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Brown Resigns as FEMA Chief

clueless on Mon September 12, 2005 3:14 PM User is offline

Brown Steps Down as FEMA Chief

A WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE NEWS ROUNDUP
September 12, 2005 3:07 p.m.

Michael Brown, the embattled director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency who was reassigned Friday from his post spearheading relief operations on the Gulf Coast, has resigned, according to people familiar with the matter.

An official announcement is expected later today.

Mr. Brown had become a lightning rod for criticism over the government's slow and bungled response to the hurricane. On Friday, Mr. Brown's boss, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, said he was sending Mr. Brown back to Washington "to return to administering FEMA nationally" and to oversee the government's response to other disasters.


That move was widely seen as a precursor to Mr. Brown's eventual departure especially given that some members of Congress said that a reassignment wasn't enough. Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and three other senators said in a letter to Mr. Bush on Friday that Mr. Brown's "continued presence in this critical position endangers the success of the ongoing recovery efforts."

The news came as New Orleans slowly and painfully stirred back to life two weeks after being slammed by Katrina.

Business owners in the central business district were issued passes into the city Monday to retrieve vital records or equipment needed to run their companies. Traffic was heavy on the only major highway into the city that was still open, and vehicles were backed up for about two miles at a National Guard checkpoint in Westwego, a suburb across the Mississippi River from New Orleans.

There were also signs of life at businesses elsewhere in the city, after a weekend in which trash collection began and the airport reopened to cargo flights. Military cargo airplanes were set to begin spraying the New Orleans area on Monday to kill flies and mosquitoes. The standing water from Katrina is expected to worsen Louisiana's already considerable mosquito problem. Before the storm hit, the state had logged 78 cases of mosquito-borne West Nile virus and four deaths from the disease this year.

President Bush got his first up-close look at the destruction in New Orleans on Monday, taking a tour that took him through several flooded neighborhoods. Occasionally, he had to duck to avoid low-hanging electrical wires and branches.

Mr. Bush denied there was any racial component to people being left behind after the storm, despite suggestions from some critics that the response would have been quicker if so many of the victims hadn't been poor and black.

"The storm didn't discriminate and neither will the recovery effort,'' Mr. Bush said. "The rescue efforts were comprehensive. The recovery will be comprehensive.''

It was Mr. Bush's first exposure to the on-the-ground leadership of his new hurricane relief chief. The federal response to the disaster has been roundly criticized as sluggish and inept. In a sign that Mr. Bush is growing weary of the accusations, he testily replied to a reporter who asked whether he felt let down by federal officials on the ground.

"Look, there will be plenty of time to play the blame game,'' he said. ``That's what you're trying to do. You're trying to say somebody is at fault. And, look, I want to know. I want to know exactly what went on and how it went on, and we'll continually assess inside my administration.''

Mr. Bush said Congress should consider whether the federal government should have more authority to step into disaster areas without a request from the states. "All of us want to learn lessons,'' he said.

Mr. Bush also clarified his now-criticized remark that no one had anticipated the levees being breached. He said he was referring to that "sense of relaxation in a critical moment'' when many people initially thought the storm hadn't inflicted heavy damage on the city.

Meanwhile, in Washington, the FEMA said it's suspending its emergency airlifts of hurricane victims to distant states as it reassesses the needs of the storm victims.

"The big evacuation is over,'' spokeswoman Kathy Cable said. She said more than 22,000 evacuees had been relocated in less than 72 hours. People who need to get to their families in a distant location will be sent on commercial flights, Ms. Cable said.

Mr. Bush, on a two-day visit to hurricane-affected areas, started the day with a briefing on the federal response effort aboard the 844-foot USS Iwo Jima, a command center for military operations. The slideshow presentation, which covered the latest relief and recovery efforts in three states, was conducted in the ship's ward room by Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad Allen, who replaced Mr. Brown as federal hurricane commander last Friday.


White House chief of staff Andrew Card said "I have great confidence" in the team now running the federal effort.

Mr. Bush toured the flooded city in a convoy of military trucks. Later, he will tour hard-hit surrounding parishes by helicopter, touching down to meet with local leaders, and then will travel to Gulfport, Miss.

It was Mr. Bush's first up-close look in the two weeks since Katrina smashed into the Gulf Coast and drowned this storied city. The trip is Mr. Bush's third and longest to the disaster area, and it came as the White House is eager to show the president displaying hands-on, empathetic leadership in the storm effort. More than half of respondents in an Associated Press-Ipsos poll last week said he is at fault for the slow response.

Mr. Card said Mr. Bush's repeated visits have tangible value: "It reminds people of the mission at hand."

