Katrina - Senate Perspective

[tw]

From the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Govermnet Affairs, a report of 27 Apr 2006 entitled "Hurricane Katrina: A Nation Still Unprepared" obtained a long list of information from every political figure who was requested to provided the committee with documents. For example, Gov Kathleen Blanco provided 8000 pages of documents including e-mails personally to and from the Governor; and made her staff available for the committe:

On November 3, 2005, we received its initial response. In a letter signed by Deputy Counsel to the President William K. Kelley, the White House started off well, pledging that “[t]he Administration is committed to cooperating with your Committee.” Unfortunately, it then offered very little to show for that commitment. Mr. Kelley’s letter and the accompanying documents made clear that the White House had little intention of giving the Committee what it had requested. ...

To make matters worse, the Committee soon learned that despite the White House’s suggestion that the Committee seek its information elsewhere, the White House was in fact directing the federal agencies that were producing documents and witnesses for the Committee’s investigation to withhold from the Committee any material or testimony relating to the agencies’ or witnesses’ interactions with the White House.

This is a honest president? Hardly. One who has much to hide? Obviously. One who is interested in addressing and solving future problems? Apparently not.

... the Committee gained virtually its only significant insight into what actually happened within the White House immediately before and after Katrina’s landfall. We learned this information only because former FEMA Director Michael Brown refused to decline to answer the Committee’s questions about his communications with the White House absent an assertion of executive privilege by the President. When the President declined to invoke that privilege, Mr. Brown testified before the Committee on Friday, February 10, and shortly thereafter sat for a more detailed, transcribed interview with our staff. In both instances, Mr. Brown made clear that he saw the White House as a critical player in the preparations for and response to Hurricane Katrina. ...

In sum, despite the Committee’s broad and detailed requests, intended to enable an understanding of the actions taken by the White House during Hurricane Katrina, we had received interviews with none of the requested White House witnesses, written answers to none of the questions posed in our October 7, 2005 letter to the White House, and roughly 17,000 pages of documents, the vast majority of which consisted of publicly available material, material otherwise generated by other agencies, and reports and updates from DHS’s Homeland Security Operations Center. In addition, we failed to receive from federal agencies an unknown volume of responsive material as a result of White House orders to withhold anything related to or referencing virtually anyone of significance in the White House.

... For example, the Committee’s original request asked [Health and Human Services] to provide all emergency and contingency plans for all Department elements and relevant regional offices that were in effect at the time of Katrina. What HHS gave us included, in essence, only one headquarters-level plan. The Committee requested afteraction reports for emergency events and drills for the past five years. While the Department’s response identified sixty events and drills in this time frame, not a single after-action report was provided until April 7, 2006. In several cases, such as two Committee questions about the provision of mental-health services, there was no response whatsoever. Similarly, the Committee asked HHS to describe the extent to which two volunteer credentialing systems were used to help process volunteer medical personnel seeking to provide medical care in Mississippi and Louisiana during Katrina, but no response was provided.

The committee must learn why failures happened. What could be changed to avoid such failures. Responses such as this were informative:

As a result, William King, FEMA’s Chief of Planning in Louisiana during Katrina, reported, FEMA had to train its own people in the midst of the response

Other problems include FEMA that was missing 15% of its staff due to underfunding and other problems.

Why would the White House not cooperate? The Senate report offers many reasons including a most damning example:

These warnings began on Saturday, August 27, 2005, two days before landfall. FEMA Director Brown says he spoke directly to President Bush, saying that Katrina could be catastrophic – “the big one” that meteorologists, emergency-management experts, and government officials had feared for years. ...

Yet White House Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin, the senior White House official participating in the FEMA video-teleconference, asked no questions after Michael Brown’s severe forecast, limiting himself to a perplexingly optimistic assessment of FEMA’s readiness: “We’re here, and anything we can do, obviously, to support you, but it sounds like the planning, as usual, is in good shape, and good luck to the States and just know that we’re watching, and we’ll do the right thing as fast as we can.” ...

There was another FEMA video-teleconference at noon on Sunday. This time, President Bush took part, along with officials from DHS, FEMA, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Dr. Max Mayfield, the director of the National Hurricane Center, predicted Katrina would be a “very dangerous hurricane,” adding that the possibility that levees could be overtopped was a “very, very grave concern.

