WASHINGTON – The White House worked furiously yesterday to try to convince skeptics it had a grip on unrest in New Orleans and make the case that the federal response to Hurricane Katrina was finally pressing forward with a monumental recovery effort.
Amid the furor over the failure to quickly help those suffering in the aftermath, Bush committed 7,000 more active-duty soldiers and Marines to help hasten evacuations and restore order, starting with New Orleans.
The Pentagon also will send another 10,000 members of the National Guard to Louisiana and Mississippi, and total troop strength will rise to about 40,000.
Another 300 Air Force airmen based in Biloxi, Miss., will return from Iraq and Afghanistan the next two weeks to help their families and join recovery efforts at Keesler Air Force Base, which took a direct hit from Katrina.
“The enormity of the task requires more resources,” said Bush, who plans to return tomorrow to the Gulf Coast to view operations. He decided to postpone a meeting next week with Chinese President Hu Jintao. “In America, we do not abandon our fellow citizens in their hour of need.”
Still, with critics fuming, Team Bush tried to emphasize some benchmarks, highlighting that the Coast Guard has saved 9,500 victims, evacuated another 25,000 people, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency has delivered 6.7 million liters of water and 1.9 million field rations. Amtrak also will soon run four trains a day out of New Orleans.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff tried to blame the feds’ slow response on the disastrous breaches in levees a day after Katrina hit, even though various officials now claim they’d warned about the weaknesses in the levees for years.
“The second catastrophe, frankly, added a level of challenge that no one has seen before,” Chertoff said.
Bush, however, couldn’t disguise his frustration over bureaucratic and organizational problems. “We will complete the evacuation as quickly and safely as possible. We will not let criminals prey on the vulnerable, and we will not allow bureaucracy to get in the way of saving lives,” he said, forgoing his weekly radio address for a live, Rose Garden appearance, as well as a meeting with top advisers.
Congressional hearings into the response to Katrina are a certainty this fall, as the list of critics – both Republicans and Democrats – who say the feds were a no-show for days want to know what went wrong.
“If a country knows they’re going to be attacked whether by Mother Nature or by terrorists, they must be prepared and it’s obvious that the federal government was not prepared,” Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-Queens) said.
The Navy announced yesterday that Vice President Cheney’s former company, Halliburton, which has handled much of the repair work as well as support services for the U.S. military in Iraq, was hired to restore power and rebuild three naval facilities in Mississippi that were wrecked by Katrina.