[StBernard] Behind the Katrina Imbroglio

[Westley Annis]

Behind the Katrina Imbroglio

New Book on Hurricane Describes
How U.S. Confusion Over Levees
Slowed Federal Disaster Response
By CHRISTOPHER COOPER and ROBERT BLOCK
July 27, 2006; Page B1

At 8:10 a.m. on Aug. 29, 2005, Bennett Landreneau, the Louisiana National
Guard's commanding general, was getting a routine situation report by phone
from an airman at Jackson Barracks, the Guard's armory in New Orleans.
Suddenly, the airman broke off the conversation, saying he had to check
something. When he returned, a hint of panic had crept into his voice.
"Sir," he said, "I don't know what's happened, but there are cars floating
down Claiborne Avenue. It looks like a river."

 
Within hours, Jackson Barracks was sitting under eight feet of floodwater.
There was also word that a towering storm surge from the eastern side of
Hurricane Katrina had nearly obliterated 100 miles of Mississippi coastline.
And eight feet of water had sent hundreds of residents in the New Orleans
Lower Ninth Ward scurrying to their rooftops.

If there had been any doubt that the state of Louisiana would need federal
help to cope with Hurricane Katrina, there was no reason for it now.

But for the federal government, reports of such destruction were immaterial
in determining the scale of the calamity unfolding along the Gulf Coast.
Federal officials had a single test for determining whether to treat the
storm as an average disaster or as the catastrophic doomsday scenario
everyone had long feared: Had the levees been breached by Katrina's storm
surge, or had the water simply flooded over the top? Unfortunately, these
were questions that state and local officials -- and even FEMA's senior
staff -- never fully understood they had to answer.

At the Department of Homeland Security, federal efforts following disasters
were dictated by the newly minted National Response Plan. Though billed as a
plan for all disasters, it made a sharp distinction between garden-variety
calamities such as Gulf hurricanes and more severe catastrophes -- generally
terrorist attacks. By the department's reckoning, standard disaster response
fell to local governments, backstopped by FEMA, while a catastrophic event
assumed the states would be immediately overwhelmed and required a massive
response from the federal government.

In the run-up to Hurricane Katrina's landfall, there were calls within
Homeland Security and the White House to pre-emptively declare the tempest a
catastrophe and put the federal government on heightened alert -- "leaning
forward," as department officials liked to say. But senior Homeland Security
officials resisted, arguing that FEMA was perfectly capable of handling a
hurricane. "I did not feel it was imperative," Homeland Security Secretary
Michael Chertoff said later.

To Mr. Broderick, the trigger for a heightened response was clear: If the
city's levee system was seriously breached and couldn't be repaired
immediately, it was a catastrophe. Flooding over the levees, by contrast,
even if it was severe, was "normal, typical, hurricane background stuff," he
would later tell Senate investigators. "You know, we have floods in
Pennsylvania all the time. We have floods in New Jersey all the time. Every
time there's a hurricane, there's a flood."

A retired Marine brigadier general with some 30 years of experience, Mr.
Broderick was determined that the information he delivered to Mr. Chertoff
and the White House be stripped of innuendo and boiled down to only the
hardest facts. "One of the jobs of HSOC is to not overreact, not get
hysterical and get the facts," Mr. Broderick told investigators. Under this
rubric, he simply didn't pass on much of the information he collected.

In the days after Katrina's landfall, Secretary Chertoff, President Bush and
others would justify the slow federal response by claiming that the
breaching of the levees was "a second catastrophe" that occurred long after
Katrina passed. But this simply wasn't true. A subsequent investigation by
the Army Corps of Engineers found that in some cases, breached levees began
flooding New Orleans even before Katrina made landfall.

Indeed, news of the levee breaches came as early as 7:30 a.m. on the Monday
Katrina hit, when the city's disaster chief, Terry Ebbert, told Washington
officials in a phone conversation that the storm "came up and breached the
levee system in the canal," according to Senate documents gathered
afterward. A half hour later, the Transportation Security Administration
made a written report directly to HSOC, confirming that the Industrial Canal
levee adjacent to the Lower Ninth Ward had been breached and that
floodwaters "have already intruded on the first stories of some houses."
Fifteen minutes after that, the National Weather Service issued its own
levee-breach warning, advising retreating residents to take an ax with them
to their attics so they could chop their way out if the waters rose.

As the morning unfolded, the reports would come with furious frequency, all
dutifully funneled to Mr. Broderick and HSOC. They came from a FEMA man at
the National Weather Service in Miami, a Homeland Security agent in New
Orleans and a pump operator for the city. At 11 a.m., moments before Gov.
Kathleen Blanco was due to participate in the daily videoconference with
Washington officials, state and federal disaster chiefs in Baton Rouge were
told that a New Orleans firefighter had seen water cascading into the city
through a breach in the 17th Street Canal floodwall. The city was filling
like a bowl.

The distinction between a breach and an "overtop" was largely lost on local
officials, who had not been told this was any particular trigger for the
federal response. To them, city streets contained an alarming amount of
water, surely enough to trigger the maximum federal response. As Gov. Blanco
put it on the conference call, whole neighborhoods were sloshing with up to
10 feet of water, "and we have people swimming in there."

