Repeat of Past Mistakes Mars Government's Disaster Response

On Sept. 25, White House press secretary Scott McClellan defended the tumultuous evacuation of 3 million Texans from the path of Hurricane Rita. "This was an unprecedented number of people who were being evacuated," he said. His comments echoed sentiments offered by Texas's governor, a senator and several mayors.

In fact, the evacuation was the largest in U.S. history -- at least since 1999.

Barely six years ago, in a lesson seemingly forgotten by U.S. authorities, Hurricane Floyd prompted the headlong flight of more than 3 million people from coastal Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas.

The result, as summarized in a 240-page report by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, foreshadowed the anarchy on freeways leading away from Houston last month: 18-hour traffic jams outside Charleston, S.C.; complaints that highways were not quickly converted into one-way exit routes; and shortages of supplies for hundreds of thousands of evacuees.

The repeated cycle of calamity, response and criticism highlights a persistent flaw in the nation's disaster preparedness four years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks: the inability of emergency agencies to learn from past mistakes, even those committed in recent years, say current and former government officials involved in homeland security.

Instead, personnel turnover, constantly changing priorities and split responsibilities among federal agencies and state and local governments sap the nation's ability to break patterns of bureaucratic failure, experts say. From establishing compatible communications systems for first responders to enforcing baseline preparedness standards for cities and states, goals set in 2001 remain frustratingly out of reach.

Heightened debate over the military's role in domestic preparedness is also familiar ground. On Sept. 3, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff declared that the sluggish response to the "ultra-catastrophe" wrought by Hurricane Katrina along the Gulf Coast required officials to "break the mold" of disaster response and improve on an eight-month-old National Response Plan. On Sept. 25, President Bush proposed enabling "the Defense Department to become the lead agency in coordinating and leading the response effort."

But 13 years earlier, authorities said that Hurricane Andrew had delivered a "mega-catastrophe" to South Florida. Then-Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) called for an expanded domestic role for the military; others called for improvements to a 1-year-old Federal Response Plan, the NRP's precursor.

Within five months, the Pentagon retooled its response to domestic disasters, issuing its first directive to speed "military support to civil authorities."

Yet the changes did not take root in time to help Katrina's victims.

"We shouldn't be in the same situation, especially now that we have a department whose mission is to increase our preparedness," said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and head of the Senate investigation into the Katrina response.

Arnold Punaro, an aide to Nunn for 24 years and a major general in the Marine Corps Reserve, said the problem is not a shortage of plans or policies, but a failure to practice and execute existing powers. "The problem with lessons learned is people unlearn them and make the same mistakes," he said.