Michelle Malkin has images of the email exchanges between FEMA headquarters and FEMA agents on the ground in New Orleans, as Hurricane Katrina wrecked havoc in New Orleans. Go read them now.
Overall they paint a rather grim picture for FEMA, providing direct evidence that FEMA had agents in the field before and during the flood who kept in constant contact with headquarters and who gave them hourly reports on the dire situation in the city and in the Superdome. They also reveal that the FEMA PR team was more concerned with providing FEMA director Michael Brown with a cozy restaurant meal and a coast-to-coast TV interview than with getting him to New Orleans to personally manage the disaster response.
But was the New Orleans debacle all Michael Brown's fault? His online resume states,
... Brown has led Homeland Security’s response to more than 164 presidentially declared disasters and emergencies, including the 2003 Columbia Shuttle disaster and the California wildfires in 2003. In 2004, Mr. Brown led FEMA’s thousands of dedicated disaster workers during the most active hurricane season in over 100 years, as FEMA delivered aid more quickly and more efficiently than ever before.
And that's a valid point that no one brings up. Brown supervised the Federal responses to hundreds of declared disasters, and none of them dissolved into the swamp of utter incompetence that we saw in New Orleans. In fact, I'd be willing to bet money that most of Brown's harshest critics (particularly Democrats) had never even heard of Michael Brown before Katrina.
So what really happened?
I believe that evidence clearly indicates that the City of New Orleans was completely unprepared for a major disaster. This was, realistically, probably the first time that FEMA encountered such utter incompetence among local authorities, and such unwillingness among residents to recognize the magnitude of the potential disaster.
Michael Brown failed to realized the seriousness of the New Orleans situation, partly as a result of poor communication within FEMA, but mostly because neither he nor anyone else in Washington had ever imagined that local authorities could have been so completely incapable of immediate disaster response.
Having said that, it's now time to jump on FEMA for a while.
First of all, if your job is disaster response, doesn't it make sense that you would approach your job always assuming that the worst will happen? Brown's lax attitude about the situation doesn't exactly inspire confidence that he would be able to handle another such crisis any better.
Secondly, we've dumped billions of dollars into "Homeland Security" during the last three years, and a fair-sized chunk of that money was supposed to be earmarked for disaster response coordination efforts between local and Federal authorities. I thought that this meant that Federal teams were supposed to get together with local municipalities, review disaster response plans, and set up coordinated responses. Maybe I was wrong. It is obvious that no one at FEMA understood how ill-prepared the city of New Orleans was, or how stubborn and recalcitrant the New Orleans residents would be. By the time the city started flooding, it was too late.
If anything, this whole episode proves conclusively that if you sit around waiting for the government to bail you out of every problem you are in, then you are in big trouble.
It also proves that life doesn't give us a do-over. Or a second chance to make a good impression. FEMA is forever scarred by the behavior of Michael Brown. Shame on him.
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