ThinkProgress has constructed a detailed, documented timeline of the response to Hurricane Katrina, including major state and federal measures beginning with Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco’s declaration of a state of emergency on August 26 and continuing through the president’s weekend attempt to place blame for the botched rescue and relief effort on state and local authorities.

The timeline documents delays in the federal response along with some of the more egregious elements of the PR and smear campaigns mounted by the Bush administration, among which are the grounding of rescue effort air traffic and the comandeering of 50 firefighters for a Biloxi, Mississippi, presidential photo opportunity, and the Washington Post’s September 3 publication of an anonymous claim by a “senior Bush official” that Governor Blanco had never declared a state of emergency.

In Atlanta, more than 1,000 firefighters who gathered to volunteer for the relief effort were told that instead of conducting the medical, search and rescue and hazardous material operations they were trained for, the Federal Emergency Management Agency wanted to use them as community relations specialists. Their duties would include distributing FEMA fliers and a toll-free FEMA telephone number.

Many of the firefighters, assembled from Utah and throughout the United States by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, thought they were going to be deployed as emergency workers.

Instead, they have learned they are going to be community-relations officers for FEMA, shuffled throughout the Gulf Coast region to disseminate fliers and a phone number: 1-800-621-FEMA.

On Monday, some firefighters stuck in the staging area at the Sheraton peeled off their FEMA-issued shirts and stuffed them in backpacks, saying they refuse to represent the federal agency.

Federal officials are unapologetic.

“I would go back and ask the firefighter to revisit his commitment to FEMA, to firefighting and to the citizens of this country,” said FEMA spokeswoman Mary Hudak.

The firefighters – or at least the fire chiefs who assigned them to come to Atlanta – knew what the assignment would be, Hudak said.

Get that? Hudak, whose riskiest moments involve choosing what to tell reporters, is questioning the courage and patriotism of men and women who routinely put their lives at risk in service of others, who volunteered to do so again and who were distraught because their skills were being wasted by FEMA.

A number of commentators and Bush administration officials say that now is not the time to play the “blame game,” even as many of them are actively engaged in deflecting blame from federal officials to local ones and even, in Hudak’s case, to men and women who have volunteered to risk their lives in response to the disaster.

But the Bush administration record of refusing to acknowledge their mistakes, let alone hold anyone accountable for them, is unblemished in five years. If anyone is to be held accountable it will be now, when passions are high and the administration’s lethally sluggish response to the disaster is fresh in everyone’s mind.

If no one is held accountable now, no one ever will be.

Which is why there will be no presidential photo opportunities involving the recovery of what may be at least 10,000 corpses from the stricken areas. In fact, FEMA is refusing permission to journalists wanting to document the process, much as the administration has long refused permission to photograph the coffins of US soldiers returning from Iraq.

Simply put, there is no doubt whatsoever that the Bush administration failed to take the emergency seriously or that when the scale of the disaster finally dawned on them, their response was slow and incoherent.

Except for the “blame game;” that operation got underway days before the first FEMA responders arrived.

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UPDATE: Economist Brad DeLong (yes, I know the name sounds French, but bear with me) explains the value of a bureaucracy in emergencies, and how the administration utterly failed to exploit it.

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