WASHINGTON (AP) -- Federal officials concerned about the slow response to Hurricane Katrina are looking at new ways to organize front-line emergency workers during catastrophes, including possibly using federal troops for law enforcement.
Talk of the changes comes less than a year after the Homeland Security Department issued a national response plan that puts local and state authorities in charge of a disaster's immediate aftermath.
''Our current system is inadequate for a catastrophe of this magnitude,'' Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, chairwoman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee said Thursday of Katrina. ''This has simply overwhelmed local, state and federal systems. We need a new approach when we're confronted with a natural disaster or, I would say, a terrorist attack that has these kinds of consequences.''
Part of the debate concerns whether local first responders - police, firefighters and paramedics - can answer the call of duty if they also are victims of a catastrophe. Seventy percent of Coast Guard personnel in the Gulf Coast region, for example, lost their own homes as a result of the storm, Collins said.
Possible changes range from staffing regional backup teams immediately outside a disaster area before it hits to designating federal forces as primary responders.
Collins and Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., said they also would consider ways to temporarily ease the Posse Comitatus Act's prohibition on military forces carrying out law enforcement missions.
Local authorities agreed that emergency responders need immediate backup support when faced with Katrina-sized calamities. But they questioned whether the federal government should assume front-line response missions given the Bush administration's tardy response to the hurricane and subsequent flooding.
''We should not try to make the federal government our first responders,'' said Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley, a Democrat who chairs the U.S. Conference of Mayors task force on homeland security. ''But when a disaster of the size of this hurricane hits, we should have better mechanisms in place that allow our federal government to restore order and provide relief.''
In January, Homeland Security issued a national response plan requiring the federal government to intervene only in national emergencies that exceed state and local capabilities. At the time, Homeland Security took pains to describe the standards as a ''national'' plan instead of a ''federal'' plan to assuage state and local fears of a Washington takeover of first responder missions.
Generally, states ask for federal assistance, said Paul Davis of the First Responder Institute in Maryland. But considering Katrina, ''the traditional model may need to be modified,'' Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said.
The Pentagon's chief homeland security adviser said first responder roles may not be the best use of military troops. But he blamed the current system for a two- to three-day delay in a government-wide hurricane response.
Not enough of the first responder capability that existed before Katrina came ashore survived the devastation, Assistant Defense Secretary Paul McHale said in an interview this week. ''This may well have been a very painful disclosure of a gap in our capability that we must now correct to deal with not only natural disasters, but with terrorist attacks that may be even larger in scope.''
