News Intelligence Analysis
From the New York Times
September 4, 2005
Homeland Security Chief Defends
Federal Response
By ERIC LIPTON and SCOTT SHANE
WASHINGTON, Sept. 3 - Michael Chertoff, secretary of the Department
of Homeland Security, gave his most detailed explanation to date
for the troubled federal response to Hurricane Katrina on Saturday,
saying the storm was particularly unpredictable and that the
government had not expected large sections of the levees protecting
New Orleans to fail.
Mr. Chertoff also expressed confidence in Michael D. Brown, a Homeland Security undersecretary and the Federal Emergency Management Agency director, who has coordinated federal efforts at the scene.
Mr. Brown has come under fire from critics of the federal government's hurricane response, who describe him as a political appointee who had no disaster experience before joining FEMA.
Though he once worked as a municipal official in Edmond, Okla., Mr. Brown's major previous job was as commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association, from which he resigned under pressure in 2001 after a controversial 10 years.
Speaking at a press briefing here, Mr. Chertoff said planners had anticipated that water would rise above the levees containing Lake Pontchartrain, but that the levees would not be breached.
"We didn't merely have the overflow," he said. "We actually had the break in the wall. And I will tell you that really that perfect storm of combination of catastrophes exceeded the foresight of the planners and maybe anybody's foresight."
The domestic security chief said the probability that the storm would hit New Orleans increased last Saturday, giving relatively little time to prepare before it made landfall on Monday.
"The way these catastrophes unfolded is unprecedented in anybody's experience," he said, comparing the disaster at one point to the dropping of an atomic bomb.
"Nature was unhelpful" in terms of giving sufficient warning, he said.
He said the experience with the hurricane had persuaded him to "break the traditional model" for disaster response, in which the federal government offers "merely a support role."
Asked whether Mr. Brown should be dismissed, Mr. Chertoff said, "I do have confidence in the FEMA director, and I have confidence in the people who are working tirelessly for him."
But emergency management experts were skeptical of the explanations. One of them, Jerome M. Hauer, a former top emergency management official for New York City and the Department of Health and Human Services, said, "In a city like New Orleans, where they had been talking for some time about the levee system not holding, why did they not expect the possibility of a levee break?"
Mr. Hauer said, "At the end of the day, FEMA was not ready for this."
Mr. Chertoff and Mr. Brown have borne the brunt of criticism of delays and confusion in the federal effort in New Orleans.
Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the top Democrat on the Homeland Security Committee, called on President Bush on Friday to dismiss one or both of them.
Instead, Mr. Bush publicly praised Mr. Brown on Friday, saying he had done "a heck of a job."
Mr. Hauer said FEMA was "struggling," in part because of Mr. Brown's lack of experience.
"Every time we have had a FEMA director who has come out of a political environment rather than an emergency environment, FEMA has struggled," he said. Mr. Brown, a lawyer who is active in the Oklahoma Republican Party, was brought to the emergency management agency as general counsel by President Bush's first FEMA director, Joe M. Allbaugh, who ran Mr. Bush's 2000 presidential campaign.
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