It has taken nearly two weeks since Hurricane Katrina smashed into the Gulf Coast and drowned New Orleans for U.S. President George W. Bush to get his first up-close look at the extent of the damage. Bush spent Sunday night on a military amphibious assault ship docked in the Mississippi River just behind the city's convention center _ now eerily empty but still strewn with piles of trash _ that was the scene of so much misery in the days after the storm. Traveling across the deserted city before bunking down aboard the USS Iwo Jima, Bush also visited "Tent City," that is now the massive staging area for hundreds of weary and dirty but enthusiastic firefighters from around the country. They included New York City firefighters who brought back a truck that the state of Louisiana and private donors gave after the Sept. 11 attacks. The president was scheduled to start Monday with a briefing on the hurricane response effort on board the 845-foot (260-meter) Iwo Jima, which that has been a command center for military relief efforts, and ending it in Gulfport, Mississippi. In between, plans called for him to ride in a convoy of military trucks to get a lengthy look at New Orleans' damaged and flooded neighborhoods. He was also touring hard-hit surrounding parishes by helicopter, touching down to meet with local leaders. Army Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honore, commander of the approximately 17,000 active-duty troops helping with the storm effort, and Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad Allen met Bush when his helicopter landed Sunday on the Iwo Jima and stuck with him from there on. It was Bush's first direct meeting with Allen since he became the new federal face of relief efforts _ replacing Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency who was recalled to Washington on Friday after coming to personify a relief operation widely panned as bumbling. The trip is Bush's third and longest to the disaster area, and it came as the White House is eager to show the president displaying hands-on, empathetic leadership in the storm effort. More than half of respondents in an Associated Press-Ipsos poll last week said he is at fault for the slow response. Bush has seen flooded New Orleans twice from the air _ from aboard Air Force One on the way back to the White House from his Texas ranch two days after Katrina hit, and again from a helicopter two days after that when he made his first on-the-ground visit to storm-ravaged areas of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.
