'NY Times': White House Knew of Levee Break in New Orleans Early On

By: E&P Staff Contrary to White House statements that officials there were surprised when told last Aug. 30, a Tuesday, that a levee had broken in New Orleans, causing the massive flood, Congressional investigators have now learned that an eyewitness account of the disaster reached the Homeland Security Department's headquarters starting at 9:27 p.m. the day before, and the White House itself at midnight, The New York Times reports Friday.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency official, Marty Bahamonde, "first heard of a major levee breach Monday morning," the Times details. "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."

An e-mail message from the agency's public affairs staff describing the helicopter flight, sent Monday night to the chief of staff of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, was "recently unearthed by investigators," the Times' Eric Lipton reports. 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, told the Times Thursday that he personally notified the White House of this news that night, though he declined to identify the official he spoke to.

Yet the followingday, President Bush, on vacation in Texas, felt relieved that New Orleans had "dodged the bullet," he later recalled, and did not return to Washington for some time. Chertoff, the Times points out, "flew off Tuesday to Atlanta for a briefing on avian flu."

Brown seemed to give conflicting statements this week about whether he would tell all, or tell nothing, in testimony to Congress on Friday. But he tells the Times: "There is no question in my mind, that at the highest levels of the White House they understood how grave the situation was."

The Times describes the new material this way: "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."

The new documents also reveal, among other things, that "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."

Representative Thomas M. Davis, Republican of Virginia and chairman of the special House committee investigating the hurricane response, told the Times that the only level of government that performed well was the National Weather Service.

"The president is still at his ranch, the vice president is still fly-fishing in Wyoming, the president's chief of staff is in Maine," Davis said.