Washington – Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff on Monday rejected accusations that he had neglected preparedness for natural disasters because he was preoccupied with terrorism, but he is likely to face tough questioning today from the Senate about his role in the government’s flawed response to Hurricane Katrina.
“I want to tell you, I unequivocally and strongly reject this attempt to drive a wedge between our concerns about terrorism and our concerns about natural disasters,” Chertoff said in a speech to emergency-response managers, declaring that he had always considered dealing with natural disasters a central part of his mission.
The secretary, whose department was created in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, is expected to be pressed hard, however, by Republicans as well as Democrats when he appears today before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
The panel is investigating what went wrong in the response to Katrina.
Although the Bush administration has maintained that the magnitude of the storm – one of the worst in U.S. history – took federal officials by surprise and overwhelmed their response plans, Senate investigators have documented a stream of advance warnings and internal communications that spelled out in graphic detail what Katrina would do to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.
In one chilling example obtained from Senate investigators, the transcript of a conference call hours before the storm hit shows that Chertoff and President Bush were told by Max Mayfield, head of the National Hurricane Center, that “the greatest potential for large loss of life is … in the coastal areas from the storm surge.”
Other warnings that circulated widely through the Homeland Security Department and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is part of Homeland Security, predicted that levees protecting New Orleans would fail and that huge areas of the city would be flooded for weeks or months to come.
Chertoff’s appearance before the Senate committee, like his speech Monday, was part of a rapidly unfolding struggle over the question of what went wrong and who was responsible – an effort that mingles political jockeying to cast or escape blame with nonpartisan efforts to learn lessons from Katrina that might reduce the toll of future natural disasters.
Last week, Michael Brown, who was forced out as head of FEMA because of the agency’s shortcomings in dealing with Katrina, told Congress the problems were rooted in what he said was the Homeland Security Department’s obsessive focus on terrorism.
It was in part as a response to Brown’s accusations that Chertoff insisted that preparation to deal with natural disasters had not been neglected.
