After the Flood

Tuesday was awful. They forgot how to drive here in Washington over the summer, and some idiot plowed into another idiot near the Third Street Tunnel, and the whole commute thing was a mess. It took nearly an hour to get downtown, and I can just about see the bus depot from the top of Big Pink.

That was just the start of it. I was gratified to hear on the radio that two of the levees along the drainage canals had been restored and the pumps were starting to lower the level of the dirty water, revealing the sewage and toxic sludge below.

Mayor Nagil was commenting that 10,000 dead was not an unrealistic total for his city alone, and I had to change stations and listen to classic rock until I thought it was safe to go back to the news.

Sitting in traffic made me contemplate the nature of our interdependency. Getting to work in the morning requires the cooperation of a couple hundred thousand commuters. It requires gas trucks going their rounds to the service stations, and the deliverymen bringing things to the Korean store in the lobby of the Bus Depot and the trains to run generally on time through the tunnels under the river.

It did not work that way yesterday, and I expect it will take a couple days for us to work it all out again, having forgotten in the warm days when the Congress was gone and things made sense. I remember driving downtown, hopelessly late, and arriving on time because the traffic seemed reasonable.

The office was a mess, people waking up and thinking they should do something about Katrina, which offends my sense of military duty. The time for action was a week ago. I feel bad, though. There was no company plan to do anything; what happened in a timely manner happened because people did the best thing they could in the time that they had.

Senator Susan Collins is chair of the Government Affairs Committee. It was from that position that she orchestrated the complete overhaul of the Intelligence Community last year. I don’t know if it worked yet, but I am willing to give it a chance. Now she says she is going to get to the bottom of the Government’s failure to respond adequately to the storm.

I applaud the fact that someone else ought to have the same level of scrutiny that the intelligence community got after 9/11. I know it must have been tempting to blame the spooks for an intelligence failure, but since we all knew the storm was coming days before it hit, that is a bit of a reach. I look forward to having the same sort of fun blaming people who were doing the best they could, knowing what they did at the time, without enough money or the mandate to change anything.

In fact, this might be even better, since there has been plenty of money spent, and plenty of mandate for change. Homeland Security was pretty well resourced, in fact, and the money divided up just the way you would expect Congress would do it. Wyoming got just as much money as New York and Chicago did.

I could save Senator Collins some time this fall. There are a lot of other things going on, after all. The Department of Homeland Security is dysfunctional. It was recognized as such when it was established, and everyone just hoped we would have enough time to sort things out before something really bad happened.

Relatively well-functioning organizations like the Coast Guard and FEMA were submerged in a sea of bureaucracy. Attempting to channel the outpouring of funds, DHS apportioned the money by jurisdiction, not by number of citizens or by likelihood of attack.

That was clearly more idiocy, even if Congress liked it, and eventually the Department designated a handful of cities actually likely to be hit, and New York and Washington and Chicago and LA got a special chance at the sweepstakes of grants to enhance their security posture. But the bottom line was that a lot of cities across the heartland got new fire engines and HazMat suits just because they were eligible for the money.

To accommodate the new DHS structure, the National Response Plan was re-written. It was a painful process. DHS asserted sovereignty over everything, and leaving some of the meetings, I felt that the logical consequence of 9/11 was that we all worked for Tom Ridge, whether he knew anything about what we were doing or not.

There were many re-writes and many compromises. We just saw the consequences of that. The Governors and the Mayors were adamant that their authority was paramount. Normally I support that view. As a long-time Federal bureaucrat, I don’t trust myself to know the inner workings of the 50,000 jurisdictions that sit across this fair land. The role of the Federal Government should be to support the local authorities, give them what they need, and get out when the job is done.

But in the case of Katrina, a storm whose possibility had made the flooding of New Orleans the number three worst scenario at DHS.

I don’t know if you had heard, but the Big Easy is known as one of the most corrupt cities in America . I am confident that a good chunk of the money was siphoned off in kick-backs and sweetheart deals. It would be interesting to see where their share of the DHS grant money went, and it is likely that it is twenty feet under the dark water right now. But the National Response Plan did not give the Feds the right to take charge of local preparations for major disaster.

There was a plan in place to deal with the storm, just as there are rules for motorists to change lanes to get to the Third Street Tunnel. I stew in traffic because some idiot has lost control of their car, or curse as I swerve around some frustrated individual standing by a car that should not have been permitted to operate on the public roadway.

So delicate is the infrastructure in Washington that a single broken-down car can cost fifty-thousand man-hours of labor. It would be cheaper to buy people new cars than sit in the fumes trying to get around the carcasses of dead vehicles.

But we don’t do that, and that is why the revelation of the poverty of much of New Orleans has made everyone a little squeamish.

You would have to follow the plan for it to work, and the local officials are the first ones who did not. There are reasons, I suppose, that will come out over time. But let me speculate that the plan was unrealistic and under-resourced and failed to account for human nature.

Other than that, a splendid plan to have on the shelf. Mayor Ray Nagin, the man who has railed so bitterly about the slow Federal response summed up the real plan pretty well, saying that at the end of the day, people should get to high ground and wait for the military to fly them out.

Considering that the Gulf coast was hit by the natural equivalent of several tactical nuclear weapons, I would argue that the response was probably as good as possible, considering we have spent the last four years getting ready for a different sort of disaster.

I hope Senator Collins gets to the bottom of things, since the process is entertaining. But it is clear that an effective National Response Plan must contain a trip-wire that turns full authority over to the grown-ups when things are really bad.

The fact that such a provision turns our constitutional division of powers on its head is something we might want to think about. Particularly when it is hard to figure out who the grown-ups are. Maybe Senator Collins will find some of them in the investigation.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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