But that's not what White House Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin wanted to
talk about when it was his turn. He had two concerns: "Yeah, what's the
current status of the levee system and the roof of the Superdome?" he asked
Gov. Blanco.

The Dome was fine, she responded. "I think we have not breached the levee.
We have not breached the levee at this point in time."

Mr. Chertoff, also on the call, would later say he had no idea that "the
flooding was extraordinary or out of the norm for a significant hurricane."

A few hours after the phone call it was clear the White House considered
Monday an average August day and Katrina an average hurricane. At 4:40 p.m.
New Orleans time, President Bush stood in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif.,
delivering a speech on the new Medicare prescription drug benefit. He
departed from the script briefly to address the situation on the Gulf Coast.
"For those of you who are concerned about whether or not we're prepared to
help, don't be. We are," the president said.

The definitive authority on levees would seem to be the Army Corps of
Engineers, which designed the system and maintained a 1,000-person district
headquarters in New Orleans. Alas, the agency had evacuated all but nine
people in advance of Katrina. And that small team, led by the district
commander, Col. Richard Wagenaar, had little equipment beyond an AM radio
and a few SUVs. During the storm, the men lay low in an underground bunker,
miles away from the affected levees.

In the hours before Katrina made landfall, Col. Wagenaar had been bombarded
with phone calls from residents, many of whom reported levee breaches. But
the colonel had only been in town for a month and had little independent
knowledge of the city's flood-control system.

By late Monday, Col. Wagenaar and his men had managed to get only to within
a few miles of the 17th Street Canal breach. There, he saw deep water -- up
to the telephone wires in some spots -- but could only speculate on the
source. "What I did know is that there was a significant problem," he said
later.

Even so, the Army Corps, drawing on eyewitness information similar to that
which Mr. Broderick had been receiving, declared late in the day that
breaches had in fact occurred. But the confirmation was cloaked in jargon
and buried on page five of a six-page report: "I-walls: Floodwalls were
overtopped on the east side of the 17th Street Canal and the east side of
the (Industrial Canal)," the report said. "Sections of wall failed in each
area." It was the confirmation everyone had been waiting for, if only they
could have deciphered it.

A short time later, Marty Bahamonde, a FEMA spokesman who was the agency's
only official in New Orleans, stood at the door of an open Coast Guard
helicopter as a blast of hot rotor wash spilled over him. He yelled to the
pilot that he was from FEMA and needed to go up.

Mr. Bahamonde was seeking confirmation of a catastrophe, and he got it once
he was airborne: The 17th Street Canal floodwall was in tatters, its
concrete caps bent like tombstones in a country graveyard. Water was pouring
into the city like Niagara; the breach was a quarter mile wide. "I knew I
was looking at the worst-case scenario that everyone had feared," he later
said.

By the time Mr. Bahamonde returned to the Superdome, it was nearly 7 p.m. He
called FEMA Chief Michael Brown in Baton Rouge and related what he had seen.
"I'm calling the White House now," Mr. Brown said.

Mr. Bahamonde's report was flashed around FEMA and passed on to Mr.
Broderick's staff at HSOC. The information made it to the White House late
that evening. Yet it would be nearly 15 hours before Mr. Chertoff formally
invoked the National Response Plan, making the disaster a federal priority.

By nightfall in New Orleans on Monday, HSOC had received nearly a dozen
definitive reports that the city's flood-control system had been breached
and eight other reports suggesting as much. But Matthew Broderick's final
report of the day said exactly the opposite. "Preliminary reports indicate
the levees have not been breached," it said.

When Mr. Broderick was asked months later by Senate staffers during a formal
briefing why he had stated so flatly late Monday that the city's
flood-control structures were intact, the former Marine said he had never
received a single report suggesting otherwise. The Senate investigator
asking the question, Jeffrey Greene, was so stunned at the response that he
asked if Mr. Broderick had misunderstood.

But Mr. Broderick hadn't misunderstood. "If I had heard there was a breach
in a levee Monday evening, I would have -- had I been aware of it, I would
have been all over it," he said. He also conceded in his deposition that he
had seen very few reports from New Orleans newspapers and routinely ignored
email that day and in the days that followed, leaving unopened as many as
700 missives sent to him during the disaster's early days.

Asked by bemused Senate investigators what evidence he had collected showing
the levees had not been breached, Mr. Broderick named two sources. The first
was the Army Corps of Engineers in Washington, but the former general said
he suspected that agency was hyping the situation because it had reported
"extensive" flooding in New Orleans, and " 'extensive' is all relative."

The second source, Mr. Broderick said, was a video segment on CNN Monday
showing a tipsy crowd on Bourbon Street, near the city's highest point.

"The one data point that I really had, personally, visually, was the
celebration in the streets of New Orleans, of people drinking beer and
partying because-and they used, they came up with the word-'we dodged the
bullet,' " Mr. Broderick said. "So that's a pretty good indicator right
there."

Mr. Broderick declined repeated requests to comment on what he told
investigators.

Write to Christopher Cooper at christopher.cooper at wsj.com3 and Robert Block
at bobby.block at wsj.com