NorthCom Official Lists Katrina Lesson

[Lawman]

Colorado Springs Gazette
October 22, 2005
NorthCom Official Lists Katrina Lessons
By Pam Zubeck, The Gazette
COLLEGE PARK, Md. - Failure to link the National Guard’s and Northern Command’s rescue plans led to multiple helicopters being sent to the same site during Hurricane Katrina, reducing the number of victims the military reached immediately after the storm passed, a top Pentagon official said Friday.
Paul McHale, deputy defense secretary for homeland defense, said the disconnect was one of several glitches Katrina exposed in the nation’s emergency response system.
Speaking to reporters at the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism at the University of Maryland, McHale said the Pentagon’s involvement began Aug. 19 when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed an “order for severe weather.” The order put NorthCom commander Adm. Timothy Keating in charge of sending officers out to coordinate as storms approached and hit and also of choosing bases at which to stock supplies during hurricane season.
On Aug. 23, when Katrina was a tropical storm, McHale and other Pentagon officials ordered an assessment of military assets used during last year’s hurricanes in Florida, including medical capability, number of ready-to-eat meals used and staging bases.
“The question was whether this was going to be a catastrophic event,” McHale said.
NorthCom, based at Peterson Air Force Base, dispatched coordinating officers to the Gulf states Aug. 28, and numerous ships were ordered to prepare to deploy. Katrina made landfall the next day.
By Aug. 30, another weakness was revealed, McHale said. While the media reported New Orleans had “dodged a bullet” because Katrina hadn’t hit the city head-on, the military was attempting to assess the true impact. That was difficult because of inadequate reconnaissance, he said.
Within hours, though, the levees broke, stranding thousands of people. Military leaders then knew the Pentagon’s contribution “would be on the high end and would be beyond anything we had ever done for this kind of natural disaster,” he said.
Although McHale said Keating and NorthCom “did great,” he added, “That said, we can’t be Pollyannas. We have to be clear-eyed in what didn’t work.”
Among those lessons was the breakdown between the National Guard and Pentagon, he said.
“The planning by the National Guard was not well integrated with the overall military,” he said. “The planning of NorthCom was first-rate but was not well known to the National Guard. The Joint Staff didn’t have a grasp of the National Guard’s plans.”
As a result, search and rescue was “not nearly as efficient as it could have been,” he said.
The military began providing assets sought by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the lead agency in responding to Katrina, within days, well before written requests were received, he said.
McHale said the Pentagon drafted the first seven or eight of what turned out to be 93 requests for aid the weekend after Katrina hit and sent the orders to FEMA, which then officially submitted them to the Pentagon on Labor Day.
“We took over logistics in the entire area,” he said, “including transportation of basic commodities because FEMA could turn to no one else to get the essential commodities necessary to begin the recovery.”
McHale said the National Response Plan needs to be reviewed “and possibly revised.” Also, the nation shouldn’t view every state’s emergency management capabilities as equal, he said. He also noted the military still is discussing standardizing the point at which the military gets involved in natural disasters.
Lastly, McHale said, Katrina showed that FEMA shouldn’t assume it can rely on local contractors for mitigation following a disaster, because in cataclysmic events, local firms are wiped out.
The military’s Katrina response cost roughly $2.1 billion, he said, and represented the Pentagon’s largest domestic relief effort, including deployment of 75,000 personnel, 293 helicopters, 68 aircraft and 21 ships.
McHale will speak next week at the Homeland Defense Symposium at Broadmoor Hall.