Bush officials blame locals
2005-09-05 08:36
Washington - Since two days after Hurricane Katrina lashed much of the Gulf Coast into oblivion, President George W Bush hasn't gone a day without a public event devoted to the storm.
Monday was no different, as he planned a return to the storm-ravaged region for a third look at Katrina's effect with visits to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Poplarville, Mississippi.
But none of it - including a stream of cabinet secretaries and other high-level federal officials to the area and on the airwaves on Sunday - has quieted the complaints that Washington moved too slowly in the storm's aftermath.
Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, just south of New Orleans, broke down on NBC's Meet the Press when he talked about people who waited for help.
"They were told like me, every single day, the cavalry's coming, on a federal level. The cavalry's coming, the cavalry's coming, the cavalry's coming. I have just begun to hear the hoofs of the cavalry ...," Broussard said.
"They've had press conferences - I'm sick of the press conferences. For God's sakes, shut up and send us somebody."
Bush's itinerary on Monday, which replaces a planned Labour Day speech in Maryland, was taking him a little farther afield of the centre of the storm's fury than his trip on Friday. Then, Bush walked a neighbourhood in decimated Biloxi on Mississippi's coast and stopped at the airport and a breached levee in New Orleans. The president also saw hurricane damage last Wednesday during a flyover of the coast from aboard Air Force One.
The president has come under fire for waiting until two days after Katrina hit - and a day after levee breaks drowned New Orleans and turned it into a place of lawless misery - to return to Washington from his August break in Texas to oversee the federal response.
Desperate New Orleans residents
It ended up taking several days for food and water to reach the tens of thousands of desperate New Orleans residents who took shelter in the increasingly squalid and deadly Superdome and city convention centre. Outlying areas, though receiving less nationwide attention, suffered some of the same problems.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff hinted at an emerging line of defence on Sunday, saying federal officials had problems getting information from local officials and were surprised they hadn't been told by Thursday of the violence and horrible conditions at the New Orleans convention centre.
"I got to tell you that hearing reports on TV and then calling the field and hearing something different is not what the secretary of Homeland Security wants to see happening," he said on "Fox News Sunday."
Senator Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat, lashed back, saying she won't tolerate federal officials' denigrating local efforts to deal with the catastrophe.
"If one person criticises them or says one more thing, including the president of the United States, he will hear from me," she said on the ABC's This Week. "One more word about it after this show airs and I might likely have to punch him. Literally."
Sniping aside, officials reported some progress, and some new worries.
Hundreds of federal health officers and nearly 100 tons of medical supplies were on their way to the Gulf Coast to try to head off disease outbreaks, feared because of the hot weather, mosquitoes and standing water holding human waste, corpses and other contaminants.
- AP