NEW ORLEANS — President Bush took responsibility Tuesday for breakdowns in the federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina, saying the massive storm had "exposed serious problems in our response capability."
Although personally shouldering blame for the first time, Bush also insisted that flaws occurred "at all levels of government," and said he wanted more cooperative relations with state and local officials to aid dispossessed Gulf Coast residents. He plans a fourth post-hurricane trip to Louisiana on Thursday to deliver a national address on the crisis.
As Hurricane Katrina's death toll in Louisiana rose to 423, bureaucratic infighting raged as the governor traded charges with federal emergency officials over bogged-down efforts to retrieve the bodies of flood victims.
Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said Federal Emergency Management Agency officials had jeopardized the massive body recovery effort by failing to renew a temporary contract with a Houston mortuary firm. Blanco said the state would try to rehire the company on its own, and accused FEMA of shirking its financial oversight for the retrieval process. FEMA officials insisted that they had no decision-making role, but later tried to reassure Blanco.
"No one, even those at the highest level, seems to be able to break through the bureaucracy to get this important mission done," she said. "I am angry and outraged."
National Guard and Army troops have joined in the retrieval of bodies in recent days, but the grim ordeal in New Orleans has moved slowly, hampered by the deteriorating condition of corpses left in floodwaters and exposed to the sun over the last two weeks. Military units have had to tether dozens of bodies to trees and poles so they can be found by overworked mortuary teams.
In the first major criminal case arising from the hurricane, the state's chief prosecutor charged a husband and wife who owned a nursing home in St. Bernard Parish with negligent homicide, accusing them of abandoning dozens of elderly residents to die in the raging flood.
"They were warned repeatedly that this storm was coming," said Louisiana Atty. Gen. Charles C. Foti Jr. Their inaction "resulted in the deaths of these people."
Pathology experts and even a disaster mortuary official working for FEMA in the Gulf Coast expressed alarm at the risk of unattended bodies lying in the open for weeks. "What I've seen is not encouraging," said Cotton Howell, a South Carolina emergency management official who is leading FEMA's Disaster Mortuary Operations Response Team in Mississippi. "It seems like there are all sorts of problems over there."
With water now covering less than 40% of New Orleans, there were more heartening signs of revival. The Army Corps of Engineers said it was pumping out about 9 billion gallons per day, and that the city should be drained of floodwaters in about a month.
The first passenger flights returned to Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport. Port officials said they expected the first cargo ship to arrive next week. And Mayor C. Ray Nagin said he hoped to reopen the historic French Quarter and the city's central business district next week, along with the Algiers and Uptown neighborhoods, which mostly escaped storm damage.
"We are bringing New Orleans back. We are bringing its culture back, we are bringing its music back," Nagin said. Glancing up at military helicopters thudding overhead, he added: "I'm tired of hearing these helicopters. I want to hear some jazz."
Nagin also acknowledged that Katrina's knockout blow had exhausted the city's cash reserves. "I don't think we will have to" declare bankruptcy, Nagin said. "There are so many people who want to help us." He added that he was "working furiously" to obtain lines of credit from banks and the federal government.
After a tour of the flood-ravaged city Monday, Bush had pledged that the federal government would help in New Orleans' recovery. He deflected questions about federal mismanagement of Katrina relief, though, saying he would not "play the blame game" -- a phrase that White House officials used repeatedly after the storm.
But Tuesday, appearing at a Washington news conference with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, Bush spoke plainly when asked whether the government was prepared for another natural disaster or a terrorist attack.
"Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government," he said. "And to the extent that the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility."
Bush added that he wanted to "know how to better cooperate with state and local government, to be able to answer that very question: Are we capable of dealing with a severe attack or another severe storm? And that's a very important question, and it's in our national interest that we find out exactly what went on so we can better respond."
