In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Bush administration officials said they had been caught by surprise when they were told on Tuesday, Aug. 30, that a levee had broken, allowing floodwaters to engulf New Orleans. 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 9:27pm the day before, and the White House itself at midnight.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) official, Marty Bahamonde, first heard of a major levee breach Monday morning. By late Monday afternoon, 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 US 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."
Michael Brown, who was the director of FEMA until he resigned under pressure on Sept. 12, 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.
White House officials have confirmed to congressional investigators that the message 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.
But somehow, this alert did not seem to register. Even the next morning, US President George W. Bush, on vacation in Texas, was feeling relieved that New Orleans had "dodged the bullet," he later recalled. Chertoff, similarly confident, flew off Tuesday to Atlanta for a briefing on avian flu. With power out from the high winds and movement limited, even news reporters in the city remained unaware of the full extent of the levee breaches until Tuesday.
The federal government had 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 US history.
Brown, the former FEMA director, was scheduled to testify before the US Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. He was expected to confirm that he notified the White House on that Monday, the day the hurricane hit, that the levee had given way, the city was flooding and his crews were overwhelmed.
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