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.We already know how seriously they took that report:
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."
Michael D. 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 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.
But the alert did not seem to register. Even the next morning, President Bush was feeling relieved that New Orleans had "dodged the bullet," he later recalled. Mr. Chertoff, similarly confident, flew Tuesday to Atlanta for a briefing on avian flu. With power out from the high winds and movement limited, even news reporters in New Orleans remained unaware of the full extent of the levee breaches until Tuesday.
A graphic here makes the timeline of events clear.
The report didn't reach the White House until about midnight, and we know of Bush's famous penchant for going to bed early even in the midst of crisis, so it's possible that Bush himself wasn't aware of the scale of the disaster when he went to bed that evening. But there's no explanation whatsoever for what Bush, or his administration's, did (or didn't do) the next morning. Viewing the timeline above, it's clear that even if they didn't know what the breaches implied at the time of the report, at the very least the DHS knew of how bad things were early Tuesday morning. Why didn't the White House know? Did they know and simply paid no heed to those reports? What were they doing up there while New Orleans was flooding? It's clear that the entire disaster was handled with incompetence by both the DHS in general and FEMA in particular, but if it wasn't clear enough already, it's becoming even more clear that Bush and his aides did not appreciate the scale of the disaster. In other words, the incompetance ran straight to the very top of our government, and Bush and his team piddled away precious hours and days while New Orleans drowned. They weren't the only ones. A list of mistakes and errors of judgment from the article is worth reprinting in full here:
¶Federal officials knew long before the storm showed up on the radar that 100,000 people in New Orleans had no way to escape a major hurricane on their own and that the city had finished only 10 percent of a plan for how to evacuate its largely poor, African-American population.¶Mr. Chertoff failed to name a principal federal official to oversee the response before the hurricane arrived, an omission a top Pentagon official acknowledged to investigators complicated the coordination of the response. His department also did not plan enough to prevent a conflict over which agency should be in charge of law enforcement support. And Mr. Chertoff was either poorly informed about the levee break or did not recognize the significance of the initial report about it, investigators said.¶The Louisiana transportation secretary, Johnny B. Bradberry, who had legal responsibility for the evacuation of thousands of people in nursing homes and hospitals, admitted bluntly to investigators, "We put no plans in place to do any of this."
¶Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans at first directed his staff to prepare a mandatory evacuation of his city on Saturday, two days before the storm hit, but he testified that he had not done so that day while he and other city officials struggled to decide if they should exempt hospitals and hotels from the order. The mandatory evacuation occurred on Sunday, and the delay exacerbated the difficulty in moving people away from the storm.
¶The New Orleans Police Department unit assigned to the rescue effort, despite many years' worth of flood warnings and requests for money, had just three small boats and no food, water or fuel to supply its emergency workers.
¶Investigators could find no evidence that food and water supplies were formally ordered for the Convention Center, where more than 10,000 evacuees had assembled, until days after the city had decided to open it as a backup emergency shelter. FEMA had planned to have 360,000 ready-to-eat meals delivered to the city and 15 trucks of water in advance of the storm. But only 40,000 meals and five trucks of water had arrived.
Is there anybody at any level of government that didn't do something wrong? Well, yes:
Representative Thomas M. Davis III, Republican of Virginia, chairman of the special House committee investigating the hurricane response, said the only government agency that performed well was the National Weather Service, which correctly predicted the force of the storm. But no one heeded the message, he said.
White House spokesman Trent Duffy says there wasn't much the White House could've done even if they had known how bad things were:
Because of course between doing nothing and flat-out fixing the levees, there's no possible other action they could've taken.Mr. Duffy, the White House spokesman, said it would not have made much difference even if the White House had realized the significance of the midnight report. "Like it or not, you cannot fix a levee overnight, or in an hour, or even six hours," he said.
The story here is pretty simple. The government, despite spending millions of dollars preparing reports on how a hurricane of Katrina's power could destroy levees and swamp New Orleans, despite the fact that they were getting information about the deterioating condition as quickly as was humanly possible, despite the fact that they had at their fingertips billions in resources to aid the stranded victims, did next to nothing even as the city was flooding, even as Americans were drowning. There's no excuse for it, and no apology sufficient to make up for what they didn't do.
No comments:
Post a Comment