Hurricane Katrina response lacked leadership says report

WASHINGTON - Failure to designate a single person in charge of the federal response to Hurricane Katrina led to confusion and a lack of decisive action in the aftermath of the devastating storm, congressional investigators said today.

And New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin told a separate Senate investigation that the city was updating its evacuation plans and will eventually be ready to handle next year's hurricane season.

A report by the Government Accountability Office, Congress' watchdog agency, said neither Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff nor former Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown filled a leadership role in the response to the hurricane.

The report also faulted Chertoff for waiting until a day after the storm hit and much of the Gulf Coast region was already devastated before he declared the area an event of national significance. That designation frees up federal funding and personnel to assist local officials.

Investigators said Chertoff should have designated the storm a catastrophic event, which would have triggered a broader federal response.

"As a result, the federal posture generally was to wait for the affected states to request assistance," the report said.

"In the absence of timely and decisive action and clear leadership responsibility and accountability, there were multiple chains of command, a myriad of approaches and processes for requesting and providing assistance and confusion about who should be advised of requests."

GAO Comptroller General David Walker said at a news conference that in the future, the president needs to designate a single individual to take charge and cut through the bureaucratic red tape.

He said a similar recommendation made by GAO more than a decade ago after Hurricane Andrew went unheeded.

The latest GAO report was released at the request of Representative Tom Davis, a Virginia Republican who is heading the US House of Representative's probe into the government's response to Hurricane Katrina. That panel is expected to complete its investigation by February 15.

At a hearing before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Nagin said he believed the US Army Corps of Engineers will meet its deadlines to have the city's levees repaired by the start of the next hurricane season in June.

"The city will be pretty well protected by the next hurricane season," he said in testimony.

He said the city is updating its evacuation plans and that there would be no repeat of the situation in the Superdome and convention centre where thousands of people were stranded for days in filth with a lack of food and water.

Nagin said the city needs 45,000 to 60,000 temporary homes and only about 2000 have been delivered to date. He also said the coastal wetland destroyed by the hurricane needs to be restored in order to fully protect the city.

- REUTERS