Four years after Sept. 11, Katrina shows little improvement in disaster response

By Julia Malone

WASHINGTON BUREAU Austin American-Statesman

Sunday, September 11, 2005

WASHINGTON -- Four years ago today, hijacked airliners obliterated America's sense of invulnerability. In the aftermath, the nation resolved never again to be caught defenseless.

Now, Hurricane Katrina has challenged the notion that the United States is better prepared to deal with catastrophic events.

"I'm totally frustrated because I see the same problems surfacing again" that were cited after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, said Thomas Kean, a Republican and former New Jersey governor who was chairman of the bipartisan independent commission that investigated the attacks.

Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton, a Democratic former congress- man, said he felt "depression that we haven't done better, that we didn't learn more than we did from 9/11," when hijackers flew airliners into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington.

"We certainly learned from Katrina that we remain very vulnerable to an incident of this kind, whether it's a terrorist attack or a natural disaster," Hamilton said.

Mary Fetchet, whose 24-year-old son, Brad, died in the World Trade Center attacks, has been stunned by the faltering relief efforts on the Gulf Coast after the Aug. 29 landfall by Katrina caused devastation in parts of Louisiana and Mississippi.

Fetchet turned grief from the loss of her son into activism. She has spent the past four years building a grass-roots movement, Voices of September 11th, to push for initiatives to make the United States more secure.

Her group pressed politicians to form the Sept. 11 commission to examine the government breakdowns that allowed the attacks. Then she successfully pressed Congress to enact some of the commission's recommen- dations.

"It was truthfully very shocking to me that we weren't better prepared" for Katrina and its aftermath, Fetchet, a former social worker from New Canaan, Conn., said last week. "As much work as we've done, we still have a long way to go."

Even the most basic problems remain unresolved, she said, recalling that New York police officers and firefighters could not communicate via radio as they raced into the trade center Sept. 11.

Four years later, floodwaters covered New Orleans police radio transmitters, leaving officers with walkie-talkies, many of which had dying batteries, crowding a single radio channel. In Mississippi, the National Guard was forced to use runners to communicate early in the relief effort.

At the Department of Homeland Security, spokesman Russ Knocke acknowledged problems in dealing with Katrina and its aftermath.

"We'll be our toughest critics and say that the response was delayed," he said. "But this mass mobilization, when it arrived, has been enormously successful in saving lives and getting evacuees out and beginning to get them on a path to normalcy."

Knocke cited considerable progress in readiness since 2001, including enhanced transportation security, new immigration procedures, expanded use of technology and the removal of barriers that had kept intelligence agencies from sharing crucial information about threats.

Others focus more on the work still undone. Hamilton and Kean say Katrina gives a new urgency to completing the unfinished security agenda that was laid out in their commission report, which became a best-selling book last year.

Among the most pressing items, they said, are:

* Freeing up part of the radio spectrum for use by emergency services. That proposal, winding its way through Congress, would make it easier for police, firefighters and other services to talk to one another. But under current plans, the program would not begin until 2009.

* Requiring cities and states to set up clear lines of authority in the event of emergencies.

"The first people who reached the World Trade Center did not know who was in charge," Kean said.

He noted that Louisiana and New Orleans officials sent conflicting messages last week about whether there would be a forced evacuation of residents still holding out in the flooded city.

"Every state and locality has got to have one agency in charge," Kean said.

* Changing the rules on doling out federal security grants to require that the money be designated for the highest-risk areas "instead of buying hazmat suits or firetrucks for virtually every congressional district," said Tim Roemer, a Democratic former congressman who served on the Sept. 11 commission.

So far, lawmakers have treated homeland security legislation "like a highway pork bill," Roemer said.

Under the grants, the low-risk state of Alaska was allocated almost $25 per capita for the current fiscal year, while New York, an obvious terror target, was slated for less than $16 per capita. The Department of Homeland Security's inspector general has criticized the grant system that sent aid to low-priority ports in Nantucket, Mass., and St. Croix in the Virgin Islands.

Katrina revealed additional weaknesses, especially in evacuation planning.

The world watched television images of misery at the Louisiana Superdome and New Orleans convention center, where tens of thousands of residents unable to evacuate before the hurricane hit were told to seek shelter by the city and were left without electricity and adequate food or water. Hundreds of school buses that could have taken people to safety before the storm remained parked at a site that was then flooded.

Bill Waugh, an urban studies professor at Georgia State University, said research into evacuation policies shows that it is fundamental to plan for people who cannot flee because of infirmity or lack of transportation. It is also well-known that in every disaster, some people refuse to leave, he said.

Richard Falkenrath, a former senior homeland security adviser for President Bush, argued for a federal statute giving the president the power to order evacuations under catastrophic conditions.

Looking at the New Orleans evacuation disaster, Falkenrath said, "You're going to have a similar situation for a nuclear or biological attack" in almost any city.

With the first investigative hearing on the Katrina response set for next week in the Senate, the list of shortcomings is sure to grow.

Critics suggest that the emphasis on fighting terrorism and the decision to make the Federal Emergency Management Agency a Homeland Security department might have diminished the government's ability to respond to natural disasters.

But experts inside and outside of government said a "brain drain" of experienced disaster hands throughout the agency, hastened in part by the appointment of leaders without backgrounds in emergency management, has weakened the agency's ability to respond.

In a report issued last July, the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, concluded that since Sept. 11, 2001, federal aid for first responders "has largely emphasized enhancing capabilities to respond to terrorist attacks."

James Carafano, who researches security issues at the conservative Heritage Foundation, offered a different view.

Since Sept. 11, the nation has expanded its capacity to respond to "your average run-of-the-mill disaster" by building up local capabilities, such as firefighting equipment, throughout the country.

At the same time, he said, "we have done very little to prepare for a national disaster like Katrina."

Now, he said, the nation has to make some hard choices and begin preparing for such catastrophic events.

The United States has made some progress in the past four years, said Hamilton, the Sept. 11 commission member, citing the overhaul of the intelligence agencies, reshaping of the FBI and tighter airport security.

"But you still see many things that need to be done," he said.