[StBernard] The Undodged Bullet - Chapter 6

[Westley Annis]

The Undodged Bullet
July 26, 2006 11:14 p.m.

Jackson Barracks, the New Orleans armory of the Louisiana National Guard,
sits at the southeastern edge of the city center, in the Lower Ninth Ward,
just five miles or so from the French Quarter. Founded in 1832 on an $87,000
grant from President Andrew Jackson, the barracks survived slave uprisings
and civil war as well as "distrustful" Creoles who chafed under American
rule in the decades following the Louisiana Purchase. Over the years,
Jackson Barracks has weathered all manner of floods and hurricanes,
including Hurricane Betsy in 1965, which breached a levee only a mile or so
from the garrison gates and flooded the Lower Ninth Ward and the Arabi
neighborhood in St. Bernard Parish.

There is a common misperception that the city's Lower Ninth Ward
neighborhood sits on some of the lowest, most flood-prone ground in New
Orleans. In fact, most of this district, Jackson Barracks included, sits
above sea level or nearly so. This is not a flood-prone area -- except when
the levee fails. And even in 1965, the National Guard garrison stayed dry.
"Jackson Barracks had never flooded -- not as long as anyone can remember,"
said Colonel Pete Schneider, a spokesman for the Louisiana National Guard.
But the streak was about to end.

As Landreneau later recounted the conversation, the airman paused in
midreport. "Just a minute, sir, let me check something," he said.

And then the airman was back and talking fast, a hint of panic creeping into
his voice. "Sir, I don't know why but there must be a foot or two of water
coming down Claiborne. No, check that -- three feet." The airman paused for
breath. "Sir, I don't know what's happened but there are cars floating down
Claiborne Avenue -- it looks like a river."

Within a few hours, the entire National Guard compound was sitting under
eight feet or more of floodwater. Though the Guard had moved its aircraft
and most of its engineering equipment in advance of the storm, much of the
rest of what it had in the armory -- a collection of rifles for a brigade's
worth of soldiers and twenty-six high-water troop transport trucks -- sank
under the murk and were essentially lost. If there had been any doubt that
the state of Louisiana would need federal help to cope with Katrina, the
point had just been hammered home. Even as the storm raged outside, the
state's front-line defense had just lost its command center; even as the
winds blew, the state's National Guard was forced to cease all normal
activity in a mad rush to reconstitute its command. Katrina had barely made
landfall when it put the Guard in retreat -- to the Louisiana Superdome,
where about 260 soldiers had already been pre-staged in advance of the
storm.

As it happened, Katrina wasn't the textbook doomsday storm that had been
predicted. Though larger than most hurricanes, the storm lumbered ashore
much diminished from its Category 5 strength of just the day before. Katrina
made landfall about fifty-five miles south of New Orleans, near Buras,
Louisiana, just after dawn on Monday as a large Category 3 storm, with
125-mile-per-hour winds.

Katrina then moved east back into open water and then north, making a second
landfall near the Louisiana-Mississippi line. The storm flat devastated the
Mississippi coastline to an extent never seen in that state, not even when
Hurricane Camille packed a 200-mile-per-hour punch. The surge broke tide
gauges up and down the coast, but watermarks suggest that Mississippi may
have been hit by a wave twenty-five feet tall, which slammed ashore between
Bay St. Louis and Gulfport and drove some twelve miles inland, sweeping
everything in its path. Many communities along the Mississippi coastline
were literally taken down to slab. The storm knocked out bridges, moved
buildings, and sent giant trees crashing to earth.

Louisiana got better treatment. Though the storm drenched the city of New
Orleans with as much as twelve and a half inches of rain in some spots, many
areas in the metropolitan area received less than half that amount. The
storm surge that hit the city's lakefront area was less than twelve feet at
its peak, which is in the range of what can be handled by that area's
hurricane protection system. Sustained winds in the city itself topped out
at just above the minimum for a hurricane -- a good blow, certainly, but not
on par with the superstorms of yesteryear, such as Hugo and Andrew or the
imagined ones, such as Hurricane Pam. And though the wind and rain caused
plenty of damage in New Orleans, Katrina didn't leave the city in splinters
in a way that Pam's creators had envisioned.

To be sure, Katrina caused plenty of the usual hurricane-related mayhem in
New Orleans. Across the city, Katrina's winds killed the electrical grid,
cutting power to the Superdome and pretty much everywhere else. The Dome,
rated for 160-mile-per-hour winds, was damaged when the wind caught a piece
of the white Teflon membrane that covered its roof and shredded it. Two
vents at the top of the Superdome were torn off, which allowed rainwater to
cascade onto evacuees some nineteen stories below. In streets adjacent to
the Superdome, skyscrapers lost windows by the hundreds, and large pieces of
public art crashed to the ground.

Closer to Katrina's second landfall, the twin-span interstate bridge over
Lake Pontchartrain that connects eastern New Orleans to Slidell was reduced
to a series of dashes, with dozens of concrete segments either shoved aside
or toppled by Katrina's wind. Aluminum power poles along the interstate
collapsed, and in eastern New Orleans water pooled in vast lakes.

Farther west, along the grand boulevards near the city center,
three-hundred-year-old oak trees crashed onto the sidewalks and many New
Orleans streets were jungles of broken limbs and dangling electrical wires.
As the city's venerable oaks came crashing down, they wrenched gas and water
lines out of the earth, which caused plenty of localized flooding and
sparked a number of fires. Shortly after Katrina hit, the city of New
Orleans reported two buildings in the French Quarter had collapsed and seven
other structures around the city were engulfed in flames, the Southern Yacht
Club among them. Beyond the reach of firefighting crews, the Yacht Club,
founded in 1849, was destined to burn to the ground.

Indeed, the city's lakefront was a Matterhorn of cabin cruisers and
sailboats that Katrina's wind and water had heaped into huge piles along the
shoreline. Several hangars at the city's Lakefront Airport were shredded by
Katrina's wind. The lakefront's restaurant district was in splinters, and
the Orleans Levee District, which had pulled back its men and equipment to a
large maintenance shed in the Seventh Ward, found itself on an urban island,
surrounded by floodwaters at least six feet deep.

