Katrina: Officials 'blundered'

2005-10-21 22:11

Washington - One of US President George W Bush's senior advisers says US disaster response officials blundered badly in handling Hurricane Katrina, which left about 1 200 people dead after striking the US Gulf Coast in August.

"The sense of everyone involved was that we were appropriately positioned and that we had the mechanisms in place.

It turned out we were all wrong; we had not adequately anticipated," said Frances Townsend, Bush's homeland security and counter-terrorism adviser.

Townsend, charged with drawing up the lessons learned from Katrina, said she would produce a final report on "systemic and process and procedural problems that resulted in the failure" and recommendations in December or January.

"If you need legislative change, you need to hit the spring session before the next hurricane season," she told reporters in a briefing at the White House.

One of the critical issues, she said, was the "gap in communication" between Washington and local authorities, as well as among emergency workers and among branches of the US military that responded to the devastating storm.

Townsend helms a 12-person team drawn from several cabinet agencies to assess the widely criticised response to Katrina, including failures by the federal emergency management agency, whose chief resigned last month.

- AFP