Reuters is reporting:
Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who heads the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, and Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, the panel’s top Democrat, said they plan to begin an oversight investigation next week when the full Senate returns from a summer recess.
“We intend to demand answers as to how this immense failure occurred, but our immediate focus must and will be on what Congress can do to help the rescue and emergency operations that are ongoing,” the senators said in a joint statement. “It is also our responsibility to investigate the lack of preparedness and inadequate response to this terrible storm,” they said, adding that it was “increasingly clear that serious shortcomings in preparedness and response have hampered relief efforts at a critical time.”
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a Tennessee Republican, called for the investigation saying he hoped the lessons learned would improve the government’s response to future disasters.
The Bush administration’s handling of the disaster that wreaked havoc in the Gulf Coast and spilled a devastating flood into New Orleans has come under sharp criticism.
As President George W. Bush toured the disaster area, Louisiana Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu (news, bio, voting record) said the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which the Bush administration placed under the Department of Homeland Security, failed to deploy enough resources to the area quickly.
She called on Bush to appoint a Cabinet-level official to direct the national response to the calamity.
“There was a time when FEMA understood that the correct approach to a crisis was to deploy to the affected area as many resources as possible as fast as possible,” Landrieu said. “Unfortunately that no longer seems to be their approach.”
Previous Comments
Paul Krugman writes in The New York Times: Before 9/11 the Federal Emergency Management Agency listed the three most likely catastrophic disasters facing America: a terrorist attack on New York, a major earthquake in San Francisco and a hurricane strike on New Orleans. “The New Orleans hurricane scenario,” The Houston Chronicle wrote in December 2001, “may be the deadliest of all.” It described a potential catastrophe very much like the one now happening. So why were New Orleans and the nation so unprepared? After 9/11, hard questions were deferred in the name of national unity, then buried under a thick coat of whitewash. This time, we need accountability. First question: Why have aid and security taken so long to arrive? Katrina hit five days ago – and it was already clear by last Friday that Katrina could do immense damage along the Gulf Coast. Yet the response you’d expect from an advanced country never happened. Thousands of Americans are dead or dying, not because they refused to evacuate, but because they were too poor or too sick to get out without help – and help wasn’t provided. Many have yet to receive any help at all. There will and should be many questions about the response of state and local governments; in particular, couldn’t they have done more to help the poor and sick escape? But the evidence points, above all, to a stunning lack of both preparation and urgency in the federal government’s response.
#134188 | Author: DonnaLadd | Date: Sep 3 2005
The Mississippi Free Press produced this story through the MFP Solutions Lab, supported by the Solutions Journalism Network. This series digs into Mississippi’s systemic issues and sheds light on responses to them in other communities. Beyond just reporting on problems, these stories interrogate their causes and inspect potential solutions.