Two parishes to the east and south of the city -- St. Bernard and
Plaquemines -- received a wallop from Katrina's storm surge that all but
wiped them out. In St. Bernard, a storm surge from Lake Borgne flopped over
the low back levee of the parish with such force that it flung huge,
outrigger shrimp boats into suburban neighborhoods and washed trophy-sized
redfish inland to swim along the parish's flooded roadways. The massive
surge swept across the parish like a broom, knocking out the electrical grid
and most communications, and flipping cars and boats up onto the rooftops of
tract homes. The stormwater ran with such force through the Murphy Oil
refinery that it moved a half-filled, 65,000-barrel tank of crude oil off
its concrete mooring. The tank flexed and then collapsed like an aluminum
can, allowing some 1.1 million gallons of crude oil to cascade into the
surrounding community of Meraux, tarring about 1,800 homes.

Stem to stern, virtually the entire parish of St. Bernard simply disappeared
under the floodwaters, but Nita Hutter, a state representative from St.
Bernard who had weathered the storm in the parish's community center,
managed to get out an e-mail message to the governor's office. She said that
2,400 of the parish's homes were underwater. Her estimate was limited by her
vista; in fact, virtually every structure in this parish of 67,000 residents
-- an estimated 27,000 homes and businesses -- received some flood damage.
And according to a rumor making the rounds that day, Plaquemines Parish --
the thin jut of land where Katrina initially made landfall -- had simply
disappeared, replaced by open Gulf.

In the mind of the federal government, the destruction of the Guard's
command center was not a measure of the scale of the catastrophe unfolding
along the Gulf Coast. Nor was the word that a towering storm surge from the
eastern side of Katrina had all but obliterated one hundred miles of
Mississippi coastline. Eight feet of water that had sent hundreds of Lower
Ninth Ward residents scurrying to their rooftops was no measure of the scale
of the calamity in Washington's mind. And the scores of fires that were
burning in the city set off no particular alarms.

In the Department of Homeland Security in August 2005, planning was guided
by the newly minted National Response Plan (NRP), which had been put into
effect just four months earlier, in April. The NRP is an overwrought and
complicated document that few people completely comprehended. And as
Hurricane Katrina plowed ashore, this cumbersome and contradictory schematic
of national disaster response was about to be put to a stern test.

Although advertised as an all-hazards plan, the NRP makes a sharp
distinction between, on the one hand, garden-variety natural disasters and
man-made accidents (such as fires, floods, train collisions, tornadoes, and
the like), and on the other hand, catastrophic events that were larger and
more severe. Standard disasters fall within the capability of local
governments, backstopped by FEMA. A catastrophic event, by contrast, assumed
that the states, perhaps several states, would be immediately overwhelmed --
calling for an overwhelming response from the federal government. In such a
scenario, FEMA assumes a supporting role to the Department of Homeland
Security, and local officials effectively are bystanders.

Clearly, terrorist attacks are what the department had in mind for the
catastrophic designation. When defining catastrophes the NRP waxes on about
coordinated evidence collection, crime scene preservation, and the
apprehension of perpetrators. In the minds of many, though not all, senior
Homeland Security officials, certain large-scale natural disasters that
affected a broad geographic area and caused a large number of deaths would
also fit this rubric.

The NRP offers no clear guidance on what distinguishes a run-of-the-mill
disaster from a catastrophic event. But generally, catastrophic events
imperil the national leadership, echo through the national economy, and
cause national disruptions. The NRP doesn't make it entirely clear who is
responsible for deciding when a disaster reaches the threshold of
catastrophe. One section says the designation comes automatically with a
presidential disaster declaration, while another section suggests the
secretary of homeland security must activate the plan himself. But once an
event is designated as catastrophic, the secretary is in complete command of
all federal assets. This centralization of authority is intended to speed
the federal response and to increase the power and scope of relief efforts.

When the secretary activates the plan, he convenes a panel known as the
Interagency Incident Management Group, or IIMG, a panel made up of expert
officials from Homeland Security and other federal agencies. The IIMG flips
the role of the federal government in times of disaster; instead of
Washington waiting for state assistance requests and then fulfilling them,
the IIMG is supposed to help Homeland Security anticipate the needs of local
officials and push supplies to them before they even ask. All of this is
supposed to make the federal response quicker.

In the run-up to Hurricane Katrina's landfall, there had been calls within
the Department of Homeland Security and the White House to go preemptively
to this higher level of response. But senior officials within the department
opposed designating Katrina as catastrophic before it hit. Deputy Secretary
Michael Jackson said the designation should be reserved exclusively for
terrorist events. "It's not necessary," Jackson told those who had pressed
him for days to activate the IIMG. "Brown has it all under control."
Chertoff also opposed the idea of convening the IIMG. "I did not feel it was
imperative to stand up an IIMG on a formal basis until this event took a
different dimension," he said.

To others, such as Matthew Broderick, the director of the Homeland Security
Operations Center, convening the IIMG didn't make sense before the disaster.
("You just got a lot of talent sitting around waiting for the fire," he
later said.) But even after Katrina made landfall, he didn't see a need to
convene the IIMG unless he saw proof positive that a catastrophe was indeed
unfolding in New Orleans. If the city's system of levees and floodwalls had
been seriously breached by Hurricane Katrina and couldn't be repaired
immediately, then Broderick and many of the top officials at Homeland
Security would consider it a catastrophe, the implication being that New
Orleans would continue to fill with water that couldn't be pumped out. If
the levees had simply been overtopped by a storm surge, filling the streets
with a finite amount of water that presumably could be removed with city
drainage pumps, then the federal government would consider it a
standard-issue hurricane, slightly more powerful than most, perhaps, but
well within FEMA's capability.

