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09-29-2005, 10:01 PM
4 Places Where the System Broke Down
A TIME investigation shows how confusion, incompetence and, ironically, a fear of making mistakes hobbled the government at all levels
By JAMES CARNEY, KAREN TUMULTY, AMANDA RIPLEY, MARK THOMPSON / WASHINGTON

Sep. 19, 2005
Ten days after Hurricane Katrina trashed the Gulf Coast, a radio talk-show host in Los Angeles asked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice if it was true that President Bush does not care about black people. (She said no.) A man standing in the ruins in Gulfport, Miss., told the Vice President, "Go f___ yourself." (He smiled.) And the mayor of New Orleans secretly decamped for much of the week to Dallas to install his family there, refusing most media interviews, although the bodies had only begun to be counted in his drowned city. Even as soldiers swarmed into the Gulf Coast and residents scattered onto dry land around the country, the anger at the government's response to Katrina did not abate. In a TIME poll of 1,000 adults nationwide, 52% said the government had done a poor job preparing for Katrina at all levels. And 62% said the government had responded too slowly to those hardest hit. In this sample at least, Americans did not single out blame but spread it far and wide.

The accused preferred a cleaner narrative. The President's supporters put out the word that the mayor of New Orleans and the Governor of Louisiana had botched the response, and the feds were only cleaning up their mess. The locals seemed flabbergasted by such claims, insisting that the crisis had immediately overwhelmed their capacity and that the feds had failed to step into the vacuum.

Should blame be portioned out according to power--or proximity? And what about the legions of elected officials and bureaucrats stacked in between, the ones who are supposed to form a human chain from city hall to the Oval Office?

Already it's clear that this debacle was more than an act of God. This country's emergency operations, awesome in their potential, are also frighteningly interdependent. The locals are in charge--until they get overwhelmed. Then they cede control to the feds--but not entirely. The scarier things get, the fuzzier the lines of authority become. As TIME's investigation shows, at every level of government, there was uncertainty about who was in charge at crucial moments. Leaders were afraid to actually lead, reluctant to cost businesses money, break jurisdictional rules or spawn lawsuits. They were afraid, in other words, of ending up in an article just like this one.

The President's spokespeople have taken to calling this the "blame game." His critics call it "accountability." However you brand the process, you should get used to it. Republicans in Congress have announced a joint inquiry with Democrats. But the Democrats are refusing to cooperate because they want an independent commission. No matter how the reckoning goes, TIME's investigation reveals at least four places where the system broke down.

1 The Mayor

Did C. Ray Nagin do everything he could to save his city?

Despite all appearances to the contrary, New Orleans had a plan. A week after the storm, Nagin summarized it for the Wall Street Journal: "Get people to higher ground and have the feds and the state airlift supplies to them--that was the plan, man." But in fact, the plan was more substantial. And it makes clear that the mayor was in charge when disaster struck. Nagin, a former executive with Cox Communications who was elected three years ago on the promise that he would purge the city of corruption, was supposed to prepare New Orleans for a hurricane and call for an evacuation. He was supposed to get help from his office of emergency preparedness, which was responsible for helping the elderly and sick get out of town and asking the state to request National Guard troops.

To date, we have heard much from the mayor about what the feds did not do; he has been less specific about what he did. He did not respond last week to repeated requests from TIME for an interview. But the paper trail shows that the mayor did indeed follow the agreed-upon course of action, more or less. It just wasn't a very good one for a city with so many poor people.

"This is not a test. This is the real deal," Nagin announced, urging people to evacuate at an afternoon press conference with the Governor less than 48 hours before the storm hit. Still, he didn't make the evacuation mandatory, as at least one nearby parish had done. According to a New Orleans Times-Picayune story written that day, the mayor said he was having his staff research whether he could issue a mandatory evacuation, which he said was unprecedented.

In fact, the city's plan clearly allows the mayor to do just that. But Nagin also hesitated because the city might be held liable for unnecessarily closing hotels and other businesses, according to the article. That was a practical, if coldhearted, calculus in a city like New Orleans. "Any place that has a lot of tourists, it's very expensive to evacuate," says Kate Hale, who was director of emergency management for Dade County, Fla., when Hurricane Andrew struck in 1992. "It costs $1 million a coastal mile to evacuate. You're shutting down businesses. It's not something you do casually."

