if I had to sum up the story it would be one of overwhelmed and often frantic local officials asking for every sort of assistance available from federal authorities, but sometimes not being completely sure precisely what they needed or the exact way to ask for it. On the other side you have the feds taking a consciously passive, reactive stance, and often displaying an oddly legalistic and bean-counterish attitude when asked for specific kinds of support. [...]As we watch the Bush/Rove effort to deflect blame from the federal government - FEMA debacle to state and local officials, we need to recall this. This was the largest disaster ever to hit the United States. Local governments were quickly overwhelmed, state officials, especially in Louisiana were similarly facing more than they had ever anticipated.
Reading those passages of the article, there's one conclusion I think any fair-minded person would have to come to. And that is that in the four years to the day since 9/11, the administration appears to have done little if any effective planning for how to mobilize a national response to a catastrophic event on American soil.
And given all the history that has passed before us over these last four years, that verdict is devastating.
It was the responsibility of FEMA to plan for the use of all resources, to preposition federal resources as soon as they knew the disaster was going to happen in New Orleans and the Eastern Gulf Coast, then coordinate to operations of all agencies in the disaster response.
This was a lot larger than 9/11, but supposedly the federal government has taken the four years since then to prepare for dealing with such disasters, and this was the single most anticipated disaster ever to hit the U.S. The federal government and specifically the Bush administration failed completely to respond adequately, and a lot of people died unnecessarily.
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