To Broderick, an overtop -- even a severe one -- 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." He
would also say he had no idea that a large hurricane hitting New Orleans fit
the federal government's very definition of a catastrophic event, as
outlined in the fifteen most serious disaster scenarios that Homeland
Security had compiled in 2004.

Broderick's view of what constituted a catastrophe was pivotal, because of
his position as the commander of the HSOC. The agency played a prime role in
advising whether the IIMG should be activated and was to be a key player
when the panel was convened. Moreover, Broderick was responsible for giving
Chertoff, his top deputies, and the White House virtually every bit of the
information they would use to develop a feel for what was happening at the
ground level of a disaster. Every day the HSOC delivers a report to
Chertoff, which the secretary reads at 6:00 a.m. in his chauffeured car on
the way to work. In times of unfolding disaster, the HSOC expands its list
of recipients, issuing a series of special reports to the White House and
certain other government officials.

As a military man, a retired Marine brigadier general with some thirty years
of operational experience, Broderick spoke often of the "fog of war" and the
unreliability of first reports, and therefore he was determined that the
information he delivered to Chertoff and the White House be completely
stripped of innuendo and speculation and boiled down to the coldest,
hardest, verified facts. Unverifiable information, or material containing
even small errors of fact, was simply not passed on. "One of the jobs of the
HSOC is to not overreact, not get hysterical and get the facts because the
first information, even the second, is usually woefully wrong," Broderick
said. "And so you're trying to clarify it because the secretary or the
president could be using what you're passing in news reports once you pass
it to them. So you have to be careful that you're getting the details, and
sometimes that takes time."

Under this rubric, much of the information Broderick collected in the
aftermath of Hurricane Katrina wouldn't pass this rigorous standard and thus
wouldn't be passed on. And that included eyewitness information, ground
details with multiple corroborating sources, and even facts gathered
specifically by people reporting directly to the HSOC. The discarded
information involved a number of subjects, but on Monday, Broderick was
focused on determining whether the flood protection system surrounding the
New Orleans metropolitan area had suffered actual breaches or had just been
overtopped by Katrina's storm surge on its pass through the area. "We were
trying to get some clarity on that, pushing hard," Broderick would later
say.

In the days following Katrina's landfall, Secretary Chertoff, President
Bush, and other federal officials would argue that the city's levees and
floodwalls didn't breach until a day after the storm had passed, and would
refer to the levee breaches as "a second catastrophe" that, in Chertoff's
words, "really caught everybody by surprise." Months later, Broderick and
Chertoff would continue to maintain this position, in the face of
overwhelming evidence to the contrary. But subsequent investigation by the
Army Corps of Engineers offers powerful evidence that this simply wasn't
true. In fact, in some cases, the opposite happened: The city's levees and
floodwalls collapsed even before Katrina made landfall.

A twenty-foot section of the 17th Street Canal floodwall collapsed around
6:30 a.m. and probably began to collapse "catastrophically," the corps later
said, at about 9:30 a.m. The corps based its reckoning on several
eyewitnesses, including a man with a telescope in a nearby high-rise, as
well as data from a nearby pump station that showed a swift drop in the
canal's water level, suggesting the waterway was draining into the city.
That places the failure of this particular breach while Katrina was still
passing over the area. Similarly, stopped-clock data and eyewitness
observations suggest the London Avenue Canal floodwall, which suffered two
major failures, collapsed at roughly the same time.

Stopped clocks also pegged the collapse of the Industrial Canal levee on the
Lower Ninth Ward side at about 7:30 a.m., which correlates with what the
Jackson Barracks sentry told General Landreneau about a half hour later. On
the other side of the Industrial Canal (which is also known as the Inner
Harbor Navigation Canal), a pair of breaches apparently opened up before
sunrise, perhaps several hours before the storm struck. This smaller breach,
which received almost no notice by the press or the government, would flood
a great deal of Gentilly and downtown New Orleans.

It was barely daylight on Monday when the Louisiana emergency operations
center in Baton Rouge began receiving reports of levee and floodwall
trouble, specifically in the Lower Ninth Ward, where water was already
reported to be eight feet deep, and the lakefront area and eastern New
Orleans, where a reported tidal surge of twenty feet was said to have
crashed through Bayou Bienvenue, near the St. Bernard-Orleans Parish line.
And it was barely daylight in Broderick's HSOC office in Washington when he
started receiving the same reports.

Indeed, during a 7:30 a.m. phone call with the state, FEMA, the National
Weather Service, and other agencies, New Orleans's disaster chief, Terry
Ebbert, made clear that the city had not dodged a bullet by any stretch. The
surge from Bayou Bienvenue, he said, "came up and breached the levee system
in the canal, so we're faced with major flooding both in the east, East New
Orleans and then out on the lakefront." Ebbert didn't elaborate on the
breach or where it was located. Nobody pressed him for details.

At 8:00 a.m., the Transportation Security Administration made a report
directly to the HSOC, saying that the Industrial Canal levee adjacent to the
Lower Ninth Ward was breached and that floodwaters in the northeast side of
the city, next to Lake Pontchartrain, "have already intruded on the first
stories of some houses." At 8:14 a.m., the National Weather Service issued a
report headed "flash flood warning," which went on to spell out the source
of the flash flood: "A levee breach occurred along the Industrial Canal at
Tennessee Street. Three to eight feet of water is expected due to the
breach." This report, like all others from the agency, was almost certainly
seen by the HSOC because a Weather Service representative sat in Broderick's
command center.

In human terms, the Weather Service report would speak volumes to anyone
familiar with the city. The Lower Ninth Ward, a neighborhood of 5,000 homes,
is one of the city's most poverty-stricken areas, with 25 percent of its
residents subsisting on an annual income of less than $10,000 a year. An
estimated 32 percent of its households didn't have a car. From an evacuation
standpoint, the Lower Ninth Ward was one of the city's most vulnerable.

