[Senate Hearing 109-829]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 109-829
HURRICANE KATRINA: THE ROLES OF U.S.
DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY AND
FEDERAL EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT
AGENCY LEADERSHIP
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
COMMITTEE ON
HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
----------
FEBRUARY 10, 2006
----------
Printed for the use of the
Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs
HURRICANE KATRINA: THE ROLES OF U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY
AND FEDERAL EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY LEADERSHIP
S. Hrg. 109-829
HURRICANE KATRINA: THE ROLES OF U.S.
DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY AND
FEDERAL EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT
AGENCY LEADERSHIP
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
COMMITTEE ON
HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
FEBRUARY 10, 2006
__________
Printed for the use of the
Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs
U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
27-029 WASHINGTON : 2007
_____________________________________________________________________________
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COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
SUSAN M. COLLINS, Maine, Chairman
TED STEVENS, Alaska JOSEPH I. LIEBERMAN, Connecticut
GEORGE V. VOINOVICH, Ohio CARL LEVIN, Michigan
NORM COLEMAN, Minnesota DANIEL K. AKAKA, Hawaii
TOM COBURN, Oklahoma THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware
LINCOLN D. CHAFEE, Rhode Island MARK DAYTON, Minnesota
ROBERT F. BENNETT, Utah FRANK LAUTENBERG, New Jersey
PETE V. DOMENICI, New Mexico MARK PRYOR, Arkansas
JOHN W. WARNER, Virginia
Michael D. Bopp, Staff Director and Chief Counsel
David T. Flanagan, General Counsel
Asha A. Mathew, Counsel
Jonathan T. Nass, Counsel
Joyce A. Rechtschaffen, Minority Staff Director and Counsel
Robert F. Muse, Minority General Counsel
Mary Beth Schultz, Minority Counsel
Beth M. Grossman, Minority Counsel
Trina Driessnack Tyrer, Chief Clerk
C O N T E N T S
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Opening statements:
Page
Senator Collins.............................................. 1
Senator Lieberman............................................ 3
Senator Stevens.............................................. 12
Senator Coleman.............................................. 19
Senator Akaka................................................ 23
Senator Bennett.............................................. 26
Senator Lautenberg........................................... 29
Senator Warner............................................... 31
Senator Dayton............................................... 36
Senator Pryor................................................ 40
Prepared statement:
Senator Voinovich............................................ 81
WITNESSES
Friday, February 10, 2006
Hon. Michael D. Brown, Former Under Secretary for Emergency
Preparedness and Response, and Director, Federal Emergency
Management Agency, U.S. Department of Homeland Security........ 8
Patrick J. Rhode, Former Acting Deputy Director and Chief of
Staff, Federal Emergency Management Agency, U.S. Department of
Homeland Security.............................................. 8
Colonel Robert B. Stephan, (USAF, Retired), Assistant Secretary
for Infrastructure Protection, U.S. Department of Homeland
Security....................................................... 57
Brigadier General Matthew Broderick, Director for Operations
Coordination, U.S. Department of Homeland Security............. 61
Alphabetical List of Witnesses
Broderick, Brigadier General Matthew:
Testimony.................................................... 61
Prepared statement........................................... 94
Brown, Hon. Michael D:
Testimony.................................................... 8
Rhode, Patrick J.:
Testimony.................................................... 8
Prepared statement........................................... 82
Stephan, Colonel Robert B.:
Testimony.................................................... 57
Prepared statement........................................... 85
APPENDIX
Post-hearing questions and responses for the Record from:
Mr. Brown.................................................... 101
Mr. Broderick................................................ 109
``Combined Catastrophic Plan for Southeast Louisiana and the New
Madrid Seismic Zone, Scope of Work, FY2004,'' Submitted by
Senator Pryor.................................................. 110
Documents submitted for the Record from Mr. Brown................ 132
Exhibit Q........................................................ 206
Exhibit 1........................................................ 299
Exhibit 2........................................................ 304
Exhibit 6........................................................ 332
Letter from Harriet Miers, Counsel to the President, submitted by
Senator Collins................................................ 334
Exhibit S........................................................ 335
HURRICANE KATRINA: THE ROLES OF U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY
AND FEDERAL EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY LEADERSHIP
----------
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2006
U.S. Senate,
Committee on Homeland Security
and Governmental Affairs,
Washington, DC.
The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 9:36 a.m., in
room SD-342, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Susan M.
Collins, Chairman of the Committee, presiding.
Present: Senators Collins, Stevens, Coleman, Bennett,
Warner, Lieberman, Akaka, Dayton, Lautenberg, and Pryor.
OPENING STATEMENT OF CHAIRMAN COLLINS
Chairman Collins. The Committee will come to order.
Good morning. Today, in our 18th hearing on Hurricane
Katrina, the Committee will examine how the Department of
Homeland Security and FEMA coordinated and led the Federal
preparations for and response to Hurricane Katrina.
Our first panel this morning consists of Michael Brown and
Patrick Rhode, who were FEMA's Director and Acting Deputy
Director in the days leading up to and following the storm.
As Katrina neared the Gulf Coast, Mr. Brown dispatched to
Louisiana, leaving Mr. Rhode as the top ranking official at
FEMA headquarters. Today we will discuss their leadership at
the agency during this enormously challenging period.
Our second panel consists of two senior officials at the
Department of Homeland Security headquarters. Robert Stephan is
the Assistant Secretary for Infrastructure Protection and one
of the chief architects of the National Response Plan.
Matthew Broderick runs the Department's Homeland Security
Operations Center, which serves as the eyes and ears of top DHS
officials, particularly during times of crisis.
Secretary Chertoff relied heavily on Mr. Stephan and Mr.
Broderick during Katrina's aftermath. We will discuss their
roles and their views of FEMA from the top of the
organizational chart.
Our panels today separate witnesses from a Federal agency,
FEMA, from those of its parent organization, DHS. The
separation is deliberate. It reflects, in part, the differing
perspectives on Katrina that we have heard consistently from
officials of the two entities. It also reflects tensions
between the two that predate the storm--tensions over
resources, roles, and responsibilities within the Department.
This tension is clear in Mr. Brown's response when
Committee investigators asked him why FEMA was not better
prepared for Katrina. Mr. Brown responded ``its mission had
been marginalized. Its response capability had been diminished.
There's the whole clash of cultures between DHS's mission to
prevent terrorism and FEMA's mission to respond to and to
prepare for responding to disasters of whatever nature.''
By almost any measure, FEMA's response to Katrina has to be
judged a failure. I must say that I have come to this
conclusion with a sense of remorse because I've been struck
throughout this investigation by the extraordinary efforts of
many FEMA professionals in the field as well as some FEMA and
DHS officials at headquarters who literally worked around the
clock to try to help bring relief to the people in the Gulf
States.
But the response was riddled with missed opportunities,
poor decision making, and failed leadership.
The responsibility for FEMA's and, for that matter, the
Department's failed response is shared. While DHS's playbook
appears designed to distance the Department's leaders and
headquarters as much as possible from FEMA, the Department's
leaders must answer for decisions that they made or failed to
make that contributed to the problems.
One problem that manifested itself in a variety of ways was
the Department's lack of preparedness for the Katrina
catastrophe. Instead of springing into action or, better yet,
acting before the storm made landfall, the Department appears
to have moved haltingly. And as a result, key decisions were
either delayed or made based on questionable and, in some
cases, erroneous assumptions.
The day after the storm, for example, Secretary Chertoff
named Michael Brown as the lead Federal official for the
response effort. At the same time, the Secretary declared
Hurricane Katrina an incident of national significance, which
is the designation that triggers the National Response Plan.
The National Response Plan, in turn, is the comprehensive
national roadmap that guides the Federal response to
catastrophes.
The Secretary's action led many to question why the
incident of national significance declaration had not been made
earlier. But in reality, the declaration itself was meaningless
because by the plain terms of the National Response Plan
Hurricane Katrina had become an incident of national
significance 3 days earlier when the President declared an
emergency in Louisiana.
The lack of awareness of this fundamental tenet of the
National Response Plan raises questions about whether DHS
leadership was truly ready for a catastrophe of this magnitude,
and I think it helps explain the Department's slow, sometimes
hesitant, response to the storm.
Similarly, we will learn today that FEMA's leaders failed
to take steps that they knew could improve FEMA's ability to
respond more effectively and quickly to a catastrophe. In the
year or so preceding Katrina, Mr. Brown was presented with two
important and highly critical assessments of FEMA's structure
and capabilities. Both included recommendations for
improvement.
The first was a memorandum produced by a cadre of FEMA's
top professional operatives known as the Federal Coordinating
Officers. Among other things, the memo warns of unprepared
emergency response teams that had no funding, zero funding, for
training, exercises, or equipment.
The other was a study conducted by the Mitre Corporation of
FEMA's capabilities. The study, commissioned by Mr. Brown, was
designed to answer such questions as what's preventing FEMA
from responding and recovering as quickly as possible. The
Mitre study is eerily predictive of the major problems that
would plague the response to Hurricane Katrina. The study
points out a ``lack of adequate and consistent situational
awareness across the enterprise,'' a prediction that became
reality when you look at all of the missed opportunities to
respond to the levee breaks; an ``inadequate ability to control
inventory and track assets,'' which we saw that over and over
again with essential commodities not reaching the destination
in time; and undefined and misunderstood ``standard operating
procedures.''
Despite this study, key problems were simply not resolved
and, as a result, opportunities to strengthen FEMA prior to
Katrina were missed.
As this Committee winds down its lengthy series of hearings
and more than 5 months of investigations into the preparedness
for and response to Hurricane Katrina, we increasingly reflect
upon what can be learned from the thousands of facts we have
gathered. One thing that I have found is a strong correlation
between effective leadership and affective response.
Unfortunately, I have also found the converse to be true.
Senator Lieberman.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR LIEBERMAN
Senator Lieberman. Thank you, very much, Madam Chairman.
Thanks not only for your excellent opening statement, but
thanks also for the leadership that you have given this
investigation over 5 months and now almost 20 public hearings.
In this now my 18th year privileged to be a Member of the U.S.
Senate, I've not been in a more thorough nonpartisan and I'd
say important investigation. I thank you for setting the tone
and showing exactly the leadership that you just described in
another sense.
And I thank our joint staff for the extraordinary work that
they have done interviewing more than 200 witnesses, compiling
and obtaining hundreds of thousands of documents.
Today and Tuesday, we're going to hear directly from the
top leadership of both the Federal Emergency Management Agency
and its parent, the Department of Homeland Security. Our
hearings are now reaching the concluding phase. To date I think
these hearings have set--the previous hearings have set the
stage for the panels we're going to hear today and Tuesday.
We've broken much new ground, and today and Tuesday we have
some tough and important questions to ask.
