Mr. Brown Goes To Washington - A Levee Tale

The media is pumping reports that the Bush Administration knew that there were levee failures in and around New Orleans on August 29, or at least they should have know late on the 29th that there were levee failures with flooding.

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."

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.

This comes on the heels of Michael Brown agreeing to testify about what he did, and what he knew in those early days of the Katrina relief efforts. Real Clear Politics wonders just what exactly is motivating Brown to testify. Is it revenge for being hung out to dry, for not getting executive privilege extended to him by the White House, or some genuine need to get his side of the story out. I think it's a combination of factors.

This renewed effort at looking at what the federal government did or did not do in those early days is going to do what exactly? Force the Administration to take a greater share of blame for not acting sooner or more urgently? The same issues of federalism apply now as they did in those early days and hours. The federal government simply couldn't overstep its bounds and there were failures at all levels that complicated matters.

The Times story notes that the White House was getting contradicting information, and given that FEMA was slow to grasp the seriousness of the situation, it is likely that the White House was waiting to see what daylight would bring. RCP thinks that this isn't going to have any longterm political fallout since we're rehashing old ground. I disagree - it refocuses attention on the Gulf Coast and the continuing slow pace of reconstruction, let alone clearing away millions of tons of debris.

Now Michael Brown is blaming failures of FEMA on the DHS. That's interesting considering that DHS was created after 9/11 and FEMA was subsumed into DHS. (Hat Tip: TMF at LGF)

The thing that is still lost on many folks is that FEMA isn't a first responder, and neither is the federal government. The state and local authorities are. And it is at those levels that the failures are most egregious. They failed to implement their existing emergency plans. This doesn't excuse the federal government's later or concurrent failures, but to place sole blame on FEMA or the federal government is misplaced.

The fact is that a good deal of blame should lie with the Army Corps of Engineers and the local levee boards who failed to properly design, maintain, and coordinate management of the levee system throughout South Louisiana. The levees failed even before they were hit with the maximum design tolerances, which suggests failures in the design and construction phase. And those are failures made years ago - decades in fact. The response to the levee failures was equally poor at the state and local level, where confusion and worries about power sharing resulted in delays. All the while, search and rescue teams from the US military, Coast Guard, local response, and National Guard units were rescuing people from rooftops all over the Gulf Coast. The most egregious failures occurred in Louisiana, where levee failures were combined with failures of leadership.

UPDATE:
FireDogLake, among others, would like to believe that President Bush was somehow on vacation at the critical moments when Hurricane Katrina came ashore and the days immediately thereafter.

Really, Scotty? Is that why the President stayed on vacation, until forced to return to the WH by public disgust and outcry? Why he told Dianne Sawyer that no one could have anticipated the levee breach? Why the President said the next morning after Katrina that New Orleans had "dodged a bullet?"

It's a damn good question to ask why President Bush made the "dodged a bullet" remark, but he was not on vacation according to his schedule. In fact, Drudge reports the following:

NEW YORK TIMES’ Eric Lipton today writes that President Bush was “on vacation in Texas” on August 30th but their own reporter filed a pool report that day from San Diego where POTUS giving a speech on the War on Terror and was visiting soldiers and families of the fallen. Sources tell DRUDGE that the original story filed by Lipton did not contain the sentence about Bush being on vacation and that it was added by an editor.

The White House is seeking a retraction.

Developing...

Pool Report #2 (from August 30, 2005) Chaos briefly reigned. After conducting an interview with the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service at a cargo plane hangar near the previous event, President Bush arrived at the Naval Medical Center San Diego on schedule, and proceded to the first event, a meeting with health care providers that was supposed to last a half hour and include a photo op at the bottom. Instead, moments after arrival, the pool was rushed to the door and told the photo op would take place immediately. Then, just as suddenly, it was canceled without explanation. Minutes later – about an hour ahead of schedule, and equally suddenly – the pool was rounded up and rushed back to the motorcade for departure. It is now 11:21 AM local time and we are heading toward the airport. More to come.

Considering that it's easy enough to figure out where the President was on any given day, claiming that Bush was on vacation, when he was in fact doing something quite different undermines the argument.

We do need to know what the federal government was doing during these critical time periods, but lying about what President Bush was doing only further inflames partisanship and does little to clarify what actions were actually taken. Did someone at the White House screwup in the communications with the President and his staff? That's a possibility. Is Brown now playing CYA in an open forum? Quite possibly. After all, he was the one tossed out on the yardarm to swing in the breeze when FEMA clearly wasn't getting things done (and for the record, they're still doing an inadequate job).

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