At 8:36 a.m., not long after the National Weather Service issued its report,
Matthew Greene, a FEMA official based at the National Hurricane Center in
Miami, sent a heads-up e-mail message to two of his superiors, including
Patrick Rhode, Michael Brown's top deputy. "Report that levee in Arabi has
failed next to the Industrial Canal," the e-mail message said.

A short time later, at 9:00 a.m., Louis Dabdoub, who worked directly for
Homeland Security as a protective security agent in New Orleans, passed an
e-mail message directly to the HSOC, warning that there was already ten feet
of water in the Lower Ninth Ward -- a clear signal that this particular
levee was not likely to have been simply topped by "overspill," as Broderick
called it. "It is getting bad," Dabdoub wrote. "Major flooding in some parts
of the city. People are calling in for rescue saying they are trapped in
attics, etc. That means water is 10 feet high there already. Trees are
blowing down. Flooding is worsening every minute."

To the locals -- and indeed to just about everyone outside of a small circle
of officials at Homeland Security and the White House -- the difference
between a breach and an overtop was inconsequential; the city was flooded
deep and wide, and people attempting to get away from the creeping water ran
the risk of death. This sentiment was probably best summed up by the
National Weather Service, which advised all citizens in New Orleans's
water-filled neighborhoods "to take the necessary tools for survival." The
Weather Service elaborated: "Those going into attics should try to take an
axe or hatchet with them so they can cut their way onto the roof to avoid
drowning should rising flood waters continue to rise into the attic." In the
minds of many, the cause of the water -- breach or overtop -- didn't matter.

Evidence of actual breaches, though, was mounting. At 10:00 a.m., the city's
Sewerage & Water Board, which had staff at a pumping station within sight of
the Industrial Canal, reported that the structure had a gaping hole in it.
Less than an hour later, FEMA's Michael Heath sent out an e-mail message
saying that the New Orleans Fire Department was reporting that "a 20-foot
wide breach" had opened at the 17th Street Canal. That particular report was
widely disseminated among state and federal officials. It was received by
Louisiana's office of emergency preparedness, which shared it with top state
officials and with FEMA, including Michael Brown. Brown had received similar
news about two hours earlier that the Industrial Canal was breached and
draining into the Lower Ninth Ward, a report he passed on by e-mail, without
comment, to nine other FEMA officials.

Governor Blanco's chief counsel, Terry Ryder, was among those informed about
the 17th Street Canal, just a few minutes before the governor was due to
participate in the daily videoconference with regional and federal
officials, at 11:00 a.m. Central time. He and other state officials were
gathered in the overwatch room of the operations center in Baton Rouge when
Colonel Henry Whitehorn, superintendent of the Louisiana State Police,
delivered the news. Whitehorn said the breach, which immediately went out in
the state police's situation report for 11:00 a.m., "was important
information."

Ryder immediately grasped the significance. "To me a breach in the wall of
that levee would be catastrophic -- recognized to be catastrophic," Ryder
said. "That would be -- the water would be pouring into New Orleans for
hours. I would recognize that as being very, very bad news and everybody
else would recognize that."

But almost as soon as Whitehorn mentioned it, someone in the crowded room --
he wasn't sure who, exactly -- said that the Army Corps of Engineers had
already discounted the report. "They said it was an overtop," Whitehorn
later recalled. Nonetheless, he rushed off to inform Governor Blanco.

Levee breaches were not the focus of the videoconference; indeed, they were
barely mentioned. Louisiana officials didn't even bring up the subject, and
neither did most of the federal officials on the call. Max Mayfield of the
National Hurricane Center made a reference to the possibility of breaches in
the city midway through a protracted weather forecast that led off the
discussion, but only to mildly shoot the idea down. Mayfield said that
judging from the relatively minor storm surge that had hit the city, the
"federal levees" protecting New Orleans were unlikely to have been breached.
His Weather Service colleagues spent a great deal of time discussing the
amount of rain Katrina might drop as the storm headed up through the Ohio
Valley.

Terry Ryder wasn't in the briefing, but other top state officials who knew
the same information were there. Michael Brown was on the call, as was
Superintendent Whitehorn and Jeff Smith, the head of Louisiana's emergency
operations center, both of whom had heard the report. Michael Chertoff was
on the call, as was Joe Hagin, President Bush's deputy chief of staff.
Hagin, a former firefighter upon whom the White House was relying heavily to
track the disaster response, had called in from Air Force One -- he was
accompanying President Bush on a long-planned trip to Arizona to discuss
Medicare.

Chertoff asked no questions at the videoconference. Instead, he doled out
some mild praise. "I just want to compliment you all on the hard work you
have done," he told the assembled. "Obviously, this is the long haul."

Brown told participants that he had spoken to President Bush earlier, once
in Crawford and then later when Bush was airborne. "He's obviously watching
television a lot," Brown said, "and he had some questions about the Dome,"
which had suffered some roof damage in the storm. "He's asking questions
about reports of breaches. He's asking about hospitals. He's very engaged
and he's asking a lot of really good questions I would expect him to ask."

Brown alone among the federal officials seemed to have a grasp of the scale
of the disaster that had visited the Gulf Coast, whether the levees had
breached or not. "I get frustrated when the media talks about [how] it's
gone from a Category 5 to 4 to 3," Brown said. "What they don't realize is
there is a lot of rain, a lot of storm surge, a lot of potential victims out
there." He urged his staff to resist the tendency to think they had dodged a
bullet. "There's still a lot of work to do, so keep it up and do a good
job," he said.

Across the table, Louisiana's Jeff Smith said FEMA's response had been
"outstanding" so far. He told the federal officials not to wait for him to
request help before pushing resources Louisiana's way. "Push it, we are
ready to receive it," Smith said. "We know we are going to need it."

About halfway through the call, Hagin broke in from Air Force One and
briskly asked two questions, both of Governor Blanco: "Yeah, what's the
current status of the levee system and the roof of the Superdome?" Blanco
answered the second question first: "The Superdome structure is still sound,
as far as we know." Then she hesitated. "What was your other question?" she
asked. She paused again, then caught herself. "The levees."

