Minnesota’s Fired Crisis Director Stays Fired

Nothing to fly home about? The head of the Minnesota Department of Transportation’s emergency management office decided not to cut short her two-week trip to the East Coast when the I-35 bridge collapsed on Aug. 1, 2007. She was later dismissed for unprofessional conduct. (Ruth Fremson/The New York Times)

By Patrick J. Lyons
NYT blog

When the I-35 highway bridge in Minneapolis collapsed last Aug. 1, Sonia Morphew Pitt was out of town. Then she was out of a job. Now she’s out of luck.

Ms. Pitt, you see, was the Minnesota Department of Transportation’s director of homeland security and emergency management, which you would think would make her a key official in a key agency for mobilizing the state’s reaction to the disaster. But all kinds of people in Minnesota, from firefighters and cops up to the governor and several state legislators, said the agency was no help at all, taking days too long to get itself organized and doing little to coordinate the urgent work of rescue, recovery and repair. In short, it didn’t manage the emergency.

Most glaringly, far from rushing home to take charge personally when the bridge fell, Ms. Pitt stayed out of town for another 10 days, on a mixed business-and-personal visit to Washington and to Cambridge, Mass., before returning to Minneapolis and the mess.

(Continued here.)