Huh?

There’s a lot of good background in the NYT article here, but this is really the puzzler:

According to the administration’s senior domestic security officials, the plan failed to recognize that local police, fire and medical personnel might be incapacitated.

Even in a limited disaster like the WTC attack, lots and lots of first responders were killed–how the hell you can call something a plan that doesn’t account for local first responders being incapacitated is….well as stupid as having Mike Brown as head of FEMA.

The frustrating paragraph is here though:

While combat troops can conduct relief missions without the legal authority of the Insurrection Act, Pentagon and military officials say that no active-duty forces could have been sent into the chaos of New Orleans on Wednesday or Thursday without confronting law-and-order challenges.

I’m pretty sure you could drive some trucks over the Crescent City Connector, take the first exit and drop off food and water. Or if you really didn’t think that was an option, drop it off the damn bridge. I’m very aware the Louisiana National Guard could have done the same thing—but the Feds could have too….

While I’m far from convinced Chertoff had even basic control over DHS during this ordeal, this seems like a no-brainer

Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, has suggested that active-duty troops be trained and equipped to intervene if front-line emergency personnel are stricken. But the Pentagon’s leadership remains unconvinced that this plan is sound, suggesting instead that the national emergency response plans be revised to draw reinforcements initially from civilian police, firefighters, medical personnel and hazardous-waste experts in other states not affected by a disaster.

The federal government rewrote its national emergency response plan after the Sept. 11 attacks, but it relied on local officials to manage any crisis in its opening days. But Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed local “first responders,” including civilian police and the National Guard.

At a news conference on Saturday, Mr. Chertoff said, “The unusual set of challenges of conducting a massive evacuation in the context of a still dangerous flood requires us to basically break the traditional model and create a new model, one for what you might call kind of an ultra-catastrophe.””

Isn’t the above situation obvious though? 9-11 was a very limited attack in many ways–shouldn’t incapacitated local first responders be assumed in such situations?