Blanco said the state had received numerous reports of overtopping and one
report of breaching, which she immediately discounted. "We heard a report
unconfirmed," she said. "I think we have not breached the levee. We have not
breached the levee at this point in time." She went on to say that many New
Orleans neighborhoods were submerged. Some city neighborhoods, along with
St. Bernard Parish, were sitting in eight to ten feet of water, "and we have
people swimming in there."

And that was it. The conversation moved on to Mississippi. The city's levees
weren't mentioned again.

At the videoconference, Smith had made no attempt to correct Blanco, though
he knew about the eyewitness report regarding the 17th Street Canal breach
and the extremely unusual depth of the floodwater in the Lower Ninth Ward,
which would be hard to mark off to anything other than a catastrophic
collapse of the levee there. Smith later said that Blanco didn't seem to
have misspoken, or even to have spoken rashly. "It seemed to me that she
conveyed the important information, which was that there was so much water
in the neighborhoods that people were swimming in it," Smith said. "That
makes it pretty clear what's going on."

A few minutes later in the videoconference, Hagin again broke in. Air Force
One was now on the ground in Arizona. "I'm sorry," Hagin said. "We just
landed. We are going to sign off your being able to get ahold of us." As far
as he (and the president) knew, the situation in New Orleans was well in
hand, and there was no need to ratchet up the federal response. The levees
had apparently held, and whatever flooding was taking place could be
addressed by ordinary means. Governor Blanco's assurance that "we have not
breached the levee" meant that the situation was not "catastrophic."
President Bush could continue with his trip to Arizona, as planned. A few
hours later, he would share cake with Senator John McCain, who was having a
birthday. Later in the day, the president would tell a crowd that he had
spoken to Secretary Chertoff that morning, but about immigration, not
Hurricane Katrina. In most respects, Monday seemed like an average August
day for the White House, and Katrina seemed like an average hurricane.


Chertoff would later remark to Congress how significant this particular
videoconference had been. "I, and the other participants heard directly from
Max Mayfield and Governor Blanco of Louisiana, as the transcript indicates,
the levees had not been breached," Chertoff said. He added that nobody on
the call had asserted that "the flooding was extraordinary or out of the
norm for a significant hurricane with substantial rainfall; or whether the
more than thirty pumps in the city of New Orleans would be able to channel
the excess water appropriately."

Brown and Broderick would later say that the Army Corps of Engineers was
declarative on Monday that the city's levees had not collapsed. Broderick,
too, would later say he received most of his information about the city's
floodwalls and levees from the Army Corps in Washington. As he would later
tell Senate investigators, "The Corps of Engineers kept backing us up and
saying, 'No, it is not breaches. These are overtopping.'"

But the corps had no idea what was a breach or an overtop; it had no
helicopters in the air, no satellite photographs, nothing it could employ to
say definitively what was going on in New Orleans with the flood control
system it had built. Indeed, it wasn't until midafternoon that the corps
even had a representative on the ground in the city.

Actually, before midafternoon, the corps had exactly nine people in New
Orleans, but they were in a sealed bunker miles away from the affected
levees, waiting out the storm. The corps had evacuated its massive New
Orleans District headquarters; left in town to "show the flag" were the
newly arrived district commander, Colonel Richard Wagenaar, and eight aides.
The small group had no specialized communications and no transportation
beyond a standard SUV. The engineers, who represented the corps' entire
ground contingent in New Orleans, knew nothing about the levee breaches, at
least nothing firsthand.

Throughout the night, Wagenaar had been bombarded with phone calls from
residents and city officials, many of whom reported problems with the city's
flood control system. Some also begged for rescue, which the corps was
unprepared to provide. "We had hundreds of reports of failures and
breaches," Wagenaar said.

But much of what the callers reported was Greek to the colonel, who had only
been in town for a month and had little independent knowledge of the city's
labyrinthine flood control system. He didn't know the system's
peculiarities, and he didn't know its weaknesses. He didn't know how
vulnerable the city's three drainage outfall canals were to an approaching
storm surge. "I didn't even know where the 17th Street Canal was," Wagenaar
said.

When he awoke on Monday morning, the local radio station was reporting that
a "levee" in the lakefront area of the city had failed. Also that morning, a
corps employee called to say that water was pouring over the top of the
levee that bounded the city's Industrial Canal, on the edge of the Lower
Ninth Ward neighborhood. When afternoon came, Wagenaar took a pair of his
aides, piled into the SUV, and headed out toward Lake Pontchartrain, where
numerous people had reported that a levee was breached.

But the roads were all but impassable, choked with storm debris and power
lines, and many of them were flowing with water. The corps officials soon
realized they'd never make it to the city's lakefront. As the truck picked
its way across the city, Wagenaar pondered the calls that had come in.
Almost all of the people reporting trouble out near Lake Pontchartrain had
referred to broken levees, probably not realizing that "floodwall" was the
technical term for the barriers along the city's canals. Crossing town took
two hours, and as the SUV crept along, Wagenaar gazed out the window, where
he saw "hundreds of people on the street" trudging through the floodwaters
in search of help and supplies. He thought Katrina had somehow managed to
gash the massive earthen levees that ring the south shore of Lake
Pontchartrain. It would be several hours before Wagenaar would come to
understand what the callers were saying. By that time, the 17th Street Canal
breach would be massive and would prove stubbornly resistant to repair.

When Wagenaar's SUV reached the canal, about two miles from the breach, it
had reached the end of the line. The water ahead was deep, up to the
telephone wires in some spots. "All I could see were the treetops," Wagenaar
said. There were no boats and no helicopters, just a few cops and civilians
milling around on top of an interstate overpass. "We just stared at the
water," Wagenaar said. "And the whole time, I'm thinking, 'This is a levee
failure' when in fact it was a floodwall failure," Wagenaar said. "What I
did know is that there was a significant problem." And he knew this problem
wasn't attributable to rainfall.

