Brown Warned White House Before Katrina Struck

Brown warned White House before Katrina struck

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060210/...na_congress_dc

By Richard Cowan
11 minutes ago

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former federal disaster chief Michael Brown told a Senate panel on Friday he had warned President George W. Bush that New Orleans was facing catastrophe the day before Hurricane Katrina struck.

The committee is investigating failures by federal, state and local officials to deal properly with the August 29 storm and particularly why the Bush administration was so slow to react to the emergency.

Brown as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency emerged as the main scapegoat for the government's response.

He told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee he had held a video conference call the afternoon of August 28, the day before the hurricane struck, which he specifically recalled Bush listened in on.

Brown said he warned top administration officials on the call that a disaster was looming and that the government should go on top alert and cut through red tape in its response. "I knew in my gut this was the bad one," he said.

Some 1,200 people died and hundreds of thousands were made homeless in the storm, which devastated parts of the coast of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

Brown, who was forced to resign two weeks after the disaster, said he also briefed White House Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin, who was with Bush at his Texas ranch, about the extent of the disaster on the evening of Aug 29.

"I told him (Hagin) that we were realizing our worst nightmare, that everything we had planned about, worried about, that FEMA, frankly, had worried about for 10 years was coming true," Brown said.

He added that he did not recall whether Bush himself was in on that telephone call but was not worried because "I knew that in speaking to Joe, I was speaking to the President."

Bush was nearing the end of his month-long summer vacation when the hurricane struck and remained at the ranch for two days after the disaster. He played golf the following day.

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The committee is trying to discover why Bush and senior administration officials apparently believed that New Orleans had been spared the worst effects of the hurricane for hours after the city was already flooded.

On September 1, Bush said in a television interview, "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees."

Yet Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman (news, bio, voting record), the committee's ranking Democrat, cited a report from the National Weather Service at 9:14 a.m. on August 29 that at least one of the levees protecting the city was breached. He cited numerous other reports as that day went on describing a massive disaster.

"Our investigation has shown a gross lack of planning and preparation by both the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA," Lieberman said.

On September 2, Bush toured the area and told Brown, a lawyer, Republican activist and former commissioner of an Arabian horse association, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job." But a week later, with public anger rising, Brown was recalled to Washington. He resigned a few days later.

Brown told the committee he felt he had been made a scapegoat. "I certainly feel somewhat abandoned," he added.

He said he believed he had had a good relationship with Bush, but added: "Unfortunately he called me "Brownie" at the wrong time. Thanks a lot sir," he said, to laughter.

Brown blamed the poor federal response to Katrina partly on the absorption of FEMA into the Department of Homeland Security, which was focused on preventing terrorist attacks and neglected the threat of natural disasters. He urged that it be set up as a separate agency once again.

He said that if a terrorist bomb had breached one of the levees in New Orleans, the department would have instantly mobilized. But because the threat was from a natural disaster, the response from senior officials was less urgent.

The morning after Katrina struck, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff boarded a plane for Atlanta for a previously-scheduled meeting on avian flu, at a time when residents of New Orleans were fighting for their lives, Chertoff will testify to the committee on Tuesday.

Brown said he had not sought to brief Chertoff directly because it would have "wasted my time."

Utah Republican Sen. Robert Bennett (news, bio, voting record) responded: "That is a staggering statement. It demonstrates a dysfunctional department to a degree far greater than any we have seen."

Brown's testimony struck a very different tone from his previous appearance before Congress a month after the disaster when he blamed local officials, called the state of Louisiana "dysfunctional" and defended his own performance.

Brown: I Warned White House As Katrina Hit

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060211/...trina_congress

By LARA JAKES JORDAN, Associated Press Writer Sat Feb 11, 3:30 PM ET

WASHINGTON - Former federal disaster chief Michael Brown, the face of the government's listless response to Hurricane Katrina, said Friday he told top Bush officials the day the storm howled ashore of massive flooding in New Orleans and warned "we were realizing our worst nightmare."

More defiant than defensive, Brown told senators he dealt directly with White House officials the day of the Aug. 29 storm, including chief of staff Andrew Card and deputy chief of staff Joe Hagin.

He also said the Homeland Security Department was among a half-dozen government agencies that received regular briefings that day from him and other officials by way of video conference calls. Administration officials have said they did not realize the severe damage Katrina had caused until after the storm had passed.