In my opinion, our investigation has shown a gross lack of
planning and preparation by both the Department of Homeland
Security and FEMA. And that guaranteed that the response to
Hurricane Katrina, or for that matter any other catastrophe
that might have happened, was doomed to be uncoordinated,
inadequate, and therefore more damaging than it should have
been.
We have heard from a large number of witnesses who have
spoken of the full range of failures during Katrina. We have
learned of one failure after another in evacuation, search and
rescue, law and order, emergency medical treatment, and
deployment of assets.
And we have learned that the Federal Government was simply
not prepared to overcome these predictable challenges in this
predictable and predicted hurricane. Even those responsible
acknowledge that they did not meet the desperate needs of the
people of the Gulf Coast.
FEMA and DHS officials have told us that in interviews and
testimony and in evidence gathered by our staff. I want to read
just a few of those statements that are on that chart.
From Michael Lowder, FEMA's Deputy Director of Response,
who in an August 27, 2005, e-mail 2 days before Katrina hit
landfall said, ``If this is the New Orleans scenario''--which
was the way they described the big hurricane arriving--``we are
already way behind.''
From Scott Wells, a FEMA Federal Coordinating Officer,
``This was a catastrophic disaster. We don't have the
structure. We don't have the people for catastrophic disaster.
It's that simple.''
From FEMA Federal Coordinating Officer Bill Lokey, the top
man for FEMA in Louisiana, ``Communications and coordination
was lacking. Pre-planning was lacking. We were not prepared for
this.''
From former FEMA Director Michael Brown, who we'll be
hearing from today, when asked the question, ``Before Katrina,
was FEMA ready for this kind of catastrophe?'' Mr. Brown said
simply and directly, ``I don't think so.''
And finally from Secretary Chertoff, who we will hear from
Tuesday, ``But I also think Katrina tested our planning and our
planning fell short.''
The fact is that when DHS, the Department of Homeland
Security, was created in 2002 in the aftermath of the terrorist
attacks of September 11, 2001, I said, and I know that I spoke
for most Members of Congress, that I hoped to see a
coordinated, consolidated, and accountable Department of
Homeland Security. In this investigation, unfortunately, we
have seen so little effective coordination and consolidation
that we must hold the Department of Homeland Security
accountable and ask urgently that it do a lot better.
We hoped that the Department would quickly evolve into a
world-class agency that had the planning, personnel, and
materials in place to respond swiftly and effectively in a
disaster, natural or terrorist. Katrina showed us that the
Department of Homeland Security has a lot of work to do on
itself.
Despite ample warnings that New Orleans is a bowl covered
by inadequate levees that would be overtopped or breached in a
big hurricane, despite the specific warnings of the mock
Hurricane Pam exercise done a year before Katrina hit that
government at all levels was unprepared to protect New Orleans
from the expected big hurricane, and despite the specific
mentions of emergency preparedness and rescue responsibilities
in the National Response Plan of January 19, 2005, the fact is
when Katrina hit America's Government was largely unprepared to
protect the people of the Gulf Coast.
Nature hit New Orleans hard but also gave its people a
break by hitting hardest 15 miles to the east. Because of the
failure to effectively evacuate the poor and infirm who could
not evacuate themselves, if Katrina had hit New Orleans head on
the death toll probably would have been in the tens of
thousands, as the Hurricane Pam exercise had predicted.
Here are a few things that came to pass. In the days before
the storm, FEMA failed to pre-stage personnel in New Orleans,
other than a single public affairs employee, or move adequate
amounts of crucial supplies of food, water, and medical
supplies to the scene.
The Department of Homeland Security failed to implement the
catastrophic incident annex to the National Response Plan early
enough, which would have triggered a more aggressive timely
Federal response.
The Department of Homeland Security failed to develop an
effective plan to maintain accurate situation assessments at
the Homeland Security Operations Center, which was set up to be
the Nation's nerve center during a disaster. That failure led
to the ignoring of reports that the levees were being breached
and overtopped and that the city had flooded with people
already trapped in attics and on rooftops.
FEMA was late in bringing in search and rescue teams and
then pulled them out for security reasons, even though other
agencies continued to stay and do search and rescue.
DHS failed to stand up until the day after landfall the
Interagency Incident Management Group, that senior level
interagency group charged with helping to coordinate the
Federal response to a catastrophe that was required once the
President declared an emergency on Saturday morning.
Yesterday we heard from General Bennett C. Landreneau of
the Louisiana National Guard who told us that the buses
promised by FEMA before the storm for post-landfall evacuation
and then at different points again on Monday, Tuesday, and
Wednesday after the storm did not arrive until Thursday, and
that delay unfortunately contributed to the human suffering
that the world saw at the Superdome and the convention center.
All those mistakes meant time was lost and lives were
threatened or lost.
Time is, obviously, everything in a crisis like Katrina or
in, God forbid, a terrorist attack. New Orleans Police
Department Superintendent Riley told us that earlier this week,
and he's right. People were drowning in flooded streets and
yards, breaking onto their rooftops with axes to await rescue,
starving in attics, and feeling that they had been abandoned
and losing all hope as their ventilators and medical support
systems failed for lack of power. Those lucky enough to escape
made it to the Superdome or Convention Center, and we all saw
the grim pictures of human neglect there.
Because timing and situational awareness is so central to
the response to every catastrophe, today's hearing is going to
look at what the most senior officials in the Federal
Government knew about the flooding of New Orleans and the
breaking of the levees and when they knew it. A little less
than a week after Katrina made landfall Secretary Chertoff
said, ``It was on Tuesday that the levee, it may have been
overnight Monday to Tuesday, that the levee started to break.
And it was midday Tuesday that I became aware of the fact that
there was no possibility of plugging the gap and that
essentially the lake was going to start to drain into the city.
I think that second catastrophe really caught everybody by
surprise.''
We're going to talk to Secretary Chertoff about that next
Tuesday. Today we will ask some of his senior staff how the
news media, including a New Orleans radio station early Monday
morning, numerous Federal agencies, and the American Red Cross
could be aware of growing and catastrophic floods in New
Orleans all day Monday, August 29, the day of landfall, while
the leadership of the Department of Homeland Security
responsible for disaster response somehow didn't know about it.
In our exhibit book we have Exhibit Q \1\ that details more
than 25 reports of flooding, levee breaches, and desperate
citizens seeking refuge from rising floodwaters that began
coming in as early as 8:30 a.m. on Monday, August 29. A
selection of them are shown on the boards here to my left. They
include, at 9:14 a.m., the National Weather Service issues a
flash flood warning reporting ``that a levee breach occurred
along the Industrial Canal at Tennessee Street. Three to eight
feet of water is expected due to the breach.''
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\1\ Exhibit Q appears in the Appendix on page 205.
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Then 2 hours later at 11:13, the White House Homeland
Security Council issues a report that says in part, ``Flooding
is significant throughout the region and a levee in New Orleans
has reportedly been breached, sending six to eight feet of
water throughout the Ninth Ward area of the city.''
The Homeland Security's operations center reports that
``Due to rising water in the Ninth Ward, residents are in their
attics and on their roofs.'' That's a quote from White House
Homeland Security Council at 11:13.
Then at 8:34 in the evening, Monday, the Army Corps of
Engineers issued a situation report that ``there is flooding in
St. Bernard Parish with reports of water up to the roofs of the
homes.'' And that ``all Jefferson and Orleans Parish pumping
stations are inoperable as of 29 August.''
Finally, Marty Bahamonde, I believe our first witness,
certainly one of the first witnesses last fall before the
Committee, the FEMA employee who Director Brown, I believe, had
dispatched to New Orleans, was there early, testified that he
had taken a flight on a Coast Guard helicopter over New Orleans
at approximately 6:30 p.m. Eastern time. A report from 10:30
p.m. Monday night that ``there is a quarter-mile breach in the
levee near the 17th Street Canal about 200 yards from Lake
Pontchartrain allowing water to flow into the city, an
estimated two-thirds to 75 percent of the city is underwater.
Hundreds of people were observed on the balconies and roofs of
a major apartment complex in the city. A few bodies were seen
floating in the water and the Coast Guard pilots also reported
seeing bodies but there are no details on locations.'' That's
the end of the report from Marty Bahamonde.
He took this picture that afternoon, and it shows a great
American city underwater, and still somehow the highest
officials at the Department of Homeland Security and perhaps at
the White House were under the impression as Monday, August 29,
ended that the city had dodged a bullet.
Madam Chairman, we've got to ask some tough questions today
because we've got to have answers if we're to make the changes
that we all want to make at DHS. In the early aftermath of the
Hurricane Katrina debacle, former FEMA Director Michael Brown
was singularly blamed for the inadequate Federal Government
response. Our investigation confirms, in my opinion, in fact
that Mr. Brown did not do a lot of what he should have done.
But he was not alone. In fact, there was a massive failure by
government at all levels and by those who lead it to prepare
and respond as they had a responsibility to do.
In the case of the Federal Government response to Katrina,
with the exceptions, proud exceptions, of the National Weather
Service and the U.S. Coast Guard, there was a shocking,
consequential and pervasive lack of preparation, response, and
leadership.
Mr. Brown, I understand that you are prepared this morning
to answer our questions fully and truthfully. I appreciate that
very much. I thank you for it. In doing so, I believe you will
be serving the public interest and this Committee's nonpartisan
interest in finding out exactly why the Federal Government
failed so badly in its preparations and response to Hurricane
Katrina so that together we can make sure it never happens
again.
Katrina has passed, but the clock is reset and ticking
again. We know that we will have to respond to another
disaster, natural or terrorist. We cannot and will not let the
clock run out on us again.
Thank you very much.
Chairman Collins. Thank you Senator. Thank you for your
generous comments.
Our first witness panel this morning includes the top two
FEMA leaders at the time of Hurricane Katrina's landfall.
Michael Brown was the Director of the Federal Emergency
Management Agency, known as FEMA, from March 2003 until he
resigned from that position in September 2005.
Patrick Rhode was Chief of Staff at FEMA from April 2003
until recently. At the time of Hurricane Katrina Mr. Rhode was
also serving as the Acting Deputy Director of FEMA. Soon after
that he returned to his former position as Chief of Staff.
I would ask that the witnesses rise so I can administer the
oath.
Do you swear that the testimony you are about to give to
the Committee will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing
but the truth, so help you, God?
Mr. Brown. I do.
Mr. Rhode. I do.
Chairman Collins. Thank you.
Mr. Brown, I understand that you have some brief remarks
that you would like to make.
TESTIMONY OF THE HON. MICHAEL D. BROWN, FORMER UNDER SECRETARY
FOR EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS AND RESPONSE AND DIRECTOR, FEDERAL
EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND
SECURITY
Mr. Brown. I do, Chairman Collins. Thank you.