Wagenaar got back to the district headquarters in the late afternoon. Based
on his observations and other information, his staff filed a situation
report under his name a few hours later that was available to Army Corps
commanders nationwide, including the headquarters in Washington. If
officials were seeking confirmation about levee breaches, the news was
buried and cloaked in jargon. On page five of the six-page report on
conditions in New Orleans, just after recounting the "positive media" the
corps had been receiving ("Fox News reported 'Corps of Engineers did a
miraculous [job] with the levees'"), the report devoted five brief sentences
to the matter of levee failures. "At this point, the Corps of Engineers has
no confirmed reports of levee breaching or levee failure of any kind during
Hurricane Katrina," the report said. "We are investigating for the
possibility of any breaching, and we are also investigating whether levees
have been overtopped at any point."

But the report was unnecessarily pedantic. A few sentences later, it got
around to reporting what many already knew and others were struggling to
confirm: "We have confirmed a floodwall failure on the Industrial Canal." It
added that the failure was on the Lower Ninth Ward side of the Industrial
Canal, which would mean that water was gushing into the neighborhood. And
the breach was huge: "It is about one block long," the report said.

Then the report turned to the matter of ensuring all district employees
would receive their paychecks and engaged in a short discussion of
Mississippi River gauges before returning again, briefly, to the subject of
the huge slug of lake water that was coursing through the streets of New
Orleans. But here again, the startling news was cloaked in understatement
and technical talk that would probably escape the notice of the average
disaster response official, coming as it did after the declarative statement
about no levee breaches. "I-walls: Floodwalls were overtopped on the east
side of the 17th Street Canal and the east side of the (Industrial Canal),"
it stated. "Sections of wall failed in each area." Here was the
confirmation.

With the floodwalls gashed and hemorrhaging billions of gallons of water
into the city, it was only a matter of a few hours on Monday before the
communications citywide began to fail as the moisture crept into the
ground-based junction boxes and electronic switching stations. Even
satellite phones became useless as the water shorted out ground-based
transponders. Communications was about to become the biggest problem of the
catastrophe.

And unbeknownst to Washington and Baton Rouge, the city was on the move.
Most of eastern New Orleans, wracked by levee overtoppings, was swimming in
up to fourteen feet of water, and people were literally swimming to highway
overpasses and tall buildings. In the Lower Ninth Ward, a pair of
catastrophic levee breaches sent a wall of water eight feet deep rushing
though the city for more than a mile in every direction. In the heart of the
city's residential area, Gentilly and the Seventh Ward, the London Avenue
Canal, gashed in two places and seriously overtopped in another spot, was
letting loose a cascade of water that filled living rooms miles away. And on
the city's lakefront, a twenty-foot-long breach grew like a summer weed.

In fact, the twenty-foot levee breach at the 17th Street Canal was expanding
all morning and into the afternoon on Monday. Eyewitness testimony gathered
months later by the Corps of Engineers suggested that the twenty-foot breach
reported at around 11 a.m. to FEMA personnel and the governor's staff was
probably a hundred feet long or more by the time the information had
filtered to Baton Rouge.

Nobody knew this. At 4:40 p.m. New Orleans time, President Bush stood in
Rancho Cucamonga, California, delivering a speech on the new Medicare
prescription drug benefit to a group of elderly citizens. He departed from
the script briefly to address the spiraling catastrophe unfolding along the
Gulf Coast. "We're in constant contact with the local officials down there,"
Bush said. "The storm is moving through, and we're now able to assess
damage, or beginning to assess damage. . . . For those of you who are
concerned about whether or not we're prepared to help, don't be. We are.
We're in place. We've got equipment in place, supplies in place. And once
the -- once we're able to assess the damage, we'll be able to move in and
help those good folks in the affected areas."

Marty Bahamonde stood at the door of an open Coast Guard helicopter as a
blast of hot rotor wash spilled over to him. He yelled to the pilot that he
was from FEMA and needed to go up. It was a hard sell. The last thing the
Coast Guard pilot wanted was to take some FEMA public affairs official on a
sightseeing tour over storm-ravaged New Orleans. It was 5:15 p.m., and
Hurricane Katrina's winds had abated just enough to make flying possible.
Hundreds of people were already hanging on to crumbling rooftops and
balconies trying to escape rising waters and storm damage. Only three Coast
Guard rescue helicopters had managed to get into the air, and each was
already overwhelmed by dozens of calls for help. This was no time to give a
joyride to a FEMA man.

The Coast Guard's own commander on the ground had vowed the only way
Bahamonde would see the inside of a chopper that day was if he needed
rescuing himself. But Bahamonde was persistent. He pressed. And he told a
little white lie. "I started dropping the president's name," he recalled.

"The president expects me to let him know what's going on here," he bellowed
to the pilot.

It wasn't a complete fabrication. Bahamonde, a trusted official with twelve
years of disaster experience under his belt, had been told by Brown's
special assistant Michael Heath a few days before that he was to chase the
storm, go "wherever the hurricane was going to hit" and find a good spot to
hold a press conference for when Brown made a visit to the disaster zone.
Heath also told Bahamonde to keep an eye out for "any and all" information
that Brown might want to share with the White House. Bahamonde had been
doing this all day Monday, sending along tips about whatever he saw.
Sometimes Brown responded to the e-mail messages, and sometimes he didn't.
Earlier in the day, Bahamonde had just happened to be passing by the radio
room in the city's emergency operations center when a panicked voice came
over the airwaves, reporting a breach in the 17th Street Canal floodwall
near Lakeshore Boulevard and 17th Street. "It's very bad," the voice said
before cutting out completely.

Bahamonde tried repeatedly to get a call through to his bosses in Baton
Rouge to tell them the news. He finally gave up and sent an e-mail message,
in which he called the floodwall a levee. But Brown seemed to already know
the news. "I'm being told here water over not a breach," was Brown's cryptic
reply. Brown later said this information came from Louisiana officials.

