Continued:

A long post but I wanted it on my home page so that it won't disappear.

Quoted form the New York Times which you need to register to open. And
I wouldn't know if it will be available long. However the good old fat
slob Michael Moore has got it -so have we, now:

February 10th, 2006 2:52 am
White House Knew of Levee's Failure on Night of Storm

By Eric Lipton / New York Times

WASHINGTON, Feb. 9 - In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Bush
administration officials said they had been caught by surprise when
they were told on Tuesday, Aug. 30, that a levee had broken, allowing
floodwaters to engulf New Orleans.

But Congressional investigators have now learned that an eyewitness
account of the flooding from a federal emergency official reached the
Homeland Security Department's headquarters starting at 9:27 p.m. the
day before, and the White House itself at midnight.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency official, Marty Bahamonde,
first heard of a major levee breach Monday morning. By late Monday
afternoon, Mr. Bahamonde had hitched a ride on a Coast Guard helicopter
over the breach at the 17th Street Canal to confirm the extensive
flooding. He then telephoned his report to FEMA headquarters in
Washington, which notified the Homeland Security Department.

"FYI from FEMA," said an e-mail message from the agency's public
affairs staff describing the helicopter flight, sent Monday night at
9:27 to the chief of staff of Homeland Security Secretary Michael
Chertoff and recently unearthed by investigators. Conditions, the
message said, "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."

Michael D. Brown, who was the director of FEMA until he resigned under
pressure on Sept. 12, said in a telephone interview Thursday that he
personally notified the White House of this news that night, though he
declined to identify the official he spoke to.

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

But the alert did not seem to register. Even the next morning,
President Bush, on vacation in Texas, was feeling relieved that New
Orleans had "dodged the bullet," he later recalled. Mr. Chertoff,
similarly confident, flew Tuesday to Atlanta for a briefing on avian
flu. With power out from the high winds and movement limited, even news
reporters in New Orleans remained unaware of the full extent of the
levee breaches until Tuesday.

The federal government let out a sigh of relief when in fact it should
have been sounding an "all hands on deck" alarm, the investigators have
found.

This chain of events, along with dozens of other critical flashpoints
in the Hurricane Katrina saga, has for the first time been laid out in
detail following five months of work by two Congressional committees
that have assembled nearly 800,000 pages of documents, testimony and
interviews from more than 250 witnesses. Investigators now have the
documentation to pinpoint some of the fundamental errors and oversights
that combined to produce what is universally agreed to be a flawed
government response to the worst natural disaster in modern American
history.

On Friday, Mr. Brown, the former FEMA director, is scheduled to testify
before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
He is expected to confirm that he notified the White House on that
Monday, the day the hurricane hit, that 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
said in the interview.

The problem, he said, was the handicapping of FEMA when it was turned
into a division of the Homeland Security Department in 2003.

"The real story is with this new structure," he said. "Why weren't more
things done, or what prevented or delayed Mike Brown from being able to
do what he would have done and did do in any other disaster?"

Although Mr. Bahamonde said in October that he had notified Mr. Brown
that Monday, it was not known until recently what Mr. Brown or the
Homeland Security Department did with that information, or when the
White House was told.

Missteps at All Levels

It has been known since the earliest days of the storm that all levels
of government - from the White House to the Department of Homeland
Security to the Louisiana Capitol to New Orleans City Hall - were
unprepared, uncommunicative and phlegmatic in protecting Gulf Coast
residents from the floodwaters and their aftermath. But an examination
of the latest evidence by The New York Times shines a new light on the
key players involved in the important turning points: what they said,
what they did and what they did not do, all of which will soon be
written up in the committees' investigative reports.

Among the findings that emerge in the mass of documents and testimony
were these:

Federal officials knew long before the storm showed up on the radar
that 100,000 people in New Orleans had no way to escape a major
hurricane on their own and that the city had finished only 10 percent
of a plan for how to evacuate its largely poor, African-American
population.

Mr. Chertoff failed to name a principal federal official to oversee the
response before the hurricane arrived, an omission a top Pentagon
official acknowledged to investigators complicated the coordination of
the response. His department also did not plan enough to prevent a
conflict over which agency should be in charge of law enforcement
support. And Mr. Chertoff was either poorly informed about the levee
break or did not recognize the significance of the initial report about
it, investigators said.

The Louisiana transportation secretary, Johnny B. Bradberry, who had
legal responsibility for the evacuation of thousands of people in
nursing homes and hospitals, admitted bluntly to investigators, "We put
no plans in place to do any of this."

Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans at first directed his staff to
prepare a mandatory evacuation of his city on Saturday, two days before
the storm hit, but he testified that he had not done so that day while
he and other city officials struggled to decide if they should exempt
hospitals and hotels from the order. The mandatory evacuation occurred
on Sunday, and the delay exacerbated the difficulty in moving people
away from the storm.

The New Orleans Police Department unit assigned to the rescue effort,
despite many years' worth of flood warnings and requests for money, had
just three small boats and no food, water or fuel to supply its
emergency workers.

*******
If you care to do a search of the Republican bloggers sites that had
anything to say about Sean Penn's attempts to do something, you will
understand the contempt I feel for people like Bob Orifice, a
vociferous, do nothing himself and a critic of mine.

*******

Investigators could find no evidence that food and water supplies were
formally ordered for the Convention Center, where more than 10,000
evacuees had assembled, until days after the city had decided to open
it as a backup emergency shelter. FEMA had planned to have 360,000
ready-to-eat meals delivered to the city and 15 trucks of water in
advance of the storm. But only 40,000 meals and five trucks of water
had arrived.

Representative Thomas M. Davis III, Republican of Virginia, chairman of
the special House committee investigating the hurricane response, said
the only government agency that performed well was the National Weather
Service, which correctly predicted the force of the storm. But no one
heeded the message, he said.

"The president is still at his ranch, the vice president is still
fly-fishing in Wyoming, the president's chief of staff is in Maine,"
Mr. Davis said. "In retrospect, don't you think it would have been
better to pull together? They should have had better leadership. It is
disengagement."

One of the greatest mysteries for both the House and Senate committees
has been why it took so long, even after Mr. Bahamonde filed his urgent
report on the Monday the storm hit, for federal officials to appreciate
that the levee had broken and that New Orleans was flooding.

Eyewitness to Devastation

As his helicopter approached the site, Mr. Bahamonde testified in
October, there was no mistaking what had happened: large sections of
the levee had fallen over, leaving the section of the city on the
collapsed side entirely submerged, but the neighborhood on the other
side relatively dry. He snapped a picture of the scene with a small
camera.

"The situation is only going to get worse," he said he warned Mr.
Brown, then the FEMA director, whom he called about 8 p.m. Monday
Eastern time to report on his helicopter tour.

"Thank you," he said Mr. Brown replied. "I am now going to call the
White House."

Citing restrictions placed on him by his lawyers, Mr. Brown declined to
tell House investigators during testimony if he had actually made that
call. White House aides have urged administration officials not to
discuss any conversations with the president or his top advisors and
declined to release e-mail messages sent among Mr. Bush's senior
advisors.

*******
Why? All contact with the President and his chief aides are a matter of
public record and belong to the US people and are stored at national
archives in the USA. Or does that only apply if he is at the White
House at the time?

*******

But investigators have found the e-mail message referring to Mr.
Bahamonde's helicopter survey that was sent to John F. Wood, chief of
staff to Secretary Chertoff at 9:27 p.m. They have also found a summary
of Mr. Bahamonde's observations that was issued at 10:30 p.m. and an
11:05 p.m. e-mail message to Michael Jackson, the deputy secretary of
homeland security. Each message describes in detail the extensive
flooding that was taking place in New Orleans after the levee collapse.

Given this chain of events, investigators have repeatedly questioned
why Mr. Bush and Mr. Chertoff stated in the days after the storm that
the levee break did not happen until Tuesday, as they made an effort to
explain why they initially thought the storm had passed without the
catastrophe that some had feared.

"The hurricane started to depart the area on Monday, and then Tuesday
morning the levee broke and the water started to flood into New
Orleans," Mr. Chertoff said on CBS's "Face the Nation" on Sunday, Sept.
4, the weekend after the hurricane hit.

Mr. Chertoff and White House officials have said that they were
referring to official confirmation that the levee had broken, which
they say they received Tuesday morning from the Army Corps of
Engineers. They also say there were conflicting reports all day Monday
about whether a breach had occurred and noted that they were not alone
in failing to recognize the growing catastrophe.

Mr. Duffy, the White House spokesman, said it would not have made much
difference even if the White House had realized the significance of the
midnight report. "Like it or not, you cannot fix a levee overnight, or
in an hour, or even six hours," he said.

But Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine and chairwoman of the
Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, said it
was obvious to her in retrospect that Mr. Chertoff, perhaps in
deference to Mr. Brown's authority, was not paying close enough
attention to the events in New Orleans and that the federal response to
the disaster may have been slowed as a result.

"Secretary Chertoff was too disengaged from the process," Ms. Collins
said in an interview.

