Via this New York Times story, we get this priceless quote:
As New Orleans descended into chaos last week and Louisiana's governor asked for 40,000 soldiers, President Bush's senior advisers debated whether the president should speed the arrival of active-duty troops by seizing control of the hurricane relief mission from the governor.
(Snip)
The debate began after officials realized that Hurricane Katrina had exposed a critical flaw in the national disaster response plans created after the Sept. 11 attacks. According to the administration's senior domestic security officials, the plan failed to recognize that local police, fire and medical personnel might be incapacitated. (emphasis added)
Yup, that's right: four years after September 11th, a decade or so after terrorism became something the goverment actively worried about, and a century after hurricanes and other natural disasters showed they were capable of wiping entire towns off the map - after all that, the Homeland Security and FEMA planners "failed to recognize" that the local first-responders might themselves be incapacitated by the storm/terrorist attack/earthquake/whatever.
That's, to use a phrase I like, "dumber than a crate of anvils." I'm not sure I'd trust these people to go grocery shopping if they had a pre-printed list (in triplicate), a cell phone, a bag of cash, a car full of gas, and a mission statement.
(Oh, the NYT article is worth reading. It's main focus really isn't on the awesome idiocy of the paragraph I quoted, but mainly talks about the political debate between Gov. Blanco and Pres. Bush about what legal status any federal (active duty troops, mostly) would have if they responded. The overall point is that Bush and his advisors debated what was legal, what wasn't, and how to skirt the line in order to get help there quickly. What's odd is that this administration, not known for worrying about legal niceties, worried about them now. Very strange. It is also clear that Gov. Blanco and FEMA/Bush/the Pentagon weren't on the same page at all.)
I'll have a much larger Katrina post later, but this really jumped out at me.
Posted by baltar at September 9, 2005 09:48 AM | TrackBack | Posted to Natural Disasters