A COMPARISON OF PREVIOUS HURRICANE RESPONSES:

President Nixon -- August 1969 when Cat-5 Hurricane Camille hit roughly the same area as Katrina, President Nixon had already readied the National Guard and ordered all Gulf rescue vessels and equipment from Tampa and Houston to follow the Hurricane in. There were over 1,000 regular military with two dozen helicopters to assist the Coast Guard and National Guard within hours after the skies cleared.

President Clinton -- September 1999, Hurricane Floyd -- Cat-3, was bearing down on the Carolinas and Virginia. President Clinton was in Christchurch, New Zealand - meeting with President Jiang of China. He made the proclamation that only Presidents can make and declared the areas affected by Floyd "Federal Disaster Areas" so the National Guard and Military can begin to mobilize. Then he cut short his meetings overseas and flew home to coordinate the rescue efforts. All one day BEFORE a Cat-3 hit the coast.

President Bush (41) -- August 1992 -- was in the midst of a campaign for re-election. Yet, he cut off his campaigning the day before and went to Washington where he martialed the largest military operation on US soil in history. He sent in 7,000 National Guard and 22,000 regular military personnel, and all the gear to begin the clean up within hours after Andrew passed through Florida.

George Bush (43) -- August 2005 -- Cat-5 Hurricane Katrina bears down on New Orleans and the Mississippi gulf. Both states are down nearly 8,000 National Guard troops because they are in Iraq -- with most of the rescue gear needed. Bush is on vacation. The day before Katrina makes landfall, Bush rides his bike for two hours. The day Katrina hits, he goes to John McCain's birthday party, and eats cake.

but

HURRICANE CHARLEY In 2004, George W. Bush and FEMA left little room for error. Not long after Hurricane Charley first made landfall on Aug. 13, Bush declared the state a federal disaster area to release federal relief funds. Less than two days after Charley ripped through southwestern Florida, he was on the ground touring hard-hit neighborhoods.

GOV. BLANCO ASKS BUSH TO DECLARE FEDERAL STATE OF EMERGENCY IN LOUISIANA:
“I have determined that this incident is of such severity and magnitude that effective response is beyond the capabilities of the State and affected local governments, and that supplementary Federal assistance is necessary to save lives, protect property, public health, and safety, or to lessen or avert the threat of a disaster.” [Office of the Governor]
The Governor’s request for help on August 28, 2005 as can be seen by viewing her official request at:
http://gov.louisiana.gov/Disaster Relief Request.pdf

WHAT BLANCO ASKED FOR: SHE INCLUDED ALL PARISHES
The official White House response to this request is in the press release at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/...
WHAT BUSH ISSUED…HE LEFT OUT NOLA AND ADJACENTS
Statement on Federal Emergency Assistance for Louisiana: Statement on Federal Emergency Assistance for Louisiana:
The President today declared an emergency exists in the State of Louisiana and ordered Federal aid to supplement state and local response efforts in the parishes located in the path of Hurricane Katrina beginning on August 26, 2005, and continuing.
The President's action authorizes the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to coordinate all disaster relief efforts which have the purpose of alleviating the hardship and suffering caused by the emergency on the local population, and to provide appropriate assistance for required emergency measures, authorized under Title V of the Stafford Act, to save lives, protect property and public health and safety, or to lessen or avert the threat of a catastrophe in the parishes of Allen, Avoyelles, Beauregard, Bienville, Bossier, Caddo, Caldwell, Claiborne, Catahoula, Concordia, De Soto, East Baton Rouge, East Carroll, East Feliciana, Evangeline, Franklin, Grant, Jackson, LaSalle, Lincoln, Livingston, Madison, Morehouse, Natchitoches, Pointe Coupee, Ouachita, Rapides, Red River, Richland, Sabine, St. Helena, St. Landry, Tensas, Union, Vernon, Webster, West Carroll, West Feliciana, and Winn.

