White House knew scale of Katrina
Senior aides to President George Bush were informed on the day Hurricane Katrina hit that their “worst nightmare” had befallen New Orleans, a Senate investigation was told yesterday, contradicting assertions by the White House that they were not immediately aware of the scale of the disaster.
The former chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Michael Brown, said the White House and the department of homeland security, which oversees Fema, had been made aware early on that a breach in the levees had left 80% of the city under water.
Mr Brown told a Senate committee investigating the response to Katrina that he had two conversations on the day of the hurricane, August 29 last year, with Mr Bush’s deputy chief of staff, Joe Hagen, who had accompanied the president to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, where he spent his summer holiday.
“I think I told him that we were realising our worst nightmare, that everything we had planned about, worried about, that Fema, frankly, had worried about for 10 years, was coming true.”
According to newly revealed documents and Brown’s testimony, the White House was told Hurricane Katrina had overrun a levee in New Orleans almost twelve hours earlier than the Bush administration has claimed. The White House has maintained it was first informed of the levee breaches the morning of Tuesday, August 30th 2005.
But Congressional investigators have now learned that an eyewitness account of the flooding from a federal emergency official reached the Homeland Security Department’s headquarters starting at 9:27 p.m. the day before, and the White House itself at midnight.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency official, Marty Bahamonde, first heard of a major levee breach Monday morning. By late Monday afternoon, Mr. Bahamonde had hitched a ride on a Coast Guard helicopter over the breach at the 17th Street Canal to confirm the extensive flooding. He then telephoned his report to FEMA headquarters in Washington, which notified the Homeland Security Department.
“FYI from FEMA,” said an e-mail message from the agency’s public affairs staff describing the helicopter flight, sent Monday night at 9:27 to the chief of staff of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and recently unearthed by investigators. Conditions, the message said, “are far more serious than media reports are currently reflecting. Finding extensive flooding and more stranded people than they had thought — also a number of fires.”
Brown said in a telephone interview Thursday that he personally notified the White House of this news that night, though he declined to identify the official he spoke to.
Brown has indicated he’s prepared to reveal his full correspondence with the Bush administration unless the White House forbids him to do so and offers legal support. Brown’s attorneys say the White House has not responded to the demand, which had a deadline of Wednesday night. Brown is expected to testify today before a Senate inquiry into the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina.
White House officials have confirmed to Congressional investigators that the report of the levee break arrived there at midnight, and Trent Duffy, the White House spokesman, acknowledged as much in an interview this week, though he said it was surrounded with conflicting reports.
The federal government let out a sigh of relief when in fact it should have been sounding an “all hands on deck” alarm, the investigators have found.
This chain of events, along with dozens of other critical flashpoints in the Hurricane Katrina saga, has for the first time been laid out in detail following five months of work by two Congressional committees that have assembled nearly 800,000 pages of documents, testimony and interviews from more than 250 witnesses. Investigators now have the documentation to pinpoint some of the fundamental errors and oversights that combined to produce what is universally agreed to be a flawed government response to the worst natural disaster in modern American history.
“There is no question in my mind that at the highest levels of the White House they understood how grave the situation was,” Mr. Brown said in the interview.
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