And one other point. A short way into the piece there's this graf ...As he says, that's "quite a flaw." Apparently DHS and FEMA were so bureaucratically hidebound they couldn't function without the proper bureaucratic request.
The debate began after officials realized that Hurricane Katrina had exposed a critical flaw in the national disaster response plans created after the Sept. 11 attacks. According to the administration's senior domestic security officials, the plan failed to recognize that local police, fire and medical personnel might be incapacitated.
Which, according to this NPR report, is precisely what happened:
"In this instance, when the states and localities collapsed alomst immediately, the rest of the DHS apparatus, with the exception of the Coast Guard, went into gridlock."--Steven Flynn, former Coast Guard Commander, member, Council on Foreign Relations.
I still blame local officials. Who could have imagined two of the poorest states in the Union wouldn't be able to prop up the Federal government in the face of a catastrophic storm?
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