Posted on 02/15/2006 11:42:39 AM PST by Cboldt
WASHINGTON -- A chastised Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff sparred with senators of both parties on Wednesday as he acknowledged "many lapses" in his agency's response to Hurricane Katrina.
Chertoff told the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs that he would do things differently if he had the chance. One thing he would not do: give overall responsibility for the relief effort to Michael Brown, who was director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency at the time. ...
"It is completely correct to say that our logistics capability in Katrina was woefully inadequate. I was astonished to see we didn't have the capability most 21st century corporations have to track the flow of goods and services," Chertoff said, promising remedies by the start of the 2006 hurricane season in June. ...
Committee Chairwoman Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said his agency's performance "must be judged a failure." She called it "late, uncertain and ineffective." ...
Under Chertoff's oversight, disaster workers "ran around like Keystone cops, uncertain about what they were supposed to do or uncertain how to do it," Lieberman said. ...
(Excerpt) Read more at courant.com ...
will he do anything differently to secure the borders?
What a chump. I'd do absolutely everything exactly the same way I originally did it. Including that time I picked a fight with that kid outside the karate school.
Owl_Eagle(If what I just wrote makes you sad or angry,
He is only following orders.
I would do a couple of things differently:
2 Husbands that turned out to be total losers to start with.
Would he insist that City of NO and State if LA are responsible for evacuation and they'd best be crackin'.
He is a typical career government hack. Nothing more.
Select Bipartisan Committee to
Investigate the Preparation for and
Response to Hurricane Katrina
http://katrina.house.gov/ <- Click Here for Committee Site
A Failure of Initiative: Main Report <- 6.4 Mb PDF
A Failure of Initiative: Appendices <- 3.6 Mb PDF
Chertoff comported himself extremely well in front of the bloviators who are still at it as we post.
Caution. This is the reporter who is married to the MoveOn.org dude and is about as biased as you can get.
It would be nice if he'd assign a staffer to check the FR hurricane threads at least once a day. All of us on FR knew Katrina was spinning up to Cat5 status and that she was headed right for NO- and that was Friday evening.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff listens as he is questioned by Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., at the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2006, on Capitol Hill in Washington. The Republican and Democratic leaders of a Senate committee chastized Chertoff on Wednesday as a congressional inquiry found that thousands of Hurricane Katrina's victims could have been spared though better planning and faster action. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
I thought the Able Danger report was due yesterday...didn't hear anything - imagine that!
Representaive Weldon is having hearings on that today. I don't know of a public report. There's a pretty lively thread on the hearings (broadcast on radio it seems), and it would be great to find a transcript at some point.
From Instapundit.
POPULAR MECHANICS has been doing Katrina followup for months, and now they're saying that recently obtained documents cast serious doubt on some of the findings of the House report. Excerpt:
We've given the report an initial read and found it riddled with poor logic, internal contradictions and exaggerations. . . .
For now, though, here’s a quick overview of what seems to be the report’s most troubling shortfall: consistently blaming individuals for failing to foresee circumstances that only became clear with the laser-sharp vision of hindsight.
For example, the report states:
"Fifty-six hours prior to landfall, Hurricane Katrina presented an extremely high probability threat that 75 percent of New Orleans would be flooded, tens of thousands of residents may be killed, hundreds of thousands trapped in flood waters up to 20 feet, hundreds of thousands of homes and other structures destroyed, a million people evacuated from their homes, and the greater New Orleans area would be rendered uninhabitable for several months or years."
This statistic is referred to often, and refers to computer modeling of a direct Category 5 hurricane landfall in New Orleans. However, it's also a distortion. According to the data the Committee itself examined, 56 hours prior to landfall, Katrina was a relatively weak Category 3 storm, heading west in the Gulf of Mexico. Over the next few hours, it began its turn north, but where the storm was going to make landfall along the Gulf Coast was any weatherman's bet (the average 48-hour margin of error is 160 miles). In fact, it was not until the next day, Saturday, that it became more of a certainty that the hurricane was heading toward New Orleans. Furthermore, hurricane forecasters and emergency managers tell PM that until about 24 hours before landfall, hurricanes are too unpredictable to warrant the sort of blanket evacuation orders the report describes.
And according to transcripts obtained by POPULAR MECHANICS of the Sunday, August 28, videoconference between FEMA, DHS, Gulf State authorities, the National Weather Service and the White House, as late as Sunday—only 24 hours before landfall—National Hurricane Center storm tracks predicted: "There will be minimal flooding in the city of New Orleans itself." The death tolls listed in the congressional report presuppose: A) certainty that the storm would hit New Orleans directly, and B) certainty the storm would strengthen to a Category 4 or 5. Neither of these propositions was certain 56 hours prior to landfall. And, in fact, the hurricane was a Category 3 storm when it did hit.
The Committee report also criticizes the DHS and FEMA for not including the Department of Defense in their pre-storm and immediate post-storm planning. However, the same August 28 transcript shows that DoD was included from the beginning. In reality, despite organizational shortcomings, the rescue spearheaded by the National Guard and the Coast Guard turned out to be the largest and fastest in U.S. history, mobilizing nearly 100,000 responders within three days of the hurricane’s landfall. While each of the 1072 deaths in Louisiana was a tragedy, the worst-case scenario death toll would have been 60,000.
Read the whole thing, and stay tuned for more.
Chertoff should tell these political hacks to shove the report up the Katrina. Thousands of lives were saved by Homeland Security.
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