Signs of Improvement

Though 50% of New Orleans remains flooded and teams are still working to recover the dead, there are signs that hopelessness is beginning to lift two weeks after Hurricane Katrina plowed ashore. Law and order has been restored to New Orleans and looting curtailed; the Superdome and city convention center, the scene of so much misery while storm evacuees waited for busses for days with no food and water, are empty; the water level is going down as workers begin to drain the city; and some power is being restored.

Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez urged business leaders Monday to invest in the Gulf Coast, saying the private sector must play a major role in rebuilding the hurricane-devastated area. In a speech at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Mr. Gutierrez said businesses should look at the region as an economic opportunity.

"I hope businesses will consider investing and locating enterprises in the rebuilding zone,'' he said. "Only then will the region be truly reborn.''

Mr. Gutierrez was asked by reporters whether the government was considering making any moves to lower the cost of lumber, cement and other building materials. Cement shipments from Mexico and softwood lumber imports from Canada both face heavy tariffs that are being levied because the Commerce Department has determined that those products are being sold in this country at unfairly low prices, a practice known as dumping.

Asked what the government was doing to lower prices, Mr. Gutierrez said, "There's no question that construction is going to be a key need in New Orleans. ... We just have to be sure that they have the supplies, but I am not prepared to talk about any specifics.''

Separately, the Labor Department announced Monday that it was creating a Web site to help people who have lost jobs due to Katrina find new work.

Thousands of Displaced Students

Meanwhile, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said Monday that Katrina forced at least 372,000 school children to flee the Gulf Coast, and there are no clear answers yet on where the money will come from to educate these students.

In Louisiana, more than 247,000 public and private school students have been displaced, 489 schools have been closed and at least six parishes have destroyed or damaged buildings. In Mississippi, more than 125,000 students have been forced elsewhere. A total of 226 schools in 30 districts are closed in that state, and almost 30 schools have been destroyed.

Ms. Spellings declined to estimate how much it will cost states to rebuild devastated districts or serve displaced students -- or how much the federal government will cover. President Bush has charged Ms. Spellings to come up with a plan to provide aid for the states, some of which are absorbing an influx of students just as the school year begins.


Despite some signs of progress, criticism of the relief efforts continues.

A Louisiana official on Sunday criticized FEMA's progress on providing temporary housing for hundreds of thousands of the state's residents displaced by Katrina. "There should be trailers rolling and things happening that are not happening fast enough," said Col. Jeff Smith, deputy director of emergency preparedness for the Louisiana Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness. "We've asked them to start thinking outside the box and it just hasn't been happening."

James McIntyre, a FEMA spokesman, acknowledged that just 10 families not involved with Katrina relief efforts have moved into temporary housing in Louisiana so far. Still, he said the agency is moving "as quickly as possible," deploying thousands of mobile homes and moving families into trailers in Mississippi and Alabama. Thousands of trailers are ready for deployment from a staging area in Baton Rouge, while more than 400 displaced families from the Slidell, La., area are moving into trailers.

An estimated million people along the Gulf Coast have been displaced by the hurricane, about half of them from the New Orleans area.

On Saturday, officials announced that FEMA has paid $669 million nationwide to families affected by Katrina. The agency has registered 573,262 households nationwide for benefits, agency spokesman Ed Conley said, explaining that the figure includes singles and families. The government is also ramping up a low-interest loan program through the U.S. Small Business Administration, which can provide as much as $1.5 million to a business and $40,000 to individuals.

Authorities raised Louisiana's death toll to 197 on Sunday, and the recovery of corpses continued. Teams pulled an unspecified number of bodies from Memorial Medical Center, a 317-bed hospital in uptown New Orleans that closed more than a week ago after being surrounded by floodwaters. But authorities said their first systematic sweep of New Orleans found far fewer bodies than expected.

Army Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honore, who heads the military's Joint Task Force Katrina, said Sunday that over the next three days, officials should learn how many people died in New Orleans. He said the preliminary figure of 10,000 offered last week by some officials was "a number we'd be very happy to be wrong about."

No Forced Evictions, So Far

Meanwhile, despite authorization to use force, officials in New Orleans haven't done so to evict those who have refused to leave. In an interview Saturday, Lt. Gov. Mitchell Landrieu said city and state officials are still assessing whether the health and safety threats justify the use of force.

The Louisiana Health Emergency Powers Act and the Louisiana Homeland Security and Emergency Assistance and Disaster Act give power to the governor and mayor to compel evacuations and to confiscate property in emergencies where there is a significant threat to public health and where remaining residents hinder recovery efforts. Under the current evacuation order, New Orleans police and fire officials, as well as the National Guard and the military, have the power to evict city residents.

