Kerry blasts Hurricane FEMA

"Nobody told me there'd be Days like these" - John Lennon.

From Intervention Magazine last October.

When President Bush appeared on “Good Morning America” on Thursday, September 1, 2005, four days after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, his main excuse for the delay in the Federal government’s response to the flooding was that nobody could have predicted that the levees around New Orleans could have broken. President Bush said, “I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees. They did anticipate a serious storm. But these levees got breached. And as a result, much of New Orleans is flooded.”

From Today's Washington Post:

In the 48 hours before Hurricane Katrina hit, the White House received detailed warnings about the storm's likely impact, including eerily prescient predictions of breached levees, massive flooding, and major losses of life and property, documents show.

A 41-page assessment by the Department of Homeland Security's National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center (NISAC), was delivered by e-mail to the White House's "situation room," the nerve center where crises are handled, at 1:47 a.m. on Aug. 29, the day the storm hit, according to an e-mail cover sheet accompanying the document.

The NISAC paper warned that a storm of Katrina's size would "likely lead to severe flooding and/or levee breaching" and specifically noted the potential for levee failures along Lake Pontchartrain. It predicted economic losses in the tens of billions of dollars, including damage to public utilities and industry that would take years to fully repair. Initial response and rescue operations would be hampered by disruption of telecommunications networks and the loss of power to fire, police and emergency workers, it said.

In a second document, also obtained by The Washington Post, a computer slide presentation by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, prepared for a 9 a.m. meeting on Aug. 27, two days before Katrina made landfall, compared Katrina's likely impact to that of "Hurricane Pam," a fictional Category 3 storm used in a series of FEMA disaster-preparedness exercises simulating the effects of a major hurricane striking New Orleans. But Katrina, the report warned, could be worse.

The hurricane's Category 4 storm surge "could greatly overtop levees and protective systems" and destroy nearly 90 percent of city structures, the FEMA report said. It further predicted "incredible search and rescue needs (60,000-plus)" and the displacement of more than a million residents.

Statement from John Kerry released today.

"How is it that the White House Situation Room received detailed warnings 48 hours before Hurricane Katrina hit, that the National Hurricane Center was warning CNN and the world that Katrina could be The Big One, that FEMA reported two days before landfall that Katrina's surge `could greatly overtop levees and protective systems,' destroy nearly 90 percent of city structures, require `incredible search and rescue needs (60,000-plus),' and displace more than a million people - and the President days later still insisted on national television, `I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees' that left 1,300 dead and thousands more homeless?

"Where's the accountability? Where's the compassion?

"Hurricane Katrina stripped away any image of competence and exposed the true heart and nature of this administration. It showed Americans at their best - and our government at its worst.

"Sadly, there's an enormous gap between what Americans deserve and what the government delivers. The shocking weakness of our government to deal with urgent challenges is tragically and dramatically underscored by the information that was being fed into the White House Situation Room, and the lack of response coming from a vacationing president on his ranch in Crawford.

"Beginning with the appointment of an Arabian horse executive to lead America's emergency preparedness in the post-9/11 world, to a president who remained away from the heart of the hurricane's devastation for five days, Katrina is the story of a failure of leadership and its very real human consequences.

"We wouldn't be having this conversation if the people running our government in Washington had cared to listen. They didn't listen to the Army Corps of Engineers when they insisted the levees be reinforced. They didn't listen to the countless experts who warned this exact disaster scenario would happen. They didn't listen to years of urgent pleading by Louisianans about the consequences of wetlands erosion in the region, which exposed New Orleans and surrounding parishes to ever-greater wind damage and flooding in a hurricane. They didn't listen when a disaster simulation just last year showed that hundreds of thousands of people would be trapped and have no way to evacuate New Orleans. They didn't listen to those of us who have long argued that our insane dependence on oil as our principle energy source, and our refusal to invest in more efficient engines, left us one big supply disruption away from skyrocketing gas prices that would ravage family pocketbooks, stall our economy, bankrupt airlines, and leave us even more dependent on foreign countries with deep pockets of petroleum. And now it's a proven fact that they didn't listen when everyone was warning that Katrina was The Big One Louisianans had long dreaded. They didn't even abandon their vacations.

"The people of the Gulf Coast got more of the same hurricane force spin and deception when they needed action and compassion. To say it's an outrage is the understatement of the year - right up there with Brownie and his `heck of a job.'"

And just when you thought it couldn't get any worse. From Uncommon Sense on Dkos:

Anyone who remembers President Bush's stall tactics on the 9/11 commission will recognize them here:

The White House is crippling a Senate inquiry into the government's sluggish response to Hurricane Katrina by barring administration officials from answering questions and failing to hand over documents, senators leading the investigation said Tuesday.

In some cases, staff at the White House and other federal agencies have refused to be interviewed by congressional investigators, said the top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. In addition, agency officials won't answer seemingly innocuous questions about times and dates of meetings and telephone calls with the White House, the senators said.

And, this is in response to a Republican-controlled investigation. We're not talking about a non-partisan commission here. We're not talking about fire-breathing Democrats with subpoena power. From the beginning, the worst that was likely to happen for the administration was a finding of equal culpability between the feds, the State of Louisiana and the City of New Orleans.

But, this president can't even fake openness. He won't even pretend to cooperate with an investigation into the devastation, on his watch, of yet another major American city.

Vyan