Under oath, Brown told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that he could not explain why his appeals failed to produce a faster response.

"I expected them to cut every piece of red tape, do everything they could ... that I didn't want to hear anybody say that we couldn't do everything they humanly could to respond to this," Brown said about a video conference with administration officials — in which President Bush briefly participated — the day before Katrina hit. "Because I knew in my gut this was the bad one."

In the end, the storm claimed more than 1,300 lives, uprooted hundreds of thousands more and caused tens of billions in damage. The devastation in New Orleans and other Gulf Coast communities left Americans with enduring images of their countrymen dying in flooded nursing homes and pleading for rescue from rooftops.

Brown, in his second Capitol Hill appearance since Katrina, told his side to the senators five months after he quit under fire as chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

He agreed with some senators who characterized him as a scapegoat for government failures.

"I feel somewhat abandoned," said Brown,

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has said he did not know that New Orleans' levees were breached until Aug. 30. Bush at the time said, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."

At an occasionally contentious White House briefing Friday, Bush spokesman Scott McClellan said there were conflicting reports about the levees in the immediate aftermath of the storm.

"We knew of the flooding that was going on," McClellan said. "That's why our top priority was focused on saving lives. ... The cause of the flooding was secondary to that top priority and that's the way it should be."

After three hours of testimony, Brown was handed a subpoena ordering him to reappear in front of a House panel investigating the storm response. Brown is expected to be questioned by House investigators this weekend — days before the panel is expected to release its findings on the storm.

Recounting conference calls that described initial damage reports the day Katrina hit, Brown scoffed at claims that Homeland Security didn't know about the devastation's scope until the next day. He called those claims "just baloney."

Some senators suggested Brown look inward before pointing the finger elsewhere.

"You're not prepared to put a mirror in front of your face and recognize your own inadequacies," said Norm Coleman, R-Minn. "Perhaps you may get a more sympathetic hearing if you had a willingness to confess your own sins in this."

Brown responded: "That's very easy for you to say sitting behind that dais and not being there in the middle of that disaster watching that human suffering and watching those people dying and trying to deal with those structural dysfunctionalities, even within the federal government."

The disjointed federal response, Brown said, was in part the result of FEMA being swallowed in 2003 by the newly created Homeland Security Department, which he said was focused on fighting terrorism.

Natural disasters "had become the stepchild of the Department of Homeland Security," he said. Had there been a report that "a terrorist had blown up the 17th Street Canal levee, then everybody would have jumped all over that," he added.

Some senators attempted to trace the failures back to the White House.

"You quite appropriately and admirably wanted to get the word to the president as quickly as you could," said Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., asking about Brown's conversation with Hagin on the evening of Aug. 29. "Did you tell Mr. Hagin in that phone call that New Orleans was flooding?"

Brown answered: "I think I told him that we were realizing our worst nightmare, that everything we had planned about, worried about, that FEMA, frankly, had worried about for 10 years was coming true."

Sen. Robert Bennett (news, bio, voting record), R-Utah, suggested Brown may have delayed the federal response by cutting Homeland Security out of the loop about the levee failures and going straight to the White House.

"I think I now understand why Secretary Chertoff says he didn't know," Bennett said. "The reason he didn't know is because you didn't think it important to tell him."

Brown said he communicated directly with the White House instead of Homeland Security because FEMA's parent agency "just bogged things down."

I got to watch a great deal of the testimony today on C-Span. What sucks about these harangues is that the senators can sit up on their high horse after all's said and done and play Monday morning armchair quarterback. Remember, never before has an entire U.S. city been completely destroyed by a natural disaster. Sure, there've been earthquakes, tornadoes, other hurricanes that did damage, but nothing like Katrina.

A slew of mistakes were made, granted. King George probably should've stopped grab-assing in Cali and acted like the leader of the U.S. Temporary housing still sits in Arkansas, due to infrastructure problems and delivery limitations. The list goes on ad nauseum....

But for U.S. senators to criticize and poke at a couple of people because of a collective breakdown in communications.... especially on a public scale so they can seem like they're getting to bottom of something (oh, and a vote comes up in '06, what a coincidence).... it rubs me the wrong way.

I don't like that Bush went to a birthday party to play guitar, and went to play golf the next day. I don't like that Dick Cheney was on vacation, and Condi was shopping for $7000.00 shoes.