In 1989, a congressman wrote a letter to the Washington
Times. That letter said that there is a fatal flaw if we
separate preparedness from response. That Congressman's name
was Tom Ridge. We reached that fatal flaw in 2003 when FEMA was
folded into the Department of Homeland Security. I would
encourage the Committee to look at a 1978 study done by the
National Governors Association in which--I'll quote very
briefly--``as the task of the projects were pursued, it became
evident that the major finding of this study is that many State
emergency operations are fragmented. This is not only because
uncoordinated Federal programs encourage State fragmentation,
but because a strong relationship of long-term recovery and
mitigation of future disasters must be tied to preparedness and
response for more immediate disasters and that is not always
adequately understood.''
Madam Chairman, I tell you that what occurred after FEMA
was folded into the Department of Homeland Security, there was
a cultural clash which didn't recognize the absolute inherent
science of preparing for disaster, responding to it, mitigating
against future disasters, and recovering from disasters. And
any time that you break that cycle of preparing, responding,
recovering, and mitigating, you're doomed to failure. And the
policies and the decisions that were implemented by DHS put
FEMA on a path of failure. And I think the evidence that we'll
have before you today will show the actions that were taken
that caused that failure, and I beg this Committee to take
corrective action to fix that so these disasters don't occur in
the future. Thank you.
Chairman Collins. Mr. Rhode.
TESTIMONY OF PATRICK J. RHODE,\1\ FORMER ACTING DEPUTY DIRECTOR
AND CHIEF OF STAFF, FEDERAL EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY, U.S.
DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY
Mr. Rhode. Good morning, Madam Chairman, Senator Lieberman,
Senators. I would like to make a very brief opening statement,
if I could.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Rhode appears in the Appendix on
page 82.
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My name is Patrick Rhode. I served as Chief of Staff of the
Federal Emergency Management Agency, part of the Department of
Homeland Security, from April 2003 until January 2006. I served
under both former Director Brown and the current Acting
Director David Paulison. I'm happy to be appearing before you
today voluntarily as you continue your important work in
reviewing the collective governmental response to Hurricane
Katrina and assessing possible changes in emergency management.
At the outset, I would like to observe, if I could, that
Hurricane Katrina was a truly catastrophic event. It was an
American tragedy on numerous levels. The magnitude of the
disaster was unlike anything we had previously faced as a
Nation. The storm compromised 90,000 square miles of the U.S.
Gulf Coast, an area almost the size of Great Britain.
On the professional level of emergency management, it was
unprecedented. On the personal level, my heart went out to
those who were suffering, and indeed, my heart still goes out
to those who continue to deal with the aftermath of Katrina.
Many people in the emergency management community,
including myself, tried to do the very best they could under
very difficult circumstances. The dedicated public servants
working on this issue at the Federal, State, and local level
were doing their very best to help as many people as they could
under the existing framework for emergency management.
As in all things, there are lessons to be learned from this
experience. I hope that these hearings will produce just such
learning and lead to the creation of new legislation that can
improve on the current system of disaster management. If we can
apply those lessons so as to make things better for the next
emergency situation, I want to do all that I can to contribute
appropriately to that effort.
As you know, in addition to appearing here today
voluntarily, I have fully cooperated with your staffs by
participating willingly in several interviews with them. In
addition, I would like respectfully to note that any statements
I offer today in response to questions about how to improve the
emergency management system are the opinions of one private
citizen. As I sit before you today, I am no longer a government
employee but have returned to private life with my wife and 6-
month-old daughter. I do not and cannot speak for FEMA.
Anything I have to offer is my own personal opinion for
whatever the Committee may deem it to be worth. And I want to
take care to be clear that it does not reflect the official
views of the agency or the Federal Government.
In short, I applaud the Committee for taking on the
challenges of assessing what kind of support is needed for and
what changes should be made to the country's emergency
management system. I am hopeful that together we can contribute
to enhancements and improvements that best assist disaster
victims in the future.
With that, I welcome any questions or comments you may
have.
Chairman Collins. Thank you, Mr. Rhode.
Mr. Brown, in my opening statement I mentioned a study that
you commissioned from the Mitre Corporation. It's under Exhibit
2 in the exhibit book.\1\ Mitre Corporation gave you its
findings on March 2005, and I'd like to read just some of the
key findings of this consultant:
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\1\ Exhibit 2 appears in the Appendix on page 303.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
``Unclear lines of responsibility lead to inconsistent
accountability. There is no deputy to you with operational
experience and there are too many political appointees. Not
enough senior management emergency experts. Lack of adequate
and consistent situational awareness across the enterprise.''
I also mention that earlier in 2004 that a group of senior
FEMA operational professionals, the Federal Coordinating
Officers cadre, wrote a memo to you outlining their grave
concerns. The memo cautions of unprepared teams and zero
funding for training, exercises, and team equipment. It is
suggested reestablishing a single response and recovery
division at FEMA to facilitate the refocusing that is necessary
to regain some of the efficiency that has been lost at FEMA.
We've received testimony that in response to both of these
warnings, which were very explicit in identifying serious
problems within FEMA, that you did not take any action.
My first question for you is, what action did you take in
response to the warnings from these senior career people and
the outside consultant?
Mr. Brown. Madam Chairman, the first thing I think the
Committee needs to understand is that I indeed did commission
those studies. In fact, I asked for both of those documents
from the FCOs and from the Mitre Corporation. We had to
literally go scrape together the money just to get the initial
work done by Mitre. But I had come to this conclusion: After 3
years of fighting, the articles you see in the Washington Post
about my attempts to try to get the FEMA mission put back on
track and how that was rebuffed consistently by the Department
of Homeland Security, I'd reached this conclusion: That in
order for FEMA to work effectively, I had to have something
that would give a roadmap to either future FEMA directors,
because I was intending to leave, and/or to the Department of
Homeland Security other than me saying it, that would point out
these problems.
As I said, we had to fight to get the money just to do the
Mitre study. Once we received the Mitre study, we were in the
process of trying to figure how to complete that, get that into
a document that would say, here's what we need to do, A, B, C,
so I could present that to Secretary Ridge and then Secretary
Chertoff to implement those. We were never given the money. We
were never given the resources. We were never given the
opportunity to implement any of those recommendations.
Chairman Collins. So you're testifying that you were
rebuffed in your efforts to remedy these problems by the
Department of Homeland Security. Did you ever discuss these
concerns about budget authority, organization, personnel with
individuals at the White House?
Mr. Brown. Yes, ma'am, I did.
Chairman Collins. With whom did you discuss those concerns?
Mr. Brown. I discussed those concerns with several members
of the President's senior staff.
Chairman Collins. Would you identify with whom you
discussed those concerns?
Mr. Brown. Before I do, Madam Chairman, may I just make a
few comments and ask for the Committee's recommendation?
Chairman Collins. Certainly.
Mr. Brown. On February 6, 2006, my counsel Andy Lester of
Lester, Loving and Davies sent to Harriet Miers, Counsel to the
President, a letter requesting direction for what I should do
when or if this kind of question is posed to me by the
Committee. Like Patrick, I'm a private citizen. The President
has the right to invoke Executive privilege in which
confidential communications between his senior advisers are not
subject to public scrutiny or discussion.\1\
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\1\ The letter from Mr. Lester (Exhibit 1) appears in the Appendix
on page 298.
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It's my belief, Madam Chairman, that I don't have the right
of Executive privilege, that I cannot invoke that. Yet I
understand that the President, the White House, the Executive
is a co-equal branch of government and that right of Executive
privilege resides with the President.
I also recognize that as a private citizen I am here to
truthfully and honestly answer any questions that you may ask.
So in response to the letter, which did not--and I want to make
sure that we understand, the letter did not request that I be
granted Executive privilege. The letter requested guidance on
what the other equal branch of government wanted me to say or
not say when these kinds of questions were posed. So despite
reports in the press to the contrary, the letter speaks for
itself. It did not request Executive privilege but guidance.
I received that guidance by letter again to counsel, to Mr.
Lester, from White House Counsel Harriet Miers in a letter
dated February 9, 2006. And I'll just read you the last
paragraph:
``The President's views regarding these Executive Branch
interests have not changed. I appreciate that your client is
sensitive to the interests implicated by potential disclosure
of confidential communications to which he was a party as a
senior official in the Administration as reflected in his
recent responses to Congressional committees and their staffs,
and request that he observe his past practices with respect to
those communications.''
In my opinion, Chairman Collins, the letter does not answer
our request for direction on what is to be done. So I am here
as a private citizen stuck between two equal branches of
government, one which is requesting that they're not going to
invoke Executive privilege but that I respect the
confidentiality of the concept of Executive privilege. And on
the other hand, appearing before you, again as a co-equal
branch of government, under oath, sworn to tell the truth,
without guidance from either one. So Madam Chairman, I would
ask you for guidance on what you would like Michael Brown,
private citizen of the United States, to do in this regard.
Chairman Collins. Does the letter that you have from the
White House Counsel direct you to assert Executive privilege
with respect to your conversations with senior Administration
officials?
Mr. Brown. It does not, and nor do I believe that I have
the right to assert that privilege on behalf of the President.
I am a private citizen.
Chairman Collins. Has the White House Counsel orally
directed you to assert Executive privilege with respect to
those conversations you've had with senior Administration
officials?
Mr. Brown. They have not to me, and to the best of my
knowledge, they have not directed that to my counsel either.
That's correct.
Chairman Collins. These conversations clearly could be
subject to an assertion of Executive privilege. In fact, if
such a privilege were to be asserted by the White House, I
would, in all likelihood, rule that the privilege applied to
those conversations and I would instruct you not to answer the
questions so that we could further explore the privilege issue
with the White House.
However, in the case of conversations between the
presidential advisers, the privilege is for the Executive
branch to assert, not the legislative branch. And because you
have testified that the White House Counsel's Office has chosen
not to assert this privilege, there is no basis for you to
decline to answer the question about your conversations with
presidential advisers. So I would direct you to respond to the
question.
Senator Stevens. Madam Chairman.
Chairman Collins. Senator Stevens.
Senator Stevens. Has anyone contacted the staff or yourself
from the White House requesting that Executive privilege be
recognized in this hearing?
Chairman Collins. Yes, I had a lengthy discussion last
night with the White House Counsel in which I advised her to
either send Mr. Brown a clear letter asserting Executive
privilege or to send it to this Committee or to have a member
of the White House Counsel's Office present today to object to
questions, and Ms. Miers declined to do either.
Senator Stevens. I just want to say for the record, as a
former general counsel of an Executive department, I believe
Executive privilege is in the best interest of the country, and
in a situation like this, if this witness testifies and there's
a difference of opinion, then we're faced with a question of
whether the White House wants to send someone down to challenge
the statements that have been made. I think it's a very
difficult ground we're on. I don't know where Mr. Brown is
going, but it does worry me that there is a legitimate basis
for Executive privilege. If they've not asserted it to you,
then that's their problem.
