By ERIC LIPTON
WASHINGTON — Determined to avoid any comparisons with the federal government’s failed response to Hurricane Katrina, the Obama administration made a public display Saturday of the range of its efforts to make sure officials in the storm-drenched states had whatever help they needed from Washington.
President Obama, who returned to Washington a day early from his summer vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, visited the headquarters of the Federal Emergency Management Agency shortly after noon. While there, he checked in on the National Response Coordination Center, a 24-hour command center based at FEMA, where dozens of federal employees from a range of agencies were assembled around the clock to help orchestrate the response to Hurricane Irene.
On wall-size television monitors, they keep track of the storm’s progress and are able to turn up or down the volume of the federal government’s response, by directing the various federal agency representatives who are there to pass on updates to their bosses.
“You guys are doing a great job, obviously,” Mr. Obama said during his brief visit. “This is obviously going to be touch and go.”
Even before the storm made landfall, Mr. Obama had declared a federal emergency for Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island and Virginia, clearing the way for federal financing and support to respond to the hurricane.
While still at FEMA headquarters, Mr. Obama joined a video conference of state and local officials in the regions expecting to be hit by the storm.
“It’s going to be a long 72 hours,” Mr. Obama said during the conference.
The bulk of the responsibility in advance of any hurricane rests with local and state governments, which are in charge of evacuation orders and preparations for flooding or other storm damage. But federal agencies must be ready in advance to provide any requested assistance, as they ultimately did in Louisiana and Mississippi in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina. But during that storm, they were often unable to quickly answer the requests.
To avoid such a repeat on Saturday, FEMA had 18 disaster incident response teams in place in coastal states and had stockpiles of food, water and mobile communications equipment ready to go. The Coast Guard had more than 20 rescue helicopters and reconnaissance planes in East Coast air stations ready to take off.
The Defense Department has another 18 helicopters in the Northeast set aside for response, and it has coordinated with states along the storm path to ensure that about 101,000 National Guard members are available, if necessary.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta issued a “prepare to deploy” order for 6,500 active duty military on Saturday to support the hurricane response. No troops have yet been deployed, as the National Guard, under the command of state officials, typically is the first called out to help in disasters.
As of Friday, the American Red Cross had positioned more than 200 emergency response vehicles and tens of thousands of ready-to-eat meals in areas in the path of the storm.
FEMA has moved onto the Internet and into social media in a big way, too, with Craig Fugate, the FEMA director, posting several times an hour from his account, @CraigatFEMA, to deliver updates on the agency’s response and the status of the storm.
“The category of the storm does not tell the whole story,” Mr. Fugate wrote Saturday morning, after Hurricane Irene was downgraded to a Category 1 storm but was still considered dangerous. “Some of our nation’s worst flooding came from tropical storms.”
The agency even released new software for Android cellphones that allows the public to monitor information on how to prepare for a hurricane, and if necessary, to apply for disaster assistance, which bogged down in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
At a news conference Saturday morning at FEMA headquarters in Washington, the Homeland Security secretary, Janet Napolitano, said that as the storm was making its first contact on the East Coast, she knew of no outstanding requests to the federal government for assistance from state or local governments.
“None of them have reported any unmet needs right now,” she said. “But we really are at the beginning of this storm response. We are basically at the end of the preparation phase.”
Ms. Napolitano urged people along the path of the storm to heed warnings to evacuate, even though the storm continued to lose some of its intensity.
“Irene remains a large and dangerous storm,” she said. “People need to take it seriously. People need to be prepared.”
Mr. Fugate, the FEMA director, said that the heavy rains and tornadoes that might accompany Hurricane Irene were not reflected in its Category 1 status, so people should not let down their guard.
“Until we actually get the impacts, we are not going to know how bad areas are getting hit,” Mr. Fugate said.
Mr. Fugate said the early reports of widespread power failures — as of 1 p.m. on Saturday an estimated 400,000 homes and businesses were without power, The Associated Press reported — suggested that federal agencies would be called on to help out.
Bill Read, the director of the National Hurricane Center, said that as of Saturday morning the storm was moving north-northeast at about 15 miles per hour and that he expected to see a storm surge along the coasts of between 5 and 9 feet — more than enough to cause severe flooding.
Mr. Read said there could also be as much as 15 inches of rain in North Carolina before the storm clears and 5 to 10 inches of rain across the Mid-Atlantic and into New England, which could cause major flooding and tree damage, even inland, as the ground is already saturated from recent heavy rains.
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