the Department of Homeland
Security with a new mission aimed at responding to the attacks of
Al-Qaida.

``What you're seeing is revealing weaknesses in the state, local and
federal levels,'' said Eric Tolbert, who until February was FEMA's
disaster-response chief. ``All three levels have been weakened. They've
been weakened by diversion into terrorism.''

In interviews Wednesday, several men and women who have led relief
efforts for dozens of killer hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes
chastised current disaster leaders for forgetting the simple Boy Scout
motto: Be prepared.

Bush administration officials said they are proud of their response.
Their first efforts emphasized rooftop rescues over providing food and
water for victims who already were safe.

``We are extremely pleased with the response of every element of the
federal government and all of our federal partners have made to this
terrible tragedy,'' Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff
said during a news conference Wednesday in Washington, D.C.

The agency has more than 1,700 truckloads of water, meals, tents,
generators and other supplies ready to go in, Chertoff said. Federal
health officials have started setting up at least 40 medical shelters.
The Coast Guard reports rescuing more than 1,200 people.

But residents, especially in Biloxi, Miss., say they are not seeing the
promised help, and Knight Ridder reporters along the Gulf Coast said
they saw little visible federal relief efforts, other than
search-and-rescue teams. Some help started arriving Wednesday by the
truckloads, but not everywhere.

``We're not getting any help yet,'' said Biloxi Fire Department
Battalion Chief Joe Boney. ``We need water. We need ice. I've been told
it's coming, but we've got people in shelters who haven't had a drink
since the storm.''

A FEMA official, James McIntyre, blamed the extent of devastation for
slowing relief efforts. Roads were washed out and relief trucks were
stopped by state police trying to keep people out of hazardous areas,
he said.

The slow response and poor federal leadership is a replay of the
mishandling of Hurricane Andrew in 1992, said former FEMA Chief of
Staff Jane Bullock, a 22-year agency veteran.

Bullock blamed inexperienced federal leadership. She noted that
Chertoff and FEMA Director Michael Brown had no disaster experience
before they were appointed to their jobs.

The slowness is all too familiar to Kate Hale. As Miami's disaster
chief during Hurricane Andrew, Hale asked: ``Where the hell's the
cavalry?''

``I'm seeing the same sort of thing that horrified us after Hurricane
Andrew,'' Hale said Wednesday. ``I realize they've got a huge job.
Nobody understands better than I do what they're trying to respond to,
but . . .''

Budget cuts have not made disaster preparedness any easier.

Last year, FEMA spent $250,000 to conduct an eight-day hurricane drill
for a mock killer storm hitting New Orleans. Some 250 emergency
officials attended. Many scenarios now playing out, including a
helicopter evacuation of the Superdome, were discussed in that drill
for a fictional storm named Pam.

This year, the group was to design a plan to fix such unresolved
problems as evacuating sick and injured people from the Superdome and
housing tens of thousands of stranded citizens. But funding for that
planning was cut, said Tolbert, who also was disaster chief for North
Carolina.

``A lot of good was done, but it just wasn't finished,'' he said. ``I
don't know if it would have saved more lives. It would have made the
response faster. You might say it would have saved lives.''

FEMA was not alone in cutting hurricane spending in New Orleans and the
surrounding area.

Federal flood-control spending for southeastern Louisiana has been
chopped, from $69 million in 2001 to $36.5 million in 2005, according
to budget documents. Federal hurricane protection for the Lake
Pontchartrain vicinity in the Army Corps of Engineers' budget dropped
from $14.25 million in 2002 to $5.7 million this year. Louisiana
Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu requested $27 million this year.

Both the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper and a local business
magazine reported that the effects of the budget cuts at the Army Corps
of Engineers were severe.

In 2004, the Corps essentially stopped major work on the now-breached
levee system that had protected New Orleans from flooding. It was the
first such stoppage in 37 years, the Times-Picayune reported.

``It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to
handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the
price we pay,'' Jefferson Parish emergency-management chief Walter
Maestri told the newspaper.

The Army Corps' New Orleans office, facing a $71 million cut, also
eliminated funds for a study on how to protect the Crescent City from a
Category 5 storm, New Orleans City Business reported in June.

Further complicating the relief effort, three top officials from
Louisiana's emergency-management office were indicted recently for the
misuse of funds from Hurricane Ivan last year.

Being prepared for a disaster is basic emergency management, experts
said.

In the 1990s, for example, while planning for a New Orleans nightmare
scenario, the federal government figured it would predeploy nearby
ships with pumps to remove water from the below-sea-level city and have
hospital ships nearby, said James Lee Witt, who was FEMA director under
President Clinton and won bipartisan praise on Capitol Hill.

Bush administration officials said a hospital ship would leave from
Baltimore on Friday.

``These things need to be planned and prepared for; it just doesn't
look like it was,'' said Witt, a former Arkansas disaster chief.

FEMA said some of its response teams were prepared. The agency had 18
search-and-rescue teams and 39 disaster medical teams positioned
outside storm areas and moved them in when the hurricane died down.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mercury News Staff Writer Pete Carey and Knight Ridder correspondents
Scott Dodd, Ron Hutcheson, Tish Wells and Alison Young contributed to
this report.

.

Loading