But Senator Susan Collins, Republican, Maine, the chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, said it was obvious to her in retrospect that Chertoff, perhaps in deference to Brown's authority, was not paying close enough attention to the events in New Orleans and that the federal response to the disaster may have been slowed as a result. "Secretary Chertoff was too disengaged from the process," Collins said in an interview.
Compounding the problem, even once Chertoff learned of the levee break on Tuesday, he could not reach Brown, his top emergency response official, for an entire day because Brown was on helicopter tours of the damage.
The day before the hurricane made landfall, the Homeland Security department issued a report predicting that it could lead to a breach in the levees that could submerge New Orleans for months and leave 100,000 people stranded. Yet despite these warnings, state, federal and local officials acknowledged to investigators that there was no coordinated effort before the storm arrived to evacuate nursing homes and hospitals or others in this urban population without cars.
Bradberry, the state transportation secretary, told an investigator that he had focused on improving the highway evacuation plan for the general public with cars and had not attended to his responsibility to remove people from hospitals and nursing homes. The state even turned down an offer for patient evacuation assistance from the federal government.
In fact, the city at that moment was desperately in need of help. And this failure would have deadly consequences. Only 21 of the about 60 nursing homes were cleared of residents before the storm struck. Dozens of lives were lost in hospitals and nursing homes.
Part of the reason the city was unable to help itself, investigators said, is that it never purchased the basic equipment needed to respond to the long-predicted catastrophe. The fire department had asked for inflatable boats and generators, as well as an emergency food supply, but none were provided, a department official told staff investigators.
The investigators also determined that the US Transportation Department had not been asked until Wednesday to provide buses to evacuate the Superdome and Convention Center, meaning that evacuees sat in these overcrowded shelters of last resort for perhaps two more days longer than necessary.
Brown acknowledged to investigators that he wished, in retrospect, that he had moved much earlier to turn over major aspects of the response effort to the US Department of Defense. It was not until Tuesday, he said, that he asked the military to take over the delivery and distribution of water, food and ice. "In hindsight I should have done it right then," Brown told the House, referring to the Sunday before the storm hit.
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