Editorial: Six months and counting

Wednesday, Jan. 4, 2006 | 7:34 a.m.

With the beginning of the Atlantic hurricane season just six months away, the Bush administration is retooling the federal disaster plan that proved to be a disaster itself before, during and immediately after Hurricane Katrina. That plan was updated and approved last year at this time. Those charged with implementing the plan, however, committed the fatal mistake of assuming that local and state responders would not need federal help with a hurricane until after it had passed.

In a special report this week by the Associated Press, officials said such an assumption will not be made again. "There has to be a way to apply federal resources when state and local resources are overwhelmed," a federal official involved in revising the plan told the AP. The whole country is a witness to the truth of that statement, as TV images in the days following Hurricane Katrina showed thousands of victims trapped because local rescuers were too overwhelmed to reach them.

Under the new plan, emergency officials will be required to exercise a greater sense of urgency. The plan approved last year gave the Homeland Security Department the authority to marshal federal resources and immediately dispatch them wherever they were desperately needed. The department, however, under Secretary Michael Chertoff, ruled that such action was reserved for sudden disasters, not for emergencies such as hurricanes that provide several days of warning.

The AP also reported that the revised plan calls for helicopter drops of communications gear. Local and state responders during Katrina could not coordinate their efforts because communications lines were down. It also calls for using what little advance notice is available to set up staging areas and portable hospitals. Additionally, federal agencies would provide security against looters.

When the toll was calculated after the 2005 hurricane season, nearly 1,800 people had been killed and property damage exceeded $100 billion. The need for a revised plan is abundantly clear, as hurricanes this year could be equally powerful.