Here are two questions we should try to find out more about in the coming days.

First, who was in charge when with Katrina? And when they were in charge, did they even know it?

On Wednesday, Aug. 31, press reports revealed that late the previous evening Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff declared Katrina an “incident of national significance.”

That seemingly bland phrase is a critical one in the current national-preparedness doctrine outlined in the national response plan promulgated by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) late last year. That determination triggers the coordinated national response to a domestic disaster — either natural or man-made — that is at the centerpiece of the DHS mission.

So why did Chertoff wait more than 36 hours after the storm had hit Louisiana and Mississippi to make this key determination?

In a Knight-Ridder article Tuesday, Jonathan Landay noted that, despite the press drubbing now-former Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) chief Michael Brown received for the federal government’s tardy response to Katrina, Brown had only very limited power to act before Chertoff’s determination a day after the storm. Under current federal government guidelines, Chertoff was the man in charge of the federal response to Katrina — not Brown — until he made the ‘incident’ determination late Tuesday, which made Brown the government point man.

What Knight-Ridder further pointed out is that Chertoff himself didn’t even seem to realize that he was tasked with directing the national response. In the memo Chertoff sent to Cabinet colleagues announcing the “incident” determination, he wrote, “As you know, the President has established the ‘White House Task Force on Hurricane Katrina Response.’ He will meet with us tomorrow to launch this effort. The Department of Homeland Security, along with other Departments, will be part of the task force and will assist the Administration with its response to Hurricane Katrina.”

Yet a further look shows even more confusion than the Knight-Ridder reporters seemed to realize.

Back on Aug. 27 — two days before the hurricane hit — President Bush declared that a state of emergency existed in Louisiana. He invoked Title 5 of the Stafford Act, which “authorized the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to coordinate all disaster-relief efforts which have the purpose of alleviating the hardship and suffering caused by the emergency on the local population and to provide appropriate assistance for required emergency measures … to save lives, protect property and public health and safety, or to lessen or avert the threat of a catastrophe.”

What hasn’t been noted yet is that, according to the response plan, that declaration on the 27th automatically made Katrina an “incident of national significance.”

If you look on Page 7 of the national response plan (which is available at www.dhs.gov/interweb/assetlibrary/NRP_FullText.pdf), it says that “while all presidentially declared disasters and emergencies under the Stafford Act are considered Incidents of National Significance, not all Incidents of National Significance necessarily result in disaster or emergency declarations under the Stafford Act.”

In other words, what Chertoff thought he was doing on Tuesday night was something the president had already done more than three days earlier. The problem was that the key players didn’t even seem to realize this.

Now, I grant you that all this flow-chart-following pales in comparison to what actually gets done on the ground in an emergency. But in this case what happened, or rather didn’t happen, on the ground is precisely the point. And these various confusions about who was in charge, who was supposed to be in charge, when and how seem to have been at the root of the problem.

The point of creating the Department of Homeland Security was to coordinate and organize the various branches of the federal government with responsibility for safety and security within the United States — particularly at moments when disasters (natural or man-made) are unfolding. With great fanfare almost a year ago, the DHS rolled out a detailed blueprint for what would happen and when, who’d answer to whom, and so forth, during an emergency. But when the plan got it’s first tryout, nobody seemed to be aware of what it said. For all intents and purposes, it was ignored.

Understanding why that happened is critical.

And now for that second point.

According to the Hattiesburg, Miss., American, on Aug. 30, the day after the storm, local electric utility officials got orders directly from Vice President Cheney’s office to stop trying to restore civilian electrical service (including that to several rural hospitals) in their areas and focus all their manpower on restoring power to a key station along the Colonial Oil pipeline, which sends oil from Texas and Louisiana up to the Northeast.

It’s a major pipeline. And the decision may have been the correct one. But is this the way the plan is supposed to work? Calls go out from the veep’s office to utility workers out in the field?

Let’s find out more about how and why that happened too.

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column appears in The Hill each week.

E-mail: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it