FEDERAL EMERGENCY DECLARED, DHS AND FEMA GIVEN FULL AUTHORITY TO RESPOND TO KATRINA:
“Specifically, FEMA is authorized to identify, mobilize, and provide at its discretion, equipment and resources necessary to alleviate the impacts of the emergency.” [White House]

9:30 AM — MAYOR NAGIN ISSUES FIRST EVER MANDATORY EVACUATION OF NEW ORLEANS:
“We’re facing the storm most of us have feared,” said Nagin. “This is going to be an unprecedented event.” [Times-Picayune]
“Special arrangements will be made to evacuate persons unable to evacuate themselves.”
This is referring to evacuating people to an emergency shelter within the city, not evacuating people to points outside the city. The Mayor did implement an emergency bussing system that evacuated the city's poor and disabled to the Superdome. This can be verified by reading the plan at http://www.cityofno.com/portal.aspx?portal=46...

Tuesday, August 30
9AM – BUSH SPEAKS ON IRAQ AT NAVAL BASE CORONADO [White House]

MIDDAY – CHERTOFF FINALLY BECOMES AWARE THAT LEVEE HAS FAILED: “It was on Tuesday that the levee–may have been overnight Monday to Tuesday–that the levee started to break. And it was midday Tuesday that I became aware of the fact that there was no possibility of plugging the gap and that essentially the lake was going to start to drain into the city.” [Meet the Press, 9/4/05]

DHS failed to use catastrophe response plan in Katrina's wake
The Homeland Security Department did not use a plan for handling catastrophes in its response to Hurricane Katrina, even though some officials say that doing so could have saved lives and brought the chaotic situation in New Orleans under control.

Documents Highlight Bush-Blanco Standoff

By Spencer S. Hsu, Joby Warrick and Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, December 5, 2005; A10

Shortly after noon on Aug. 31, Louisiana Sen. David Vitter (R) delivered a message that stunned aides to Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D), who were frantically managing the catastrophe that began two days earlier when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast.

White House senior adviser Karl Rove wanted it conveyed that he understood that Blanco was requesting that President Bush federalize the evacuation of New Orleans. The governor should explore legal options to impose martial law "or as close as we can get," Vitter quoted Rove as saying, according to handwritten notes by Terry Ryder, Blanco's executive counsel.

Thus began what one aide called a "full-court press" to compel the first-term governor to yield control of her state National Guard -- a legal, political and personal campaign by White House staff that failed three days later when Blanco rejected the administration's terms, 10 minutes before Bush was to announce them in a Rose Garden news conference, the governor's aides said.

The standoff, illuminated among more than 100,000 pages of documents released Friday by Blanco in response to requests by Senate and House investigators, marks perhaps the clearest single conflict between U.S. and Louisiana officials in the bungled response to New Orleans's surrender to floodwaters and chaos.

While attention has focused on the performance of former Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael D. Brown, and communications breakdowns that kept Washington from recognizing for 12 to 16 hours the scope of flooding that would drive the storm's death toll above 1,200, the clash over military control highlights government officials' lack of familiarity with the levers of emergency powers.

Blanco's top aides relied on ad hoc tutorials from the National Guard about who would be in charge and how to call in federal help. But in the inevitable confusion of fast-moving events, partisan differences and federal/state divisions prevented top leaders from cooperating.

A Blanco aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the people around Bush were trying to maneuver the governor into an unnecessary change intended to make Bush look decisive.

"It was an overwhelming natural disaster. The federal government has an agency that exists for purposes of coming to the rescue of localities in a natural disaster, and that organization did not live up to what it was designed for or promised to," the aide said. Referring to Bush aides, he said, "It was time to recover from the fiasco, and take a win wherever you could, legitimate or not."

Vitter, in an interview, disagreed but acknowledged the clash.

"In my opinion, they [Blanco aides] were hypersensitive. . . . They seemed to feel there was some power play, which I don't think there was," he said. "The fact that it was [Rove] -- might that have fueled the governor's hypersensitivity? It may have, I don't know."

White House spokeswoman Christie Parell said: "The president has said that these reviews are critically important and that government at all levels could have done better. But our focus right now is on ensuring that victims of Katrina are getting what they need to get back on their feet."