Chairman Collins. The Senator is correct, and I invited the
White House to provide me with that assertion last night. They
declined to do so. I invited the White House to have an
attorney present to make the assertion. I have reviewed the
letter, and we will put both the letter from Mr. Brown's lawyer
and Ms. Miers' response into the record. And the letter does
not assert the Executive privilege.\1\
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\1\ The letter from Ms. Miers appears in the Appendix on page 334.
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Senator Stevens. Is there White House counsel present?
Chairman Collins. There is not a White House counsel
present that I am aware of. I suspect there are White House
staffers here however.
Senator Lieberman.
Senator Lieberman. Madam Chairman, if I may, first I wanted
to tell you I both appreciate and support your ruling in the
context of--even if Executive privilege had been asserted, we
are a co-equal branch of government, and in this case, we are
doing an investigation on a totally non-partisan basis that
goes to the heart of the public safety of the American people.
So we have an interest in obtaining the truth. We're not out to
get anybody. We're out to get the truth.
That would be my opinion even if Executive privilege had
been asserted, but Executive privilege has not been asserted,
and therefore I think the privilege and responsibility, let
alone the right, of Congress as representatives of the American
people to get the whole truth about Katrina really is the
priority value that we have to honor. I thank you, Madam
Chairman, for doing exactly that in your ruling.
Chairman Collins. Mr. Brown, I would direct you to answer
the question, and I am going to reclaim the time that I had
before we had to resolve this issue.
Mr. Brown. Chairman Collins, I'm happy to answer those
questions. Could you restate the question? [Laughter.]
Chairman Collins. I asked you with whom you talked at the
White House about the budget authority and personnel problems
that you perceived were hindering your ability to carry out
your mission.
Mr. Brown. At various times I had conversations with the
Deputy White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten before he moved
over to OMB. And I had numerous conversations with Deputy White
House Chief of Staff Joe Hagin and occasionally conversations
with Chief of Staff Andy Card.
I've also had conversations with both former White House
Homeland Security Adviser General John Gordon and with the
current Homeland Security Adviser Fran Townsend.
Chairman Collins. Thank you. Mr. Brown, Exhibit 6 is a
series of e-mails about conditions in New Orleans on Monday
morning.\1\ We know from testimony before this Committee that
Marty Bahamonde of FEMA first received a report of the levees
breaching on Monday morning at about 11 o'clock. He later in
the day overflew the area and saw it firsthand.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ Exhibit 6 appears in the Appendix on page 331.
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The e-mails also talk about all of the other problems in
the city. By 10 o'clock on that Monday morning, August 29, you
had received a report from Mr. Bahamonde that there was already
severe flooding in the area, that the water level was ``up to
the second floor of the two-story houses, that people were
trapped in attics, and that the pumps for the levees were
starting to fail.''
What action did you take in response to that information
and to pass that information along to the Secretary of Homeland
Security?
Mr. Brown. Two things, Chairman Collins. First and
foremost, I alerted headquarters as to those reports and asked
them to get in contact with Marty to confirm those reports.
And I also put a call in and spoke to, I believe it was,
Deputy Chief of Staff Hagin on at least two occasions on that
day to inform him of what was going on.
Chairman Collins. Was there anyone else that you called at
the White House to inform them of these developments?
Mr. Brown. It would have been either Andy Card or Joe
Hagin.
Chairman Collins. DHS officials tell us that they did not
know of the severity of the situation in New Orleans until
Tuesday morning. That's almost 24 hours after you received the
information that I referred to about the severe flooding in New
Orleans. They also assert that they believe you failed to make
sure that they were getting this very critical information.
I'd like you to respond to that criticism.
Mr. Brown. First and foremost, I find it a little
disingenuous that DHS would claim that they were not getting
that information because FEMA held continuous video telephone
conferences--I'll refer to them as VTCs--in which at least once
a day if not several times a day we would be on conference
calls and video calls to make certain that everyone had
situational awareness. Now I'm sitting in Baton Rouge, so I'm
not sure at all times who is on the video conference, on the
VTC, but the record indicates that on numerous occasions at
least Deputy Secretary Jackson and at least Matthew Broderick
or Bob Stephan, someone from the HSOC, the Homeland Security
Operations Center, is in on those conversations, on those VTCs.
So for them to now claim that they didn't have awareness of it
I think is just baloney. They should have had awareness of it
because they were receiving the same information that we were.
It's also my understanding that Mr. Rhode or someone else
on his behalf sent an e-mail either directly to the DHS Chief
of Staff or perhaps to the HSOC about that information.
But in terms of my responsibility, much like I had operated
successfully in Florida, my obligation was to the White House
and to make certain that the President understood what was
going on and what the situation was, and I did that. And the
VTCs were the operational construct by which DHS would get that
situational awareness. They would get that through those VTCs.
Chairman Collins. Mr. Rhode, were you aware of when the
levees had broken on Monday morning? And what did you do with
the information? First, when were you aware of the problems
with the flooding as a result of the levees breaching?
Mr. Rhode. Madam Chairman, I believe that I first heard
about the issues with the levee, at least partial information,
during the early hours of Monday morning or mid-morning, I want
to say, somewhere between 9 o'clock, 10 o'clock or so. I
believe that I came across an e-mail that was sent to me that
suggested that perhaps there was a levee breach. I don't think
there was a whole lot more information than that. And I
endeavored to, as was always my practice whenever someone was
sending me operational information, I tried to make sure that
information made it directly to the operators.
Our protocol within FEMA was to make sure that the
operations team had any sort of situational information. Again,
my role was in Washington, DC. I was not in Louisiana. But as
that information became available and as I became aware of it,
I wanted to make sure that the operations team had it within
Washington so that it could then be transmitted to the Homeland
Security Operations Center as there were many situational
reports, obviously, throughout the day.
Chairman Collins. But that's exactly why I'm asking you.
You were in Washington.
Mr. Rhode. Yes, ma'am.
Chairman Collins. You were now the top FEMA official. Did
you take any steps to ensure that Secretary Chertoff was aware
of this information?
Mr. Rhode. As the information became more and more
apparent, Marty Bahamonde later that day helped orchestrate a
conference call, that I participated in, and at the conclusion
of that conference call I sent a letter to the department, or
sent an e-mail to the Department of Homeland Security, in
addition to what I thought was operational people that were
also on that call that were making sure the Homeland Security
Operation Center had that information.
Chairman Collins. Mr. Brown, it isn't only DHS officials
who say that they were unaware until Tuesday that the levees
had collapsed. I've also been told that exact same thing by
Admiral Timothy Keating, the head of Northern Command, who is
responsible for homeland defense for DOD. He, in an interview,
told me that he was not aware until Tuesday morning that the
levees had breached and that the city had flooded.
Was there any communication from you or did you take any
steps to ensure that Northern Command was informed of this
catastrophic development?
Mr. Brown. I would not, at that point, have called Admiral
Keating directly but would, through the FEMA operations center,
there is a military liaison there. So they would have had that
same operational situational awareness to pass back up their
chain of command so that Admiral Keating or Secretary Rumsfeld
or any of those could have had that same situational awareness.
Chairman Collins. What is so troubling is we have heard
over and over again from top DHS officials, from top DOD
officials, from the leadership throughout the Administration
that they were simply unaware of how catastrophic the
hurricane's impact had been because of the breaching of the
levee. Can you help us understand this enormous disconnect
between what was happening on the ground, a city 80 percent
flooded, uncontrolled levees, people dying, thousands of people
waiting to be rescued, and the official reaction among many of
the key leaders in Washington and in Northern Command that
somehow New Orleans had dodged the bullet.
Mr. Brown. Chairman Collins, let me frame an answer a
little different way. It's my belief that had there been a
report coming out from Marty Bahamonde that said, yes, we've
confirmed that a terrorist has blown up the 17th Street Canal
levee, then everybody would have jumped all over that and been
trying to do everything they could. But because this was a
natural disaster, that has become the stepchild within the
Department of Homeland Security.
And so you now have these two systems operating, one which
cares about terrorism, and FEMA and our State and local
partners who are trying to approach everything from all
hazards. And so there's this disconnect that exists within the
system that we've created because of DHS.
All they had to do was to listen to those VTCs and pay
attention to those VTCs, and they would have known what was
going on. And in fact I e-mailed a White House official that
evening about how bad it was, making sure that they knew again
how bad that it was, identifying that we were going to have
environmental problems and housing problems and all of those
kinds of problems.
So it doesn't surprise me that DHS officials would say,
well, we weren't aware, they're off doing other things, it's a
natural disaster, so we're just going to allow FEMA to do all
of that. That had become the mentality within the Department.
Chairman Collins. Senator Lieberman.
Senator Lieberman. Thanks, Madam Chairman.
Thanks for your cooperation. Mr. Brown, we are going to get
back to those comments. Obviously, our hope was that the
Department would be ready to deal with natural disasters and
terrorist attacks and that the impact of a terrorist bomb on
the levees would have been exactly the same as the hurricane
was to flooding the city.
Let me go back to that day because this is very important,
and your comments just now highlight it, and this is about
Marty Bahamonde. He takes the two helicopter flights, 5 p.m.
and 6 p.m. Central Time. He sees the devastation, and he told
us that immediately after those helicopter rides, he called you
and reported his findings to you.
Is it correct that Mr. Bahamonde told you that during the
helicopter rides on that Monday evening, he could see New
Orleans flooding?
Mr. Brown. That's correct.
Senator Lieberman. Now, is it also correct that Mr.
Bahamonde told you that during the helicopter ride he could see
that the levees had broken? Is that right?
Mr. Brown. That's correct.
Senator Lieberman. Mr. Bahamonde told us that after he
finished giving you that devastating information, you said you
were going to call the White House. In your staff interview,
you said that you did have a conversation with a White House
official on Monday evening, August 29th, regarding Bahamonde's
flyover. Who was that White House official?
Mr. Brown. There is an e-mail--and I don't remember who the
e-mail was to, but it's in response to the information that
Marty has given me. And my e-mail--because I recall this quite
vividly--I am calling the White House now.
Senator Lieberman. In other words, you were e-mailing
somebody at the White House----
Mr. Brown. No, I was actually e-mailing somebody in
response to Marty's information.
Senator Lieberman. Got it. OK.
Mr. Brown. Back to FEMA, in which I said, yes, I'm calling
the White House now. And I don't recall specifically who I
called, but because of the pattern of how I usually interacted
with the White House, my assumption is that I was probably
calling and talking to Joe Hagin.
Senator Lieberman. Joe Hagin, who is the Deputy Chief of
Staff----
Mr. Brown. The Deputy Chief of Staff who was at Crawford
with the President on that day.
Senator Lieberman. He was at Crawford, and you called him.
