He called the situation unsettled, however, and urged patience. "We can make this work," he said.
Critics in Washington and Louisiana said that even though Katrina had been closely tracked on its way to the Gulf Coast, the administration had not used the time to prepare adequately. They also complained that the Bush White House had repeatedly slashed congressional efforts to boost funding for levee work and other flood control upgrades.
As recently as January, Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) had warned on the House floor that if Hurricane Ivan last year had veered westward and hit New Orleans, thousands would have died and infrastructure would have sustained $100 billion in damage. "The city has always been at risk," he said then.
Sen. Mary L. Landrieu (D-La.) told her colleagues on the Senate floor a year ago that it was crucial to spend more government money to shore up the levees at New Orleans. "I hate to say it," she said. "It's going to take a loss of hundreds of thousands of lives on the Gulf Coast to make this country wake up and realize what we are underinvesting in."
Critics also noted that late last summer, in the midst of a hard-fought presidential campaign in which Florida was pivotal, FEMA received glowing marks from Florida officials for responding quickly to hurricanes there.
Some wondered why the New Orleans response was earning no such praise.
White House spokesman McClellan sought to dismiss such criticism as politics. "The last thing that the people who have been displaced or the people who have been affected need is people seeking partisan gain in Washington," he said.
Yet sharp criticism of the government's response to Katrina was not confined to politicians. Many experts in hurricanes, flooding and emergency management were more pointed.
The measures that Chertoff and other administration officials are putting together now should have been "in motion three to four days before the storm hit," Florida disaster researcher Olson said, especially in light of the fact that the New Orleans' vulnerability to a hurricane and a consequent flood had been carefully studied.
In November, for instance, a periodical published by the University of Colorado Natural Hazards Center examined the potential impact of a Category 4 or 5 hurricane on New Orleans. In a column, the director of the University of New Orleans' Center for Hazards Assessment Response and Technology, sociologist Shirley Laska, estimated that the damage would include storm surges, flooding and the breakdown of the levee system.
