New Orleans Drowned While Homeland Security Chief Was Briefed For Hours On Bird Flu Pandemic Preparations

By Darryl Mason.

Reports now indicate that the chief of US Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, was so distracted by the threat of a bird flu pandemic in the US that, for almost 40 hours, he was not aware the city of New Orleans had flooded and tens of thousands of Americans were in dire need of rescue.

The Knight Ridder Agency reported on September 15 that Homeland Security chief, Michael Chertoff, went ahead with bird flu briefings on Tuesday, August 30, as some 30,000 men, women and children screamed for help in the streets of New Orleans and a hundred thousand more Americans pulled themselves from the wreckage of their homes across Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi.

The head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Michael Brown, told the New York Times that he had repeatedly tried to reach Chertoff the day after Hurricane Katrina hit to alert Homeland Security that the situation was spiralling “out of control.”

The intricate web of bureaucracy meant neither Brown nor the governors of the affected states could call in the resources of the Army, Navy and the Marines to deal with the epic scale of the national emergency.

Such an order for a full-scale rescue and recovery operation had to come from Chertoff himself under the recently overhauled National Response Plan.

Before firing off the memo necessary to unleash a full scale rescue and recovery by federal troops, Chertoff was briefed for hours at the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention on bird flu and how the US might respond to the national emergency of a spreading pandemic.

The National Response Plan designed to cope with everything from terrorism to hurricanes to volcanic eruptions and disease outbreaks, such as bird flu, is now being torn to shreds in Washington and hastily rewritten.