WASHINGTON, June 1 (UPI) -- The head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency says mistakes that marred the U.S. response to Hurricane Katrina will not be repeated this year.
His remarks came as FEMA marks the official start Friday of the 2007 hurricane season -- predicted by forecasters to be a particularly severe one -- with a videoconference for state officials in vulnerable areas of the country.
FEMA Administrator David Paulison told C-SPAN Television that he was "very comfortable" about the ability of the federal government to respond to large-scale disasters now, in part because of the adoption by the agency of a new system for inter-agency cooperation and information-sharing, long used by local first responders.
"What I'm most happy about is the fact that we're using a system called unified command where we're sharing information. That did not happen in Katrina," he said, calling it "the biggest failure that I saw" in the botched response to the 2005 storm that destroyed New Orleans and left tens of thousands of Americans -- overwhelmingly poor and black -- trapped in the flooded and devastated city.
"We worked very hard the first seven months after I took over (at FEMA) to put a unified command system in place," he said, adding that local first responders had developed the system over 25 years.
The unified command system has been tested in smaller disasters like the aftermath of the tornado that wiped out the town of Greensburg, Kan., and it "worked very well."
"That's what's going to make it work," he said of the new system.
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Shaun Waterman, UPI Homeland and National Security Editor
