4 Places Where the System Broke Down

(5 of 7)
2 The Governor

Did Kathleen Babineaux Blanco make every effort to get federal help?

Early Wednesday morning, Aug. 31, two days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans, Blanco was frantic. Without any aides along, she and her husband had made an unannounced visit to the Superdome the night before and seen how desperate the situation there was becoming. The arena was teeming, its roof was leaking, and people had begun dying. "They were scared; they were upset. A lot of emotions were coming from them. Some were sick. They needed their diabetes medicine," the Governor told TIME in an interview. "What we were dealing with was a minute-by-minute life-or-death situation."

The day the storm hit, she asked President Bush for "everything you've got." But almost nothing arrived, and she couldn't wait any longer. So she called the White House and demanded to speak to the President. George Bush could not be located, two Louisiana officials told Time, so she asked for chief of staff Andrew Card, who was also unavailable. Finally, after being passed to another office or two, she left a message with DHS adviser Frances Frago Townsend. She waited hours but had to make another call herself before she finally got Bush on the line. "Help is on the way," he told her.

No one would mistake Blanco, 62, for Rudy Giuliani. In the first week after the storm hit, she came across as dazed and unsteady, at one moment in despair over "people probably who are on drugs, who are threatening other people, who are causing our rescue effort to stall"; at another, declaring her troops had "M-16s, and they're locked and loaded."

But there were glimpses as well of the cautious and deliberative management style that has been both her strength and her weakness since she became Governor in 2003. Beginning the previous Friday, when the forecasts still had it that the hurricane was more likely to hit the Florida Panhandle, the Governor had followed her responsibilities under the state's disaster plan to the letter. She proclaimed a state of emergency; put the National Guard on alert; arranged to have traffic patterns on outgoing roadways reconfigured; made sure the parishes that were not at risk would have shelters and supplies for people from the ones that were. And once an evacuation was ordered, she would have one more job, according to the state's official Emergency Operations Plan: "Request Federal Government assistance as needed."

Whether she did that as effectively or as forcefully as the catastrophe demanded is the question that now haunts the Governor. Should Blanco have told Bush she needed 7,000 cots? 200 boats? The 82nd Airborne? "I didn't give him a checklist or anything," she acknowledged in an interview. Nor should she have had to, her aides insist. Fumed one: "That's like telling a drowning man that you are not going to help him until he asks for a life preserver."

And yet, with the exception of the mayor, no one was in a better position than Blanco to know precisely what was needed and how soon. Not until the following day--Thursday, Sept. 1--did she come up with specifics: 40,000 troops; urban search-and-rescue teams; buses; amphibious personnel carriers; mobile morgues; trailers of water, ice and food; base camps; staging areas; housing; and communications systems.

State officials also concede that the Governor had unrealistic expectations of precisely what Washington was capable of doing. "She thought it would be more omniscient and more omnipresent and omnipowerful than it turned out to be," says one. Among her greatest regrets, says the official, is having relied on FEMA's assurances that it would provide bus transportation out of the Superdome to evacuees. A day later, she discovered those buses were still on the way from other states and ordered her staff to start rounding up local buses. Recalls Tyson Bromell II, her rural-development director: "She pulled me to the side, and asked me, 'Where are all the buses?' I said, 'We've been told not to send them, that there were already enough buses.' And she just looked at me and said, 'Get those buses, Ty.'" But the Governor acknowledges she made mistakes. "I'd have had more helicopters standing by. More resources standing by. We didn't expect the water," she says. "I would have wanted a faster response. We have to have a better communications network."

Blanco is not the first Governor to learn those kinds of lessons the hard way. In 1992 Florida Governor Lawton Chiles came under withering criticism for waiting three days after the destruction from Hurricane Andrew before making a written request for the federal troops that were standing by with food and tents. As for FEMA, Chiles later said ruefully, it "may be well meaning, but they have no clout in the initial phase ... You've got to loudly and strongly and probably with all kinds of paper tell the White House what you need."

Further tangling the post-Katrina disaster effort was a struggle for power. On the Friday after the hurricane, as the Governor met with Bush aboard Air Force One on the tarmac of the New Orleans airport, the President broached a sensitive question: Would Blanco relinquish control of local law enforcement and the 13,268 National Guard troops from 29 states that fall under her command? State officials say Blanco considered it an odd move, given that federal control would not in itself mean any additional troops and would prohibit the guard under the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 from acting as policemen. And she thought the request had a political motive. It would allow Washington to come in and claim credit for a relief operation that was finally beginning to show progress.

Dan Bartlett, counselor to the President, denied anything as unseemly as politics was behind the move. "The same discussions" were under way with Republican Governor Haley Barbour of hurricane-ravaged Mississippi, he told Newhouse News Service. However, Barbour's press secretary Pete Smith told TIME that "no such request" was made of the Mississippi Governor. (Bartlett says Barbour's office made it clear early on they did not want to relinquish authority.) Blanco asked for 24 hours to consider it, but as she was meeting at midnight that Friday night with advisers, Card called and told her to look for a fax. It was a letter and memorandum of understanding under which she would turn over control of her troops. Blanco refused to sign it.

The signs of hard feelings between the White House and the Governor were hardly subtle. Blanco hired James Lee Witt, Bill Clinton's well-regarded FEMA chief, as an adviser--and didn't discourage anyone from assuming that it reflected her feelings about the ineffectiveness of Bush's FEMA director, Michael Brown. When Bush decided to make a second trip into the state last week, Blanco learned about it from the media--and had to cancel her trip to visit evacuees in the Houston Astrodome. Blanco insists, however, that Washington and Baton Rouge are now on the same page. Bush, she said, "is disappointed by the response, given the immediacy of the need. We're both disappointed. But you know, that's the past, and we have to move into the future."

While Blanco has come under fire, Republicans and Democrats in Louisiana's congressional delegation have stood behind her. Her fellow Governors, frustrated by FEMA's lack of response to their own offers of assistance, began trying to coordinate help through the National Governors Association. But by late last week, neither system appeared to be working. Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, initially told to expect 300 evacuees, got 9,000; meanwhile, Virginia Governor Mark Warner arranged for 1,400 beds in Blackstone, Va., complete with Internet access, a school, day care, even a heated pool and gym. By Friday, not a single person had shown up to claim them. --By Karen Tumulty. With Brian Bennett / New Orleans and Nathan Thornburgh / Baton Rouge

3 The Director

Why did FEMA and its chief, Michael Brown, fail their biggest test?

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