Though Brown would later tell a congressional committee that Bahamonde was
given to hyperbole, the FEMA man's BlackBerry

e-mail missives do not come across that way. Indeed, there was nothing
shrill about the reports at all: Bahamonde simply stated what he saw and
carefully sourced the rest. "Windows and parts of the east side of the Hyatt
hotel have been blown out," he said in one dispatch. "Furniture is blowing
out of the hotel."

Also, earlier in the day, Bahamonde had managed to get through to Heath to
relate the news that the situation at the Superdome was quickly becoming
dire. The building was beginning to fill with people. And the sixteen trucks
of food and fifteen trucks of water that FEMA promised for the arena had
turned out to be two trucks of food and five trucks of water, Bahamonde
said. Moreover, the FEMA medical team due to arrive at the Superdome before
the storm had in fact never shown at all. As it turned out, Brown had indeed
passed this information on to the HSOC and the White House. Bahamonde didn't
know that.

Bahamonde was determined to make himself useful. "I need to be on this
chopper," he shouted at the pilot. The pilot blinked. "You got ten minutes,"
he yelled back. "Take it or leave it."

Bahamonde jumped aboard. "Where to?" the pilot asked. Bahamonde didn't
hesitate. "The 17th Street Canal levee," he said.

The New Orleans Downtown Heliport is located on top of a parking garage
adjacent to the Superdome. As the helicopter lifted off, Bahamonde could see
that the white skin of the massive arena's roof had been pulled back like an
orange peel, revealing a grubby brown core. It was an amazing and depressing
sight. But it was nothing compared to what lay out by Lake Pontchartrain and
points east.

If Bahamonde wanted a strict confirmation of catastrophe, he got it: Even on
the ten-minute flight, he saw enough to definitively call Katrina a massive,
overwhelming disaster. The 17th Street Canal floodwall was in tatters, its
concrete caps bent askew like tombstones in a country graveyard. Water was
pouring into the city like Niagara. The breach was now a quarter mile wide.
All through the neighborhood, Bahamonde could see people huddled forlornly
on the roofs of their single-story homes while floodwater lapped at the
eaves. As the pilot quickly circled the breach and headed back toward the

Superdome, Bahamonde furiously snapped photographs with his palm-sized
digital camera. "I knew I was looking at the worst-case scenario that
everyone had feared," he said.

The hour was growing late. The city had been filling with water for ten
hours, maybe more. The pilot dropped Bahamonde at the heliport and
immediately jacked up into the sky. But within a half hour another
helicopter had landed. This one was for Bahamonde. He quickly clambered
aboard.

On the second flight, the pilot headed east, and Bahamonde got an eyeful of
a city in distress. Whole swaths of New Orleans were submerged, and the
water was creeping relentlessly toward downtown. At this point, Bahamonde
estimated that 75 percent of the city was underwater. The scene from the
helicopter was awesome, even for Bahamonde, a veteran disaster worker.
Everywhere he looked, he could see survivors clinging to trees and rooftops.
The pilot took Bahamonde for a good long ride. He saw the Interstate 10
bridge across Lake Pontchartrain, gap-toothed and totally impassable. He saw
eastern New Orleans as it had never been seen: a lake to the horizon, broken
only by roof peaks and highway ramps.

By the time Bahamonde returned to the Superdome, it was nearly 7:00 p.m. and
approaching sunset. As he hopped off the helicopter, Bahamonde fumbled with
his cell phone to call Brown in Baton Rouge. He got through on the first
try. Speaking slowly and carefully, Bahamonde related what he had seen.

Brown said little during the briefing. When Bahamonde finished, Brown
thanked his advance man. "I'm calling the White House now," Brown said.

Bahamonde then called Heath, who said nothing upon hearing his news. And
then he called the FEMA public affairs office in Washington, demanding that
they arrange a conference call with all FEMA top officials at 9:00 p.m. so
he could make as many people as possible aware of the situation that faced
the city of New Orleans.

It was now almost 8:00 p.m., and Bahamonde left to find Mayor Nagin. As he
walked the two blocks to City Hall, his phone rang. It was Cindy Taylor, the
deputy director of FEMA public affairs. "Marty, I believe you," she said,
"but are you really sure what you saw? Are you sure? Because I'm getting
some pushback on this conference call; people here are saying they don't
need to talk to you. So I just want to know how far to push it. Are you
sure?"

Bahamonde was livid. He knew what he'd seen. He took a breath. "Cindy, I am
as sure of what I saw as I am that sure my name is Marty," he said in a
measured voice.

Taylor promised to do what she could.

Bahamonde then tracked down the mayor at the emergency operations center. He
had found a willing audience. Nagin called in his aides and everyone sat
down at a conference table. The mayor listened raptly as Bahamonde delivered
a thirty-minute description of what he had seen. "Nagin was stunned,"
Bahamonde said. "He had this vacant expression as he listened to me that
said everything."

Though Nagin was convinced, Brown may not have been, or at least not
completely. As he settled in that evening in Baton Rouge for a round of
televised interviews, Brown alternately described the levees as both topped
and breached. On CNN, Brown hedged. "We have some, I'm not going to call
them breaches, but we have some areas where the lake and the rivers are
continuing to spill over," he said. Nonetheless, he called Katrina a
catastrophe, and said that tens of thousands of people might need rescue. On
Fox News that evening, Brown managed bravado even as he acknowledged the
defining event that would have elevated the disaster to a top national
priority. "Now we averted the catastrophic disaster here, but a lot of the
things that we anticipated, that we practiced for are coming true," he said.
"We now have breaches. We now have water moving into New Orleans."

A few minutes later in New Orleans, Bahamonde broke off the meeting with
Nagin to make his conference call. On the call were FEMA's deputy director
Patrick Rhode and a few agency men who were in Baton Rouge. Bahamonde told
them that the heart of the city and many of its suburbs were cut off and
inaccessible to trucks. He said the interstate routes east and west sank
into floodwaters at the outskirts of town. He said he expected the situation
to worsen as the city filled up with water from the breaches, which were
real.