But it's not clear that calling for an evacuation earlier would have made a huge difference. As with every hurricane, some people don't leave, for all kinds of reasons, including that they simply can't. In fact the plan itself estimates that 100,000 residents would have no means of transport. At the press conference, Nagin said the Superdome would be a shelter of last resort for people with special needs. But even then, they were expected to come with enough food and drinks to last three or four days, Nagin said. The city's website advised people who needed a ride out of town to "try to go with a neighbor, friend or relative." Those who had to go to the shelters were advised to "eat a full meal before arriving."

The Superdome has had a lousy track record as a refuge since it was first used in 1998 during Hurricane Georges. The place wasn't prepared for the 14,000 people who showed up there: in the chaos, people stole some $8,000 worth of barstools and artificial plants and did about $46,000 in damage. Seven years later, the city had still not stockpiled enough generator fuel, food and other supplies to handle the job. Over the years city officials have stressed that they didn't want to make it too comfortable at the Superdome since it was safer to leave the city altogether. "It's not a hotel," the director of emergency preparedness for St. Tammany parish told the Times-Picayune in 1999. But they never helped people find a better alternative.

To their credit, Nagin and state officials did pull off a complex traffic-evacuation plan that weekend, which involved reversing the traffic flow on three interstates. A similar scheme led to massive gridlock last year during Hurricane Ivan. Officials had just finished a new plan, weeks before Katrina. For people with cars, it worked beautifully. An estimated 80% of the population evacuated, which--if true--is a major accomplishment in any city--but especially in New Orleans, where residents have to travel at least 80 miles to get out of harm's way.

The Saturday before the storm, Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center, called the mayor personally to emphasize just how serious the threat was. "This was only the second time I called a politician in my life," Mayfield tells TIME. "I wanted to be able to go to sleep knowing I had done everything I could do."

On Sunday morning, less than 24 hours before the hurricane's landfall, Nagin finally called for a mandatory evacuation. "We are facing a storm that most of us have long feared," he said. Some city buses were dispatched to take people without cars to the Superdome to ride out the storm. But there is no indication that buses also ferried people out of the city, beyond the reach of water. In fact, a fleet of several hundred buses was left to languish in a lot that eventually flooded.

All this had been foreshadowed with disconcerting accuracy last summer. Hundreds of regional and federal officials met in Baton Rouge, La., for an elaborate simulation exercise. The fictional "Hurricane Pam" left the city under 10 ft. of water and looked a lot like Katrina. The report on the simulation, obtained by TIME last week, warns that transportation would be a major problem.

Before any disaster, the first responsibility of local responders is to evacuate hospitals, nursing homes and special-needs populations, says Billy Zwerschke, former president of the International Association of Emergency Managers and a consultant to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Apparently, aside from some informal plans to rely on churches and neighbors to get people out, the city had not come up with a solution to that particular challenge in time for Katrina.

"Many people have plans sitting on a shelf. New Orleans had two exercises, and they identified the problems," says Billy Wagner, a New Orleans native who is in his 25th season as senior director for emergency management for the Florida Keys. "We do these exercises, and we don't follow through on them. We just don't have the money."

But we still don't know what happened to New Orleans' $7 million grant in 2003 for a communications system that would connect all the region's first responders. Soon after the hurricane struck, the radios used by police, fire fighters and Nagin drained their batteries. Then their satellite phones would not recharge, according to the Wall Street Journal. And, of course, land-line and cell phones went out. For two days, the mayor and his emergency team were cut off--holed up in the Hyatt Regency, fending off gangs of looters. We don't know why the mayor and his emergency team did not use the city's Mobile Command Center--meant for just such a disaster--or join the other local officials at the emergency center in Baton Rouge.

In Florida, by comparison, emergency officials across the state are linked by a system of satellite telephones, and the lines of authority between local and state officials are sharp. And in Texas, ham operators have a place at the table in the emergency bunker in Austin along with the high-tech communications experts.

