SAN ANTONIO (Texas), Sept 25: US President George W. Bush, at a military briefing on Hurricane Rita, suggested on Sunday the armed forces should take over all government response efforts to some major natural disasters. “Is there a circumstance in which the Department of Defence becomes the lead agency? Clearly, in the case of a terrorist attack, that would be the case,” Bush said as he heard from the joint task force running the reaction to Rita.

“Is there a natural disaster which — of a certain size — that would then enable the defence department to become the lead agency in coordinating and leading the response effort,” he said at Randolph Air Force Base here.

“That’s going to be a very important consideration for Congress to think about,” said Bush, who paid a steep political price for the widely criticized response to killer Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans on August 29 and left most of the city of half-a-million people under water.

One of Bush’s briefers, Major General John White, told the president the lack of coordination in search and rescue efforts in New Orleans after Katrina had led to a “train wreck.”

Hurricane Katrina left more than 1,000 people dead in Louisiana and neighbouring Mississippi and the government under fire for failing to quickly mobilize relief efforts for beleaguered residents of New Orleans.

“We need a national plan,” pleaded White, who walked Bush through a slide-by-slide video presentation of the response to Rita, showing him the movement of military assets in the powerful storm’s aftermath.

Bush, on his third day of military briefings in the wake of Rita, attended church on the base before flying to Baton Rouge, the capital of Louisiana, for a first-hand look at the response efforts there.

Bush first suggested that the Pentagon ought to have a much broader role in the event of major natural disasters when he gave a prime-time speech in a deserted New Orleans square on September 15.

On Friday, Bush travelled to the Colorado headquarters of the Pentagon’s Northern Command, which was created after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks to protect the US territory.—AFP