Compounding the problem, once Mr. Chertoff learned of the levee break
on Tuesday, he could not reach Mr. Brown, his top emergency response
official, for an entire day because Mr. Brown was on helicopter tours
of the damage.

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, the ranking Democrat on the
homeland security committee, said the government confusion reminded him
of the period surrounding the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

"Information was in different places, in that case prior to the
attack," Mr. Lieberman said, "and it wasn't reaching the key decision
makers in a coordinated way for them to take action."

Russ Knocke, a homeland security spokesman, said that although Mr.
Chertoff had been "intensely involved in monitoring the storm" he had
not actually been told about the report of the levee breach until
Tuesday, after he arrived in Atlanta.

"No one is satisfied with the response in the early days," Mr. Knocke
said.

But he rejected criticism by Senator Collins and others that Mr.
Chertoff was disengaged.

"He was not informed of it," Mr. Knocke said. "It is certainly a
breakdown. And through an after-action process, that is something we
will address."

The day before the hurricane made landfall, the Homeland Security
Department issued a report predicting that it could lead to a levee
breach that could submerge New Orleans for months and leave 100,000
people stranded. Yet despite these warnings, state, federal and local
officials acknowledged to investigators that there was no coordinated
effort before the storm arrived to evacuate nursing homes and hospitals
or others in the urban population without cars.

Focus on Highway Plan

Mr. Bradberry, the state transportation secretary, told an investigator
that he had focused on improving the highway evacuation plan for the
general public with cars and had not attended to his responsibility to
remove people from hospitals and nursing homes. The state even turned
down an offer for patient evacuation assistance from the federal
government.

In fact, the city was desperately in need of help. And this failure
would have deadly consequences. Only 21 of the 60 or so nursing homes
were cleared of residents before the storm struck. Dozens of lives were
lost in hospitals and nursing homes.

One reason the city was unable to help itself, investigators said, is
that it never bought the basic equipment needed to respond to the
long-predicted catastrophe. The Fire Department had asked for
inflatable boats and generators, as well as an emergency food supply,
but none were provided, a department official told investigators.

Timothy P. Bayard, a police narcotics commander assigned to lead a
water rescue effort, said that with just three boats, not counting the
two it commandeered and almost no working radios, his small team spent
much of its time initially just trying to rescue detectives who
themselves were trapped by rising water.

The investigators also determined that the federal Department of
Transportation was not asked until Wednesday to provide buses to
evacuate the Superdome and the convention center, meaning that evacuees
sat there for perhaps two more days longer than necessary.

Mr. Brown acknowledged to investigators that he wished, in retrospect,
that he had moved much earlier to turn over major aspects of the
response effort to the Department of Defense. It was not until the
middle of the week, he said, that he asked the military to take over
the delivery and distribution of water, food and ice.

"In hindsight I should have done it right then," Mr. Brown told the
House, referring to the Sunday before the storm hit.

*******

All American ****wits at their best.

Weatherlawyer wrote:
Continued:

All American ****wits at their best:

The Land of 10,770 Empty FEMA Trailers

Far from the victims of Katrina for whom they are meant, the furnished
shelters crowd an airport, benefiting only the town of Hope, Ark.

By Johanna Neuman / Los Angeles Times

All because of the latest example of how federal, state and local
officials have responded to Hurricane Katrina. Time was, Hope was known
primarily as the childhood home of President Clinton. Now it's Trailer
Town, USA.

After the Aug. 29 storm left thousands homeless on the Gulf Coast,
officials in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama began calling for
trailers to provide temporary shelter. More than 100,000 were
requested, and somebody decided to create holding areas for the
trailers outside the hurricane zone.

Today, legions of wide-bodied mobile homes sit empty at Hope's
Municipal Airport, a sprawling former military base. After all these
months, storm victims can't seem to get the trailers, which are proving
a mixed blessing to Hope and Arkansas.

"It just boggles the mind in this day and time," said Mark Keith,
director of the Hope-Hempstead County Chamber of Commerce. "There are
10,770 trailers at Hope Airport. That's one for every man, woman and
child in Hope, with a few left over to send to Emmet, down the road."

*******

State coffers also have benefited. Many truckers got tickets ranging
from $125 to $425 each for not carrying the right permits or for
getting stuck on the road after dark, said businessman Dennis Larson of
Montevideo, Minn., whose company hauled nearly 400 of the trailers to
Hope.

"I have a dozen of the tickets sitting on my desk," he said. "The state
of Arkansas set out to profit. It was by far the worst of all the
states that we went through..

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/la...ex.php?id=5817