White House Blames System for Katrina Response

Feb. 23, 2006 — -- A new White House report on Hurricane Katrina found "significant flaws" in the Homeland Security department's national response plan for dealing with emergencies.

"Hurricane Katrina was a deadly reminder that we can and must do better, and we will," Frances Townsend, President Bush's Homeland Security adviser, wrote in a letter to him accompanying the report.

"This is the first and foremost lesson we learned from the death and devastation caused by our country's most destructive natural disaster: No matter how prepared we think we are, we must work every day to improve," she said.

Bush met with his Cabinet today to discuss the report on the response to Katrina, which the president himself has called inadequate. Offering 125 recommendations for handling future disasters, the report focuses on lessons learned.

"We will learn from the lessons of the past to better protect the American people," Bush said after the meeting. "I wasn't satisfied with the federal response."

Townsend said that would be addressed. "We can improve the response," she said. "We can make it faster and more efficient, and that's the focus of the 125 recommendations, which are really broken into 17 different areas."

The report looks at the handling of Katrina and the aftermath as a systemic failure rather than pointing fingers at individuals. It concluded that inexperienced disaster-response managers and a lack of planning,discipline and leadership contributed to vast federal failures during Hurricane Katrina.

The report also said that the response "fell far short" of expectations across a spectrum of agencies big and small.

"We are not as prepared as we need to be at all levels within the country: federal, state, local and individual," the report said.

In an interview on "Good Morning America," Townsend said the system "wasn't dependent on any one person."

"It was a failure of various aspects of decision-making that needed to happen real time and quickly to get federal response efforts," she said.