Isn’t that standard procedure though?

No. After the first 24 hours, the chances of live rescues plummet. After 72 hours, the chances are basically 0. SOP is to deploy ASAP to rescue as many people as possible.

Katrina hit August 29th, 2005. Bush signed the relief package 9/2, 4 days later. And that was just approving the money to be spent, not actually spending it.

You say this as if it’s supposed to be a good thing. I’m going to assume you’re either too young to remember it happening, or old enough that you were already in the conservative bubble. Katrina was one of the largest fuckups in Bush’s political career. He waited four days to deploy because he thought the death and damage reports were being exaggerated. He saw the official reports on his desk, and basically went “fake news! It can’t be that bad, can it?” His aides had to compile live aerial news footage for him to even begin to comprehend the level of damage that Katrina had caused. And they only had easy access to aerial footage because the 20’ deep floods prevented ground footage. Bush’s delayed response to Katrina is widely cited as one of the single worst emergency responses in American history. Basically second only to Trump digging his heels in and denying the pandemic.

I mean, if the area is actively being destroyed, how do you even get people in to help?

Logistics takes time, and that’s why rapid response is crucial. If it takes 8 hours to get boots on the ground, and rescue ops are most successful within the first 24, you can do the math on how rapidly the deployment would need to begin.

Well… as the article pretty explicitly mentions, they would normally have staged resources at a nearer location so that their response could be more rapid, but Noem’s new rules hampered them by being overly burdensome. And Texan crews were already operating.

No. Katrina was a colossal fuck-up for Bush. His aides had to make a DVD of the news coverage to get him to realize the severity of the situation and that he needed to deploy significant resources. It was a huge embarrassment for the administration.

And then several Republicans in Congress were questioning whether the city should be rebuilt at all. People had to sit them down and explain that it’s important to have a port that basically every navigable river east of the Rocky Mountains is a tributary and the Port of New Orleans is critical national infrastructure. A lot of agricultural exports go through it. It was so stupid.

There were mistakes by the mayor and governor but a lot of the federal government was just oblivious (aside from the Coast Guard, who saved hundreds, if not thousands of stranded people.) And that’s just New Orleans. Katrina was massively wide and Mississippi and Alabama were having issues too.

No, it is not normal at all. You are talking about a relief package to help people rebuild. Those come later. This article is talking about search and rescue teams. Those teams go in as soon as possible to help find and rescue people.

“In the past, FEMA would have swiftly staged these [search and rescue] teams, which are specifically trained for situations including catastrophic floods, closer to a disaster zone in anticipation of urgent requests, multiple agency sources told CNN,” reported Gabe Cohen and Michael Williams. However, “even as Texas rescue crews raced to save lives, FEMA officials realized they needed Noem’s approval before sending those additional assets.”

That approval came on Monday. Apparently she doesn’t work weekends.

No. For an emergency response like this the first 72 hours are critical, that’s the entire window where you have a chance of live rescue.