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White House Katrina Study Blames Government
Posted by Pile
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[Beating Dead Horses]
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 The results are in, and after tons more money spent on another report to asses what went wrong with the Katrina disaster, the obvious answer appears again, that FEMA and the Dept. of Homeland Security screwed up. Even the administration's own report reveals it.
Major departments across the U.S. government must assume significantly greater responsibility in future catastrophes, because the flawed response to Hurricane Katrina demonstrated that the United States relies too much on insufficient and not always well-managed resources of the Department of Homeland Security, a White House study has concluded. |
The report, released Thursday by Frances Fragos Townsend, the homeland security adviser to President George W. Bush, calls for greater roles in planning for and responding to major natural disasters or terrorist attacks for the Departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development and Justice.
Bush, at the end of a cabinet meeting Thursday at which the report was released, said that he "wasn't satisfied with the federal response" and that the government would "learn from the lessons of the past to better protect the American people."
Some of the most fundamental changes proposed in the report would be in immediate response to a catastrophe, distribution of emergency aid to victims and identification of housing for those who lose their homes.
The U.S. government did not sufficiently recognize that there are certain types of disasters, like Hurricane Katrina, in which local and state governments will be so overwhelmed that they will largely be unable to help themselves, the report said.
The report recommends a more active role in handling major disasters for the Department of Defense, as had already been proposed by Bush and by Michael Chertoff, chief of Homeland Security. Defense forces would lead the national response to help accelerate search and rescue missions, evacuation and the delivery of supplies.
The report does not give details on how such changes might be made. It suggests only that the Departments of Homeland Security and Defense study the matter and come up with a plan.
But the report does offer examples of incidents that would justify such steps, including a nuclear attack or "multiple simultaneous terrorist attacks causing a breakdown in civil society."
The National Guard, used frequently to help relieve Department of Defense troops, should revise its mission to be prepared to respond to domestic disasters, the report recommends.
"Reserve components historically have focused on military and war fighting missions, which will continue," the report states. "However, we should recognize that the reserve components are too valuable a skilled and available resource at home not to be ready to incorporate them in any federal response planning and effort."
The Department of Justice, the report states, must be prepared to step in more quickly and decisively after a major disaster with national law enforcement officers to help prevent lawlessness like that in New Orleans after Katrina.
In response to the frustration over the way the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a division of Homeland Security, handled distribution of emergency aid to victims after Katrina, the report Thursday recommended that the Department of Health and Human Services be charged with creating a "robust, comprehensive and integrated system" to deliver national and state assistance "in a simple and seamless manner."
This aid might range from immediate cash assistance to emergency shelter.
Health and Human Services, the report says, also should resume control of the National Disaster Medical System, a network of medical response teams that was given to Homeland Security after it was set up in 2003, a transfer that the report says in retrospect was a mistake.
"Public health professionals and emergency medical responses should be managed and overseen by HHS, which has the greatest health experience and expertise," the report says.
Housing and Urban Development, which has played an extremely limited role in the response to Katrina, even though it represented one of the largest displacements of people in American history, would in future disasters be the lead agency to arrange for temporary housing. FEMA, in its Katrina effort, has been widely criticized for the way it handled the job, including the slow installation of travel trailers and mobile homes and the excessive reliance upon expensive hotel rooms, instead of empty apartments that were available throughout the South.
The report calls for a fundamental change in this housing policy.
"While there will always be a need for some victims to remain on their property while rebuilding their homes, the provision of trailers should not be the default means of temporary housing offered to all evacuees," it says. |
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| Posted by wizeGurl on 2006-02-24 11:20:25 | Let me get this straight--the agency in charge of responding to disasters (FEMA) does a crappy job due to "insufficient and not always well-managed resources of the Department of Homeland Security," and the solution is NOT to provide more resources and better management? Maybe make it no longer the ignored stepchild of the Department of Homeland Security?
So now, instead of having one agency charged with responding to disasters, the vast majority of tasks will be taken care of by other agencies with other priorities--Housing will take care of temporary housing, Health will take care of medical needs. Basically, instead of disaster response being the charge of ONE poorly-run, underfunded agency that could be fixed with better funding and competent managers, it can become the charge of a DOZEN poorly-run, underfunded agencies for whom helping in disasters is not their number-one goal. |
| Posted by damn wilcox on 2006-02-24 17:42:46 | well govn't only knows one answer : more govn't. Majority rule is a one trick pony tends toward the principle of 'if force isn't working; then you're not using enough'. And look at where's its taken our foreign policy, drug prohibition and govn't media control: we're obviously in a good place, so the only answer is to put more things under govn't control. LOL
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Guns solve problems
Posted by Stan A on 2006-02-25 10:07:25 | | It seems to be the mantra of the conservatives: guns solve problems. Let's militarize FEMA as a solution. It's hard to argue with a guy when he's carrying an M16 and that Marshall law stuff is pretty cool from the government's perspective. |
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