Editorial: A script for Keystone Cops

Monday, Oct. 17, 2005 | 7:57 a.m.

There seems to be no end to the stories about communications lapses and mass confusion during relief efforts following Hurricane Katrina. On Friday the Washington Post reported another one.

On Sept. 5 the first of several air shipments of packaged meals, 400,000 of them altogether, arrived in Arkansas as a donation from the British government. Tractor-trailers met the loads at Little Rock Air Force Base and began hauling the food, worth $5.3 million, to Louisiana. Today most of the food is back in Arkansas and quarantined at storage sites costing U.S. taxpayers $16,000 a month.

The reason most of the food was never distributed is because a lot of the packages contain meat. And meat from Britain has been banned since 1997, when that country experienced an outbreak of mad cow disease. Although several federal agencies had a role in requesting, accepting and distributing the food packages, the Post reported that none is being clear about where the responsibility lies for this fiasco.

This ongoing confusion over emergency response is revealing of how badly prepared this country is when it comes to disasters. Who or what agency tracks donations from foreign governments? Who is responsible for coordinating with other agencies to ensure that the donations are acceptable?

What happened with these food shipments is right out of an old Keystone Cops movie. On Sept. 6, the Post reported, the day after the food arrived, the Department of Agriculture learned that "food donations may be coming that needed inspection." It took two days, however, for them to confirm the information. At that point, the paper reported, USDA inspectors "hit the road -- literally chasing the delivery trucks to (New Orleans) shelters, the city's downtown convention center and other locations."

By the time inspectors caught up with the trucks, 115,000 meal packets had been distributed. Although some were vegetarian, others contained meat. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease) destroys brain tissue in cattle and a variant, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, can fatally attack the brains of humans who eat meat from the diseased animals.

The USDA acted correctly in racing to prevent the distribution of the meals. Evacuees shouldn't be fed food that has been banned. But why wasn't the department informed at the beginning, when the British first offered the donation? This case of the well-intentioned donation should be studied thoroughly by the Department of Homeland Security. With lack of communication being its root cause, the case is a microcosm of nearly everything that went wrong with the federal response to Hurricane Katrina.