In any event, the conflict delayed the arrival of active-duty troops in New Orleans, where reports of looting and violence prevented rescuers from retrieving stranded residents and evacuating hospitals and the Louisiana Superdome.

Blanco has said she asked Bush on Aug. 29, the day of Katrina's landfall, "for everything you've got," requesting 40,000 troops on Aug. 31. The president deployed 7,000 active-duty troops on Sept. 3. Thousands more National Guard troops were already on the ground.

But White House officials were concerned enough about what Brown and military leaders have testified to Congress was a lack of "unified command" to bring state Guard troops and active-duty federal troops under a single commander. They ultimately declined to force the issue over Blanco's objection and worked with existing command authorities.

But Blanco's reluctance stemmed from several factors. According to documents and aides, her team was not familiar with relevant laws and procedures, believed the change would have disrupted Guard law enforcement operations in New Orleans and mistrusted the Bush team, which they saw as preoccupied with its own public relations problems and blame shifting.

Within 30 minutes of receiving Rove's message on Aug. 31, Ryder and Blanco Chief of Staff Andrew Kopplin were briefed by Col. Jeff Smith, a senior state emergency preparedness official, advising them of the National Response Plan and Incident Command System, basic components of the Department of Homeland Security's playbook that lay out the chain of emergency authority.

By 2:20 p.m., Blanco called Bush, saying she needed additional resources but not federalization, according to Ryder's notes. Instead, she said an emerging federal/state partnership was jelling and asked Bush instead to commit to an arrival date for troops.

"We don't know necessarily what 'unified' command, or what do these words mean," the Blanco aide said. "The governor thinks that by that time, the command structure that is coming together will work."

The next day, on a Bush visit, administration officials ganged up on Blanco out of the presence of staff members and tried to bully her into changing her mind, they said. Blanco requested 24 hours.

Ryder's notes report that on the night of Sept. 1, Army Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, advised Blanco, as an aide put it, "You don't want to do that. You lose control, and you don't get one more boot on the ground."

Later, Blum told Ryder he came "under political duress" for his opinion and used military slang to describe an out-of-control situation, according to Ryder's notes.

Blanco defends actions in storm

“The Blanco administration released the mountain of documents to U.S. House and Senate committees investigating the response to Katrina on Friday evening, with the governor saying in a statement that they will show the hard work of her administration during its greatest crisis.
"These documents will demonstrate what I have said for several months -- that dedicated employees of the state of Louisiana worked tirelessly and effectively during this period to save many thousands of lives," Blanco said in the written statement.
To a large degree, the massive document dump was Exhibit A in Blanco's public relations defense of her performance during and after the storm. Since the days after the Aug. 29 hurricane, she has been portrayed as indecisive and bumbling in the face of the nation's worst natural disaster. But the documents, especially a 33-page timeline she constructed, take pains to show her as engaged and assertive as she tries to cope with false promises and intransigence from the federal government.

