An unanticipated silence.Byline: The Register-Guard This time it wasn't Michael Moore who caught President Bush frozen in the headlights of an oncoming catastrophe. It was the Bush administration's own Federal Emergency Management Agency The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is the federal agency responsible for coordinating emergency planning, preparedness, risk reduction, response, and recovery. The agency works closely with state and local governments by funding emergency programs and providing technical in a video briefing the day before Hurricane Katrina laid waste to the Gulf Coast. The FEMA FEMA, n.pr See Federal Emergency Management Agency. video, obtained by The Associated Press, features former FEMA Director Michael Brown and his hurricane team doing a remarkably credible job of sounding a serious alarm and predicting Katrina's destructive potential with uncanny accuracy. What's missing from the video is an engaged, motivated president who is on top of the situation. The Aug. 28 video depicts Brown and his team urgently warning President Bush and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that Katrina was the "big one." The huge hurricane could cause levees to fail in New Orleans. Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center The U.S. National Hurricane Center, located at Florida International University in Miami, Florida, is the division of National Weather Service's Tropical Prediction Center responsible for tracking and predicting the likely behavior of tropical depressions, tropical storms and in Miami, told them there was ``potential for large loss of life.'' Given the gravity of the situation, President Bush proceeded to ask ... no questions. Not one. In his final briefing just hours before the costliest natural disaster in the nation's history would kill more than 1,300 people, the president simply reassured "folks at the state level" that "we are fully prepared." Then, in spite of the video record proving he was warned on Aug. 28 of the serious threat Katrina posed to New Orleans' levee levee (lĕv`ē) [Fr.,=raised], embankment built along a river to prevent flooding by high water. Levees are the oldest and the most extensively used method of flood control. system, four days after the storm Bush famously declared, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." That flagrant misrepresentation misrepresentation In law, any false or misleading expression of fact, usually with the intent to deceive or defraud. It most commonly occurs in insurance and real-estate contracts. False advertising may also constitute misrepresentation. deserves a place of honor alongside the "unanticipated" failure to find Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction Weapons that are capable of a high order of destruction and/or of being used in such a manner as to destroy large numbers of people. Weapons of mass destruction can be high explosives or nuclear, biological, chemical, and radiological weapons, but exclude the means of transporting or , the "unanticipated" insurgency in post-Saddam Iraq and the "unanticipated" problems and costs associated with the Medicare prescription drug plan. The president is doing a heckuva heck·uv·a adj. Slang Used as an intensive: You've done a heckuva good job. [Alteration of heck of a.] job of unanticipation. |
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