The Best of Humanity, the Worst of Response

The Gulf storm has resulted in a much needed outpouring of money, services, and material. From a child's sidewalk lemonade stand, to TV telethons, it feels like the whole of the nation (and major portions of the world) have stopped to help out. Everyone is focused on trying to turn around a tragedy.

Unfortunately, closer to the event, the same could not be said.

In many cases, resources that were available were not used, whether Amtrak trains that could have taken evacuees to safety before the storm or the U.S. military's 82nd Airborne division, which spent days on standby waiting for orders that never came. Communications were so impossible the Army Corps of Engineers was unable to inform the rest of the government for crucial hours that levees in New Orleans had been breached.

Mistakes were made in so many areas that it is mind numbing. In the end the failure has to laid at the door for Homeland Security and FEMA.

Instead, confusion reigned at every level of officialdom, according to dozens of interviews with participants in Louisiana, Mississippi and Washington. "No one had access. . . . No one had communication. . . . Nobody knew where the people were," recalled Secretary of Health and Human Services Mike Leavitt, whose department did not declare the Gulf Coast a public health emergency until two days after the storm.

Communications and coordination seemed to keep coming up as major issues, and both of those area areas where the federal government is suppose to take charge. For some reason FEMA just never got started.

But as the headquarters staff came in, there was a strange sense of inaction, as if "nobody's turning the key to start the engine," said one team leader, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. For his group, Friday was a day to sit around wondering, "Why aren't we treating this as a bigger emergency? Why aren't we doing anything?"

President Bush did make the emergence declaration early, as requested, but it appears that communications issues may have impacted even here.

The president was told the evacuation was proceeding as planned for New Orleans, according to a senior White House official, and that 11,000 National Guard troops would end up in a position to respond. But Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, chief of the Guard, said there were only about 5,100 members on duty in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama before landfall.

There is a huge difference in available guard members and it reminds us that many of the guard members were not home to help in this emergency, but in Iraq involved in an unnecessary war.

Around midnight, at the last of the day's many conference calls, local officials ticked off their final requests for FEMA and the state. Maestri specifically asked for medical units, mortuary units, ice, water, power and National Guard troops.

"We laid it all out," he recalled. "And then we sat here for five days waiting. Nothing!"

Here is the heart of the failure - the slow to nonexistent response. The local leaders expected to see and were told to expect a response from the federals in 24 to 48 hours after the event. Days later the support and supplies they had were requested, and were promised, were nowhere to be found.

Heck, in one Parish the first troops arrives on Sunday after the storm, the FEMA representative arrived on Monday, both were greeted by a Canadian search and rescue team that had already been working in that Parish for days. Our official emergency forces take a week to arrive, while a Canadian crew is there in hours.

And again Iraq comes into play.

The federal disaster response plan hinges on transportation and communication, but National Guard officials in Louisiana and Mississippi had no contingency plan if they were disrupted; they had only one satellite phone for the entire Mississippi coast, because the others were in Iraq.

But the list of FEMA mistakes just gets longer and longer.

Maj. Gen. Richard Rowe, Northcom's top operations officer, recalled. "We knew that it would be among the worst storms ever to hit the United States." But on Monday, the only request the U.S. military received from FEMA was for a half-dozen helicopters.


Col. Jeff Smith, Louisiana's emergency preparedness chief, grew frustrated at FEMA's inability to send buses to move people out. "We'd call and say: 'Where are the buses?' " he recalled, shaking his head. "They have a tracking system and they'd say: 'We sent 349.' But we didn't see them."


William Lokey, FEMA's coordinator on the ground, declared that morning: "I don't want to alarm everybody that New Orleans is filling up like a bowl. That is just not happening."


At the noon videoconference, several participants said, Louisiana's Smith heatedly demanded federal help. Where were the buses? At first, Smith recalled, he had asked for 450 buses, then 150 more, then an additional 500; by the end of the day, none had arrived.


In Jefferson Parish, Maestri sent out an urgent call that morning for power packs in hopes of rescuing his county's faltering sewage system. "In (Hurricane) Pam, they had said they'd have those ready on pallets so they could airlift them in, no problem," he later recalled. "It's 11 days later, and I still don't have them.

The result of this failed response was clear to see.

"As systems either were not followed or broke down, people just went to what they believed they could handle. Every man for himself," said Ghilarducci, Blanco's adviser. "You don't use the system, you don't use resources effectively and it breaks down."