Brown: “A Convenient Fall Guy”
By Montag | Related entries in Hurricane KatrinaAccording to a Knight Ridder article, it was Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff who had the power and responsibility to react to hurricane Katrina — not then FEMA chief Michael Brown.
But Chertoff – not Brown – was in charge of managing the national response to a catastrophic disaster, according to the National Response Plan, the federal government’s blueprint for how agencies will handle major natural disasters or terrorist incidents. An order issued by President Bush in 2003 also assigned that responsibility to the homeland security director.
But according to a memo obtained by Knight Ridder, Chertoff didn’t shift that power to Brown until late afternoon or evening on Aug. 30, about 36 hours after Katrina hit Louisiana and Mississippi. That same memo suggests that Chertoff may have been confused about his lead role in disaster response and that of his department.
The rest of the article is worth reading.
Knight Ridder: Chertoff delayed federal response, memo shows
This entry was posted on Thursday, September 15th, 2005 and is filed under Hurricane Katrina. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
September 15th, 2005 at 8:25 am
While there is little doubt that Brown was grossly unqualified to run FEMA, this makes sence. The policy of putting FEMA under HLS was immensely stupid because of the “quick-response” nature of FEMA’s duties versus the bureacratic clearing-house nature of HLS. In any other context I love to watch the leviathan of the federal government break-down and die, but here it is tragic.
September 15th, 2005 at 1:31 pm
Can you imagine how much focus there would be on cronyism if Kerlik was DHS Secretary right now?