Bush Takes Responsibility for Failures in Storm Response
By KIRK JOHNSON and CHRISTINE HAUSER
nytimes.com.
(HELL HAS FROZEN OVER! The chimp takes the (qualified) BLAME, for ONCE in his life!)
NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 13 - President Bush said today that he accepted responsibility for the extent to which the federal government fell short in the Hurricane Katrina relief effort.
The Bush administration has come under criticism for the federal reaction to the catastrophe, which displaced hundreds of thousands of people and destroyed large swaths of towns and cities and their infrastructure in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
This afternoon, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco accused the federal government of moving too slowly to recover the bodies of those killed by Hurricane Katrina, and said she had signed a contract on behalf of the state with the recovery company originally hired by FEMA.
The dead "deserve more respect than they have received," she said at state police headquarters in Baton Rouge, The Associated Press reported.
The Houston-based company hired to handle the removal of the bodies, Kenyon International Emergency Services, threatened to pull its workers out of Louisiana unless either the state or the federal government offered it a signed agreement, the governor said.
"No one, even those at the highest level, seems to be able to break through the bureaucracy to get this important mission done," the governor said. "The failure to execute a contract for the recovery of our citizens has hurt the speed of recovery efforts. I am angry and outraged."
A FEMA spokesman, David Passey, responded that "from what I understand, Kenyon had some questions about the contract" and that FEMA had expected Louisiana to take the lead in the collection of bodies, The A.P. reported.
The official death toll, which has been predicted to reach thousands, is now approaching 800 as the authorities throughout the region continue their search for victims and conduct forensic tests on recovered bodies to determine whether death was storm-related. Today, the Louisiana health department raised its death toll to 423, up from 279 on Monday. Tens of thousands of people, at minimum, were driven out of their homes.
Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans said that the city, which has been under a mandatory evacuation, could begin to reopen very soon. He said officials were awaiting a report on air and water quality, and if they were satisfactory, the city would reopen parts of downtown and the Algiers, French quarter and uptown sections.
The president, speaking during a Washington news conference with Iraq's president, Jalal Talabani, said that he wanted to assess the relief response at all levels of government.
"Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government," Mr. Bush said. "And to the extent that the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility."
"I want to know what went right and what went wrong," Mr. Bush added. "I want to know how to better cooperate with state and local government, to be able to answer that very question that you asked: Are we capable of dealing with a severe attack or another severe storm?"
The president is to deliver a major speech on the issue on Thursday in Louisiana, the White House said today. That will mark his fourth trip to the disaster area since Hurricane Katrina struck slightly more than two weeks ago, devastating Gulf Coast areas and leaving parts of this city inundated after levees broke.
In Washington, the chief White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, told reporters that "the president will talk to the American people about the recovery and the way forward on the longer-term rebuilding."
The bodies of 45 people found in a flooded uptown hospital here on Sunday sharply increased the death toll and raised new questions about the breakdown of the evacuation system as the disaster unfolded. The discovery of the bodies was announced on Monday, though a spokesman for the hospital's owner said that not all might have been related to the storm or subsequent flooding. Some corpses may have been bodies of people who had died before the storm and been placed in the hospital's morgue, the spokesman said.
A communications director for the city of New Orleans, Sally Forman, said today that all hospitals in the city have temporary morgues and that "there are probably more bodies in those morgues."
Asked how it could take so long to recover the 45 bodies from the hospital, which remained there for more than a week after patients and staff had evacuated, she cited water in the building and referred questions about body recovery to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Repercussions from the storm continued to echo in Washington this week. On Monday, the director of FEMA, Michael D. Brown, a symbol to many people in New Orleans of government failure in the crisis, resigned. Mr. Brown was relieved of his role in the day-to-day disaster operations here on Friday and was recalled to Washington.
The new acting director of FEMA, R. David Paulison, pledged today to intensify efforts to find more permanent housing for the tens of thousands of Hurricane Katrina survivors now in shelters.
"We're going to get those people out of the shelters, and we're going to move and get them the help they need," R. David Paulison said in his first public comments since taking the job.
