Chertoff ripped on storm response

WASHINGTON -- Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff yesterday took responsibility for his department's ''many lapses" in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, as a congressional inquiry released yesterday said the government's poor handling of the disaster led to unnecessary deaths.

''I am accountable and accept responsibility for the performance of the entire department, the bad and the good," Chertoff told a Senate committee. ''I also have a responsibility to fix what's wrong."

Shortly after Chertoff finished testifying before the Senate Homeland Security committee yesterday, a special House panel released its 520-page investigative report into the government's response to the hurricane, which flooded New Orleans and killed more than 1,300 people.

Though the report's conclusion had been widely reported in the past few days -- that the Bush administration, along with state and local officials, bore responsibility for serious lapses -- the full document described how some of deaths and suffering could have been avoided had the government been more competent.

''If this is what happens when we have advance warning, we shudder to imagine the consequences when we do not," said the House report, which was overseen by the chairman, Tom Davis, Republican of Virginia. ''Four and a half years after 9/11, America is still not ready for prime time. This is particularly distressing because we know we remain at risk for terrorist attacks and because the 2006 hurricane season is right around the corner."

In his testimony, Chertoff told the Senate that he is acutely aware of the coming hurricane season, which begins June 1. He promised that Homeland Security will have sharply improved its emergency operations by then, putting in place a new system to track the movement of supplies into a disaster zone.

Chertoff also said he has hired more officials with experience dealing with disasters. Much of the blame for the federal government's problems has centered on the former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Michael Brown, who landed his FEMA position through political connections and had had no emergency-management experience.

Last week, Brown testified before the same Senate committee that he had found Chertoff's calls during the crisis to be annoying and chose instead to give updates directly to the White House. The committee chairwoman, Susan M. Collins, Republican of Maine, told Chertoff that she found it ''astonishing" that he had put Brown in charge of federal operations.

But Chertoff, who had been in his position for six months before the hurricane, said that when Katrina struck, he believed Brown would act more professionally.

''If I knew then what I know now about Mr. Brown's agenda, I would have done something differently," Chertoff said.

Chertoff also said he deferred to Brown in the first days of the disaster because he did not want to be disruptive, but decided he had to replace Brown as head of federal Katrina operations about a week and a half after the hurricane. Brown resigned from FEMA several days later.

But in a scathing appraisal, Collins said Chertoff deserved much of the blame for his department's problems as well. Other than its Coast Guard component, she said, the agencies of Homeland Security ''failed . . . utterly in preparing for and responding to a disaster that had been long predicted and was imminent for days."

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, the ranking Democrat on the panel, asked Chertoff why he had ''done so little" to make sure his agencies were ready. Lieberman said Chertoff's underlings ''ran around like Keystone Kops, uncertain about what they were supposed to do or unable to do it."

Chertoff stoically acknowledged his department's failings, including delays in bringing a fleet of buses into New Orleans to evacuate people who were stranded at the Superdome and the convention center. He said he had been planning to overhaul the emergency-response agencies, but Katrina hit too soon into his tenure.

''The worst element of this catastrophe, personally, is not criticism I have received or the department has received from committees and commentators, but the vision of people who did have their suffering unnecessarily prolonged because this department did not perform as well as" it should have, he said.

Several senators also criticized Chertoff for having gone to Atlanta to attend a bird flu conference on Aug. 30, the day after Katrina struck, rather than heading to the disaster area.

Collins said, ''You did seem curiously disengaged to me."

But Chertoff said he also visited an emergency operations center in Atlanta that was running part of the Gulf Coast relief operation, and remained in constant contact with the White House and his department throughout the visit to Atlanta.

While the senators yesterday focused on federal problems, the House report spread blame across all levels of government. The report blasted local officials for failing to evacuate the city more fully before the storm. It also found that the federal government should have done much more to get ready before the storm, and said President Bush should have moved more quickly to intervene once the problems in the rescue effort became evident.

Earlier this week, Frances Fragos Townsend, Bush's domestic security adviser, said the president had been ''fully involved" in the hurricane relief effort.