BATON ROUGE, La. — As the death toll from Hurricane Katrina climbed to 710 on Wednesday, White House aides said President Bush's address to the nation tonight would call for reconstructing the Gulf Coast using conservative blueprints and private-sector initiatives.
In preparing for his speech to be delivered from New Orleans, the president consulted widely with Republican leaders and conservative thinkers.
With damage estimates as high as $200 billion, massive federal spending appears inevitable. Late Wednesday, the Senate passed a $3.5-billion measure that would provide emergency housing vouchers to more than 350,000 families. That is in addition to nearly $60 billion in emergency aid already authorized.
A day after Bush accepted blame for breakdowns in federal disaster efforts, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco took "full responsibility" for her own mistakes. Blanco did not specify those errors in her televised speech from the statehouse in Baton Rouge. City and federal officials have questioned preparations made by state officials before Katrina struck.
"We must take a careful look at what went wrong and make sure it never happens again," Blanco said.
Earlier in the day, officials said that Blanco and Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad W. Allen had repaired splintering relations over management of the body retrieval effort in New Orleans, where corpses have floated for days in floodwaters and accumulated in houses and evacuated buildings.
Louisiana officials said they had taken over a lapsed federal contract with a Houston mortuary firm. The arrangement would allow the private company's crews to continue collecting the bodies of flood victims scattered across southern Louisiana.
Blanco had lashed out at the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Tuesday, arguing that its failure to come to terms with Kenyon International Emergency Services Inc. had threatened the operation. Allen, the agency's new point man in the flood-swept Gulf Coast region, at first responded that the state, not FEMA, had full authority for the recovery of bodies.
The conflict centered on who would pay for Kenyon's contract. State officials insisted that FEMA had hired Kenyon and needed to guarantee that Louisiana would be compensated for future costs. FEMA replied that the decision was the state's to make.