Louisiana State Police officials said many people are evacuating voluntarily even after refusing to do so initially after learning about the health and safety threats they face and after officials have made shelter arrangements for their pets. A police spokeswoman said she had no estimate for how many people still remain in the city and refuse to leave.

Also over the weekend, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers halved its estimate of how long it will take to pump floodwaters out of some areas around New Orleans and said it expect to have New Orleans essentially pumped out by early October. As more pumps have come on line, the Corps reduced its estimate for pumping water out of Plaquemines Parish, a lake-dotted area to the south of New Orleans to 40 days from 80, estimating that the most flooded areas will be cleared by Oct. 18.

Severe Environmental Damage

With water receding from some of the most heavily damaged areas of New Orleans, it's becoming increasingly clear that Hurricane Katrina has left a major environmental mess in its wake.

Assessment teams and local emergency officials have identified at least six serious oil spills and numerous smaller incidents in southern Louisiana, but they are most concerned about a leak of an estimated 672,000 gallons of crude oil from a storage tank at a Murphy Oil Corp. refinery, some of which seeped into densely populated neighborhoods on the southeastern outskirts of New Orleans.

Federal officials told area leaders in private meetings over the weekend that they have designated the location around the Murphy refinery in Meraux in St. Bernard Parish as a "hot zone," or a potentially deadly hazard. Official access to the area has been restricted, but reporters from The Wall Street Journal who drove through city streets in the area saw block after block of homes within a mile of the refinery that had been inundated with what appears to be a mixture of oil and mud. Streets and much of the ground are covered in several inches of oozing muck.

The company believes most of the spilled oil was trapped behind a containment dike around the storage tank, and "we don't think very much oil got out of our refinery property, as far as we can tell," says Kevin Fitzgerald, a Murphy spokesman. The Coast Guard says Murphy Oil estimated 672,000 gallons of crude oil leaked out of the partially filled, 3.6 million gallon storage tank. The company says the tank may have dislodged from its foundation during the flood, floated as far as 15 feet and was punctured. Murphy Oil says the containing wall around the tank was damaged during the storm, causing an unknown amount of oil to spread into the neighborhood.

Crude oil contains several harmful substances, including benzene, says Lynn Goldman, a professor of environmental health sciences at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Goldman said that the oil could seep into storm drains and sewers and spread through the city. "Literally the environment around the city would become polluted from it," she says.

The Coast Guard says it is helping clean up as many as six separate oil spills in Louisiana, including the one in Meraux. The other spills occurred along the Louisiana coast, south of New Orleans at facilities owned by Chevron Corp., Royal Dutch/Shell and others. Most of the discharged oil -- totaling more than 5.4 million gallons, according to the Coast Guard -- was contained by retaining systems around the storage tanks, although there was some reported leakage beyond the protective walls. (By comparison, the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Prince William Sound in Alaska was about 11 million gallons.)

Other areas of concern to environmental officials in New Orleans include a federal Superfund site near the Industrial Canal where a school and housing were built on top of a former landfill. That area was underwater for days. Before the hurricane, cleanup crews had removed soil that may have been contaminated with arsenic and lead and capped the area with a special covering.

--Staff reporters John D. McKinnon, Steve Levine, Christopher Cooper, Michael Corkery, Betsy McKay and Thaddeus Herrick contributed to this article

WSJ

meaux on Tue September 13, 2005 9:15 AM User is offlineView users profile

I don't know if Brown was good or bad. FEMA is not a "first responder".

It's just that he's a Republician, and the Dems allways need a corpse and make them quit...You won't see Nagin, Blanco or Landru go anywhere...You never see a Democrat cave to pressure and quit his/her job...Clinton, Kennedy, Pelosi, Rodam...and many others that break the law, but never pay a price...Berger ought to be in Jail for breaking Federal Law, but he only had to pay a fine, most likely with brown bag money...how funny...

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Lazy bum who lives off his wife.

01 BMW 530i Sport, 92 Porsche 968, 85 F150, 72 911, 08 GM SUV, 01' Ford Lightnin'

MrBillPro on Tue September 13, 2005 9:28 AM User is offlineView users profile

Quote
Originally posted by: meaux
You never see a Democrat cave to pressure and quit his/her job.

Yes, because it's also almost impossible for them to find a job anywhere unless there voted in.

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Don't take life seriously... Its not permanent.

NickD on Tue September 13, 2005 9:49 AM User is offline

Ha, that's "their". Today, the president has to appoint some odd 10,000 people for various government positions, can only say with running the country, a war, and other details involved with this job, kind of difficult to bat a thousand in hiring people. I have both republican and democrat friends and relatives, I don't hold that against them, besides being kind of dumb in politics, don't know much either about how to fix their cars or other such common sense tasks.

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