Bush Administration Bureaucratic Tug-of-War While Americans Died

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I found this on the nola.com pages. . .interesting summary of the battle between Blanco and Bush and why support was delayed. . .

Appeals for troops unheeded for days

Blanco, Bush disagreed on authority over forces

By Jan Moller and Robert Travis Scott
Capital Bureau

BATON ROUGE - As it became clear last week that the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina required far more help than state and local authorities could provide, Gov. Kathleen Blanco and other state officials began pleading for more help from the federal government.

But substantial active-duty Army deployments didn't arrive until a week after the storm, a fact that might turn out to be one of the enduring controversies about the state and federal response to what likely will be one of the deadliest and most costly events in American history.

This week, Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, who commands Joint Task Force Katrina, said search and rescue is the top priority for the 7,000 active-duty soldiers ordered to Louisiana by President Bush on Saturday. But the vast majority of the rescue effort was conducted by state and local authorities, volunteers with flat-bottomed boats that could access the narrow streets where flood victims were stranded on roofs and attics, and by the Louisiana National Guard.

"We pulled out 250,000 people before the Army got here,"said Sam Jones, a former mayor of Franklin who serves as a senior adviser to Blanco and helped organize the boat rescue operation. "By Thursday (Sept. 1), we knew we'd turned a corner."

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