White House 'knew of levee failure'

From correspondents in Washington
February 10, 2006

Mr Bush is under enewed pressure over New Orleans / AP CONGRESSIONAL investigators had learned a federal official's eyewitness account of the New Orleans flooding reached the Homeland Security Department the night before the Bush administration has said it learned of the disaster, the New York Times has reported.

The newspaper said a Federal Emergency Management Agency spokesman sent an e-mail at 9:27pm on Monday, August 29, the day the levee broke in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, to the chief of staff of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.
The email said, according to The Times, that conditions "are far more serious than media reports are currently reflecting. Finding extensive flooding and more stranded people than they had thought – also a number of fires."

White House officials have confirmed to congressional investigators that the report of the levee break arrived there at midnight, the paper said. It said Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, "acknowledged as much in an interview this week, though he said it was surrounded with conflicting reports".

Furthermore, Michael Brown, director of FEMA until he resigned under pressure on September 12, told the Times yesterday that, learning of this eyewitness report, he notified the White House of the news that night.

Mr Brown is scheduled to testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee today (local time).

The newspaper said he was expected to confirm that he notified the White House the night of August 29 the levee had given way, the city was flooding and his crews were overwhelmed.
"There is no question in my mind, that at the highest levels of the White House they understood how grave the situation was," Mr Brown told the Times.

Congressional committees have assembled nearly 800,000 pages of documents, testimony and interviews that pinpoint fundamental errors and oversights that helped lead to "what is universally agreed to be a flawed government response to the worst natural disaster in modern American history", the Times said.

Investigators have questions why President George W. Bush and Mr Chertoff said the levee break did not happen until Tuesday. The two said they believed initially the storm had passed without a catastrophe.

In their defence, the newspaper said, Mr Chertoff and White House officials had said they were referring to official confirmation the levee had broken, which they received on Tuesday morning from the Army Corp of Engineers.

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