Sorting out Katrina: the lessons so far

The Senate Homeland Security Committee is moving quickly, laying groundwork for public hearings as early as next week. A terrorist attack could produce chaos similar to that of Katrina, but with no warning, and perhaps the added danger of chemical or biological weapons, noted lawmakers. Thus Washington needs a thorough understanding of how to do better next time.

"Governments at all levels failed," said Sen. Susan Collins (R) of Maine, the panel's chairwoman.

Meanwhile, in the House, majority leader Rep. Tom DeLay (R) of Texas was pushing for a joint House-Senate inquiry. On Tuesday tempers reportedly flared during a meeting between House members and Cabinet secretaries responsible for response to Katrina, with both Republican and Democratic members charging that the situation was worse than the administration was admitting.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D) of New York, and many other Democrats, called for the restoration of independent authority to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA's effectiveness has been compromised by its inclusion as a sub-agency within the Department of Homeland Security, said Senator Clinton in a broadcast interview on Wednesday after a visit to refugees at the Astrodome. She urged that an independent commission study the federal disaster response.

"The people that I met in Houston, they want answers.... I don't think the government can investigate itself," she said.

FEMA has come in for harsh criticism for its actions in the hurricane's immediate aftermath. Its director, Michael Brown, waited until five hours after Katrina had made landfall before sending Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff a memo that proposed dispatching 1,000 federal emergency workers to the region, according to an AP report.

FEMA had prepositioned small teams in the region, but the memo may have represented Mr. Brown's first move toward sending concerted help.

Meanwhile, state and local officials in Louisiana themselves will have to answer questions about how it was that thousands of people came to be stranded in the Superdome and the New Orleans convention center with inadequate food and water.

At a Washington briefing over the weekend Secretary Chertoff noted pointedly that "our constitutional system really places the primary authority in each state with the governor."

There are also questions about whether Army Corps of Engineer projects to shore up the New Orleans levees were starved of funds by the administration, due to the expense of the war in Iraq.

"Their money went to other priorities, and Louisiana knew it, and they knew that put them at risk. On so many levels things didn't go right in the planning," says Alice Fothergill, a University of Vermont rapid response disaster expert and a professor of the sociology of disasters.

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