Bush takes responsibility
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationw...na_lat,0,2091786.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Bush Takes Responsibility for Slow Hurricane Response
By David Zucchino and Solomon Moore
Times Staff Writers
9:51 AM PDT, September 13, 2005
NEW ORLEANS — President Bush today accepted responsibility for the weak federal response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster.
At a Washington news conference with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, Bush acknowledged that the federal government has been blamed for a slow and inadequate response to the killer hurricane that hit the Gulf Coast Aug. 29.
"Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government. And to the extent that the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility," the president said.
It was the strongest statement of responsibility from the White House since the hurricane crisis began and initial relief efforts were sharply criticized by officials in hard-hit New Orleans and Louisiana. Michael Brown was forced to step down as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The public's dissatisfaction with the federal storm response dragged Bush's job approval rating to the lowest level of his presidency at 42%, a Washington Post/ABC News poll reported. Some 57% disapprove of Bush's performance in office, a double-digit increase since January, the survey found.
Today, Bush was asked whether the federal response to Katrina should worry Americans that their government isn't prepared to respond to another disaster or even a terrorist attack.
"That's a very important question, and it's in our national interest that we find out exactly what went on so that we can better respond," Bush said.
As he has before, Bush said he wanted to know what went wrong and what went right. "I'm not going to defend the process going in," Bush said. "I am going to defend the people saving lives."
He again praised relief workers at all levels. "I want people in America to understand how hard people worked to save lives down there," he said.
Bush will address the nation from Louisiana on Thursday evening, the White House announced today. It will be the fourth presidential trip to the hurricane-damaged Gulf Coast.
Bush spoke after R. David Paulison, the new acting director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, pledged to increase efforts to house the tens of thousands of evacuees who fled the storm.
"We're going to get people out of the shelters. We're going to move on and get them the help they need," Paulison told reporters in his first public comments since he was appointed.
Hundreds of thousands of people have fled to shelters in states across the country. Texas has about 250,000 in shelters and private housing.
Meanwhile, New Orleans awaited the opening of the airport and the waterfront today as authorities investigated the deaths of about 45 patients found in a flooded hospital.
The exact number of bodies recovered Sunday from the 317-bed Memorial Medical Center was unclear. A state official said the corpses of 45 patients were found; a hospital administrator said there were 44, plus three on the grounds.
The discovery raised Louisiana's official death toll to nearly 280, though officials have put the final count in the thousands. In Mississippi, the estimated toll is at more than 1,000 with about 200 bodies already recovered.
Paulison has a loyal following of firefighters in Florida, where as Miami-Dade County's fire chief he is remembered for pressing for aid for 400 firefighters whose homes were destroyed or damaged during Hurricane Andrew in 1992.
"He got a good baptism with Andrew," said Dominick Barbera, a vice president of the International Assn. of Firefighters. "He's going to step into a real hot box now."
In his letter of resignation to Bush, Brown, 50, said he was leaving "to avoid further distraction from the ongoing mission of FEMA." Brown had become a pincushion for critics of the Bush administration's storm response and was accused in recent news reports of exaggerating his emergency experience on his official resume.
Housing remains a critical issue. FEMA is barreling ahead with plans to create huge trailer-park cities — complete with schools and security. "This may not be on the scale of building the pyramids, but it's close," said Brad Gair, FEMA's disaster-area housing chief.
As many as 200,000 people — most of them in Louisiana — would be housed in the giant trailer parks for up to five years. The sites, scattered around the state, would vary in size from 5,000 to 25,000 people. About 6,000 FEMA-owned trailers are in Louisiana, and hundreds more are arriving daily, Gair said. In the next few days, FEMA plans to break ground on a 15,000-unit trailer city in the Baton Rouge area, and evacuees could start moving in within 10 days.
Meanwhile, mortuary teams continued to process the bodies after they were removed a day earlier from Memorial Medical. Health officials had known since last week that they would find bodies there, informed by doctors who were forced to evacuate after surging floodwaters short-circuited power to vital life-support respirators.
State health officials said many of the dead were elderly, ill patients whose conditions worsened as doctors and nurses struggled with sweltering 106-degree temperatures and shortages of food, water and medicine.
Joanne Lalla, an oncology nurse, said she "couldn't understand why nobody was coming to help us."
Dave Goodson, the hospital's assistant administrator, said that at one point, 500 hospital staff members were there along with 2,000 patients.
"These patients were not abandoned," Goodson said.
Patients at several other New Orleans hospitals also died during evacuations over the same period. At Charity Hospital, several patients died after doctors and nurses trying to evacuate them came under sniper fire and retreated inside.
But in St. Bernard Parish, state officials launched an investigation into the deaths of 20 residents of St. Rita's Nursing Home. The victims perished at the height of intense flooding.
Prosecutors are looking into reports that the facility's staff fled the premises, leaving behind mostly elderly patients, some trapped in their beds.
"I want answers," state Atty. Gen. Charles C. Foti Jr. said. "I want to know why those people were trapped and were not evacuated."
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Zucchino and Moore reported from New Orleans. Times staff writers Lianne Hart in Baton Rouge, and Ellen Barry and Rick Loomis in New Orleans and Michael Muskal in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
