Jay Inslee: “this Labor Day weekend I flew from Seattle to Houston to join thousands of Texans to volunteer in the Astrodome to help…”

“this Labor Day weekend I flew from Seattle to Houston to join thousands of Texans to volunteer in the Astrodome to help these evacuees, and there I met an incredible family with such courage and grace, trying to keep their family together on the floor of the Astrodome. A woman named Penny told me that her mother named Alice was trapped at a specific address on Bell Street in New Orleans, and I pitched in to try to help to get her rescued. For 3 days, the most powerful Nation in the world was incapable of going to a specific address on Bell Street and rescuing this 80-year-old lady named Alice. While that was going on, a lot of the lower level FEMA people were working hard to effectuate that, but they were handicapped by a lack of senior leadership, senior leadership who failed to anticipate the breaching of the levees; senior leadership who failed to call for help, who waited 5 hours to call for help after landfall of the hurricane; senior leadership that allowed FEMA's job to protect us from hurricanes to be totally overwhelmed by the responsibility regarding terrorism. This senior leadership led me to conclude, and millions of Americans to conclude, that we cannot have confidence in senior leadership at FEMA today. This is not a matter of finger-pointing or accountability. It is a matter of whether we have confidence in dealing with the next hurricane that is getting ready in the Atlantic Ocean right now. This is the middle.…”