Because of all the chaos that descended on New Orleans, the acts of heroism often took the form of mini-rebellions against the bureaucracy. Richard Zucschlag, head of Acadian Ambulance, the largest ambulance transport company in southern Louisiana, moved his dispatch center to the outskirts of New Orleans, where it became the only communications network in the early hours of the disaster. Then, although Zucschlag's staff is not trained to do triage, he sent 10 ambulance medics to the Superdome while his 40 ambulances and seven helicopters served as the initial rescue force in the city. For 40 hours, his medics were the only treatment unit there. Zucschlag tells TIME he ran into plenty of roadblocks, but he barreled through them. "The top dogs [at FEMA] say go ahead, but lower down, people in the field want paperwork," he says. "I am gambling a bit, but I am saving lives. If I get sued, fine." --By Amanda Ripley. With reporting by Cathy Booth Thomas and Tim Padgett / New Orleans, Hilary Hylton / Austin, Siobhan Morrissey / Miami, Michael Peltier / Tallahassee and Eric Roston / Washington

2 The Governor

Did Kathleen Babineaux Blanco make every effort to get federal help?

Early Wednesday morning, Aug. 31, two days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans, Blanco was frantic. Without any aides along, she and her husband had made an unannounced visit to the Superdome the night before and seen how desperate the situation there was becoming. The arena was teeming, its roof was leaking, and people had begun dying. "They were scared; they were upset. A lot of emotions were coming from them. Some were sick. They needed their diabetes medicine," the Governor told TIME in an interview. "What we were dealing with was a minute-by-minute life-or-death situation."

The day the storm hit, she asked President Bush for "everything you've got." But almost nothing arrived, and she couldn't wait any longer. So she called the White House and demanded to speak to the President. George Bush could not be located, two Louisiana officials told Time, so she asked for chief of staff Andrew Card, who was also unavailable. Finally, after being passed to another office or two, she left a message with DHS adviser Frances Frago Townsend. She waited hours but had to make another call herself before she finally got Bush on the line. "Help is on the way," he told her.

No one would mistake Blanco, 62, for Rudy Giuliani. In the first week after the storm hit, she came across as dazed and unsteady, at one moment in despair over "people probably who are on drugs, who are threatening other people, who are causing our rescue effort to stall"; at another, declaring her troops had "M-16s, and they're locked and loaded."

But there were glimpses as well of the cautious and deliberative management style that has been both her strength and her weakness since she became Governor in 2003. Beginning the previous Friday, when the forecasts still had it that the hurricane was more likely to hit the Florida Panhandle, the Governor had followed her responsibilities under the state's disaster plan to the letter. She proclaimed a state of emergency; put the National Guard on alert; arranged to have traffic patterns on outgoing roadways reconfigured; made sure the parishes that were not at risk would have shelters and supplies for people from the ones that were. And once an evacuation was ordered, she would have one more job, according to the state's official Emergency Operations Plan: "Request Federal Government assistance as needed."

Whether she did that as effectively or as forcefully as the catastrophe demanded is the question that now haunts the Governor. Should Blanco have told Bush she needed 7,000 cots? 200 boats? The 82nd Airborne? "I didn't give him a checklist or anything," she acknowledged in an interview. Nor should she have had to, her aides insist. Fumed one: "That's like telling a drowning man that you are not going to help him until he asks for a life preserver."

And yet, with the exception of the mayor, no one was in a better position than Blanco to know precisely what was needed and how soon. Not until the following day--Thursday, Sept. 1--did she come up with specifics: 40,000 troops; urban search-and-rescue teams; buses; amphibious personnel carriers; mobile morgues; trailers of water, ice and food; base camps; staging areas; housing; and communications systems.

State officials also concede that the Governor had unrealistic expectations of precisely what Washington was capable of doing. "She thought it would be more omniscient and more omnipresent and omnipowerful than it turned out to be," says one. Among her greatest regrets, says the official, is having relied on FEMA's assurances that it would provide bus transportation out of the Superdome to evacuees. A day later, she discovered those buses were still on the way from other states and ordered her staff to start rounding up local buses. Recalls Tyson Bromell II, her rural-development director: "She pulled me to the side, and asked me, 'Where are all the buses?' I said, 'We've been told not to send them, that there were already enough buses.' And she just looked at me and said, 'Get those buses, Ty.'" But the Governor acknowledges she made mistakes. "I'd have had more helicopters standing by. More resources standing by. We didn't expect the water," she says. "I would have wanted a faster response. We have to have a better communications network."