It is surprising you wouldn't remember exactly, but to the best
of your recollection, you called Joe Hagin. And is it right
that you called him because he had some special responsibility
for oversight of emergency management?
Mr. Brown. No. It was because I had a personal relationship
with Joe, and Joe understands emergency management, and he's at
Crawford with the President.
Senator Lieberman. Got it. And you, quite appropriately and
admirably, wanted to get the word to the President.
Mr. Brown. That's correct.
Senator Lieberman. As quickly as you could. Did you tell
Mr. Hagin in that phone call that New Orleans was flooding?
Mr. Brown. I think I told him that we were realizing our
worst nightmare, that everything that we had planned about,
worried about, that FEMA, frankly, had worried about for 10
years was coming true.
Senator Lieberman. Do you remember if you told him that the
levees had broken?
Mr. Brown. Being on a witness stand, I feel obligated to
say that I don't recall specifically saying those words, but it
was that ``New Orleans is flooding, it's the worst-case
scenario.''
Senator Lieberman. Right, and maybe that's the bottom line,
that you said this was the worst-case scenario, the City of New
Orleans is flooding. Did you ask Mr. Hagin for any particular
action by the White House, the President, the Administration,
in that phone call?
Mr. Brown. They always asked me, What do you need? Joe was
very good about that. The difference is in 2004--the best way
to describe it, Senator, if you'll bear with me for a minute,
is in 2004 during the hurricanes that struck Florida, I was
asked that same question, What do you need? And I specifically
asked both Secretary Card and Joe Hagin that on my way from
Andrews down to Punta Gorda, Florida, that the best thing they
could do for me was to keep DHS out of my hair. So--if I could
just finish.
Senator Lieberman. Yes.
Mr. Brown. So what had changed between 2004 and 2005----
Senator Lieberman. Katrina, right.
Mr. Brown. Between the hurricanes of 2004 and now Katrina,
was that there was now this mentality or this thinking that,
no, now this time we were going to follow the chain of command.
Senator Lieberman. Which was?
Mr. Brown. Which was in essence----
Senator Lieberman. Put you in charge.
Mr. Brown. Was put me in charge, but now I have to feed
everything up through Chertoff or somehow through DHS, which
just bogged things down.
Senator Lieberman. So you don't have any recollection of
specifically asking Mr. Hagin for the White House to take any
action at that time?
Mr. Brown. Nothing specific. I just thought they needed to
be aware of the situation.
Senator Lieberman. Understood. Mr. Brown, on the evening of
landfall, you appeared on the 9 p.m. edition, that is, that
same evening, of MSNBC's ``Rita Cosby Live and Direct.'' You
said then very explicitly that you were deeply concerned about
what was happening in New Orleans, and I quote, ``It could be
weeks and months before people are able to get back into some
of these neighborhoods'' because of the flooding. You also said
that you had ``already told the President tonight that we can
anticipate a housing need here of at least in the tens of
thousands.'' You were correct.
Did you, in fact, speak to President Bush that night,
August 29?
Mr. Brown. I really don't recall if the President got--
normally during my conversations with Deputy Chief of Staff
Hagin, sometimes the President would get on the phone for a few
minutes, sometimes he wouldn't, and I don't recall specifically
that night whether he did or not. But I never worried about
whether I talked directly to the President because I knew that
in speaking to Joe, I was talking directly to the President.
Senator Lieberman. Well, it is surprising, again, to me
that you wouldn't remember whether the President was on your
call to Joe Hagin.
Mr. Brown. I don't want to appear arrogant, but I talked to
the President a lot, and so sometimes when he is on the phone
or not on the phone, I just wouldn't recall.
Senator Lieberman. All right. So that maybe you were
inflating a little bit or being loose with your language when
you told MSNBC that you had already told the President that
night about----
Mr. Brown. No, because when I say that I've told the
President, if I've told Joe Hagin----
Senator Lieberman. I got it.
Mr. Brown [continuing]. Or told Andy Card, I've told the
President.
Senator Lieberman. I have this problem here in the Capitol,
too, when somebody says, ``Senator Warner told me to tell
you''--and then I found out it was a staff member, or I told
Senator Warner--OK. [Laughter.]
Mr. Brown. Well, you need to get staffers as good as Hagin
and Card because, trust me, they tell the President.
Senator Lieberman. OK. Let me now go to Secretary Chertoff
because you talked about the chain of command that you were
asked to follow. Did you speak to Secretary Chertoff after your
call with Marty Bahamonde and tell him about the severity of
the situation in New Orleans on Monday evening?
Mr. Brown. I don't recall specifically if I talked to
Chertoff on that day or not.
Senator Lieberman. Why would you not have if that was the
chain of command?
Mr. Brown. Because I'm still operating that I need to get
things done, and the way I get things done is I request them
from the White House and they happen.
Senator Lieberman. Well, then, did you tell anyone else at
the Department of Homeland Security in a high position--Deputy
Secretary Michael Jackson, for instance?
Mr. Brown. I think that Michael and I may have had a
conversation.
Senator Lieberman. Monday evening?
Mr. Brown. Yes.
Senator Lieberman. Which would have been along the same
lines.
Mr. Brown. Exactly.
Senator Lieberman. Am I right that at some point on Monday
evening there was either a phone conference call or a video
conference call that you were on reporting on the situation
from New Orleans?
Mr. Brown. Yes.
Senator Lieberman. And do you know whether anybody from the
Department of Homeland Security was on that call?
Mr. Brown. They were on all the calls.
Senator Lieberman. OK. Was Secretary Chertoff on that call?
Do you remember?
Mr. Brown. I don't recall.
Senator Lieberman. Do you know where he was that evening?
Mr. Brown. As I went back through my e-mails, I discovered
that he was either gone or going to Atlanta to visit the FEMA
Region IV offices and to visit CDC.
Senator Lieberman. Yes, and we are going to ask him about
that because obviously the No. 1 man in terms of the
responsibility for the Federal Government response to this
disaster for some reason did not appreciate that it was such a
disaster that he got on a plane and went to Atlanta for a
conference on avian flu.
I want to go back to Sunday, the day before. Am I right
that there was a video teleconference on that Sunday in which
President Bush and Secretary Chertoff were on the conference?
Mr. Brown. I specifically recall the President being on the
conference because he was in the SCIF at Crawford.
Senator Lieberman. Right.
Mr. Brown. But I don't specifically recall seeing Secretary
Chertoff on the screen.
Senator Lieberman. OK. And on that Sunday video conference
call, am I right, you were still in Washington then?
Mr. Brown. That's correct. I left that afternoon.
Senator Lieberman. But you described the catastrophic
implications of the kind of hurricane that Dr. Max Mayfield and
all the other forecasters were predicting that day.
Mr. Brown. I told the staff--and if you don't have the
transcripts of that VTC, then we need to get them for you.
Senator Lieberman. I want to give you a phrase. You
described it as ``a catastrophe within a catastrophe.''
Mr. Brown. That's correct. This was why I was screaming and
hollering about getting money to do catastrophic disaster
planning. This is why I specifically wanted to do New Orleans
as the first place to do that. This is why I was so furious
that once we were able to do Hurricane Pam that I was rebuffed
on getting the money to do the follow-up, the follow-on. This
is why I told the staff during that video conference call----
Senator Lieberman. The day before the hurricane?
Mr. Brown. The day before the hurricane struck--that I
expected them to cut every piece of red tape, do everything
they could, that it was balls to the wall, that I didn't want
to hear anybody say that we couldn't do anything, to do
everything they humanly could to respond to this because I knew
in my gut, Senator, this was the bad one.
Senator Lieberman. Thanks, Mr. Brown. Time is up for me.
Chairman Collins. Senator Coleman.
Senator Coleman. Thank you, Madam Chairman, and, again,
like all my other colleagues, my thanks to you for your
leadership. This has been extraordinary.
I have to make a couple of observations as I listened to
the testimony, Madam Chairman. We hear a lot and we have seen
in this Committee a lot of discussion about structural
problems. We have had hearings where local folks and Federal
folks and State folks all pointed at each other saying, well,
they were in charge, they were in charge. Anytime you get a
disaster like this--a disaster not just of Katrina but the
disaster of the response--you get an analysis that we are
getting here of literally hundreds of thousands of pages of
review of information.
But I am going to be very blunt here. What we had--and
having been a mayor and involved in situations that could have
been terrible, that weren't so terrible, in the end when things
go bad we do the analysis and we see all the structural
inadequacies. But when you have good leadership, oftentimes
even with structural inadequacies, things don't go bad. And my
sense as I listened to this is we had almost the perfect storm
of poor leadership. We had a governor who was indecisive, met
with the President, met with the mayor, and did not make a
decision, wanted more time. We had a mayor who, though well
intentioned, is holed up in a hotel room without
communications. Again, good intentions, wants to know what is
going on on the ground, but nobody is in charge.
And, Mr. Brown, the concern that I have is from your
perspective I am hearing ``balls to the wall,'' but I am
looking at e-mails and lack of responsiveness. Marty Bahamonde
sending an e-mail about ``situation past critical''--this is on
Wednesday at this time--``hotels kicking people out, dying
patients,'' and your response is, ``Thanks for the update.
Anything I need to do to tweak?''
Mr. Brown. Senator, with all due respect, you take that out
of context because you do that on the fly saying, yes, is there
anything else I need to tweak, and what you ignore is what's
done beyond that, which is calling the White House, talking to
the operations people, and making certain that things are
getting done. And I'm frankly getting sick and tired of these
e-mails being taken out of context with words like, ``What do I
need to tweak?'' Because I need to know is there something else
that I need to tweak, and that doesn't even include all of the
other stuff that's going on, Senator.
So, with all due respect, don't draw conclusions from an e-
mail.
Senator Coleman. And, Mr. Brown, I would maintain that, in
fact, the context of the e-mails are very clear, that they show
a lack of responsiveness, that they show a disconnect. That's
the context. In fact, I am not going to take individual ones,
but if you look at the entire context of the e-mail discussion,
you are getting information on Monday, 11:57, a message saying
New Orleans reported 20-foot-wide breach. It is 11:57. An e-
mail, not out of context, coming back saying, ``I am told water
not over the bridge.'' At that point obviously it hasn't hit
the fan for you. And so I don't think it is out of context. I
think the context of the e-mails--and not just the e-mails, by
the way, but the things that we as Americans saw, to me it is
absolutely still stunning that on Thursday, you have people at
a Convention Center that are suffering. All of America knows
that. All you have to do is watch TV. It doesn't matter what
channel you watch. And what we have you saying at that time is,
``We have just learned that''--this is a CNN interview,
September 1, not out of context. ``And so this is catastrophic
as it continues to grow. I will tell you this, though, every
person at that Convention Center, we just learned that today,
and so I have directed we have all available resources.'' I
knew a couple of days ago. So did America----
Mr. Brown. Senator----
Senator Coleman. And so let me finish the comment. What I
hear is you saying, well, the structural problem falls with the
Mitre report, in which it was laid out very clearly the
structural inadequacies. And your testimony today is that you
had conversations, you pushed that forward.
