Several states ready and willing to send National Guard troops to the rescue in New Orleans didn’t get the go-ahead until days after the storm struck — a delay nearly certain to be investigated by Congress.

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson offered Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco help from his state’s National Guard last Sunday, the day before Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana. Blanco accepted, but paperwork needed to get the troops en route didn’t come from Washington until late Thursday.

Nine stockpiles of fire-and-rescue equipment strategically placed around the country to be used in the event of a catastrophe still have not been pressed into service in New Orleans, five days after Hurricane Katrina, CNN has learned.

Responding to a CNN inquiry, Department of Homeland Security spokesman Marc Short said Friday the gear has not been moved because none of the governors in the hurricane-ravaged area has requested it.

The federal official in charge of the bungled New Orleans rescue was fired from his last private-sector job overseeing horse shows.

And before joining the Federal Emergency Management Agency as a deputy director in 2001, GOP activist Mike Brown had no significant experience that would have qualified him for the position.

The Oklahoman got the job through an old college friend who at the time was heading up FEMA.

The agency, run by Brown since 2003, is now at the center of a growing fury over the handling of the New Orleans disaster.

[...]

Brown - formerly an estates and family lawyer - this week has has made several shocking public admissions, including interviews where he suggested FEMA was unaware of the misery and desperation of refugees stranded at the New Orleans convention center.

Before joining the Bush administration in 2001, Brown spent 11 years as the commissioner of judges and stewards for the International Arabian Horse Association, a breeders’ and horse-show organization based in Colorado.

“We do disciplinary actions, certification of (show trial) judges. We hold classes to train people to become judges and stewards. And we keep records,” explained a spokeswoman for the IAHA commissioner’s office. “`This was his full-time job . . . for 11 years,” she added.

Brown was forced out of the position after a spate of lawsuits over alleged supervision failures.

“He was asked to resign,” Bill Pennington, president of the IAHA at the time, confirmed last night.

Soon after, Brown was invited to join the administration by his old Oklahoma college roommate Joseph Allbaugh, the previous head of FEMA until he quit in 2003 to work for the president’s re-election campaign.

Frustration about the federal response to Hurricane Katrina has reached Chicago City Hall, as Mayor Richard Daley today noted a tepid response by federal officials to the city’s offers of disaster aid.

The city is willing to send hundreds of personnel, including firefighters and police, and dozens of vehicles to assist on the storm-battered Gulf Coast, but so far the Federal Emergency Management Agency has requested only a single tank truck, Daley said.

“I was shocked,” he said.

“We are ready to provide considerably more help than they have requested,” the mayor said, barely able to contain his anger during a City Hall news conference. “We are just waiting for the call.”

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, once a powerful independent agency focused solely on responding to earthquakes, floods, hurricanes and other natural disasters that occur on average about four times a month, was placed within the huge Department of Homeland Security after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The Department of Homeland Security sends $1.1 billion each year to states to combat terrorism, but just $180 million to help prepare for disasters such as Katrina. Much of the terrorism grant money is given under conditions that specifically exclude spending it on items or personnel that would be used in responding to hazards other than terrorism.

Since 1995, the federal government has declared 562 major disasters. All were natural disasters except two terrorist attacks: Oklahoma City in 1995 and the 9-11 attacks.

The hearings and investigations will likely show that the disaster response expertise of FEMA was badly eroded once it became part of the terrorism-fighting bureaucracy of Homeland Security, state officials and some former FEMA officials said.

“There are no emergency managers at any level in the Department of Homeland Security. It’s all law enforcement,” said George Haddow, former FEMA deputy chief of staff. “It doesn’t look like anyone’s in charge to me because the system has been deconstructed.”

Three babies died at the New Orleans Convention Center from heat exhaustion, said Mark Kyle, a medical relief provider.

Another military official said that commanders had not been aware of the large and desperate concentration of people at the convention center until Wednesday, that the focus had been on evacuating the Superdome and conducting other emergency operations in the city.

“It had not perhaps been raised to our consciousness by the reports we had received,” Maj. Gen. Richard Rowe, the chief operations officer of the U.S. Northern Command, said in a phone interview.

[...]

As reports continued of famished and dehydrated people isolated across the Gulf Coast, angry questions were pressed about why the military has not been dropping food packets for them — as was done in Afghanistan, Bosnia and in the aftermath of the Asian tsunami.

Bill Wattenburg, a consultant for the University of California Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and one of the designers of the earlier food drop programs, said that he has lobbied the administration and the military to immediately begin something similar. He said he was told that the military was prepared to begin, but that it was awaiting a request from FEMA.

“We know very well how to do this, and it’s just incomprehensible that we’re not,” Wattenburg said.

“Saturday and Sunday, we thought it was a typical hurricane situation — not to say it wasn’t going to be bad, but that the water would drain away fairly quickly. Then the levees broke and (we had) this lawlessness. That almost stopped our efforts…Katrina was much larger than we expected.”

After years and years of warnings, this is simply inexcusable coming from the man in charge of the federal government’s emergecy response agency.

Sadly, this list is far from comprehensive. And it will most certainly grow longer.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 4th, 2005 at 8:51 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.