Blanco is not the first Governor to learn those kinds of lessons the hard way. In 1992 Florida Governor Lawton Chiles came under withering criticism for waiting three days after the destruction from Hurricane Andrew before making a written request for the federal troops that were standing by with food and tents. As for FEMA, Chiles later said ruefully, it "may be well meaning, but they have no clout in the initial phase ... You've got to loudly and strongly and probably with all kinds of paper tell the White House what you need."

Further tangling the post-Katrina disaster effort was a struggle for power. On the Friday after the hurricane, as the Governor met with Bush aboard Air Force One on the tarmac of the New Orleans airport, the President broached a sensitive question: Would Blanco relinquish control of local law enforcement and the 13,268 National Guard troops from 29 states that fall under her command? State officials say Blanco considered it an odd move, given that federal control would not in itself mean any additional troops and would prohibit the guard under the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 from acting as policemen. And she thought the request had a political motive. It would allow Washington to come in and claim credit for a relief operation that was finally beginning to show progress.

Dan Bartlett, counselor to the President, denied anything as unseemly as politics was behind the move. "The same discussions" were under way with Republican Governor Haley Barbour of hurricane-ravaged Mississippi, he told Newhouse News Service. However, Barbour's press secretary Pete Smith told TIME that "no such request" was made of the Mississippi Governor. (Bartlett says Barbour's office made it clear early on they did not want to relinquish authority.) Blanco asked for 24 hours to consider it, but as she was meeting at midnight that Friday night with advisers, Card called and told her to look for a fax. It was a letter and memorandum of understanding under which she would turn over control of her troops. Blanco refused to sign it.

The signs of hard feelings between the White House and the Governor were hardly subtle. Blanco hired James Lee Witt, Bill Clinton's well-regarded FEMA chief, as an adviser--and didn't discourage anyone from assuming that it reflected her feelings about the ineffectiveness of Bush's FEMA director, Michael Brown. When Bush decided to make a second trip into the state last week, Blanco learned about it from the media--and had to cancel her trip to visit evacuees in the Houston Astrodome. Blanco insists, however, that Washington and Baton Rouge are now on the same page. Bush, she said, "is disappointed by the response, given the immediacy of the need. We're both disappointed. But you know, that's the past, and we have to move into the future."

While Blanco has come under fire, Republicans and Democrats in Louisiana's congressional delegation have stood behind her. Her fellow Governors, frustrated by FEMA's lack of response to their own offers of assistance, began trying to coordinate help through the National Governors Association. But by late last week, neither system appeared to be working. Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, initially told to expect 300 evacuees, got 9,000; meanwhile, Virginia Governor Mark Warner arranged for 1,400 beds in Blackstone, Va., complete with Internet access, a school, day care, even a heated pool and gym. By Friday, not a single person had shown up to claim them. --By Karen Tumulty. With Brian Bennett / New Orleans and Nathan Thornburgh / Baton Rouge

3 The Director
Why did FEMA and its chief, Michael Brown, fail their biggest test?

As flames blazed 400 miles away in New Orleans on Labor Day, about 600 fire fighters from across the nation sat in an Atlanta hotel listening to a FEMA lecture on equal opportunity, sexual harassment and customer service. "Your job is going to be community relations," a FEMA official told them, according to Joe Calhoun, an assistant fire chief from Portage, Ind., who was there. "You'll be passing out FEMA pamphlets and our phone number."

The room, filled with many fire fighters who, at FEMA's request had arrived equipped with rescue gear, erupted in anger. "This is ridiculous," one yelled back. "Our fire departments and mayors sent us down here to save people, and you've got us doing this?" The FEMA official climbed atop a chair, Calhoun says, and tried to restore order. "You are now employees of FEMA, and you will follow orders and do what you're told," he said, sounding more like the leader of an invading army than a rescue squad.

The scene in Atlanta was one of the many ways FEMA failed to live up to Katrina's challenge. First, despite being warned by multiple hurricane experts that Katrina would be a catastrophic hurricane, Brown waited until about five hours after the storm's landfall before he proposed sending 1,000 federal workers to deal with the aftermath. While people were dying in New Orleans, the U.S.S. Bataan steamed offshore, its six operating rooms, beds for 600 patients and most of its 1,200 sailors idle. Foreign nations--responding to urgent calls from Washington--readied rescue supplies, then were told to stand by for days until FEMA could figure out what to do with them. Florida airboaters complained that they had an armada ready for rescue work but FEMA wouldn't let them into New Orleans. Brown defended his agency's measured steps, saying aid "has to be coordinated in such a way that it's used most effectively."

