Washington – Former FEMA director Michael Brown disputed that floodwaters had breached New Orleans’ levees in the early hours after Hurricane Katrina roared ashore, new e-mails released Tuesday show.
The 928 pages of e-mails, obtained and released by the Center for Public Integrity, also portray Brown and the Federal Emergency Management Agency as obsessed with media coverage in the days leading up to and just after the Aug. 29 disaster. At one point early that morning, Brown reported to an aide that he was “sitting in the chair, putting mousse in my hair” as he waited for media interviews to begin.
Later that morning, at 9:50 a.m., a FEMA staffer at the National Hurricane Center sent department brass an alert from a local TV station report that “a levee breach occurred along the industrial canal” near the city’s low-income Ninth Ward.
More than two hours later, at 12:09 p.m., Brown sent a message back to one of his aides, saying: “I’m being told here water over not a breach.” The aide, Michael Lowder, replied: “OK. You probably have better info there.”
The e-mail exchange provides the latest evidence of rampant federal confusion over whether the levees had been breached, or broken by the storm surge, or merely topped by floodwaters.
The timing of the breach has been key in reviews of failures to respond to Katrina. The White House was alerted to breach reports by 6 p.m., but it confirmed the damage the next morning.
Since quitting FEMA on Sept. 12, Brown has criticized the Bush administration for failing to respond quickly levee-breach reports. He has said he was convinced of a levee breach by 1 p.m. on the day Katrina hit.