Asking for the Guard
On Sept. 2, five days after Katrina made landfall, Blanco fired off a letter urging President Bush to bring the 256th Louisiana National Guard Brigade home from Iraq to help along with a slew of reinforcements to help with everything from firefighting to fishing the dead from the water.
The waters had stopped rising in New Orleans, but tens of thousand of people stranded by the flood were isolated in the Superdome, the Convention Center and on highway overpasses pleading for help.
But according to an e-mail from a White House staffer five days later, the letter never arrived.
Margaret Grant sent an e-mail to Blanco's office Sept. 7 asking that the Sept. 2 letter be resent.
"We found it on the governor's Web site but we need 'an original,' for our staff secretary to formally process the requests she is making," Grant wrote.
Other documents show Blanco's growing frustration with federal response. Nothing was more of a flash point than the lack of buses to rescue people from New Orleans.
The day of the storm, Aug. 29, Blanco met for the first time with former FEMA chief Mike Brown, who promised the state ample supplies and said that his agency had "500 buses on standby, ready to be deployed," according to the Blanco timeline.
In an initial review by reporters of the thousands of e-mails, notes and other documents that Blanco's staff kept during that time period, there is no documentation of Brown's pledge. But a Blanco spokeswoman said the timeline is based, in part, on the governor's recollection of what happened in the first hectic days of the storm.
On Aug. 31, when the FEMA buses don't arrive, Blanco reiterated her need to federal officials for transportation to get the thousands of people out of the Superdome, Convention Center and off the Interstate 10 overpass. That day she issued an executive order to commandeer private buses to "cope with the disaster." Ultimately 1,500 would be seized, and about 800 used, the document said.
In a conversation with White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, Blanco on August 31 tells him that 500 buses will not be sufficient and that the federal government should try to provide as many as 5,000. Later that day in a conversation with President Bush, Blanco "reiterates her frustration about the FEMA buses," according to the timeline.
While state officials are obtaining buses, the governor's staff creates a plan to send the buses in convoys to evacuate people, according to the timeline. The first substantial number of FEMA buses do not begin to arrive in north Louisiana -- many hours away from New Orleans -- until "just before midnight" on August 31.

Looking for buses
The e-mails and quick Blackberry exchanges between members of Blanco's staff demonstrate that her administration was also struggling to find buses and get them to where they were needed.
The first mention of buses among her top advisers comes from Chief of Staff Andy Kopplin, who sends out a missive to many in the executive ranks. "We need you to find buses that can go to N.O. asap," Kopplin wrote.
In an e-mail, Kim Hunter Reed, Blanco's policy director, complained on the afternoon of August 31 that she needs to know where to send the needed assistance.
"I am getting these calls to (sic) and I have buses and water but can't get word on where and how to send," wrote Reed, who in a separate note that same day also said she needed direction from the Louisiana State Police and the American Red Cross.
In her timeline, Blanco noted that the news reports of violence escalating in New Orleans made it difficult to recruit bus drivers to take on the rescue missions.
According to the timeline, Blanco says she learns late Wednesday, Aug. 31, that "a number of the promised FEMA buses are finally crossing into N. Louisiana, 7 or 8 hours away from New Orleans."
The documents also reveal a sense of desperation on the governor's part. On Sept. 3, she penned a letter to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger asking for help. In it she requests police reinforcements and four helicopters.
The cache of documents contain what appear to be talking points drawn up for Blanco by her staff, possibly in anticipation of her testimony before congressional committees in the weeks after the storm.
Already on the defensive, the talking points can be seen as Blanco's first effort to turn public opinion about her performance her way.
"I requested massive federal assistance in letters to President Bush on Aug. 27 and Aug. 28 -- before the storm's landfall," she said in one. "I spoke with President Bush on Sunday (Aug. 28) and Monday (Aug. 29) and told him I needed everything he had. I believed FEMA officials who told me that every federal resource was at my disposal. I believed this meant every single available resource."
Later on in the talking points document, she responds to a hypothetical question about what she did wrong in response to Katrina.
"I believe my biggest mistake was believing FEMA officials who told me that the necessary federal resources would be available in a timely fashion," she said.”

No doubt about it. These incompetent public "servants" depend on luck rather than sound engineering principles and preventative measures.

We'll see what their explanation is when the next disaster comes and overwhelms their flimsy infrastructure that they built on the cheap.

"9:30 AM — MAYOR NAGIN ISSUES FIRST EVER MANDATORY EVACUATION OF NEW ORLEANS:
“We’re facing the storm most of us have feared,” said Nagin. “This is going to be an unprecedented event.”

Admittedly, I don't know the date when Nagin issued the evacuation, but it just occurred to me that Nagin's statement is false.

This was not an unprecedented event; in fact, hurricane Katrina passed New Orleans without doing the harm. To the contrary, as we all know, it was not the hurricane but the levees breaking that was the problem, and, if memory serves me, the Feds, the State of La, and the City of New Orleans all knew beforehand that the levees were at risk of breaching, and yet Nagin proclaims that the hurricane is unprecedented, but that is a lie, is it not?