Project Katrina

Yesterday President Bush made a “pit stop” in California for a photo-op and to showcase his administration’s ability to respond better to natural disasters than it did after Hurricane Katrina pounded Louisiana and the Gulf Coast. On Tuesday he pronounced the federal government’s actions “well-coordinated” after a Cabinet meeting to discuss the crisis. This would be the Cabinet meeting where Vice President Cheney fell asleep.

Bush and the Republicans are using this natural disaster to score political points by stressing to us they’ve improved on how they handled the last natural. The only problem is according to the Washington Post the comparison don’t make much sense.

Federal and state emergency managers say, however, that the two disasters can hardly be compared. Katrina’s floods and winds wreaked havoc on a far larger scale. California’s local responders lead the nation in training and coordination, while Louisiana’s rank near the bottom. And the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s responsibilities for battling wildfires are far more limited than its role in dealing with hurricane damage. “FEMA is not getting a real test in putting direct federal assets on the ground,” said George W. Foresman, undersecretary of preparedness for the Department of Homeland Security in 2005 and 2006.

[...]

While Katrina’s vast floods and winds covered an area the size of Britain at 90,000 square miles, fires in seven California counties blackened about 700 square miles as of yesterday —a footprint one-third smaller than wildfires burned there four years ago. The number of homes destroyed was about 1 percent of the 300,000 made uninhabitable by Katrina, and financial losses were less than 2 percent, based on initial estimates, comparable to the damage caused by wildfires in Oakland in 1991 and in Southern California in 2003.

It should be interesting to see how things progress over the coming weeks and months when we see if the promises made by the White House and FEMA are fulfilled. Or if this was just another in a long line of political grandstanding.