Repug report on Katrina blasts Bush

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By Eric Lipton The New York Times
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2006
WASHINGTON Republicans in the House of Representatives plan to issue a blistering report Wednesday that says the Bush administration delayed the evacuation of thousands of New Orleans residents by failing to act quickly on early reports that the levees had broken during Hurricane Katrina.

A draft of the report, to be issued by an 11-member, all-Republican committee, says the Bush administration was informed on the day Hurricane Katrina hit that the levees had been breached, even though the president and other top administration officials earlier said they had learned of the breach the next day.

That delay was significant, the report says, rejecting the defense given by the White House and the Department of Homeland Security that the time it took to recognize the breach did not significantly affect the response.

"If the levees breached and flooded a large portion of the city, then the flooded city would have to be completely evacuated," the draft report says. "Any delay in confirming the breaches would result in a delay in the post-landfall evacuation of the city."

It adds that the White House itself discounted damage reports that later proved true.

The report, by the select House committee examining the government's response to the hurricane, is the first of three major investigations into the subject; the others, for which reports are expected in one or two months, are being conducted by a Senate committee and by the White House.

The House report blames all levels of government, from the White House to Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana to Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans, for the delayed response to the storm. "Our investigation revealed that Katrina was a national failure, an abdication of the most solemn obligation to provide for the common welfare," the draft says. "At every level - individual, corporate, philanthropic and governmental - we failed to meet the challenge that was Katrina."

A White House spokesman said President George W. Bush was now focused on the future, not the past. A homeland security spokesman said Michael Brown, the former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, was partly to blame for failing to make timely reports to his superiors.

The response to Katrina and its aftermath, in which about 1,400 people died along the Gulf Coast, raises troubling questions about the United States' ability to react to other threats to domestic security, the draft report says.

"If this is what happens when we have advance warning, we shudder to imagine the consequences when we do not," the draft says, referring to the potential for a terror attack.

Democrats declined to appoint members to the committee, raising concerns that the group would produce a whitewash, though several House Democrats participated in committee discussions.

"It remains difficult," the report says, "to understand how government could respond so ineffectively to a disaster that was anticipated for years, and for which specific dire warnings had been issued for days. This crisis was not only predictable, it was predicted."

The homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, and Bush's own staff of White House domestic security advisers, drew some of the most scathing criticism in the report, some of the contents of which were first reported Sunday in The Washington Post.

Chertoff, the draft report says, should have moved two days before Katrina hit - when the National Weather Service issued dire predictions about the storm - to set up a special interagency leadership team to ensure that emergency supplies and rescue squads would be in place before the storm.

These critical prestorm mistakes were only compounded, the draft report says, when the department failed another vital challenge: to determine rapidly whether the storm had breached a major levee.

A staff member from the department's Federal Emergency Management Agency who was on the ground in New Orleans learned on Monday morning, Aug. 29, the day the storm hit, that a major section of the 17th Street Canal levee had collapsed.

But the House investigators were told by Kenneth Rapuano, the deputy assistant to the president on homeland security, that the administration did not immediately act on the report because it had other dispatches suggesting that such a breach might not have occurred.

"Because the HSOC failed to confirm the levee breaches on Monday," the draft says, referring to the Homeland Security Operations Center, the first federal decision to line up buses needed to evacuate the city was not made until Tuesday, when the federal disaster relief worker in New Orleans "saw the water reaching the Superdome and realized it would become an island."

The White House declined to provide copies of e-mail messages or other correspondence by senior advisers to the president, limiting the House investigators' ability to understand fully the White House's role in the response, the report says. But with the information the committee collected, it says, it is clear that the president's office is also to blame.

"The White House failed to de-conflict varying damage assessments and discounted information that ultimately proved accurate," the draft says.

[ourmaninBusan]

♫ And the walls...came-a tumblin' down
and the walls...came-a tumblin' down
And the walls...came-a tum-bel-in
Dooooowwwwwwwwwwnnnn...♪♪

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