Just when things seemed to be stabilizing, another FEMA fiasco would light up the news wires. Last Thursday, as the Red Cross began distributing its own debit cards, thousands stood for hours in the 93° heat outside the Astrodome in Houston for FEMA cards that never came. A day earlier, Brown had heralded his agency's cards as a way to "empower" survivors "to start rebuilding their lives." But the agency scrapped the plan late Thursday, saying it would be more efficient for the government to deposit funds directly into evacuees' bank accounts.

For many disaster experts, FEMA's feeble response, just like the massive hurricane that triggered it, was woefully predictable. President Bush began emasculating the agency soon after taking office. Jane Bullock, a 22-year FEMA veteran who ended up as the agency's chief of staff during the Clinton Administration, says she sensed the incoming Administration's disdain during her first postelection meeting with members of Bush's FEMA transition team. "They said we had done a good p.r. job," she recalls. "I got the impression they had no idea what has to happen to deal with a disaster." Joe Allbaugh, Bush's first FEMA chief, labeled federal disaster aid "an oversized entitlement program" four months before 9/11.

A parking lot for political allies since its creation in 1979, FEMA had improved under the stewardship of Witt during the Clinton years. Staffed by disaster experts, it won bipartisan praise. Even Bush lauded Witt during a debate with Al Gore in 2000 for FEMA's skill at coordinating the resources Washington can bring to a disaster zone when adversity overwhelms local efforts.

But the agency's highest ranks began to fill with political chums again once Bush took over. Brown and FEMA's other two top officials have ties to Bush's 2000 campaign or to the White House's advance office, whose primary mission is making the President look good. None had disaster experience. TIME.com reported last week that Brown appears to have padded his own résumé by, among other things, claiming to have been a manager of emergency services in Edmond, Okla., when he was actually "more of an intern," according to a city official.

FEMA's identity complex worsened after 9/11, when the newly created DHS swallowed it whole. Two months ago, DHS chief Michael Chertoff proposed that FEMA only respond to disasters, not prepare for them. State officials have complained that FEMA is neglecting natural disasters in favor of terrorism. Nearly 75¢ of every dollar that the Federal Government has given to local and state disaster units has been earmarked for terrorism.

In the Gulf last week, some of FEMA's bumbling could have been an attempt to compensate for its haste last year after Hurricane Frances struck Florida. The agency ran afoul of federal auditors after it paid $31 million to residents of Miami-Dade, which was 100 miles south of the hurricane's eye.

Now there are calls from Capitol Hill to return FEMA to the Cabinet as an independent agency. There are also calls for Brown's head. On Friday the Administration sent Brown back to D.C. and announced that Coast Guard Vice Admiral Thad Allen would take over the recovery effort. But, warns Bullock, the problem is bigger than Brown. "The system is broken, and firing Mike Brown is not going to fix it."

Back in Atlanta, Joe Calhoun and other fire fighters got tired of hanging around their hotel and returned home. --By Mark Thompson / Washington

4 The Secretary

Does Michael Chertoff at Homeland Security understand the job?

For all his failures, Brown has in some ways been a scapegoat for the incompetence of others. After all, as head of FEMA, Brown is just a second-tier manager in the nation's second largest Cabinet agency, the sprawling Department of Homeland Security. From the moment he declared Katrina "an incident of national significance"--a full 36 hours after landfall--the man in charge of the federal response was Brown's boss, DHS Secretary Chertoff.

A former federal judge, prosecutor and chief of the Justice Department's criminal division, Chertoff may have brought more impressive credentials to his job, but he has often seemed no less out of touch with the reality on the ground in New Orleans. On Aug. 31 he declared himself "extremely pleased" with the federal response to Katrina. In a conference call the next day with President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and five congressional leaders, when chaos and despair reigned in New Orleans, Chertoff insisted things weren't going as badly as media reports suggested, adding that he had spoken to local law-enforcement officials in the past hour. "Not that bad?" asked Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic leader, according to congressional sources. "Turn on your TV!"

