Informed Speculation

Certainly Michael Brown, until quite recently the head of FEMA, has reason to minimize his own mistakes and failures, but in an interview with the New York Times, Brown makes it clear that Governor Blanco of Louisiana had completely bungled the state’s response to Katrina:

Hours after Hurricane Katrina passed New Orleans on Aug. 29, as the scale of the catastrophe became clear, Michael D. Brown recalls, he placed frantic calls to his boss, Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, and to the office of the White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr.

Mr. Brown, then director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said he told the officials in Washington that the Louisiana governor, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, and her staff were proving incapable of organizing a coherent state effort and that his field officers in the city were reporting an “out of control” situation.

“I am having a horrible time,” Mr. Brown said he told Mr. Chertoff and a White House official – either Mr. Card or his deputy, Joe Hagin – in a status report that evening. “I can’t get a unified command established.”

…In his first extensive interview since resigning as FEMA director on Monday under intense criticism, Mr. Brown declined to blame President Bush or the White House for his removal or for the flawed response.

“I truly believed the White House was not at fault here,” he said.

He focused much of his criticism on Governor Blanco, contrasting what he described as her confused response with far more agile mobilizations in Mississippi and Alabama, as well as in Florida during last year’s hurricanes.

Clearly, by the time we would expect FEMA to step in, the situation had been greatly exacerbated by the inept local response.

President Bush will address the nation at 8:00 p.m. central this evening.