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Gold9472
09-04-2005, 08:05 PM
Bush Administration Puts Katrina PR Campaign Into Overdrive

http://www.komotv.com/news/printstory.asp?id=38969

September 4, 2005
By KOMO Staff & News Services

WASHINGTON, D.C. - The Bush administration kept its Hurricane Katrina response and its public relations campaign in overdrive on Sunday, even as first confirmation came from Washington of a dreaded statistic - that the storm probably killed thousands of people.

Responding to accusations of racial insensitivity, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, "Nobody, especially the president, would have left people unattended on the basis of race."

Rice, who was dispatched to her native state of Alabama, was among four Cabinet secretaries and other high-ranking administration who fanned who out across the storm-ravaged region on Sunday. President Bush was planning to return to the area Monday, three days after an initial visit.

Six days after Katrina lashed much of the Gulf Coast into oblivion, and five days after levee breaks drowned New Orleans and turned it into a place of lawless misery, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said military personnel and National Guard troops have secured the city and ensured that those still stranded can be moved out.

But he said significant challenges remain - including how to care for the people being relocated.

"We are still in the middle of the emergency. This is not the time that we can draw a sigh of relief," Chertoff said on CNN's "Late Edition." "We are moving the city of New Orleans to other parts of the country."

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, at the government's request, announced a new hot line and Web site dedicated to reuniting family members torn apart by the storm. By noon EDT Monday, people will be able to get help at 1-888-544-5475 or by going to www.missingkids.com, where they can post or look through photographs, lists of names and physical descriptions.

There were also warnings of new dangers. Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt said he had received a report from Biloxi, Miss., of dysentery - a painful, sometimes-fatal intestinal disease that causes dehydration. With hot weather, mosquitos and standing water holding human waste, corpses and other contaminants, diseases such as West Nile virus, hepatitis A, salmonella and E. coli bacteria infections also are a concern, he said on CNN.

"We have the ingredients for a bad situation there," Leavitt said.

Hundreds of federal health officers and nearly 100 tons of medical supplies and antibiotics were being delivered to the Gulf Coast to try to head off the problem. Federal authorities were also considering how to combat the growing mosquito population - including spraying the sewage-filled floodwaters.

Local officials have already predicted the storm's death toll would reach into the thousands. Without putting a precise figure on it, the federal government agreed Sunday.

"I think it's evident it's in the thousands," Leavitt said.

Chertoff wouldn't make a prediction but said it's likely an untold number will be found dead in swamped homes, temporary shelters where many went for days without food or water, or even in the streets once the waters are finally drained from New Orleans. Removing the water could take a month or more.

"I think we need to prepare the country for what's coming," Chertoff said on "Fox News Sunday." "It is going to be about as ugly of a scene as I think you can imagine."

It has taken days for food and water to begin reaching the tens of thousands of desperate New Orleans residents who took shelter in the city's increasingly squalid and deadly Superdome, convention center and highway underpasses.

"We have been abandoned by our own country," Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, just south of New Orleans, told NBC's "Meet the Press." "It's not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans here. Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area."

The Bush administration continued to scramble to counter such tough talk - that Washington, and particularly the president, didn't move aggressively enough in the early days of the storm's aftermath.

The president and first lady Laura Bush paid a thank-you call on the Red Cross' disaster operations center and announced a White House blood drive later in the week for storm victims. The White House also hurried to arrange another trip by Bush to the Gulf Coast on Monday.

"The world saw this tidal wave of disaster ascend upon the Gulf Coast," Bush said after spending about 45 minutes at the Red Cross and appealing for all Americans to donate money, time and blood to the relief effort. "Now they're going to see a tidal wave of compassion."

Besides Rice, Chertoff and Leavitt, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard Myers also traveled to the region Sunday.

"It's going to take many, many, many months and into years for this area to recover," said Rumsfeld, who took a helicopter tour of New Orleans, met with military personnel conducting search-and-rescue missions and visited a concourse where evacuated patients were being treated on stretchers.

Rice - the administration's highest-ranking black - became its chief defender against charges that help, particularly to the hurricane's disproportionately black and poor victims in New Orleans, came too slowly. "Americans don't want to see Americans suffer," she said as she toured Alabama.

On television, Chertoff was omnipresent, dispatched by the administration to appear on all five Sunday news shows after FEMA Director Michael Brown's damage-control efforts met with little success earlier in the week. Chertoff echoed the White House line - repeatedly saying that the time to talk about blame will come later.

However, Chertoff hinted at a future line of defense for the White House, mentioning that federal officials had problems getting information from local officials and were surprised, for instance, that they hadn't been told by Thursday of the violence and horrible conditions at the New Orleans convention center.

"I was frustrated," he said on Fox. "I got to tell you that hearing reports on TV and then calling the field and hearing something different is not what the Secretary of Homeland Security wants to see happening."