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Brown Asserts He Alerted White House Quickly on Katrina
By JOHN O'NEIL and MARIA NEWMAN
February 10, 2006


Michael D. Brown, former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, testified today that he let senior White House staffers know as soon as he had heard that flooding had begun in New Orleans on the day Hurricane Katrina made landfall.

Mr. Brown also called claims by top officials at the Department of Homeland Security that they weren't aware of levee breaches until the next day " just baloney."

Mr. Brown said that homeland security officials were being regularly updated by reports delivered through video conference calls, and that he personally contacted White House officials.

"My obligation was to the White House and to make sure the president knows what's going on," he said, "and I did that."

Later in the day, however, two top officials with the Department of Homeland Security testified that it was Mr. Brown's refusal to accept that his agency reported to them, and not directly to the White House, that prevented critical information about the disaster's urgency from flowing to the correct people quickly enough.

One of them, Robert Stephan, the department's assistant secretary for infrastructure protection, said that FEMA had left officials in his department "virtually blind" during the crisis.

Mr. Brown's testimony provided the first detailed look into communications between emergency management officials and the White House. He testified that the White House counsel, Harriet Miers, had written him on Thursday asking him to respect the confidentiality of conversations with presidential advisers.

But Senator Susan Collins, the Maine Republican who is chairwoman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, directed him to answer questions on those conversations, saying that the White House had declined her invitation on Thursday night to make a claim of executive privilege.

Katrina hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast on the morning of Monday, Aug. 29. Mr. Brown said today that he first learned of the levee breaches from a FEMA official in New Orleans, Marty Bahamonde, who sent a report Monday at about 10 a.m. to report severe flooding, up to the second floor of houses in many parts of the city.

Mr. Brown, who at the time was in Baton Rouge, said he alerted FEMA headquarters, asking them to contact Mr. Bahamonde directly to confirm the information.

"I also put in a call" to White House staffers, Mr. Brown said. He said that he spoke at least twice that day to Joe Hagin, a deputy White House chief of staff, and said that he also communicated with Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff.

Mr. Brown said that it was not clear until the afternoon whether the flooding was from a breach in a levee or was from a levee being overtopped, a less catastrophic development.

But by that afternoon, the White House was informed of the breach, and by Monday evening Mr. Brown said he was delivering an even more dire message.

Mr. Brown said that he had e-mailed Mr. Card on the 29th to tell him that "this was the big one."And later that evening, Mr. Brown said, he gave a fuller account of the problems in a call to Mr. Hagin, who was with President Bush. Mr. Bush was in San Diego at the time.

"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," he said.

Mr. Brown said he might have spoken briefly to Mr. Bush on the night of the 29th, but was not sure.

"I knew that in speaking to Joe I was talking directly to the president," he said.

Before the hurricane, Mr. Brown said, he talked about 30 times with White House officials concerning preparations. Two of the conversations were with Mr. Bush, he said, including one call in which he asked the president to call Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana and Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans to persuade them to order a mandatory evacuation.

Both President Bush and Michael Chertoff, the head of the Homeland Security Department, have said that they learned of levee breaks on Tuesday. At the time, Mr. Bush said, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."

At the White House, the president's spokesman, Scott McClellan, said during a briefing today that there had been conflicting reports about the levees and the source of the floods just after Katrina passed. "Some were saying it was over top, some were saying it was breached," he said.

"We knew of the flooding that was going on," Mr. 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."

Mr. Brown talked at length about frustrations over structural conflicts after his agency was folded into the Department of Homeland Security, and of angry clashes in Katrina's aftermath. He said that one time Mr. Chertoff kept top FEMA officials waiting for an hour and a half for a briefing he had requested, at which point Mr. Brown said he had let them go "so they could do their jobs."

And he described Mr. Chertoff as "irate" when Mr. Brown left Baton Rouge to visit damaged areas in Mississippi.

Mr. Brown said the legislation creating the department had a "fatal flaw," the separation of responsibilities for planning for disasters and responding to them.

He said that he had ignored the new structure, making a practice during disasters like the 2004 Florida hurricanes of calling the White House instead of working through the department's chain of command because he found that it produced results far faster.

