Bush, Sebelius Point Fingers Over Tornado
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WASHINGTON — The Bush administration and Kansas’s governor started pointing fingers at each other yesterday over the response to last week’s devastating tornado. By lunchtime, both sides had backed down.
With President Bush set to travel to now-razed Greensburg, Kansas, today to view the destruction wrought by Friday’s 205 mph tornado, the Democratic governor said she planned to tell Bush that Kansas National Guard deployments to Iraq had hampered the disaster response.
“I don’t think there is any question if you are missing trucks, Humvees and helicopters that the response is going to be slower,” Governor Sebelius said Monday. “The real victims here will be the residents of Greensburg, because the recovery will be at a slower pace.”
Ms. Sebelius said that with other states facing similar limitations, “stuff that we would have borrowed is gone.”
White House press secretary Tony Snow fought back aggressively.
In an approach reminiscent of the exchange of blame between the White House and another Democratic governor, Kathleen Blanco of Louisiana, after the federal government’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Mr. Snow at first said the fault for any slow response would be Ms. Sebelius’s. He said she should have followed procedure by finding gaps, then asking the federal government to fill them, but she did not.
“If you don’t request it, you’re not going to get it,” he told reporters yesterday morning.
Mr. Snow said no one had asked for heavy equipment. “As far as we know, the only thing the governor has requested are FM radios,” the spokesman said.
At Mr. Snow’s second, midday briefing with reporters, he offered that it turned out that the state had requested several items that the federal government supplied — those radios, and also a mobile command center and a mobile office building, an urban search and rescue team, and coordination on extra Blackhawk helicopters.
Mr. Snow recounted a telephone conversation yesterday between Ms. Sebelius and Mr. Bush’s White House-based homeland security adviser, Fran Fragos Townsend, in which the governor said she was pleased with the federal performance on the tornado and had everything she needed.
