Bush: Help on the way

BY CRAIG GORDON | WASHINGTON BUREAU; Staff writers John Riley, Deborah Barfield Berry, J. Jioni Palmer contributed to this story and it was supplemented with wire reports.

September 2, 2005

WASHINGTON - With the situation in New Orleans growing increasingly desperate, the Bush administration was forced to defend its hurricane response yesterday as local officials and residents blasted the federal efforts and pleaded for more help.

New Orleans' emergency operations chief called the federal response a "national disgrace," while Democrats pointed to budget cuts in Louisiana flood-control funding by the Bush administration.

President George W. Bush appealed for patience from storm-battered refugees as his administration rolled out a series of new initiatives to improve law and order, speed up evacuations and recruit high-profile fundraisers, especially Bush's two immediate predecessors, his father and Bill Clinton, who worked together on Asian tsunami relief. The administration also asked Congress for $10.5 billion to cover immediate needs. The Senate approved it last night, and the House planned to convene on it at noon today.

"I fully understand people wanting things to have happened yesterday," Bush said on ABC. "I understand the anxiety of people on the ground. ... So there is frustration. But I want people to know there's a lot of help coming."

Added Michael Brown, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency: "Everyone in the country needs to take a collective breath. ... They [FEMA staff] are doing every single thing they can and meeting every single request."

Yet the soothing words and pledges of help were little match for television pictures of bodies left unattended on the streets of a popular American city, or thousands of hungry and homeless residents awaiting buses and other aid that had yet to arrive. Tempers boiled over, with one man saying, "We're out here like pure animals."

Bush announced plans to visit the area ravaged by Hurricane Katrina today as even Republican analysts said the questions over his response to the storm could damage his political fortunes, already weakened by Iraq, gas prices topping $3 a gallon and economic uncertainty.

Questions linger

The hurricane even touched on questions over Bush's handling of Iraq, as critics questioned whether the war had drained money from domestic priorities like emergency preparedness and National Guard troops from homeland duties.

Bush won high marks for his handling of 9/11. But analysts say Katrina is different, its impact landing in every town in America, immediately and visibly, with rising gas prices.

Also, "it helps to have somebody to hate, as we did after 9/11. It rallies everybody around the same banner," said Republican pollster Whit Ayres. In a natural disaster, "people have ended up blaming the political leaders when they were dissatisfied with the handling of it."

The disaster has also triggered questions about who was to blame for the failure of the city's storm protection system. Some of those questions involve decisions made years ago by the Army Corps of Engineers to design it to withstand a Category 3 hurricane - expected to hit only once every 200 to 300 years - while others focus on more recent cuts by the president and Congress of money requested for improvements.

Katrina hit with Category 4 force, but Corps Commander Carl Strock yesterday defended the assessment, saying, "Anything above Category 3 had a very low probability of occurring."

Funding for levee system

In the past several years, Corps officials from New Orleans have occasionally complained publicly about underfunding of projects to upgrade vulnerable parts of the levee system. Alfred Naomi, the project manager in the New Orleans district, called a recent $71.5-million cut "drastic." But Naomi yesterday said that none of the funding cuts involved projects affecting the areas of the levee system that broke this week - those were all previously upgraded, he said. One program designed to remove water from flooded areas has seen its funding cut during the Bush administration from a high of $75 million in 1999 to $31 million in 2004. Republicans charge that Corps projects have been a favorite target of Democratic presidents as well, including Clinton and Jimmy Carter.

Still, federal officials were aware of the dangers of a massive flood in New Orleans, even spending $250,000 last year on an eight-day drill for a mock Hurricane Pam, said Eric Tolbert, who was Bush's FEMA disaster response director until February. Tolbert said follow-up planning was supposed to address some of the very things being struggled with today, such as mass evacuations and emergency housing. That funding was never approved before he left, Tolbert said. FEMA couldn't be reached.

At times yesterday, there appeared to be a disconnect between political officials overseeing recovery efforts and reports on the ground. Some media agencies were reporting a rise in crime against those displaced by the storm, including gunfire, rapes and beatings.

Yet FEMA chief Brown said in a nationally televised news conference, "I actually think the security situation is pretty darn good."

Staff writers John Riley, Deborah Barfield Berry, J. Jioni Palmer contributed to this story and it was supplemented with wire reports.