Tapes Show More Katrina Confusion
A newly released videotape shows even more confusion among government officials on the day Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast.
In the new tape, Louisiana's governor is seen assuring federal emergency management officials that New Orleans' levees were holding — hours after a levee breach had been reported.
"We keep getting reports in some places that maybe water is coming over the levees," Gov. Kathleen Blanco said shortly after noon on Aug. 29 — the day the storm made landfall.
"We heard a report unconfirmed, I think, we have not breached the levee," she said on a video of the day's disaster briefing that was obtained Thursday night by The Associated Press. "I think we have not breached the levee at this time."
Blanco gave that assessment three hours after the National Weather Service had already reported a levee breach, according to a White House record.
Delays in confirming levee breaches held up repair efforts and have been a key issue in reviews of the government's failed response, CBS News correspondent Claudia Coffey reports.
Transcript: Aug. 28, 2005 (day before Katrina hit)
Transcript: Aug. 29, 2005
Former FEMA director Michael Brown, who's taken much of the heat for the government's response, was asked Friday if he was misled by the governor and if this had anything to do with the delayed response to those levees being breached.
"I'm sure it caused some delay. I think the public needs to know there was some confusion, that we had reports earlier in the day of a breach," Brown told CBS News' The Early Show.
"I think the important thing to remember is in emergency management you prepare for the worst. Whether there had been a breach or topping of the levees you still need to be getting rescue people in there immediately," said Brown.
The rampant confusion is highlighted in the two Federal Emergency Management Agency video briefings, obtained this week by The Associated Press, revealing disaster plans and damage reports detailed by officials as the storm smashed into the coast.
The tapes — and particularly the pre-storm Aug. 28 video that includes an appearance by President Bush — prompted widespread criticism by Republican and Democratic lawmakers who said the government should have been better prepared for the storm that flooded New Orleans and killed more than 1,300 people.
That video "makes it perfectly clear once again that this disaster was not out of the blue or unforeseeable," Sen. David Vitter, R-La., said Thursday. "It was not only predictable, it was actually predicted. That's what made the failures in response — at the local, state and federal level — all the more outrageous."
After AP's broadcast this week showing some of the Katrina briefings, the Homeland Security Department refused Thursday to release videos from five other days immediately before and after Katrina hit. The agency insisted last year — in response to AP's requests under the Freedom of Information Act — there were no such tapes. Now it acknowledges more tapes exist.
"We do have tapes," DHS spokesman Russ Knocke said. "We have the tapes from the v-tels (video teleconferences), and we've provided the transcripts — they've been in the public domain for months."
In the Aug. 29 video, Blanco is not shown in the video but is heard as a disembodied voice speaking from an emergency operations center in Baton Rouge, La., to 11 people sitting around a table at the headquarters of the Federal Emergency Management Agency in Washington. She sounds uncertain about the reliability of her information and cautioned that the situation "could change."
Blanco spokeswoman Denise Bottcher said Thursday that "our people on the ground were telling us that there could be overtopping and breaching, but it was hard to tell" by the noon briefing.
Another official who was heard but not seen on the video was Brown, who was at the federal emergency operations center in Baton Rouge, La. He implored officials to "push the envelope as far as you can," noting that he had already spoken to Mr. Bush twice that day and described the president as "very, very interested in this situation."
Brown was asked on The Early Show if the new tapes exonerate him.
"I'll leave that for others to decide," he said. "What I can tell you is that for three years — in 2003, 2004 and 2005 — I kept saying we're not ready for these catastrophic disasters. We need to do the planning. I think, now, Congress, the administration, all need to wake up and say let's take FEMA out. Let's fix FEMA and get it back to where it was and serve the American people the way we should be serving them."
Brown was also asked if Homeland Security Michael Chertoff should resign.
"If he's not going to fix things, I think he should," Brown said.
The new video shows weather forecasters predicting the storm's path and also briefly cuts to White House deputy chief of staff Joe Hagin asking Blanco about the status of the levees and the situation at the Superdome in New Orleans.
By that time, an estimated 15,000 evacuees had gathered at the stadium, where food and water was beginning to run out, said Col. Jeff Smith, Louisiana's emergency preparedness deputy director. Smith also reported up to 10 feet of flooding in neighboring St. Bernard Parish and that there were 45 patients on life-support at one area hospital that lost its power.
Still, "the coordination and support we are getting from FEMA has just been outstanding," Smith said.
Mississippi officials were less complimentary, reporting significant damage to hospitals, flooded and collapsed emergency operations centers and people trapped on the roofs or in the attacks who were begging for help.
The Homeland Security Department played down the new video. Knocke said it "reveals nothing new because the transcript had previously been released."