Obama takes aim at hurricanes

Four years after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and days before the start of the 2009 hurricane season, President Obama stressed “personal responsibility” in preparing for the storms.

Obama, visiting the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) headquarters in Washington, said that individuals and states will have “the primary responsibility in preparing for and responding to disasters — but they’re going to have the full resources of the federal government backing them up.”

{mosads}Obama’s FEMA director, Craig Fugate, was only recently confirmed due to a hold on his nomination by Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), but the president said Friday that Fugate “has hit the ground running and is already doing an outstanding job not just leading this briefing but leading this excellent agency.”

FEMA, along with President George W. Bush, were almost universally condemned in the wake of the government’s response to Katrina, which left thousands of New Orleans residents stranded and waiting for help.

With Hurrican season officially set to begin on June 1, the Obama administration appears determined to avoid a repeat of that chapter, unveiling the website Ready.Gov which tells Americans steps they can take to prepare for a storm.

“We are all here together because we are determined to be as prepared as possible when the next catastrophic hurricane hits the United States,” Obama said.  “And we want to make sure that cities and our people remain resilient enough to weather any storm.”

Louis Uccellini, director of the National Centers for Environmental Predictions, told reporters at the White House that generally areas that are hard hit are more prepared to respond. The bigger concern are areas that have experienced large population growth but no major storms.

Obama noted that he has seen “some statistics coming out of Florida indicating that a huge percentage of people in hurricane areas simply don’t make plans” for the emergencies.

“They don’t have a plan, they don’t have a set of contingencies that will allow them to respond in an effective way,” Obama said. “Those people who have the capacity to plan, they will thereby relieve some of the resources that the government has to provide and we can stay focused on those folks who are most vulnerable and have the most difficulty dealing with a storm.”

Because of that, the president said he hopes that “that message of personal responsibility sinks in.”

Ucellini said the administration is urging individuals to prepare and make plans now because “waiting 24 hours before a landfall is too late.”

“They can’t wait until a storm is approaching,” Ucellini said. “They have to make their plans now.”

Ucellini’s group is forecasting a 50 percent chance of a “normal” hurricane season, which includes a 70 percent chance of nine to 14 named storms, four to seven hurricanes and one to three major hurricanes.

The centers update their forecast in early August, and the season officially ends Dec. 1.