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Retooled disaster plans to greet next hurricane season

WASHINGTON - Before the next big hurricane's winds howl ashore, Homeland Security officials want an emergency communications network operating, emergency medical facilities treating patients and teams dispatched to search for victims at the likely ground zero.

In the wake of congressional hearings that exposed the breathtaking failures of the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, the Bush administration is retooling its disaster plan to react more quickly to the next catastrophe.

Michael Brown, now the ex-chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, became the public face of Katrina's failure. But the administration is reviewing how other leaders also failed last August to execute a playbook approved just eight months earlier to handle such a disaster.

For example, Brown's boss - Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff - did not invoke special powers in the National Response Plan that would have rushed federal aid to New Orleans when state and local officials said they were swamped.

The department concluded the authority should be invoked only for sudden catastrophic events that offer no time for preparation and not for slow-approaching hurricanes.

That will not happen next time, according to officials who described to the Associated Press some of the changes in the administration's evolving disaster response plan.

"There has to be a way to apply federal resources when state and local resources are overwhelmed," said Joel Bagnal, a special assistant to the president for homeland security who is involved in the administration's lessons-learned review.

Chief among the changes to the original 426-page plan are several ideas for rushing federal resources to a stricken area. They include:

Dropping small military or civilian vehicles, packed with communications gear, into a disaster zone by helicopter or driving them from nearby staging areas.

Setting up portable hospitals with federal emergency medical teams to augment local facilities.

Helping local and state police catch looters and snipers by providing federal law enforcement officers if requested.

White House spokesman Trent Duffy said Friday that the revamped National Response Plan is expected to be finalized in the coming weeks after meetings with hundreds of federal, state and government officials and individuals outside the government.

The union representative for FEMA headquarters workers worries about how well the agency will respond next time. FEMA reacted quickly to big disasters when it operated independently, he said, but fell short in its first big test as a member of the huge Homeland Security Department.

Those on the front lines say their hope is to have a unified philosophy that values flexibility and quick thinking to adapt solutions to a rapidly unfolding human disaster.

"When you have a disaster, nothing goes by any kind of plan," said Dr. Arthur Wallace, leader of the Oklahoma 1 FEMA medical team that was dispatched from its staging area too late to beat Katrina to New Orleans.

Wallace's 34-member medical team from Oklahoma left its Houston staging area Aug. 28 after receiving a request from Louisiana officials to head for the Superdome.

Katrina made landfall in Louisiana just after 6 a.m. on Aug. 29, but the team did not arrive until that night.

It did not receive its first patients until dawn on Aug. 30.

In the future, the administration wants medical teams in position before the storm strikes.

[Last modified January 1, 2006, 00:29:14]