But then Katrina hit, and he said the White House seemed to resist his way of reporting directly to them, he learned when he called Mr. Card at one point.

"For the first time," he said, Mr. Card told him, "Mike, you're going to have to feed that up the chain of command."

Mr. Brown said that before Katrina he had discussed the structural problems with Mr. Hagin and with his predecessor, with the current White House homeland security adviser, Frances Fragos Townsend, and her predecessor, and occasionally with Mr. Card.

In their testimony, Mr. Stephan and another top official of the Homeland Security Department said that Mr. Brown and FEMA had failed to provide sufficient information and that Mr. Brown's dislike of FEMA's subordination had interfered with the disaster response.

"There was a prevailing attitude from Mr. Brown that he did not want anyone from Department of Homeland Security to interfere with his operations," said Matthew Broderick, who ran the department's operation coordination center during the hurricane. Mr. Broderick said that on that Monday, when Katrina hit Louisiana, there was a steady stream of conflicting reports and that FEMA had said as late as Monday night that there had been no breach of the levees.

He acknowledged that it was his job to get urgent information to other top officials. But, he said, "there were no urgent calls or flash messages coming up from anyone on Monday."

He said the rift between the two branches of the department had led his group to sit back and wait for FEMA to take the lead. Members of the committee expressed amazement that Mr. Stephan and Mr. Broderick said the e-mails about the levee breaches were not shared with Mr. Chertoff or other top officials until Tuesday.

Senator Mark Dayton, Democrat of Minnesota, called it an "information paralysis" that had to be fixed before another disaster took place.

"People think they're communicating," he said. "But we've got a president of the United States — and I take him at his word — who says he didn't know about this until Tuesday," he said. "If people don't communcate with one another, then, you don't have an effective structure."

He added later: "If somebody didn't read their e-mail until whenever. . . that's not Mr. Brown's responsibility, in my judgment."

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, the ranking Democrat on the committee, said: "We better get this right. We've got to figure out how to see the warning lights when they go off so we can protect the lives of the American people."

Mr. Brown, who has a permanent residence in Colorado but continues to live in Washington, has formed a disaster-relief consultancy. He would not name clients but said he had signed up a number of companies, including firms that sell communications equipment and work on rebuilding on the Gulf Coast.

Mr. Brown appeared rueful about what he called "my demise." At one point, discussing what a good working relationship he had with Mr. Bush, he joked about Mr. Bush's praise — "heckuva job, Brownie" — during the president's first visit to New Orleans, a line that has been endlessly lampooned.

"Unfortunately he called me Brownie at the wrong time; thanks a lot, sir," Mr. Brown said, to laughter.

But when asked directly whether he felt that he had been made a scapegoat by the administration for the failures in responding to Katrina, Mr. Brown replied simply, "Yes."

But in a testy exchange with Senator Norm Coleman, Republican of Minnesota, Mr. Brown grew defensive and angry about criticism about his leadership during Katrina.

"What do you want me to say? I've admitted to mistakes publicly," he said.

Mr. Coleman said that he was dismayed that Mr. Brown, during this morning's session, seemed to be blaming the problems in response on the "structure" of the agencies entrusted with providing help to the disaster. But Mr. Coleman said that the record, including some of Mr. Brown's own e-mails to his staff, seemed to suggest that the problem was not so much systemic, but rather the leadership of those in charge, including Mr. Brown.

He said that at one point, after hearing that hotels are kicking people out and patients were dying, "your response is, Thanks for the update. Anything I need to do to tweak?' "

"I'm frankly sick and tired of these e-mails getting out of context," Mr. Brown said. "With all due respect, don't draw conclusions from the e-mails.

When Mr. Coleman suggested that Mr. Brown "didn't provide the leadership," Mr. Brown shot back, "that's very easy for you to say, sitting behind the dais."

" And I absolutely resent you sitting here saying that I lack the leadership to do that because I was down there pushing everything that I could," Mr. Brown said, almost shouting. "I've admitted to those mistakes. And if you want something else from me, put it on the table and you tell me what you want me to admit to."

The senator told him: "A little more candor would suffice."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/10/national/nationalspecial/10cnd-katrina.html