Report: U.S. Unprepared for Major Disaster

WASHINGTON (AP) - The U.S. is unprepared for a disaster of Hurricane Katrina’s scale, according to a Senate inquiry that lawmakers said Wednesday took a critical look at failures in responding to the storm.

The final report is “fair and tough, and it charts a course to strengthen our nation’s emergency preparedness at all levels,” leaders of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee wrote their colleagues.

The Associated Press on Wednesday obtained a copy of the letter written by the committee’s head, GOP Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, and the top Democrat, Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut. The report’s title is “Hurricane Katrina: A Nation Still Unprepared.”

Senators were to get the report on Thursday, with a public release set for next week. The committee on Thursday planned to disclose the report’s 86 recommendations, said Collins’ spokeswoman, Jen Burita.

Separate reports in February by the House and White House concluded that apathetic and confusing disaster plans led to the sluggish federal response.

“I think it’s fair to say that it’s the most extensive of any of the investigations,” Collins said in a brief interview.

A committee member, Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark., said the report would be “somewhat critical” of the preparations and response by the Bush administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“My sense is, it’ll give us somewhat of a blueprint of how we should proceed in the committee,” Pryor said. “It’ll identify areas that need work, that need to be addressed.”

The House report said that if President Bush had gotten involved earlier, the government could have reacted more quickly to the Aug. 29 storm. This report said Michael Brown, who led FEMA when the storm hit, failed to follow the chain of command and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff failed to muster enough resources right away.

Katrina was one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history, killing more than 1,300 people in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. It left hundreds of thousands of people homeless and caused tens of billions of dollars in damage.

The Senate report is based on a seven-month investigation that included 22 hearings, more than 320 interviews and 838,000 pages of documents from local, state and federal officials, as well as from private companies.

Collins’ committee is expected to use the report to press for legislative changes in how the government prepares for and responds to disasters.

The House report singled out the Homeland Security Department for most of the breakdowns and made 125 recommendations.

Yet the demand for change seems to have little effect in the Gulf Coast so far, said Mississippi Gov, Haley Barbour, a Republican.

“I don’t know that the reports, per se, have changed much conduct,” said Barbour, who was in Washington to meet with senators on Wednesday.

He said that overall, “the federal government is doing a whole lot more right than wrong. They have certainly done some things that are worthy of criticism, and I think they’ll admit that.”

With the 2006 hurricane season beginning June 1, the investigative arm of Congress says FEMA is destined to repeat million-dollar mistakes of disaster aid waste and fraud unless it quickly can establish controls for verifying names and addresses.

Gregory Kutz, managing director of special investigations for the Government Accountability Office, said he has little confidence that FEMA will be ready by June 1 to safeguard taxpayer dollars should a disaster like Katrina strike again.

A FEMA spokesman said agency officials are working hard to improve and tighten controls in its disaster aid program.