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Thad Allen on the Katrina Cleanup

Principal federal official. It's a prosaic official title for one of the hardest temporary jobs in history, held by Vice Adm. Thad Allen. Allen is principal federal official (PFO) for the Gulf Coast recovery from Hurricane Katrina.

"I don't think the national response plan anticipated how we would react to what I'd call a catastrophic loss of the elements of a civil society," Allen says. "New Orleans was taken down hard. This is far beyond the scale for what might have been envisioned for a natural disaster response and comes closer to what you might envision if a weapon of mass effect was used on a municipality. From that standpoint the lessons learned from this will be extremely useful."

Since his posting, Allen has spent one day away from the Gulf Coast (for Washington meetings). No date has been set for a transition from recovery to reconstruction, when he'd be relieved of his duty.

Allen is quick to praise the hundreds of FEMA officials in New Orleans, and his Coast Guard, which has a history of cleaning up disasters (see "Same Ship, Different Day"). "What the Coast Guard did here is nothing different than what we've done for over 200 years," Allen says. "The scope and the complexity of the job here was more than we've seen in a long, long time. As I've said, transparency of information breeds self-correcting behavior, and I hope that has not been lost on the Congress."