Knight Ridder Newspapers

SAN ANTONIO – Military commanders urged President Bush on Sunday to consider a national search-and-rescue plan to avoid the sort of chaos that engulfed New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

The federal response to the killer storm has been widely critiqued as too slow. But Maj. Gen. John White, briefing the president at Randolph Air Force Base, said rescue efforts, particularly by air, were poorly coordinated as well.

A call for help would come in, White said, and five helicopters would show up at the same place at the same time.

“Certainly, that was a train wreck that we saw in New Orleans,” he said, pointing to a much more closely coordinated relief plan for Hurricane Rita that struck the Texas and Louisiana coasts early Saturday.

“At least, we can have a plan,” he said. “It never goes as planned, but we can adjust as we go along.”

And Bush, who finished a three-day, three-state “fact- finding” trip Sunday, signaled his agreement.

“It’s precisely the kind of information that I’ll take back to Washington to help all of us understand how we can do a better job in coordinating federal, state and local response,” he said, wondering aloud whether the Defense Department should sometimes take the lead in dealing with natural disasters as he said it would in a terrorist attack.

“That’s going to be a very important consideration for Congress to think about,” Bush said.

Since he arrived in Colorado Springs, Colo., Friday at the Northern Command, which manages the military response to domestic disasters, most of his briefings by the military and state officials have been private. But reporters and cameras were allowed into the conference room for a while Sunday before Bush attended worship services on the base, where he had spent the night.

His last stop on his way back to Washington was at the Federal Emergency Management Agency field office in Baton Rouge, La., the hastily developed outpost where Katrina relief efforts are being coordinated.

At the Randolph air base, the president, looking tired, sat at the table alongside Lt. Gen. Robert Clark, the joint military task force commander for Hurricane Rita, who also embraced a national strategy to better rescue disaster victims.

“A national plan, good training against the plan, gets you to this state faster in extremis,” Clark said. “That’s the goal.”

One of the recurring issues raised after the searing pictures of New Orleans residents pleading for help in the wake of Katrina has been the role of the military – why its assistance was slow in coming and whether it should play a greater role.

National Guards, usually deployed early for disaster relief, are under the command of state governors. But U.S. armed forces are under the president’s command, and there have been various suggestions that federal law be changed to give them limited law enforcement powers and other enhanced duties, if not put in charge.

The president raised the issue himself during his address to the nation Sept. 15 from New Orleans, acknowledging that relief efforts at every level were initially overwhelmed.

“It is now clear,” he said, “that a challenge on this scale requires greater federal authority and a broader role for the armed forces – the institution of our government most capable of massive logistical operations on a moment’s notice.”

He has since broached the matter several other times, all but endorsing it completely on Sunday.

The question is, he said: “Is there a circumstance in which the Department of Defense becomes the lead agency. Clearly, in the case of a terrorist attack, that would be the case – but is there a natural disaster … of a certain size that would then enable the Defense Department to become the lead agency in coordinating and leading the response effort?” The issue, though, is far from settled.

Congressional committees plan hearings on Capitol Hill this week to review relief efforts in New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast, ravaged by Katrina. And there is not yet any emerging consensus on how to best to fix the problems exposed in FEMA and its parent Department of Homeland Security, created after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks four years ago.

“We still have enormous problems with different levels of law enforcement agencies and other emergency responders to communicate with one another,” Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”

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