Katrina Report: No Chain Of Command

(CBS/AP)  Congressional investigators on Wednesday lambasted the U.S. government for its response to Hurricane Katrina, saying a lack of a clear chain of command hindered relief efforts and that Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff or another top official should have been the point person on relief efforts.

The Government Accountability Office also found that the government still lacks sufficient plans and training programs to prepare for catastrophic disasters like the Aug. 29 storm that devastated much of the Gulf Coast area. But it also singled out Chertoff in several shortcomings.

The report, which marks the first congressional conclusions about the much-criticized federal response to Katrina, offered a harsh assessment of the government's preparations and reaction to catastrophic disasters.

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Read the GAO Report (.pdf)

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Responding, a Homeland Security Department spokesman attacked the GAO's preliminary findings as "premature and unprofessional."

Until now, Chertoff has largely escaped widespread criticism of the government's sluggish response to Katrina. By contrast, then-FEMA Director Michael Brown, the principal federal official at the disaster site, quit his job after becoming the public face of the failures.

The report said that neither Chertoff nor any of his deputies in the disaster area acted as President George W. Bush's overall storm coordinator, "which serves to underscore the immaturity of and weaknesses relating to the current national response framework."

Leadership "was unclear," the report found.

Because of the internal confusion, federal officials were indecisive and slow to realize Katrina was a catastrophic disaster, it said.

The report also noted that Chertoff declared Katrina an "incident of national significance" on Aug. 30, a full day after the storm hit. But Chertoff did not specifically classify the storm as a catastrophic disaster, which would have activated parts of the National Response Plan to trigger a faster response.

"As a result, the federal response generally was to wait for the affected states to request assistance," the report found.

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