United States President George Bush, facing a political crisis over the government’s handling of relief efforts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, announced on Tuesday that he would lead his own investigation of what went wrong.
Bush also declared that he was sending Vice-President Dick Cheney to the ravaged Gulf coast region to assess recovery operations, and remove ”any bureaucratic obstacles that may be preventing us from achieving our goals”.
The announcements, made after a Cabinet meeting in the White House, reflected anxiety that the humanitarian crisis remained grave and that the political threat to the Bush presidency’s legacy and second-term agenda was growing, as more details emerged of the failure of Washington’s immediate response to the disaster.
”What I intend to do is to lead an investigation to find out what went right and what went wrong,” Bush said. ”We want to make sure that we can respond properly if there’s a WMD [weapons of mass destruction] attack or another major storm.”
There were signs on Tuesday that the army had begun literally to turn the tide in New Orleans. After having plugged the biggest hole in the levees around the city, the engineers’ corps began pumping water out of the flooded streets for the first time.
But New Orleans’ mayor, Ray Nagin, warned that it would take three weeks to bail the water out, and another few weeks to remove the debris. Until then it posed a serious danger.
CNN on Tuesday quoted Nagin’s office as saying E coli bacteria had been found in the water, which is contaminated by sewage, dead bodies and toxic chemicals washed out of oil refineries and other industrial plants.
‘We will build a better New Orleans’
Nagin gave police officers the green light on Tuesday to forcibly remove survivors who refuse to leave their homes or the city.
In a new evacuation order issued by his office, Nagin authorised any public safety officer ”to compel the evacuation of all persons … regardless of whether such persons are on private property or do not desire to leave.”
The only exceptions were people engaged by a local, state or federal agency with the relief effort.
The order came as official patience ran out with some diehard Katrina survivors who rode out the storm at home and have adamantly refused to leave despite warnings of serious health risks.
Rescue teams sent to try and persuade them to leave said they were often ignored or verbally abused.
The mayor said he understood that people did not want to abandon their city, but tried to reassure them that the move would not be permanent.
”It’s OK. Leave for a little while. Let us get you to a better place. Let us clean this city up, and once we clean it up, I promise everybody that you will be able to come to a city that’s safe and a city that is better,” he said.
”We will build a better New Orleans.”
The aircraft carrier Iwo Jima arrived at New Orleans on Tuesday to help provide helicopters and medical care for survivors. Paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division were deployed with small boats to help the house-to-house search for the living and the dead, amid some predictions that the death toll could reach 10 000.
”It’s going to be awful, and it’s going to wake the nation up again,” Nagin said.
Meanwhile the US Senate launched its own investigation, as both Republicans and Democrats denounced the government’s performance, which left tens of thousands of people stranded for four days or more in New Orleans with little or no food, water or medical assistance.
”Government at all levels failed,” Susan Collins, a Republican on the Senate governmental affairs committee, said. ”It is difficult to understand the lack of preparedness and the ineffective initial response to a disaster that had been predicted for years, and for which specific, dire warnings had been given for days.”
The seriousness of the political storm Bush is facing was vividly illustrated on Tuesday by an editorial in the staunchly conservative Wall Street Journal which warned ”the aftermath of Katrina poses a threat to his entire second term”.
The usually supportive editorial page concluded: ”What’s really at stake in the coming months is the Republican claim to be the governing party.”
Bush insisted he would not be drawn into the ”blame game”, but echoed an argument his aides have been making — that the primary responsibility lay with state and local authorities.
Meanwhile Bush, already under pressure for the impression that he has been unable to empathise with the poor, mainly black victims of the disaster, was not helped by remarks made by his mother, Barbara, after touring a relief centre in Texas.
”What I’m hearing which is sort of scary is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality,” Mrs Bush told the Public Broadcasting Service. ”And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.” – Guardian Unlimited Â