He also expressed confidence and pride in "the fine employees of FEMA standing beside me," adding: "They too have dedicated their lives to serving the public. It's a job they don't take lightly and I'm pleased to have such professionals around me as we move forward."
The news on Monday that 45 bodies had been found at the Memorial Medical Center was also a reminder of how much else, in the physical structure and in the human toll, might yet remain unknown.
Officials at the Memorial hospital said at least some of the victims died while waiting to be removed in the four days after the hurricane struck, with the electricity out and temperatures exceeding 100 degrees.
Steven L. Campanini, a spokesman for the hospital's owner, Tenet Healthcare, said the dead included patients who died awaiting evacuation as well as people who died before the hurricane struck and whose bodies were in the hospital morgue. Mr. Campanini said the dead might have also included evacuees from other hospitals and the surrounding neighborhood who gathered at Memorial while waiting to evacuate the city.
On Monday, the authorities elevated the statewide death toll from Hurricane Katrina to 279; of those, 242 were from the New Orleans metropolitan region. In Mississippi, Gov. Haley Barbour said the toll there was at 218.
Senior Bush administration officials touring the Gulf Coast area expressed concern today about possible shortages of natural gas, saying that the region's production may not recover for months, The A.P. reported.
The energy secretary, Samuel W. Bodman, said there is less known about the damage to the natural gas supply system than about the effect on crude oil production, it said. He said in addition to possible pipeline damage, the hurricane also shut down gas processing facilities on-shore, the agency said.
The Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport reopened to limited commercial flights today for the first time since the hurricane struck more than two weeks ago, and the port was back in operation, too.
Northwest Airlines Flight 947 from Memphis, Tenn. -- the first commercial flight into or out of Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport since the storm hit -- landed around midday with about 30 people aboard, far fewer than the jet could hold.
On Monday, Mr. Bush toured the ghostly streets of New Orleans, standing in the back of an open-air truck flanked by the mayor of the city and the governor of Louisiana, who have been sharply critical of the federal performance.
Mr. Bush's appearance with Mr. Nagin and Governor Blanco, both Democrats, suggested that at least some of the bitterness over the response to the disaster had lifted.
On Mr. Bush's most recent visit to the stricken area, on Sept. 5, Ms. Blanco learned that he was making the trip from news reports.
The president, in a brief question and answer session with reporters after his tour on Monday, said that government coordination in rebuilding the city and the region was paramount and that local vision should determine the direction of the reconstruction.
"It's very important for the folks in New Orleans to understand that, at least as far as I'm concerned, this great city has got ample talent and ample genius to set the strategy and set the vision," Mr. Bush said after his 40-minute tour. "Our role at the federal government is, you know, obviously within the law, to help them realize that vision. And that's what I wanted to assure the mayor."
Mr. Bush also returned to accusations that racial discrimination was involved in government's response to the hurricane, saying "the storm didn't discriminate" and neither did the rescuers.
Mr. Nagin and Ms. Blanco have said federal delays in sending aid had compounded the damage of the storm and heightened the anarchy in the days after the storm, when tens of thousands of people were trapped for days at sites like the Convention Center and the Superdome without food or water.
Mr. Nagin said in a radio interview on Monday, when asked about his meeting with the president, "If anything, he told me he kind of appreciated my frankness and my bluntness."
More than 1,000 displaced residents from St. Bernard Parish crowded the State Capitol in Baton Rouge on Monday to learn about the state of their devastated houses. No one has been permitted to re-enter the area to retrieve belongings or examine their houses. News of the meeting traveled by word of mouth and Web sites, and people lined up for blocks outside the Art Deco Capitol, where Gov. Huey P. Long was assassinated in 1935. Some drove from Houston.
Local officials did not try to hide the bad news.
"You will not recognize St. Bernard Parish," the parish president, Henry J. Rodriguez Jr., told hundreds of residents in the marble foyer of the Capitol. "All you will have left of St. Bernard Parish is your memories."
Kirk Johnson reported from New Orleans, La., for this article and Christine Hauser from New York. Reporting was contributed by Sewell Chan in Baton Rouge, La.; Michael Luo and William Yardley in New Orleans, and Campbell Robertson in Gulfport, Miss.
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