That the Federal Emergency Management Agency failed when asked to respond to Katrina was obvious last summer to anyone with a working television. That the agency was told more than a year before the hurricane hit that it would fail “to manage the next ‘big one'” without substantial reform places the question of responsibility in a new light. As Congress continues to investigate this disaster, it is properly tracing back the causes of the failures along the Gulf Coast.

A June 2004 memo from federal coordinating officers – the agency’s on-the-ground disaster experts who lead emergency response teams – to FEMA Undersecretary Michael Brown begins by noting, “As you sensed, all is not well in Denmark!” It then lists 19 items in six areas that “present real obstacles to command, control and core mission accomplishment.” One of the federal coordinating officers who wrote the memo, William Carwile, testified last week before the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, chaired by Sen. Susan Collins.

The memo begins with reviewing a decision to have separate emergency response and recovery teams, noting that this “has caused an increasingly challenging issue for the connectivity of a ‘single incident’ response.” The core of the problem is that the coordinating officers serve under the recovery division and the emergency response teams they lead serve under the response division, creating bureaucratic slowdowns and miscommunications that frustrate everyone under the difficult circumstances of a crisis.

Perhaps even more important, those national response teams receive almost no training despite at least four budget requests submitted to FEMA officials over 18 months. Those requests were not even acknowledged, according to the memo. The result is that the teams – which include about 30 people each within FEMA who are scattered across the country – had no training, no team equipment and no practice working together.

One of these teams was sent to the Gulf region before Katrina, but with a confusing bureaucracy and a lack of training and equipment, is it any wonder it wasn’t effective? It’s worth noting that these flaws were created over the last few years – recovery and response were one division under the previous director, James Lee Witt, and training was better.

The Senate hearings will continue this week and into January; the House is holding a similar investigation. Both should continue beyond the immediate response to Katrina, back to the causes of the response and ahead to the slowly moving recovery effort that looks increasingly like a disaster of its own.

What has been revealed so far, however, is an agency that was weakened as a result of leadership and wasn’t prepared for a major disaster. Reconstruction will be extensive. It has already been costly.