Editorial: President failed in leadership

Saturday, Sept. 3, 2005 | 3:01 a.m.

WEEKEND EDITION

September 3-5, 2005

As morning dawned a week ago, Hurricane Katrina was barely in the nation's consciousness. It had formed over the Bahamas as a tropical storm and reached hurricane strength as it raced over Florida on Aug. 25, dumping 18 inches of rain. As it moved over the Gulf of Mexico, it rapidly gained strength but little nationwide notoriety. On Aug. 27, however, on the advice of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, President Bush, vacationing in Crawford, Texas, declared an emergency in Louisiana. The next day, last Sunday, he extended the declaration, which gives FEMA authorization to provide federal assistance and begin mobilizing help, to Mississippi and Alabama.

By late Sunday morning, Katrina's rapidly accelerating power began dominating TV news reports. The eye was on a direct path to hit New Orleans, perilously vulnerable because of its below-sea-level setting. The whole coastal regions of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama were in peril of catastrophic wind and floodwaters. Frighteningly, Katrina was upgraded to the highest category of hurricane and the mayor of New Orleans ordered the whole city evacuated. Highways became clogged as hundreds of thousands of people, who had the means to do so, heeded the warnings. In the evening, with winds already tearing into New Orleans and experts confirming the potential for unimaginable devastation, CNN anchor Aaron Brown was moved to ask: Are we on the verge of losing an American city?

On Monday, headlines across the country were blaring the news. A disaster of incalculable proportion was in the making. TV images were showing apocalyptic images of New Orleans and other urban and rural areas along more than 500 miles of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama coastline. The news was even more horrifying Tuesday, as the death toll began to be reported. On Wednesday The New York Times' banner headline read, in part, "Much of Gulf Coast is crippled; toll rises." The paper also ran a smaller headline underneath: "Bush cuts vacation short."

Finally, three days into one of the most devastating events in United States history, an event that left hundreds of urban and rural areas in ruins, perhaps thousands of Americans dead, thousands more in life-threatening situations and millions more in despair, President Bush returned to Washington from vacation. After being given early warning over the weekend by FEMA, it wasn't until Wednesday that he convened a meeting at the White House with federal emergency managers.

By then, as is well known, New Orleans was in the grips of a human tragedy that rivaled scenes of suffering in Third World countries. The total breakdown of law and order, the mass suffering, the deaths of elderly and infirm people unable to be rescued and the unanswered cries for help showed an America utterly unprepared and virtually leaderless. Other affected areas were in chaos as well, with no one in charge. We hold President Bush responsible for the fact that rescue and evacuation operations were relatively nonexistent for the first several days of the crisis.

Given the perilous situation of New Orleans, a city built below sea level, Bush should have swung into action well before the storm reached land, as he knew there was a good chance it would strike the city dead on. There was time then to pair federal agencies with the state governments to prepare for a massive evacuation. In a storm as powerful as Katrina, a strong leader would have anticipated the worst, including the breaching of the levees. Instead, Bush remained at his ranch, on vacation, declining to take personal charge of this coming national disaster.

It wasn't until Friday that National Guard troops began arriving in New Orleans in sufficient numbers to restore law and order, allowing mass evacuations to get under way. They, and other individual rescue units that acted heroically throughout, deserve credit for saving a lot of lives and relieving a lot of suffering.

It's too bad the same cannot be said for the nation's leader.