Can you show me where either in the e-mails or in the
record your very clear directives to go ``balls to the wall''
to clean this situation, to fix it? Do you have anything that I
can look at as a former prosecutor in writing that gives
substance to what you have testified to today?
Mr. Brown. Absolutely. I've testified in front of the House
that I misspoke on that day regarding that e-mail. We learned
about the Convention Center on Wednesday, and we started
demanding--because the Convention Center was not planned for.
It was not in anyone's plans, including the city and the State.
And when we learned about it on Wednesday night, we immediately
started demanding the Army and resources to take care of that.
And there are e-mails in the packages that you have where I am
screaming, ``Where is the Army? I need the Army now. Why hasn't
it shown up?'' And because I misspoke about when I learned
about the Convention Center after being up for 24 hours, you
want to take that out of context, and, Senator, I'm not going
to allow you to do that.
Senator Coleman. Let me ask you about a conversation that--
Mayor Nagin came before us, this Committee, and he talked about
going over to Zephyr Stadium. And Mayor Nagin's comment to this
Committee is, and I quote, ``I was so flabbergasted. I mean,
we're in New Orleans. We're struggling. The city was touch and
go as it relates to security. And when I flew out to Zephyr
Stadium to the Saints' facility, I got off the helicopter and
just started walking around, and I was awestruck. We had been
requesting portable lights for the Superdome because we were
standing at night and all over. To make a long story short,
there were rows of portable lights. We all knew sanitary
conditions were so poor, we wanted portable toilets. They had
them all over the place.''
Were you with Mayor Nagin at that time?
Mr. Brown. I don't know whether I was with him on that
particular date or not, but I know the area he is talking
about.
Senator Coleman. And can you explain to this Committee why
if there had been obvious deep concerns about sanitary
facilities, about lighting, why those facilities, those
concerns had not been met?
Mr. Brown. Because they were having--the U.S. Army, the
National Guard, were having difficulty getting those supplies
into the Superdome. You need to understand that there are media
reports of shooting, there are media reports of looting and
everything else going on. And if the Army moves in there, the
Army kills people. And so they had to be very careful about
moving those things in there.
By the same token, you have civilians who began to move
things in there and couldn't get them there. So, yes, there
were things stockpiled, and as that supply chain continued to
fill up, Zephyr Field was full of a lot of stuff. And those
things were continuing to go on the other end to get into the
city.
And so for you to take a snapshot of Mayor Nagin going
there and being there for a few minutes and seeing all of that
and him screaming in his typical way about, ``I want all this
stuff in the city,'' again is taking it out of context,
Senator.
Senator Coleman. When did you order that food and water be
delivered into the Convention Center?
Mr. Brown. The day that we learned about it, that
Wednesday. We immediately ordered that stuff to be moved.
Whether it was or not, whether it was actually done or not is
the question you should be asking. And if it wasn't, you need
to be asking why because we didn't have the capacity within
FEMA ourselves to do that, and we needed the Fifth Army or the
First Army to move that stuff in there.
Plus, I will also remind you that there's no----
Senator Coleman. Mr. Brown, just on that point alone, my
notes indicate--and I just wanted to check the records. Records
that have been produced to the Committee by DHS indicate that
FEMA did not order food and water for the Convention Center
until 8 a.m. on Friday, September 2.
Mr. Brown. I can tell you unequivocally, Senator, under
oath, that the minute that I learned that there were people in
the Convention Center, I turned to Bill Lokey, my Federal
Coordinating Officer, my operations person on the ground, and
said, ``Get MREs, get stuff moving in there.''
Senator Coleman. Did you ever do any follow-up to find out
whether that happened?
Mr. Brown. Senator, I continued to do operations as best I
could all along throughout that time, and I would continually
ask questions: Are things happening? Are things happening? Are
things happening?
Senator Coleman. The record is very clear as to when the
order was given. It was given on Friday.
My concern is this, Mr. Brown: Again, I understand there
are structural problems. I understand some of the concerns that
have been raised about the function of DHS and the integration
of FEMA. But as I listen to your testimony, you are not
prepared to kind of put a mirror in front of your face and
recognize your own inadequacies and say, ``You know something?
I made some big mistakes. I wasn't focused. I didn't get things
done.'' And instead what you have is, ``The problems are
structural. I knew it up front. I really tried to change it.''
The record, the entirety of the record, doesn't reflect
that. And perhaps you may get a more sympathetic hearing if you
had a willingness to kind of confess your own sins in this. You
know, your testimony here is that you are going to communicate
to the President as to what he understood. I am not sure what
you understood. I am not sure you got it. And I have to tell
you the record, not the e-mails but the record, reflects that
you didn't get it or you didn't in writing or in some way make
commands that would move people to do what has to be done until
way after it should have been done.
Mr. Brown. Senator, with all due respect, what do you want
me to say? I have admitted to mistakes publicly. I have
admitted to mistakes in hearings. What more, Senator Coleman,
do you want from me?
Senator Coleman. Well, I think----
Mr. Brown. What do you want from me? I am asking you. What
do you want from me?
Senator Coleman. Well, what I am hearing today and what I
heard from your testimony is coming in and talking about all
these structural problems--that the die was cast. That was your
testimony today, about the integration--and, by the way, I have
my own questions about the integration of FEMA and DHS. But
what I heard today from you that the die was cast----
Mr. Brown. It was.
Senator Coleman. And what I am saying, Mr. Brown, I am
saying that, in fact, leadership makes a difference, you didn't
provide the leadership. Even with structural infirmities,
strong leadership can overcome that, and clearly that was not
the case here.
Mr. Brown. Well, Senator, that is very easy for you to say
sitting behind that dais and not being there in the middle of
that disaster watching that human suffering and watching those
people dying and trying to deal with the structural
dysfunctionalities, even within the Federal Government. And I
absolutely resent you sitting here saying that I lacked the
leadership to do that because I was down there pushing
everything that I could. 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.
Senator Coleman. A little more candor would suffice.
Thank you, Madam Chairman.
Mr. Brown. How much more candid--ask me the question,
Senator. Ask me the question.
Senator Coleman. Thank you, but I think my time is up.
Thank you, Madam Chairman.
Chairman Collins. Senator Akaka.
Senator Akaka. Thank you very much, Madam Chairman. I want
you to know that I admire your leadership and commend you and
our Ranking Member for your leadership in pursuing these
hearings for the sake of the security and safety of our
country.
I agree with you, Madam Chairman, and with the Ranking
Member that it is unfair to lay blame of the gross
mismanagement of the disaster on one or two people. And I do
not believe that Mr. Brown should be the scapegoat for all that
went wrong.
Mr. Brown. Thank you, Senator.
Senator Akaka. However, you and Mr. Rhode were in charge of
FEMA, and I can recall Harry Truman's statement that ``The buck
stops here.'' And so you are it, and the hearing is on you.
What happened to the people in Louisiana and throughout the
Gulf Coast reinforces the need for qualified, experienced
leaders in senior positions throughout the Department of
Homeland Security. That is why I introduced legislation last
fall to require minimum professional qualifications for most
Senate-confirmed positions at DHS.
Nor should we forget that until 2003 FEMA was an
independent Cabinet-level agency. One of my reasons for voting
against creating DHS was that FEMA would no longer operate
independently. FEMA's activities and budget are controlled by
the Secretary of the Department. We cannot forget that the
problems of FEMA are the problems of DHS and the ultimate
responsibility of the Commander-in-Chief.
Mr. Brown, my question relates to a statement you made
during your interview with the Committee. When asked about
whether you were keeping Secretary Chertoff apprised of the
situation in New Orleans on Monday, the day the storm hit, you
stated that you, and I quote, ``did not believe that the
Department had any operational mandate at that point and that
if the Secretary wants information about something, he can
either call me directly or reach out to HSOC to get that
information.''
Wasn't it your responsibility as Under Secretary to keep
Secretary Chertoff informed on the developments of an ongoing
crisis that involved multiple components of his agency?
Mr. Brown. Yes, Senator, it is my responsibility to keep
him informed, and we have structures in place by which to do
that. The HSOC and his representatives are involved in the
VTCs, and he and I exchanged phone calls and talked at times to
do that. But when you are running operations, the primary
responsibility has to be to run operations, and then you feed
information, as you should, through the channels--through the
VTCs, through the e-mails, through the situation reports that
get to him. And then if he has questions about any of those SIT
reports that come to him, he can call me, or if there is
something in the SIT reports that I think is of particular
interest to him, then I would call and tell him.
Senator Akaka. Mr. Brown, in your interview, you referred
to the so-called tax that FEMA was forced to pay when the
Department was first stood up and you were the Deputy Director
of FEMA. You said that the tax funded the shared components of
DHS, such as the Secretary's office and the IT system. You told
Committee investigators that FEMA's mitigation funding suffered
a disproportionate reduction because you were trying to avoid
taking money out of other areas, such as the National Flood
Insurance Fund.
You may recall that the Administration tried to reduce
FEMA's mitigation funding prior to the creation of DHS. The
President's fiscal year 2002 budget proposed eliminating the
Pre-Disaster Mitigation program, which later was saved by
Congress. The Administration responded by seeking to eliminate
all post-disaster mitigation funding in fiscal year 2003.
Is it possible that the reason mitigation funding took such
a hard hit when DHS collected its tax is that mitigation
programs were not valued by the Administration?
Mr. Brown. It is nice to appear before a Committee as a
private citizen and not be constrained by talking points or
SAPs that say what you can and cannot say, but, yes, I think
that is part of the problem, that there is a belief within OMB
that mitigation programs don't have a good enough cost/benefit
ratio so, therefore, we need to eliminate them, when indeed I
do believe that there is a good side to it, that the
Administration believes that pre-disaster mitigation funds
could be used. So there is a balance to be struck to try to do
both pre- and post-disaster.
But I do think that mitigation, to a certain extent, was
given a back seat.
Senator Akaka. Mr. Brown, in response to prehearing
questions for your confirmation hearing before this Committee
in June 2002 to be Deputy Director of FEMA, you stated,
``Mitigation will continue to be a primary focus for the
Agency.''
As Under Secretary, did you consider informing Congress
that mitigation programs are not being prioritized and were, in
fact, receiving less funding than you thought they should have
under DHS?
Mr. Brown. I think the American public needs to know how it
works in DC, that an agency administrator can have his
priorities and OMB can have their priorities and never shall
the 'twain--shall the two meet. And despite my personal belief
that mitigation is good and we need more mitigation funding in
this country, OMB takes a different tack, that mitigation
doesn't have a great cost/benefit analysis, which you could
argue all day long. I believe that it does. And so consequently
mitigation gets cut. I don't believe that it should.