Michael Brown reiterated his concern: “My gut tells me – I told you guys my gut was that this [missing] is a bad one and a big one,” and that Katrina could be “a catastrophe within a catastrophe.”

Neither the President nor his staff made any inquiries.

Early Sunday morning, ... Katrina had been upgraded to a Category 5 storm;: at approximately 5 p.m. ET, DHS’s Homeland Security Operations Center sent to the White House a report ... which repeated Dr. Maxfield’s warning about floodwaters overtopping New Orleans’ levees.

But again this problem of a president who does not read his memos.

... early Monday morning, just hours before landfall. At 1:47 a.m. ET, ... “Any storm rated Category 4 or greater on the Saffir-Simpson scale will likely lead to severe flooding and/or levee breaching. This could leave the New Orleans area being submerged for weeks or months…. The magnitude of this storm is expected to cause massive flooding.”

On Monday as the hurricane struck

At noon, Hagin, who was traveling with the President on Air Force One, participated in a conference call with state and local officials who reported flooding of eight to 10 feet in St. Bernard Parish. The President did not take part in the call.

Where was the president flying to?

What we do know is that instead of responding to the ominous reports from the Gulf, the President spent the day of landfall discussing Medicare in Arizona and California, as well as joining Arizona Senator John McCain at his birthday celebration. At 4:40 p.m. New Orleans time, as Hurricane Katrina was flooding and battering the city, the President was in Rancho Cucamonga, California, delivering a speech on Medicare and new prescription drug benefits. ...

President Bush had offered similar assurances to survivors of the storm earlier in the day, during a “Conversation on Medicare” at the Pueblo El Mirage RV Resort and Country Club in El Mirage, Arizona

On Tuesday as flooding was clearly evident and disasterous

These reports notwithstanding, no one from the White House participated in an inter-governmental conference call at noon organized by FEMA. Instead, the President was at a naval base in San Diego, where, once again, he offered a falsely reassuring assessment of the crisis ...

In fact, it seems as if President Bush and, consequently, the Administration, did not grasp that Katrina was a catastrophe until later in the day – a full day and a half after landfall – when Michael Brown informed President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, Secretary Chertoff, and Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove in a telephone call that at least 90% of New Orleans’s population had been displaced and that responders “needed military assets; this was the big one.” He added that FEMA “needed the help of the entire cabinet… DOD and HHS and everybody else.”

Brown testified that this, at last, may have been the turning point in the President’s comprehension of the catastrophe

[continues in next post]

[tw]

[continued from previous (original) post]

More likely, this is when Cheney first heard about how severe Katrina really was - being that Cheney makes White House decisions.

Brown added that he thought the officials on the call continued to fail to grasp how badly FEMA and the state were overwhelmed, but Brown’s alarm seems to have prompted a “discussion about convening the Cabinet.”

Still widespread denial among George Jr's senior staff when a responsible leader would have long ago galvanized his administration into action.

On Tuesday morning, while in California, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan announced that the President would return to Washington, D.C. on Wednesday in order to “oversee the response efforts from there.”

At 5:11 p.m. on Wednesday, nearly 60 hours after landfall, President Bush began asking questions such as

a list of available resources from each federal agency assigned responsibility in a disaster under the National Response Plan.

Even several days after landfall, statements from the President and the White House suggested that they still did not understand or appreciate what had happened to New Orleans.

On the Thursday, September 1 edition of “Good Morning America,” the President said that “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.” He was later given an opportunity to correct his statement, where the President said he was not misinformed and affirmed his view

So the president gets all his information for news sources. IOW he does not even read his own memos? Meanwhile as Congress wants to define solutions, the president will not cooperate AND will even impede the investigation.

Due to restrictions placed by the White House and DOD on the Committee's ability to interview White House and senior civilian and military officials within DOD about deployment decisions, the Committee has been unable to conclude why the President ordered the deployment of federal active-duty troops on Saturday, September 3, including reasons why the President did not order the deployment of federal active-duty troops sooner.

Curiously, the report criticizes Michael Brown most often by name. It has many times more criticisms of Michael Chertoff but mostly describes Chertoff only by title: Secretary of DHS.