UNWINDING A STORM

At a Senate hearing yesterday on the aftermath of Katrina and who was responsible for the miserable failure of governments on several levels to respond, former FEMA Director Michael Brown more or less cleared the air, though not so much to his own benefit. His responses suggest both systemic and personal shortcomings that resulted in loss of life and a city that is far from recovered.

The Senate committee, chaired by Sen. Susan Collins, focused on Aug. 29, 2005, the day the New Orleans levees broke. The questions were straightforward: How is it that the Homeland Security operations center and the White House did not respond faster? Why were television viewers seemingly more aware of the breach than the nation’s top officials? Once everyone knew, why was the response so slow?

Mr. Brown, now a private citizen and able to speak bluntly, did so before the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. He said he had informed the president, either directly or through top assistants, early on. Assistants to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff were part of several conference calls detailing the deteriorating situation from the morning the levees broke. Top administrators, he strongly asserted, knew what was happening.

Federal officials may have known, but Mr. Brown also chafed at working through the chain of command. He apparently insisted that his agency could handle the problem. He never called Mr. Chertoff directly to tell him of the severity of the problem because he didn’t think it would do any good. Recalling an earlier emergency in Florida, he praised former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge because “he left me alone.”

There is arrogance in all of this, the assumption that because he did not like the bureaucratic arrangement within Homeland Security, he could ignore it. He did so at the peril of New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf region. The Federal Emergency Management Agency was not able to carry out the cycle of preparedness, response, recovery and mitigation, a condition the Senate committee saw for itself when it held hearings in the region last month.

One of the reasons for this was identified in a June 2004 memo from federal coordinating officers – the agency’s on-the-ground disaster experts who lead emergency response teams – who questioned a decision to have separate emergency response and recovery teams. They noted 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 slowdowns and miscommunications that frustrate everyone under the difficult circumstances of a crisis. A second key issue was a lack of training.

But as the committee heard Friday, these systemic problems were made much worse by an agency leader who did not like the system and would not operate within it. The result remains apparent.