But by the same token, Senator, I think you would not
respect me if I came to you in your office and sat down and
said, I know the President has proposed this, but here's my
personal belief.
Now, yes, sometimes I would try to make certain that people
understood what my real belief was in hopes that they could
maybe do something about it. But I would not want to be that
disloyal.
Senator Akaka. Mr. Brown, Marty Bahamonde, a FEMA public
affairs officer that has been mentioned by other Senators
today, was sent to New Orleans prior to the storm to be your
eyes and ears on the ground because you personally trusted him,
according to his testimony before the Committee in October
2005. His description of why he was sent to New Orleans, is it
correct?
Mr. Brown. I actually tried to send two people to New
Orleans. I sent Marty to New Orleans and tried to send Phil
Parr, one of our FCOs, to New Orleans, too. Marty was able to
make it in. Phil couldn't. I think Phil got stuck in Beaumont
or Houston or somewhere and couldn't actually get there. But I
trusted both of those men, and I wanted both of them there
because I did trust their capabilities.
Senator Akaka. Mr. Brown, in your interview with the
Committee, you stated that you didn't completely rely on Mr.
Bahamonde's Monday morning report that the levees had broken
because, ``He tends at times toward hyperbole.''
Why did you send Mr. Bahamonde to be your eyes and ears if
you did not implicitly trust his ability to relay information
back to you accurately?
Mr. Brown. Look, I trust Marty, and I think Marty has good
judgment. But Marty does tend to hyperbole. I mean, that
doesn't mean you don't trust him.
The real problem that was going on while Marty was down
there is that I'm sitting in Baton Rouge, Marty's giving us
these reports, and yet the governor's staff is getting
conflicting reports. And I'm trying to balance those two
reports. Marty's down there, a guy that I know. The governor's
telling me she has people down there that she trusts, and there
are two conflicting reports. So I'm trying to synthesize those
two reports.
But I trusted him, and I still trust him. That's why based
on what he told me I made my calls.
Senator Akaka. Madam Chairman, my time is expired, but I
will make concluding remarks by saying that I tend to agree
with you, Mr. Brown, that if a terrorist had blown up the
levee, as you had stated, there would have been a reaction. We
need an all-hazards approach to defending our homeland, not a
call 911 only if it is a terrorist attack. And as I mentioned
in my opening remarks, what we are doing in these hearings is
to try to find solutions that can help the security and safety
of our country, and this Committee is doing that very well
under your leadership.
Thank you very much, Madam Chairman.
Chairman Collins. Senator Bennett.
Senator Bennett. Thank you very much, Madam Chairman.
Mr. Brown, you may recall during your confirmation hearing
I made a comment--I don't have it in front of me, but I
remember it well enough because I made it a number of times. I
think I am the only Member of this Committee who served in the
Executive Branch, and I served at the Department of
Transportation 18 months after it was put together. And so the
comment that I made repeatedly was, ``A, we needed to create
the Department of Homeland Security and, B, we needed to be
under no illusion that it would work for at least 5 years.''
The Department of Transportation was put together much like
the Department of Homeland Security, taking highways from
Commerce, taking FAA as an independent agency, as FEMA was,
taking the Coast Guard from Treasury, etc., mass transit from
HUD, putting them together in a Department that looked
wonderful on paper. It was created--it looked as if it was
created by the geniuses at the Harvard Business School. It had
magnificent lines, well drawn. And as I got there 18 months
after it had been created when the Nixon Administration took
over from the Johnson Administration, it was obvious I was
walking into chaos, cultural clashes, turf battles, and all of
the kind of things you are describing here.
So I am not surprised, and I am not prepared to be
pejorative in attacking who was responsible. The creation of
such a Department in the world in which we live made great
academic sense. The President was attacked by his political
enemies for not doing it sooner. And yet there is great concern
now that all of the problems connected with the creation of
such a Department surfaced. So I am sympathetic to what you are
saying.
At the same time, having been in that kind of a situation
and having seen a Department struggling with those kind of
problems, I know that there are some things that can be done. I
am struck by your testimony this morning where you say, ``I
don't remember who I called at the White House. I think it was
Joe, but I don't remember.'' And then you are quite specific in
what was said. There is a little bit of a disconnect that if
you have a conversation and you can't remember who it is with
but you are very specific that, ``Yes, I said this, and I said
that,'' and so on----
Mr. Brown. Can I tell you why?
Senator Bennett. Yes, I would appreciate your clarifying
that.
Mr. Brown. Because generally I say the same things to
everybody. If I have a message that I need X, I am saying it to
everybody I can get on the phone.
Senator Bennett. All right. But going back to the context
of a Department that has problems by virtue of its structural
difficulties, problems that I am not prepared to say
specifically it is this person's or that person's, the way you
deal with that, at least from my point of view, in an
emergency, is you ignore the departmental lines. And it is easy
for me to say after the fact, I recognize that. But trying to
put myself in your position, I think I would have gotten on the
phone and said, ``I have to talk to Secretary Chertoff
directly. I don't want to talk to his staff. I don't want to
send an e-mail. And I don't care where he is.'' And I would
think even in a Department that is heavily bureaucratic, that
kind of statement from you saying, ``I am in the midst of the
greatest natural catastrophe that we have seen. I have got a
governor that is giving me information that is different. I
have got a mayor that seems to be paralyzed. I have got to talk
to the Secretary, and I want to talk to him right now.''
Did it ever occur to you to say that within the Department?
Or was the Department culture so stultifying that you felt you
couldn't do that?
Mr. Brown. The culture was such that I didn't think that
would have been effective and would have exacerbated the
problem, quite frankly, Senator.
That's why my conversations were predominantly with the
White House because through the White House I could cut through
any interagency bureaucracy to get what I needed done.
Senator Bennett. You are telling us that a face--well, not
face-to-face but wire-to-wire conversation directly with
Secretary Chertoff would not have produced any kind of
worthwhile results?
Mr. Brown. No, it would have wasted my time, not because--
and I say that not because of any disparagement of Secretary
Chertoff, but because if I needed the Army to do something,
rather than waste the time to call Secretary Chertoff and then
have him call somebody else and then have--maybe he calls
Rumsfeld, and then Rumsfeld calls somebody, I'd rather just
call Andy Card or Joe Hagin and say, ``This is what I need,''
and it gets done. That's exactly what we did in Florida.
Senator Bennett. That is a staggering statement. It
demonstrates a dysfunctional Department to a degree far greater
than any we have seen.
Mr. Brown. Senator, you have copies of documents \1\ that I
have brought today that I pray for the country that you will
read, where I have, since 2003, been pointing out this
dysfunctionality and these clashes within the Department, and
that if they are not fixed, this Department is doomed to fail,
and that will fail the country.
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\1\ Documents from Mr. Brown appear in the Appendix on page 132.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Senator Bennett. I appreciate your opinion. If I may
express an opinion, if I were Secretary Chertoff and I had a
Deputy Secretary who would prefer to call the White House
rather than talk to me, I would find that very disturbing. Have
you ever sat down with Secretary Chertoff, particularly a fresh
start, a new Secretary coming in, available now, and said to
him, ``Mr. Secretary, there is an issue I have got to discuss
with you here, and I know you have plenty on your plate, but
can I have 15 minutes, can I have half an hour to discuss this
with you?''
When Secretary Chertoff came here for his confirmation
appointment--admittedly he was probably the most available at
that point because we controlled whether or not he got
appointed--he was open to all kinds of suggestions about how
the Department should be structured based on the information we
had developed in our hearings, and I do not find him a man who
would refuse to talk to you or refuse to hear your point of
view.
Did you ever make any attempt to discuss this with him when
he first came on board before he got overwhelmed by all the
bureaucracy?
Mr. Brown. Two attempts. The first one occurred very
shortly after he arrived, and in March 2005, I drafted a memo,
which is in your materials, dated March 2005, from me to the
Secretary entitled--the subject matter is ``Component Head
Meeting.'' Secretary Chertoff had announced that he wanted the
Under Secretaries to prepare for him a briefing, a very honest
briefing about where we were in terms of our budget, personnel
issues, and, most importantly, he wanted to know what our most
serious challenges were so that he could address those
challenges.
So I drafted it--you can read it at your leisure--where I
discussed preparedness, the National Response Plan, what needed
to be done with it; the organizational structure, the turf
battles, the cultural clash between, say, ODP and FEMA and how
that needed to be done. And he was to have those component head
meetings with everybody. He never had one with me.
The second time was when the whole issue--when they began
to do their 2SR review of where things are at. The issue then
became whether or not to pull preparedness out of FEMA, and,
again, I requested a meeting and Deputy Secretary Jackson was
able to get that meeting for me, and I went in and made my case
about why preparedness belonged in FEMA and why the way the
statute was created had not been implemented the way the
statute read but it should be, and made that case to him, the
same case I made to Secretary Ridge on September 15, 2003,
which is, again, in your materials. And on that day when I made
that case to the Secretary, the people at FEMA will tell you
that in the car on the way back to headquarters, I was ecstatic
because I thought I had won, that I had found someone who
understood that issue, had agreed with me, and indeed, he had
agreed that we needed to do what I had outlined in the memo.
Forty-eight hours later, that decision is reversed, and we
are going in a different direction.
Senator Bennett. Well, my time is up. I think I now
understand why Secretary Chertoff says he didn't know because
you didn't feel it necessary--``necessary'' is the wrong term.
You didn't feel it was efficient or proper--that is the wrong
term. Let me phrase it as correctly as I can. He didn't know
because you didn't think it would do any good for you to tell
him.
Mr. Brown. I succeeded in Florida in 2004. I succeeded in
the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster, the fires in California,
the fires in the mountainous West. I succeeded in the tornado
outbreak. And when I didn't succeed, one of the reasons why I
didn't succeed, other than the mistakes I have said that I have
made, is that DHS was an additional bureaucracy that was going
to slow me down even more. And the way I got around that was
dealing directly with the White House.
Senator Bennett. Regardless of where you may or may not
have succeeded, once again, you did not--the reason he did not
know is because you did not think it important to tell him.
Thank you.
Chairman Collins. Senator Lautenberg, my apologies for not
calling on you prior to Senator Akaka. The information I had
was wrong.
Senator Lautenberg. We have a new time clock here. We are
going to straighten it all out. Thank you very much, Madam
Chairman, for your zeal and your consistency on trying to get
to the bottom of this.
I want to set my view as clear and as straight as possible.
I am not here, Mr. Brown, to defend you. I am not here to
defend anybody who has made mistakes, and now we can distribute
the mistake array and see who really made some of the worst
ones.
