Dear President Bush,
Fran Townsend, White House Homeland Security Advisor hosted a kickoff for your bird flu implementation plan this past week. From a cursory review it appears to have fewer holes than your Lessons Learned report from Hurricane Katrina. However, Mrs. Townsend said several noteworthy things in her press presentation with Scott McClellan.
The implementation plan devotes a full chapter to the United States government's response to a pandemic, and describes in detail the actions we will undertake at each stage before, during and after a pandemic…..
If you changed the name in the previous sentence from “pandemic” to “hurricane”, the Lessons Learned report would fall far short. Besides not conducting a credible investigation on the evacuation of hospital and nursing home patients both pre and post landfall, the document reveals no detailed actions as to how that would be accomplished in the future. For the President and Sec. Brown to be so concerned about hospital patients just days after the storm, this area received “short shrift” from an analysis and future plans standpoint.
In addition to describing the actions we are taking, we provide a great deal of detail in the rationale behind our approach and our framework for future decision making.
The rationale behind the sorely lacking Lessons Learned report is not yet clear. Why was the group that managed most patient and staff evacuations from dead New Orleans area hospitals, the Louisiana Hospital Association not mentioned? Why did the report mention a nursing home where 6 or 7 patients died yet leave out the LifeCare facility where 24 patients expired? Did it have anything to do with the Carlyle Group’s August 2005 purchase of LifeCare, just weeks before Katrina’s landfall?
The Pennsylvania Avenue investment house with famous insider connections to you and your administration likely appreciates their omission from the Lessons Learned report. It removes one possible hurdle in LifeCare’s likely wrongful death civil lawsuits as the White House failed to weigh in with a credible investigation and allocation of responsibility. The Carlyle Group benefits from your incompetence, whether they solicited it or not. What was the rationale in omitting LifeCare from the over 200 page document?
The fact is, we have a responsibility to the American people, as well as to state and local governments, to provide them with our expertise, our insight, our advice on how best to prepare, and then to work with them in advance of a crisis to ensure that we understand what they expect and will need from us…
How will you work with state and local governments on the evacuation of hospital and nursing home patients both pre and post landfall in future storms? This not evident in any of the planning to date and hurricane season is just a few weeks away. The Mayor of New Orleans' recently released plans failed to address this issue.
I think it's really important that we talk about -- based on facts and what we know. Obviously, the United States government has, based on science, created a planning assumption, a worst-case scenario. And that's our responsibility, to assume the worst knowing that anything short of that we will, then, be well prepared for.
The government assumed the worst via its Hurricane Pam drill, received almost the worst with Hurricane Katrina and still failed to perform. It’s government’s burden to prove it can do better. That proof awaits in the handling of some of our most vulnerable citizens, hospital and nursing home patients.
I think it's important to distinguish this from a terrorist attack or a natural disaster. I refer to those as a kinetic event. It happens, and it's sudden, and it's pervasive. In the case of the Gulf Coast, it was 93,000 square miles affected at one time.
How many hospitals and nursing home were in those 93,000 square miles? Had many had the internal resources to manage their own crises and how many needed outside assistance? Where was the closest capable outside assistance? Were there significant quantities to meet all the demands in a timely manner?
Good planning and preparation will avoid it being chaotic. It just will.
So where is it? Hurricane season is just around the corner and public evidence of good planning does not exist…..
This last question was asked by a reporter:
How soon are you going to let the general public know what you're doing and what's going on, because a lot of the people are very afraid, they don't know -- there's going to be another New Orleans hurricane problem, or are you going to do it via television, radio, or how?
Yes, Mrs. Townsend how will you let people know what you’re doing?
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