It was a reasonable suggestion since on the same day Chertoff first learned--from an NPR anchor in Washington--that there were thousands of people stranded, starving and in some cases dying in the New Orleans Convention Center, a story that had been all over the media that morning. Again, Chertoff suggested reporters were exaggerating. "If you talk to someone and you get a rumor or you get someone's anecdotal version of something," he said, "I think it's dangerous to extrapolate it to all over the place." Demonstrating the kind of tenacious dedication to a line of argument that made him a successful Mob prosecutor, Chertoff reprised the same theme last week in a briefing with House members on Capitol Hill, insisting that the federal response had been far better than advertised. In essence, he was telling politicians to believe the Administration rather than their own eyes. Some Democrats walked out of the briefing in disgust. "He's a great lawyer, very smart and extremely decent," the top aide to a G.O.P. Senator says of Chertoff. "But he's a lousy politician."

Chertoff gave up his lifetime appointment as a federal appellate judge six months ago to become the second Secretary of Homeland Security, taking charge of an agency that was created after 9/11 to protect the nation from terrorism. Chertoff lost friends in the attacks, and those close to him say he took the job because he felt a patriotic duty to protect the homeland. FEMA was just 1 of 23 agencies folded into the massive new department, with its 181,000 employees and $40 billion annual budget. DHS aides insist the department has paid as much attention to preparing for natural disasters as terrorist attacks, but its allocation of resources suggests terrorism was the agency's, and the Secretary's, paramount focus. When Chertoff was nominated, Bush called him "a key leader in the war on terror."

Chertoff inherited a two-year-old agency that was already dysfunctional-- lampooned for its color-coded terrorism warning system and maligned for its profligate spending on office parties and management bonuses. But he also inherited the National Response Plan, a 426-page report published last December that DHS heralded as "a bold step forward in bringing unity in our response to disasters and terrorist threats and attacks." Outlining detailed lines of authority in the event of calamity, the plan "ensures the seamless integration of the Federal Government when an incident exceeds local and state capability." The plan failed miserably, as even Chertoff was admitting by late last week. The problem, says Jim Carafano, a homeland security expert at the Heritage Foundation, is that DHS's plans still assume that state and local authorities will be responsible in the first 72 hours after a catastrophe. "In this case," he says, "the state and local response was wiped out. There was no one to fill the 72-hour gap."

Bush aides say that Chertoff, unlike Brown, doesn't have to worry about losing his job. "He'll gut it out," says a Bush adviser of Chertoff. "He'll definitely do better next time." --By James Carney. With reporting by Mike Allen and Sally B. Donnelly / Washington

So are there any lessons to draw from these four breakdowns in the system? The good news is that most disasters don't compare to Katrina. Even 9/11 was not in the same category since the infrastructure of New York City--bridges, tunnels and roads--remained largely intact. That said, earthquakes, nuclear attacks or, say, the demolition of a dam near an urban center would create similarly appalling levels of destruction, experts say. Now the bad news: the response would probably be worse because we would have less time to prepare.

Already, there is talk of rewiring the country's emergency apparatus. "Washington handed out $750 million to small fire departments around the country, but if the fire department is wiped out, as it appears to have been in New Orleans, what's the plan?" says Carafano at the Heritage Foundation. The tiered response, whereby state and local officials are responsible for the first few days, doesn't work in a megadisaster.

Others have suggested that the President get more power to order a mandatory evacuation or federalize troops. But eerily similar proposals were made after Hurricane Andrew in 1992, and here we are again. If Andrew is any guide, it will prove more politically palatable to spend more money and appoint more experts. And that, says Clark Kent Ervin, former inspector general for the DHS, would be a huge improvement. "I am a Republican. I am not one of these people who thinks the answer to everything is more money," says Ervin. "But I do think part of the problem is that we've tried to do Homeland Security on the cheap. We spend $400 billion on the Defense Department. It's telling that we're spending literally a tenth of that on Homeland Security."

We need to start thinking of homeland security the way we think of national security, Ervin and others argue. That would mean billions more. But it also might mean a chain of command that made more sense. No one can say the military is functioning seamlessly these days, but there is, at least, someone in charge.