The federal government so far has been slow in helping the hungry, thirsty and desperate victims of Hurricane Katrina, former top federal, state and local disaster chiefs said yesterday.
The experts, including a former Bush administration disaster-response manager, said that the government was not prepared, had scrimped on storm spending, and had shifted its attention from dealing with natural disasters to the global fight against terrorism.
The agency at the center of the relief effort is the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is now part of the Department of Homeland Security.
"What you're seeing is revealing weaknesses in the state, local and federal levels," said Eric Tolbert, who until February was FEMA's chief of disaster response. "All three levels have been weakened. They've been weakened by diversion into terrorism."
In interviews yesterday, several men and women who have led relief efforts after killer hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes over the years chastised current disaster leaders, saying they were not prepared.
Bush administration officials said they were proud of their efforts. "We are extremely pleased with the response of every element of the federal government," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said during a news conference yesterday in Washington.
The agency has more than 1,700 truckloads of water, meals, tents, generators and other supplies ready to go in, Chertoff said. Federal health officials have started setting up at least 40 medical shelters. The Coast Guard reports rescuing more than 1,200 people.
But residents, especially in Biloxi, Miss., said they were not seeing the promised help, and reporters along the Gulf Coast said they saw little visible federal relief efforts, other than search-and-rescue teams. Some help started arriving yesterday by the truckloads, but not everywhere.
"We're not getting any help yet," said Joe Boney, battalion chief of the Biloxi Fire Department. "We need water. We need ice. I've been told it's coming, but we've got people in shelters who haven't had a drink since the storm."
The slow response to Katrina and poor federal leadership is a replay of 1992's mishandling of Hurricane Andrew, said former FEMA chief of staff Jane Bullock, a 22-year veteran of the agency.
Bullock blamed inexperienced federal leadership. She noted that neither Chertoff nor FEMA director Michael Brown had disaster experience before they were appointed to their jobs.
Budget cuts have not made disaster preparedness any easier.
Last year, FEMA spent $250,000 to conduct an eight-day hurricane drill for a mock killer storm hitting New Orleans. About 250 emergency officials attended. Many of the scenarios now playing out, including a helicopter evacuation of the Superdome, were discussed in that drill for a fictional storm named Pam.
This year, the group was to design a plan to fix such unresolved problems as evacuating sick and injured people from the Superdome and housing tens of thousands of stranded citizens.
Funding for that planning was cut, said Tolbert, the former FEMA disaster response director.
"A lot of good was done, but it just wasn't finished," said Tolbert, who was the disaster chief for the state of North Carolina. "I don't know if it would have saved more lives. It would have made the response faster. You might say it would have saved lives."
FEMA was not alone in cutting hurricane spending in New Orleans and the surrounding area.
Federal flood control spending for southeastern Louisiana has been chopped from $69 million in 2001 to $36.5 million in 2005, according to budget documents. Federal hurricane protection for the Lake Pontchartrain vicinity in the Corps of Engineers' budget dropped from $14.25 million in 2002 to $5.7 million this year.
Both the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper and a local business magazine reported that the effects of the budget cuts at the Corps were severe.
In 2004, the Corps essentially stopped major work on the now-breached levee system that had protected New Orleans from flooding. It was the first such stoppage in 37 years, the Times-Picayune reported.
"It appears that the money has been moved in the President's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay," the Jefferson Parish emergency management chief, Walter Maestri, told the newspaper.
The Corps' New Orleans office, facing a $71 million cut, also eliminated funds to pay for a study on how to protect the Crescent City from a Category 5 storm, New Orleans City Business reported in June.
Being prepared for a disaster is basic emergency management, disaster experts say.
For example, in the 1990s, in planning for a New Orleans nightmare scenario, the federal government figured it would pre-deploy nearby ships with pumps to remove water from the below-sea-level city and have hospital ships nearby, said James Lee Witt, who was FEMA director under President Bill Clinton.
Federal officials said a hospital ship would leave from Baltimore tomorrow.
"These things need to be planned and prepared for; it just doesn't look like it was," said Witt, a former Arkansas disaster chief who won bipartisan praise on Capitol Hill during his tenure.
A FEMA spokesman, James McIntyre, blamed the devastation in the region for slowing down relief efforts.
Roads were washed out and relief trucks were stopped by state police trying to keep people out of hazardous areas, he said.
Distributed by the Associated Press
