Yesterday, I commented on a story in WaPo on a power struggle in Louisiana over control of the relief effort in the state.

I need to make two corrections and make an additional remark.

The first correction is to a statement made in the article, which stated as follows:

As of Saturday, Blanco still had not declared a state of emergency, the senior Bush official said.

However, this is incorrect, as Harry of Kudzufiles notes. Here’s the order (PDF).

What is striking about that fact is twofold: 1) what Bush administration official is saying things like that? (as it is pretty inflammatory, and hence highly unhelpful) and 2) how could the WaPo reporter not fact-check this?

My second comment is that in my post, I made a rather egregious error in misreading the story in terms of the following:

The administration sought unified control over all local police and state National Guard units reporting to the governor. Louisiana officials rejected the request after talks throughout the night, concerned that such a move would be comparable to a federal declaration of martial law. Some officials in the state suspected a political motive behind the request. “Quite frankly, if they’d been able to pull off taking it away from the locals, they then could have blamed everything on the locals,” said the source, who does not have the authority to speak publicly.

My error was misreading which Saturday was being referred to (for some reason I was thinking the Saturday before the hurricane, which makes no sense, as Bryan S. of Arguing with Signposts rightly notes–and kindly blames the reporter’s writing, instead my own reading and comprehension skills). As such, I can see why the unnamed local official made the statement that was made, however this still leaves the question open as to whether some in state government are more concerned about political reputation than they are about figuring out the best way to fix this problem (and the degree to which some may wish to retain the ability to use the feds as a scapegoat).

My remark is that the remainder of my comments in that post stand. I don’t understand Blanco hiring Witt, and the fact that “Louisiana did not reach out to a multi-state mutual aid compact for assistance until Wednesday” (as the story notes–with three state-level sources) bespeaks of serious command-and-control problems.

There does seem to be some serious problems in the execution of disaster policy in Louisiana.

I will note, as I did yesterday, that the magnitude of the event is a huge part of the problem.