White House ‘warned of levee breach’

White House ‘warned of levee breach’
By Andrei Postelnicu in New York
Published: February 10 2006 12:09 | Last updated: February 10 2006 17:16Copyright by the Financial Times

The White House was alerted of a breach in the New Orleans levee system on the night Hurricane Katrina struck the city, a former Bush administration official told US senators on Friday.

The testimony from Michael Brown, the former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to a Senate committee clashes with White House statements that the administration had been taken by surprise by the levee failure.

Mr Brown, told the Senate’s homeland security committee that he told Joseph Hagin, President Bush’s deputy chief of staff, about the levee breach on the night of August 29th, as Katrina made landfall on New Orleans.

“I think I told him we were realising our worst nightmares,“ Mr Brown said. In response to inquiries about the president’s awareness of the situation, Mr Brown said he thought “If I’ve told Joe Hagin or [chief of staff] Andy Card, I’ve told the president“.

White House officials have said they did not know about the levee breach and subsequent flooding of New Orleans until the morning of Tuesday, August 30th. The Bush administration has come under sharp criticism for the delays in getting emergency supplies into New Orleans in Katrina’s aftermath.

“For them [the White House] to claim that we didn’t have awareness of it is just baloney,” Mr Brown said.

The former official, who resigned less than two weeks after Katrina struck amid uproar about the US government response to the hurricane, also told lawmakers that he often bypassed Michael Chertoff, his boss at the Department of Homeland Security in favour of talking directly to the White House.

The revelations come as a five-month investigation into the hurricane response revealed in detail the chain of events that saw images of mosrly poor and black Americans in distress in a crippled city.

A Fema official who was in New Orleans emailed his supervisors in Washington to say conditions “are far more serious than media reports are currently reflecting”, investigators found.

Mr Brown said that going through the chain of command at the homeland security department “would have been a waster of time”. The department, which was created following the September 11th terrorist attacks, was “was an additional bureaucracy that was going to slow me down even more, and the way I got around that was dealing directly with the White House“.

The remarks atracted retorts from senators describing the situation as “dysfunctional”. While some admitted the “structural” deficiencies of the new department, they accused Mr Brown of a leadership failure which, combined with the structure, became a “perfect storm”.

Mr Brown, whose appointment without obvious qualifications for the Fema job brought the White House under attack, sought to defend his record at the agency by mentioning previous responses to California wildfires and the crash of a space shuttle.

He told senators he was “sick and tired of emails taken out of context”.