The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)'s Hurricane Katrina response was sharply criticized as sluggish. Americans were shocked by scenes of chaos in the devastated Gulf Coast city of New Orleans and images of people desperately waiting for help on the roofs of their flooded homes.

"Although FEMA pre-positioned significant numbers of personnel, assets and resources before the hurricane made landfall, we now know its capabilities were simply overwhelmed by the magnitude of this storm," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, whose massive department includes FEMA, told a congressional committee looking into the Katrina disaster.

As powerful Hurricane Wilma threatened the southern state of Florida, Chertoff proposed to overhaul the federal agency to enable it to respond to large-scale natural catastrophes.

The White House said authorities were handling Wilma differently than Katrina.

"The primary difference between Wilma and Katrina storm preparations is a renewed effort to make coordination at all levels of government as seamless as possible," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan.

"FEMA is coordinating video teleconferences with our field offices in the Gulf Coast region as well as our state partners daily to ensure close coordination in preparation, as done in all approaching storms," McClellan said.

The federal agency is also "encouraging people to follow the advice of local authorities, including possible evacuation orders," he said.

Among his recommendations, Chertoff said the agency must improve its ability to move supplies to a disaster area, recruit more experienced experts, upgrade communications that failed during the storm and ensure its contracting is efficient and honest.

FEMA's procurement decisions have been questioned for hurricane relief work and it recently reopened bidding for contracts in storm-hit areas.

Chertoff said FEMA also needed to adapt the way it requires disaster victims to register for aid at a particular location. This method "does not hold up when a vast area is affected by a catastrophic event," he said.

One solution was to deploy teams over a broad area to register recipients of aid, he said.

The Department of Homeland Security planned to establish reconnaissance teams that will move in quickly after a disaster to provide timely information for the government's relief effort.

"During the Katrina response, our efforts were significantly hampered by a lack of information from the ground," he said.

One of the worst natural disasters in US history, Hurricane Katrina struck the southern coast along the Gulf of Mexico on August 29, killing more than 1,200 people.

The federal government was widely criticized for its slow relief effort amid chaotic scenes of hurricane survivors stranded for days in New Orleans.

President George W. Bush later admitted the response had been flawed and said he took responsibility for the federal government's role.

Michael Brown quit as head of FEMA last month after a torrent of criticism over his handling of the disaster. He was replaced by David Paulison.

As Chertoff spoke, authorities in Mexico ordered the evacuation of resorts on the Yucatan peninsula threatened by Hurricane Wilma, the strongest hurricane recorded in the Atlantic.

With Honduras, Nicaragua, Jamaica and other Caribbean islands on alert, the National Hurricane Center said Wilma was headed for the US state of Florida this weekend.

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