Hurricane Katrina Response Branded National Failure By Republican Inquiry

The response to Hurricane Katrina was "a national failure" and "an abdication of the most solemn obligation to provide for the common welfare", according to details from the first of three anticipated reports into the disaster, published yesterday.

The report, by a committee of Republicans in the Houseof Representatives, declared that "all the little pigs built houses of straw".

The report, entitled A Failure of Initiative, is due to be published on Wednesday. It criticizes the homeland security chief, Michael Chertoff, saying his detachment from events led him to implement federal emergency response measures "late, ineffectively or not at all".

It finds that President George Bush was the one person who could have cut through the bureaucratic paralysis crippling the federal response to last summer’s hurricane. "Earlier presidential involvement could have speeded the response," it says.

It adds that the White House did not "substantiate, analyse and act on the information at its disposal". It also questions why the "untrained" Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) chief, Michael Brown, was selected to lead the response to the disaster, noting that he and the US military set up rival chains of command.

The details were leaked to the Washington Post as residents of New Orleans took the latest step back towards normality at the weekend , kicking off the Mardi Gras season with a parade featuring effigies of the city’s mayor, Ray Nagin, and the Louisiana governor, Kathleen Blanco, and floats with themes such as "C’est Levee".

The House select committee behind the 600-page report was boycotted by Democrats, who are calling for an independent commission to investigate the response to Hurricane Katrina. They argued that the committee’s work was compromised because it did not compel the White House to hand over documents, and had held no administration officials accountable.

The committee, chaired by Republican Representative Thomas Davis, held nine hearings and considered 500,000 pages of documents. Following the leak of a 60-page summary of the report, Democrats called for Mr Chertofff’s removal.

Local officials, including the New Orleans mayor and Governor Blanco were also criticized in the report for not completing the mandatory evacuation order issued on August 28.

The preface to the report states: "If 9/11 was a failure of imagination, then Katrina was a failure of initiative. It was a failure of leadership. In this instance, blinding lack of situational awareness and disjointed decision-making needlessly compounded and prolonged Katrina’s horror."

It recommends a series of measures to prevent the repeat the errors of last August, including studies of state evacuation plans, the creation of a national database of shelter information, and making commercial airliners available to transport the evacuees.

The report is the first of three being undertaken, by the Senate, the House and the White House.

Last week, the former Fema chief Mr Brown used his appearance at the Senate inquiry to argue that the White House had been made aware of the severity of the crisis at an early stage.

He also said he felt Fema had been sidelined in the department of homeland security and that rather than communicating with the department head, Mr Chertoff, he went straight to the White House.

In a preview of the attitude likely to be taken by Mr Chertoff in his forthcoming appearance before the Senate committee, his spokesman told the Washington Post that the department had given Mr Brown all the authority he needed, but that his "willful insubordination ... was a significant problem".