„Katrina might have been avoided”
WASHINGTON - The deaths and suffering of thousands of Hurricane Katrina’s victims might have been avoided if the government had heeded lessons from the 2001 terror attacks and taken a proactive stance toward disaster preparedness, a House inquiry concludes.
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Last Wednesday, a 520 page report, titled ”A Failure of Initiative”, was being released as Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff testifies before a Senate committee conducting a separate investigation of the government’s Katrina response.
„The preparation for and response to Hurricane Katrina should disturb all Americans”, said the report, written by a Republican dominated special House committee chaired by Republican Tom Davis. „Passivity did the most damage”, it said. „The failure of initiative cost lives, prolonged suffering, and left all Americans justifiably concerned our government is no better prepared to protect its people than it was before 9/11, even if we are.”
The hard hitting findings allocated blame to state and local authorities and concluded that the federal government’s single largest failure was in not recognizing Katrina’s likely consequences as it approached. That could have prompted a mobilization of federal assets for a post storm evacuation of a flooded New Orleans, the report said, meaning aid „would have arrived several days earlier.”
It also found that Bush could have speeded the response by becoming involved in the crisis earlier and says he was not receiving guidance from a disaster specialist who would have understood the scope of the storm’s destruction. „Earlier presidential involvement might have resulted in a more effective response”, the inquiry concluded.
The inquiry into one of the nation’s worst natural disasters looked at everything from the evacuation to the military’s role to planning for emergency supplies and in each category found much to criticize. The House study is the first to be completed in a series of inquiries by Congress and the Bush administration into the massive falures exposed by Katrina.Katrina left more than 1,300 people dead in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, hundreds of thousands homeless and tens of billions of dollars worth of damage. Bush has accepted responsibility for the federal government’s shortfalls, but the storm response continues to generate finger pointing.
In a 59 page response, Republicans Charlie Melancon and William Jefferson of Louisiana said that while they largely agreed with its conclusions, the report falls short of holding „anyone accountable for these failures.” Despite its accomplishments, the committee „adopted an approach that largely eschews direct accountability”, Melancon and Jefferson said in their assessment.
The House panel spent five months investigating the failures. It interviewed scores of federal, state and local authorities, sorted through more than 500,000 pages of e mails, memos and other documents and held nine public hearings spotlighting sometimes feeble explanations by officials.Though some Democrats -mostly representing Gulf Coast districts- participated in the House inquiry, their party leaders boycotted it, holding out for an independent commission similar to the one that investigated the September 11, 2001, attacks. (World)
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