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APPEALS FOR TROOPS UNHEEDED FOR DAYS -- BLANCO, BUSH DISAGREED ON AUTHORITY OVER FORCES |
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by Jan Moller and Robert Travis Scott
September 15, 2005 NOLA.com BATON ROUGE - As it became clear last week that the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina required far more help than state and local authorities could provide, Gov. Kathleen Blanco and other state officials began pleading for more help from the federal government. But substantial active-duty Army deployments didn't arrive until a week after the storm, a fact that might turn out to be one of the enduring controversies about the state and federal response to what likely will be one of the deadliest and most costly events in American history. This week, Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, who commands Joint Task Force Katrina, said search and rescue is the top priority for the 7,000 active-duty soldiers ordered to Louisiana by President Bush on Saturday. But the vast majority of the rescue effort was conducted by state and local authorities, volunteers with flat-bottomed boats that could access the narrow streets where flood victims were stranded on roofs and attics, and by the Louisiana National Guard. "We pulled out 250,000 people before the Army got here," said Sam Jones, a former mayor of Franklin who serves as a senior adviser to Blanco and helped organize the boat rescue operation. "By Thursday (Sept. 1), we knew we'd turned a corner." Despite the presence of 5,700 Guard troops and assistance from the Coast Guard, Navy helicopters and other military assets, which were deployed in advance of Katrina and in its immediate aftermath, state and local officials said there was a need throughout the week for more troops to aid in search and rescue operations, provide food and other assistance and restore order as New Orleans was beset by looting and violence. Blanco spokeswoman Denise Bottcher said the situation was so dire that the need for Army support was obvious. New Orleans was like a dying man who needed CPR, she said, and shouldn't have had to ask for help. State officials of both parties remained frustrated by the delays in getting federal forces. A review of records and interviews with state, White House and military officials revealed contentious negotiations and apparent miscommunication between the two sides as they tried to cope with a disaster that presented unexpected challenges each day. Blanco administration officials said the governor spoke twice to Bush -- once Sunday morning, in the hours before Katrina made landfall, and again Wednesday morning after the storm. In both telephone conversations, according to Blanco and her senior aides, the governor asked Bush for increased federal help. "I asked him to send me everything he's got," Blanco said of their first conversation,. In their second conversation, Blanco was more specific, saying the state needed 40,000 troops to restore order and complete the search and rescue mission. But state officials said the governor didn't ask directly for active-duty troops. Bottcher said the governor was prepared to accept any combination of Guards members and regular Army troops, as long as there were enough numbers to calm the city and complete the rescue effort. The subject of active-duty troops did not come up until a face-to-face meeting on Air Force One on Sept. 2, when Blanco and Bush spent about 45 minutes meeting behind closed doors. But the president's order to deploy was not made until the following day, and in the meantime the White House and the Blanco administration tussled over who ultimately would be in charge of the rescue effort. A Bush administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the delay in ordering active-duty forces occurred because the regular Army had to wait for Guard units to be in place before they could deploy. But Lt. Col. Pete Schneider, a spokesman for the Louisiana National Guard, said, "I don't know how that has anything to do with it." By law, federal troops are not allowed to engage in law enforcement, which makes the Guard the logical first responder in times of crisis. The White House official said Bush's mobilization order Sept. 3 came at the appropriate time given the sequence of the various military mobilizations. The official said the prolonged dispute over lines of authority "obviously … caused some problems," but said the disagreement in no way affected the speed at which the Army forces were deployed. A senior official with the U.S. military said that from the Army's point of view, the president's order is the only criteria for deploying soldiers, whether or not Guards members are in place. Blanco said this week that she fears the conflict over lines of authority wasted valuable time that she and her staff could have better spent addressing other issues, possibly slowing the relief effort. "It's just a paper war, that's all it is," she said. "This is about the silliest argument that I can think of." After the meeting on Air Force One, the White House sent Blanco a proposed memorandum of understanding late Friday night that she was urged to sign right away, according to the governor. The memo would have taken the rare step of putting Honore in charge of both the Guards and the active-duty military units while answering to both the president and Blanco, known in the military as dual reporting. But Blanco, after meetings by her staff that consumed much of Friday night and Saturday morning, declined to sign the memo and opted to preserve her authority of the Guard forces, which by then numbered more than 13,000. Blanco said she did not want to undermine the authority of Maj. Gen. Bennett Landreneau, who leads the Louisiana National Guard and oversees the Guard troops who have arrived from other states. "The problem with the offer (to federalize) was that when the question was asked, 'How does this make things better?' the question was never answered," said a state official who attended meetings about the issue but asked to remain anonymous because he does not have authority to speak for the governor. Relief efforts have ramped up rapidly, with more than 18,000 Guard troops from 29 states in Louisiana and about 18,000 active-duty military spread across the Gulf Coast by Thursday, but the delay remained mystifying to some of the local rescue workers who struggled against impossible obstacles to keep people alive at makeshift shelters where conditions deteriorated with each passing hour. Dr. Gregory Henderson, a pathologist at Ochsner Clinic Foundation who helped set up a makeshift medical clinic at the French Quarter Bar last week, said he will never understand why help didn't arrive sooner. In a brief interview outside the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center Wednesday, where he was tending to evacuees, Henderson said, "That's going to be, at the end of the day, the great mystery." |
