New York Times analysis of Katrina failures misses mark

Disarray Marked the Path From Hurricane to Anarchy - New York Times:

"FEMA appears to have underestimated the storm, despite an extraordinary warning from the National Hurricane Center that it could cause 'human suffering incredible by modern standards.' The agency dispatched only 7 of its 28 urban search and rescue teams to the area before the storm hit and sent no workers at all into New Orleans until after the hurricane passed on Monday, Aug. 29."

This is as good a place as any to begin to analyse the analysis. The first sentence quoted above is equivalent to saying "It's gonna be big, really big!" But that doesn't really tell you much about what help will be needed where.

The second sentence is more interesting from my point of view. USAR is primarily a structural search function focusing on collapsed and partially collapsed structures. What you ended up with in N.O. was a lot of largely intact structures partly of entirely submerged which is a slightly different problem requiring different skills and equipment. But, the last part is the most critical - the first rule of emergency response (they really drum this into you in EMS) is "Don't become a victim." If you do, you subtract yourself and those who have to rescue you from the resources available to deal with the incident. So, getting rescuers positioned to respond quickly is not more important than keeping them out of harm's way until their skills can be used.

This pretty well characterizes the Times story - fairly solid reporting, but little understanding of what the facts mean.

Completely missing from the Times piece was any discussion of why there was such a disconnect between the public pronouncements of the principals about the situation and what they have had to say about one another. From where I sit, you can't begin to sort this out without a nodding acquaintance with the politics of the situation. Including Louisiana's uniquely "non-partisan" primary system.

Republicans (including the top officials of FEMA and the Bush administration) are reluctant to appear critical of Mayor Ray Nagin. There are two reasons for this - he is a prominent black political leader and the party does not want to appear to be anti-black, and Nagin has shown in the past his willingness to endorse the GOP candidate in a state-wide race and they would like him to do so again.

Governor Blanco, although being a white Democrat, also gets at least a partial pass because of her sex. Republicans hate running against women (this is why Hillary Clinton scares them so much) because they find it hard to criticize a woman without sounding like they are critical of women generally and that cuts into their courting of the "soccer mom" demographic.

I believe this is the only way to explain why the administration refuses to defend itself vigorously on certain points where it is becoming clear that the mayor and governor not only dropped the ball but lied to the public about non-cooperation from the feds. Most famously, refusing to let the ARC bring in supplies to the Superdome while pleading on TV for help for the people suffering there.

This is not to say that FEMA's performance was flawless. The Times story mentions the screw-up with the 1400 firefighters in Atlanta but fails to convey the full dimensions of the insanity. For more details on this, see my blog entry on the subject.

"The Louisiana National Guard, already stretched by the deployment of more than 3,000 troops to Iraq, was hampered when its New Orleans barracks flooded. It lost 20 vehicles that could have carried soldiers through the watery streets and had to abandon much of its most advanced communications equipment, guard officials said."

Assuming this is true, it is a failure of disaster planning on the part of the Louisiana NG. All sorts of corporations and government agencies managed to limit the damage they suffered by prudent planning, why not the Guard? For instance, the Post Office diverted mail bound for N.O. to a warehouse in Houston and moved mail already in N.O. and awaiting delivery to an upper floor where it appears to have been saved from the flood. On the other hand, the local court system let its records fall victim to the flood and now has hundreds of prisoners in custody with no paperwork to show why they are being held.

"As the city become paralyzed both by water and by lawlessness, so did the response by government. The fractured division of responsibility - Governor Blanco controlled state agencies and the National Guard, Mayor Nagin directed city workers and Mr. Brown, the head of FEMA, served as the point man for the federal government - meant no one person was in charge. Americans watching on television saw the often-haggard governor, the voluble mayor and the usually upbeat FEMA chief appear at competing daily news briefings and interviews."

The whole system is predicated on the state governor being the responible official. If Louisiana state law does not give the governor sufficient authority to direct local government resources within the state, that is not a failing of FEMA.

I won't attempt to list every quibble I have with the Times presentation which seems to me overly slanted to the view that FEMA and the Bush administration generally were at fault. Suffice to say that if, as the Times reports, the governor didn't know what to ask for, that was a failing of her staff in the state homeland security office and the adjutant general of the state guard.

One last thought. Comparisons to 9/11 are entirely off the mark. For starters, there was no advance warning and therefore no evacuation issue. There was very limited need to evacuate after the fact and relatively little search and rescue to do. There was also no significant damage to housing, so shelters were not a large issue either. Lastly, Federal pre-emption could easily by justified on 9/11 by treating the attacks as acts of war, yet NYC managed its own response rather well despite losing its emergency operations center in the destruction of WTC 7. The Pentagon attack was on federal property and presented few jurisdictional issues and the plane crash in PA was just a matter of picking up pieces in farmers' fields.