Miscommunication Cited in Katrina Response

ap on Yahoo ^ | 10/12/05 | Robert Burns - ap

[NormsRevenge]

WASHINGTON - The military's response to Hurricane Katrina was the largest and fastest in U.S. history, but it was hampered by an early disconnect with state and local authorities, a senior Pentagon official said Wednesday.

Paul McHale, the assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense, said the military should have learned more from its experience in previous natural disasters, including Hurricane Andrew in south Florida in 1992.

Communication with state and local authorities in Louisiana and Mississippi was so poor in the hours immediately after Katrina struck the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29 that military commanders had to use couriers to transmit messages, McHale said.

"Early situational awareness was poor, a problem that should have been corrected following identical damage assessment challenges during Hurricane Andrew," McHale said in a group interview with Pentagon reporters.

"Military command and control was workable, but not unified," he said. While National Guard planning was well executed, he said, it was not well integrated with the Pentagon's Joint Staff and Northern Command.

"We performed well, but we intend to get better," McHale said.

He said that Joint Task Force-Katrina, which was created to coordinate the federal military response in Louisiana and Mississippi, would have only about 250 active-duty personnel remaining by the end of this week. Later, U.S. Northern Command, which oversaw the military response, issued a statement saying the task force was shut down Wednesday.

Northern Command said Col. Tony Daskevich, who arrived in Louisiana on Aug. 27, two days before Katrina's landfall, will coordinate all further Defense Department relief effort there for as long as it is needed.

At its peak, the task force had 22,000 military personnel from all services, McHale said. They were in addition to as many as 50,000 National Guard troops that operated there under the state governors' command.

"With that drawdown toward the end of the week we recognize that the mission of Joint Task Force-Katrina is now approaching what we believe to be a successful conclusion," McHale said. The task force commander, Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, left the Gulf Coast on Tuesday to return to his normal headquarters at Fort Gillem, Ga., where he is commander of the 1st Army.

McHale denied that President Bush ever proposed to Gov. Kathleen Blanco of Louisiana or Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi that Honore take charge of all military forces in those states, including the National Guard. Instead, Bush proposed that Honore be "dual hatted," McHale said — putting Honore in direct charge of the federal troops while also having him command the National Guard troops under the direction of the governors.

Both governors resisted that approach. Honore ended up commanding only the federal troops, while the adjutant generals of Louisiana and Mississippi retained command of National Guard forces under the governor's control. McHale said this arrangement worked well.

[God luvs America]

so....will the MSM who created much of the anti-Bush hysteria with their poor performance now apologize??

Mike Brown looks better everyday....

[RichInOC]

Kind of hard to connect with somebody who doesn't even know which end to plug in.

[MNJohnnie]

Communication with state and local authorities in Louisiana and Mississippi was so poor in the hours immediately

Does AP even read what they write? Poor Communictions in a disaster zone? AH DUH!

[malia]

"so....will the MSM who created much of the anti-Bush hysteria with their poor performance now apologize?? "

No, why should they, we allowed the MSM to get President Bush right where they want him. Ratings in the low to mid 40's.

We only had about 1/4 of FoxNews and sometimes Joe Scarborough, MSNBC, that wasn't in the hysteria mode.

[Roux]

I work in Telecom in a hospital in Baton Rouge. Almost everything in the PSTN(public switched telephone network) failed. Although we never lost dial tone per se it was difficult to communicate outside our facility. Cell phones were useless and many pagers didn't work at all. We were able to communicate very well within the hospital but the outside world was a hit and miss kind of thing.

Once the PSTN and wireless networks came back on line they were saturated with calls. Remember every evacuee depended on their cell phones and the network isn't built for that amount of traffic. A lot of phone traffic was routed through NO, which was gone. The secondary routes just didn't have enough paths to handle the traffic.

Toll free(800) traffic is not allocated the paths that normal traffic has and the toll free calls wouldn't go through. It was a mess.

You have to give the carriers a hand they did a good job of coming back on line after the storm. I learned not to depend on anything I don't have complete control over.