Raw Story is reporting the following:
Paper: Internal docs show feds
‘bungled’ Katrina response RAW STORYAs the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency stepped down
yesterday, government documents surfaced showing that vital resources, such
as buses and environmental health specialists, weren’t deployed to the Gulf
region for several days, even after federal officials seized control of
Hurricane Katrina relief efforts, the (paid-restricted) WALL STREET JOURNAL
reports Tuesday. Excerpts follow.# Separately, internal documents and emails from FEMA and other
government agencies dating back to Aug. 31 and reviewed by The Wall Street
Journal show the extent to which the federal government bungled its response
to the hurricane. The documents highlight serious deficiencies in the
Department of Homeland Security’s National Response Plan, a post-Sept. 11
playbook on how to deal with catastrophic events. Mr. Chertoff activated the
National Response Plan last Tuesday by declaring the aftermath of Hurricane
Katrina an “Incident of National Significance.”In one instance, federal environmental health specialists, who were
charged with protecting both rescue workers and evacuees, weren’t called in
by the Department of Homeland Security until Sunday — 12 days after the
Occupational Safety & Health Administration announced it had teams from
various agencies standing by ready to assist. Even now, with mounting
evidence of environmental problems, the deployment is being held up by
continuing interagency wrangling, according to officials at the National
Institutes of Health, which also is involved in the effort.In addition, FEMA’s official requests, known as tasking assignments and
used by the agency to demand help from other government agencies, show that
it first asked the Department of Transportation to look for buses to help
evacuate the more than 20,000 people who had taken refuge at the Superdome
in New Orleans at 1:45 a.m. on Aug. 31. At the time, it only asked for 455
buses and 300 ambulances for the enormous task. Almost 18 hours later, it
canceled the request for the ambulances because it turned out, as one FEMA
employee put it, “the DOT doesn’t do ambulances.”FEMA ended up modifying the number of buses it thought it needed to get
the job done, until it settled on a final request of 1,355 buses at 8:05
p.m. on Sept. 3. The buses, though, trickled into New Orleans, with only a
dozen or so arriving on the first day.The part of the plan that authorizes OSHA’s role as coordinator and
allows it to mobilize experts from other agencies such as NIH wasn’t
activated by FEMA until shortly before 5 p.m. Sunday. The delay came despite
repeated efforts by the agencies to mobilize.Attempts by officials at NIH to reach FEMA officials and send them
briefing materials by email failed as the agency’s server failed.“I noticed that every email to a FEMA person bounced back this week. They
need a better internet provider during disasters!!” one frustrated
Department of Health official wrote to colleagues last Thursday.
I heard that numerous government watchdog organizations and media outlets
have filed Freedom of Information Acts in order to get documents relating to
Katrina. I expect over the next few weeks we will hear more and more about the
failures of our government. This is just further proof of the need for an
independent commission to investigate the response and not a partisan committee.