Under-fire Bush pledges to fix hurricane misery

President George W Bush today promised stunned and suffering hurricane victims along America’s battered Gulf Coast that he would fix what’s “not going exactly right” in the storm’s aftermath.

The president, seeking to stem criticism that a slow federal response has contributed to needless misery, was also preparing for a rare live radio broadcast from the White House Rose Garden later today.

After returning to Washington late on Friday from nearly seven hours touring some of the most devastated areas of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, Bush took several more steps in his effort to meet that pledge and recapture the leadership kudos he won after the 2001 terrorist attacks.

He immediately signed a £6bn (€8.8bn) disaster aid package passed by Congress - an amount he repeatedly called “just the beginning” of federal expenditures for storm relief.

He issued a memorandum saying Hurricane Katrina had created a “severe energy supply interruption” that could damage the national economy, and formally authorised a drawdown of crude oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

The White House was already planning for a return trip to the stricken region on Monday, scrapping Bush’s plans for a speech in Maryland to mark the Labor Day holiday in favour of visits to undisclosed parts of the storm-affected region.

Aides arranged for a hurricane briefing to be the first item on Bush’s daily agenda for the foreseeable future.

“I’m not going to forget what I’ve seen,” the president said in New Orleans as he ended his tour. “I understand the devastation requires more than one day’s attention.”

Describing that devastation in Mississippi and elsewhere along the coast that was battered by Katrina’s enormous winds, Bush said it was “as if the entire Gulf Coast were obliterated by the worst kind of weapon you can imagine”.

During his tour he saw enormous casino barges flung like toys on to dry land, houses collapsed on themselves like decks of cards, staircases leading nowhere and thousands of cement-only squares and piles of debris where buildings used to be.

In New Orleans, where the worst problems were caused by massive flooding from breaches in the city’s levees (dams), Bush talked about the suffering of the people who have gone days without rescue, food, water or medicine – some dying in the process.

But what he experienced of the crisis there was mostly by air.

He avoided the lawless parts of New Orleans where looting has become common and snipers have fired on hospital evacuations, visiting only the airport and the ruptured 17th Street levee where huge sandbags were being dropped by helicopter into the water flowing through the 90-meter (300-foot) breach.

Bush heard plenty, however, during more than an hour of meetings aboard his plane with state and local politicians about why it is taking so long to relieve the misery of so many people in New Orleans who have been living in squalor without the necessities of life.

“He heard some things he didn’t want to believe at first,” said Mary Landrieu, a Democratic senator from Louisiana. “The president is starting to grasp the magnitude of the situation.”

Four days after Katrina killed hundreds if not thousands, Republicans joined Democrats in shaking their heads.

“If we can’t respond faster than this to an event we saw coming across the Gulf for days, then why do we think we’re prepared to respond to a nuclear or biological attack?” asked former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican.

Republican Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts called the government’s response “an embarrassment.”

The criticism stung for a president who won widespread praise for his handling of the September 11 terrorist attacks four years ago – and who already is suffering sagging approval ratings in the polls over the Iraq war and petrol prices that were high even before Katrina wreaked havoc on Gulf of Mexico operations.

Hoping to turn the tide of opinion in his favour, Bush spoke four times publicly during Friday.

“The results are not acceptable,” he declared at the beginning of the day.

Along the way, the president promised to restore order in New Orleans, rush food and medicine to the needy and provide temporary housing to those who have lost their homes. Rescuing those still trapped would take a matter of days, he said, and restoring electricity to the millions without it would come within weeks.

“We’re going to clean all this mess up,” he said. “My attitude is, if it’s not going exactly right, we’re going to make it go exactly right.”

Longer term – a process that he predicted would take years – Bush pledged to see New Orleans and Mississippi and the entire region rebuilt.

“I understand it seems dark right now,” he said. “But by working together and pulling together and capturing that great spirit of our country, a great city will rise again, a great state will be vibrant.”