Bahamonde lingered on the human toll, describing the hundreds of people on
rooftops and bodies floating in the city's streets. He said the situation at
the Superdome was dire and that food and water were in short supply.
Bahamonde didn't hype what he saw -- there was no real need. "I believed
that I was confirming the worst-case scenario that everyone had always
talked about," he later said.

And yet Bahamonde got the sense that the FEMA men weren't listening. Scott
Wells, FEMA's Louisiana deputy in Baton Rouge, thanked Bahamonde for
confirming "most of what we know already." Wells told Bahamonde to get ready
to leave the city; FEMA was already working on sending someone in to relieve
him.

Bahamonde hung up the phone feeling terrible. But there was no time to
brood. Nagin and his staff were clamoring for his attention, asking if he
could tell them again what he had seen, this time using a map. For two
hours, Bahamonde would describe what he saw to the city officials. When it
was over, he was exhausted. Bahamonde crawled under a desk on City Hall's
ninth floor. He used a spare shirt as a pillow. He fell into a restless
sleep.

Bahamonde's report didn't die. It was typed up and flashed around FEMA, and
it made its way relatively quickly to the Department of Homeland Security.
At 9:27 p.m. Eastern time, following Bahamonde's conversations with Brown
and Heath at FEMA, John Wood, Michael Chertoff's chief of staff, and five
other Homeland Security officials received an e-mail message from Brian
Besanceney, the department's assistant secretary for public affairs, saying
that a FEMA employee in New Orleans witnessed destruction there that was
"far more serious" than what reporters and others were saying. "FYI in case
tomorrow's [reports] seem more 'severe,'" the e-mail message said. The
information made it to the White House about two and a half hours later,
shortly after midnight.

Bahamonde's report made its way to the Homeland Security Operations Center
at about the same time. And there, it was added to the breach confirmation
reports from the press and the city and the state and the Red Cross and the
Coast Guard and the National Weather Service and the Transportation Security
Administration and the Army Corps of Engineers and other agencies within the
Department of Homeland Security. Bahamonde's report was just another tile in
the mosaic at the HSOC, assigned no more and no less importance than any
other piece of information on the same subject. Matthew Broderick wouldn't
see Bahamonde's report until months later (he had left the office at 9:00
p.m. on Monday). But when he did, he still discounted its value.

"You know, you can see why we go in and try to get clarification," Broderick
later said when questioned about Bahamonde's report. "It says . . .
'Downtown, there is less flooding.' Yet, he says, '75 percent of the city is
underwater.' You know, that's hyping something that you would go back and
check. A quarter-mile breach in a levee: again, is it a breach or is it
overspilling?"

By 5:00 p.m. Washington time on Monday, Broderick's shop had received no
fewer than nine reports that the city's flood control system had been
breached. Moreover, the HSOC had received at least eight other reports that
huge swaths of the city were underwater and that hundreds, perhaps
thousands, of people were awaiting rescue in the sultry summer heat.

But Broderick's final report of the evening, sent out at 6:13 p.m.
Washington time, shot down the idea that the city's levees had been
breached. "Preliminary reports indicate the levees have not been breached,"
the report declared.

At the end of the day, it was clear in some respects who considered the
question of breach versus overtop to be important. Broderick certainly did.
Hagin, at the White House, homed in on the question at the Monday
videoconference, so he may have realized the significance.

Bahamonde seemed to recognize instinctively that the information Washington
needed was sitting at the 17th Street Canal. Chertoff certainly understood
the importance of the question -- he said so on many occasions afterward.

But the people who didn't know how crucial the question was were the very
people who were best situated to answer it. They were the local officials.
In New Orleans, Mayor Nagin and his emergency manager, Terry Ebbert, spoke
of the breaches in their public statements but didn't emphasize them and
indeed seemed to speed over the question in their press conferences. And it
seems clear that Governor Blanco, who had carefully calibrated practically
every move she made during the early days of the crisis, wouldn't have been
so dismissive during the videoconference of the reports of levee breaches
had she known that the federal response was hanging on it.

When Broderick was asked months later by Senate staffers why he had stated
so declaratively late Monday that the city's flood control structures were
intact, the former Marine general said, improbably, that he had never
received a single report during the day that suggested otherwise. The Senate
investigator asking the question, Jeffrey Greene, was so stunned at the
response that he initially asked if Broderick had misheard him.

But Broderick hadn't misheard. "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.

Instead, Broderick said, all he had heard out of the city on Monday was the
sound of a "normal hurricane situation. The Corps of Engineers had to go in
and do a debris clean-up. We have to get power restoration," Broderick said.
"We may have to go in and help with search and rescue for a certain amount
of people but it's the regular hurricane drill."

Broderick would also tell investigators that he rarely looked at his e-mail
and had received seven hundred e-mail messages during the disaster that he
had never even bothered to open. He admitted that he didn't read the New
Orleans newspaper, the Times-Picayune, which on the day Katrina hit had
treated the collapse of the 17th Street Canal as fact and had written a long
story describing the scene after two reporters on bicycles had visited the
area. Broderick would later say he hadn't seen Michael Brown on CNN on
Monday night referring to Katrina as a catastrophe and saying that as many
as 10,000 people might be trapped in the floodwaters. Finally, asked by
exasperated Senate investigators what evidence he had collected showing the
levees had not breached, Broderick said he had relied exclusively on two
sources. The first was the Army Corps of Engineers, but the former general
suspected even that agency of hyping the situation, since it had reported
"extensive" flooding in New Orleans and "'extensive' is all relative,"
Broderick said.

The second source, Broderick allowed, was unimpeachable: CNN Headline News.
Late Monday afternoon, the network aired a report from New Orleans. The
focus of the video snippet was a scene on Bourbon Street, near the highest
spot in the city, where people "seemed to be having a party," Broderick
said.

"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,'" Broderick said. "So that's a pretty good indicator right
there."