The fact is that if I have a fire in my house, I don't
insist on talking to the fire chief before I satisfy that I
have sounded the alarm. And if you want to convey something to
the President and you cannot trust his Deputy Secretary or the
other people who the President appointed to do things, then we
are in bad shape. And the fact that we are parsing words here
and trying to figure out whether you should have spoken A, B,
or C or retroactively trying to fit this puzzle all together,
does it surprise anybody that perhaps there was some panic as
people were drowning and carrying not only their luggage on
their heads but their children on their heads, trying to escape
the ravages of this incredible inferno--I will use that term--
that was enveloping us?
So whether or not you called A, B, or C, B or C had to get
to A, and you had to believe that there was a mechanism. I
would tell you this: That when the terrorists struck the World
Trade Center, people didn't wait to get to the President to
send the alarm to him that something terrible had happened and
was happening.
You have been selected as the designated scapegoat. That is
what I see because I think that we are clear on President
Bush's message to you on Friday after the storm struck on
Monday. And while I do not have--well, yes, I do have the
precise words: ``Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job.''
Now, I cannot imagine the President would trivialize this
situation just to be a good guy with you. Somebody must have
said to him you were doing things right and you were doing your
best. Whether it was good enough or not, it may have not been
good enough.
I served in World War II. I know sometimes no matter how
hard we tried, we couldn't protect everybody that we wanted. So
keep your chin up and fight back, as you did. You are not here
to be, as I said, the designated scapegoat, designated target.
Call it whatever you want.
Mr. Brown. Senator, thank you.
Senator Lautenberg. I did it for my conscience, not to be a
good guy. I mean, I see this all in front of me, and I have
been in situations where panic struck and people react in
different ways. You try to do your best. But we are, after all,
human beings, and human beings make mistakes.
What I see here are mistakes on a current basis that
infuriate me. In the New York Times yesterday or today, the
piece about the fact there are--I have so much paper here to
try to get it all organized because, as you can see, I am in a
state of anxiety here. ``Storm Victims,'' reporting February 9
in the New York Times; on February 10, this day, in the Los
Angeles Times: ``Nearly 6 months after two hurricanes ripped
apart communities across the Gulf Coast, tens of thousands of
residents remain without trailers promised by the Federal
Government for use as temporary shelters while they rebuild. Of
135,000 requests for trailers that the Federal Emergency
Management Agency had received from families, slightly more
than half have been filled.''
Yesterday, we were greeted by hundreds of people who worked
their way up here from New Orleans, pleading for help. I spoke
to the people, and what I got was, ``Please, give us a place to
cover our heads with, a place that we can lie down and go to
sleep.'' They are not looking for jewels or trappings. They are
looking for an ability to exist.
So Mr. Brown is not on the payroll. Mr. Rhode is not on the
payroll now. Who is responsible for not catching up with our
responsibilities? And the fingers, no matter which way they try
to point them, to me they point at the White House. That is
where the responsibility belongs. Get those trailers there. Get
those homes built. We sent down lots of money that was not
efficiently used, and that was after your departure, need I
remind you.
And so when we look at this, I think the blame game is an
easy one to play, but it is a hard game to win. And I find that
the response now indicates where we were before.
I listened to you carefully. I ran a fairly big company
before I came to the U.S. Senate, and I know that there was a
lot of buck-passing and people would make mistakes. But, on the
other hand, if people earnestly tried to do the right thing,
then that is what we can ask. And if the system breaks down
because it is poorly designed, that is too bad, and I hope we
learn from this. But it is hard to understand why when wires
were going at 9:30 in the morning--``wires'' are e-mails. That
shows my dating, ``wires,'' right? That they are saying the
pumps are starting to fail. You suggested, Mr. Brown, that
Marty Bahamonde might be a little hyperbolic, but the fact of
the matter is this is as he gave it to us, and when he gave it
to us, he was under oath like you are. And he said, ``Severe
flooding on St. Bernard-Orleans Parish line. Police report
water level up to second floor of two-story houses. People are
trapped in attics. Pumps starting to fail, city has now
confirmed.'' This is a report from Michael Heath. Do you know
who Michael Heath is?
Mr. Brown. Yes.
Senator Lautenberg. He was your assistant, right?
Mr. Brown. Yes.
Senator Lautenberg. So he is reporting to you that he had
gotten a report from Marty Bahamonde that these things were
happening, and this was at 10:12 in the morning when the most
severe point of the storm's attack was at about 8 o'clock. So
information was flowing. And for the White House to deny that
they had clear reports is, I think, disingenuous at best. White
House officials confirm--this is now February 10--that the
report of the levee break arrived there at midnight, and Trent
Duffy--Marty Bahamonde sent his report out at 9 o'clock in the
morning--arrived there at midnight. And Trent Duffy, the White
House spokesman, acknowledged as much in an interview this week
saying it was surrounded with conflicting reports.
When did you have an awareness that it was sent to the
White House?
Mr. Brown. Senator, I am going to give you two answers, if
I may, to what you just said. May I first address your question
about the White House notification? And then you touched on
housing, and I really want to give you some information about
housing, if I could do that, because I think it is pertinent to
your concern.
On Monday, August 29, at 10 o'clock, I had written Andy
Card and told Andy Card that this is the bad one and that
housing, transportation, and environment were going to be long-
term issues and that if he wanted any additional details, to be
sure and call me or continue to BlackBerry because he had
written me earlier that indeed Joe Hagin had been keeping him
informed of what I had been telling him. So I had been telling
them about that situation throughout the day, so they knew
about it.
Senator Lautenberg. So at midnight they are saying
conflicting reports.
Mr. Brown. Well, all I can tell you is that during the day
on Monday, they were being told. They were aware of that.
Senator Lautenberg. OK.
Mr. Brown. But you also mentioned something about housing
and the concern about housing. I think it is important for this
Committee to know that for the 2005 budget, I specifically
requested $10 million to redesign our recovery from
catastrophic events, including catastrophic housing; I
requested $80 million for the Emergency Response Teams to do
things such as catastrophic planning, and the e-mail says, for
example, like New Orleans. And this whole e-mail chain, which
is dated December 30, 2003, which I want the Committee to have
in the record, is that we were asking for all of those things
to address housing issues, to address those response teams, and
every one of those was never even presented to OMB because DHS
took them out of our over-target request.
Senator Lautenberg. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chairman.
Chairman Collins. Senator Warner.
Senator Warner. Madam Chairman and Senator Lieberman, I
congratulate you once again on helping to prepare a record
which I really am confident is going to be complete with regard
to this tragic episode. And I think we owe no less to the many
victims who suffered and are still suffering and also to
prepare our great Nation for the future.
Mr. Brown, despite what my good friend of the left is
saying about the Executive Branch, I did spend 5 years in the
Pentagon as Secretary of the Navy during the---- [Laughter.]
Vietnam War, and my friend over here, Mr. Stevens, had he
heard that comment, he would have come out of his chair because
he spent a couple of years in the Department of the Interior as
their counsel. But, anyway, all of us have a little humor here
on a Friday morning.
But I come to this responsibility with no prejudice and no
fixed views. I simply think that I want to support my Chairman
and Ranking Member in getting the best record possible.
Now, I have been informed--and I would appreciate it if you
would verify the accuracy of this statement--that in the course
of interrogation by very able Committee staff--and they have
done a commendable job----
Mr. Brown. They are very good.
Senator Warner [continuing]. That you felt that you had to
rely on counsel of FEMA and decline to give a full response to
perhaps as many as 12 questions. Is that correct?
Mr. Brown. That's correct. Counsel for FEMA was present,
and when the types of questions about who and what was said to
certain White House officials, they would--I think counsel for
FEMA is quality counsel, but they never wanted to use the word
``executive privilege.'' It was ``high-level communications,''
and so there was this legal dance going on. And I just felt
caught in the middle because, look, Senator Warner, I respect
this President and I respect the Presidency. I respect this
branch of government, too, and now as a private citizen, I am
caught between these two in terms of executive privilege.
Senator Warner. Right. I listened very carefully, but I
believe now given the very clear guidance by the Chairman,
these impediments are now removed. Would I be correct in that
assumption?
Chairman Collins. That is correct.
Senator Warner. Well, then, Madam Chairman, I would think
we would ask this witness to go back over each of those
questions and provide for the Committee and the staff the full
answer that he is capable of giving. May I make that in the
form of a request?
Chairman Collins. You may.
Senator Warner. And you will be quite willing to do that.
Mr. Brown. I would be happy to do that.
Senator Warner. Well, that is extremely----
Mr. Brown. As long as we can work out schedules properly,
Mr. Bopp.
Senator Warner. I think it is very important that we have a
full and complete record, and your willingness to do that, I
think, is very helpful.
Chairman Collins. Senator Warner, if I could just clarify,
it is possible that the White House might decide to assert the
privilege, which it has a right to do, at some future time.
Senator Warner. Well, I understand that.
Chairman Collins. I just wanted to clarify.
Senator Warner. I am trying to move through this to be of
some assistance to the Chairman.
Senator Lieberman. Madam Chairman, if I can say, I want to
thank Senator Warner. I think you make a very important point.
Now that Mr. Brown has taken a different position, for all the
reasons we talked about at the beginning, just to complete the
record, if those questions are not all asked today, which they
probably won't be, I think it is a very important idea to
schedule a time to come back and talk to our joint staff again.
Mr. Brown. If I could just say, Senator, though, I am not
really taking a different position. I always wanted to answer
the questions.
Senator Lieberman. Understood. I accept your amendment.
Mr. Brown. Thank you.
Senator Warner. I think that is important.
Now, my responsibilities around here--and, coincidentally,
my two distinguished leaders here--are on the military
committee, and I am quite interested in your assessment of the
performance of the uniformed individuals, both Guard and
Reserve and the active forces that were brought to bear. I
think we have to keep going over this because a lot of people
following do not understand the Guard and Reserve are under a
certain framework of Federal statutes, as you well know, and
the regular force is under others.
My understanding is that one of the series of questions in
which you felt that you couldn't give a full answer related to
the following issues. You spoke to a number of White House
personnel while on an airplane, probably on Friday, September
2, about the proposal to establish a dual-hatted commander of
the National Guard and Title X forces in Louisiana.
Can you now tell us about what your views were? And the
situation in your judgment dictated, I think quite
appropriately, a clarity of the chain of command to military
personnel, be they Guard or Reserve or active?
Mr. Brown. Correct. General Honore had decided to deploy
and come to Baton Rouge, and I had a conversation with him on
his way down there that said--because we had not federalized
anything yet. I think General Honore has testified before this
Committee.
Senator Warner. Yesterday.
Mr. Brown. And if you watched television, you know he is a
very commanding presence.
Senator Warner. Yes. I have gotten to know him, and I have
known many officers in my years here. He is very impressive.
Mr. Brown. Very impressive. And so when General Honore and
I first got on the telephone together, he already had a litany
of things he wanted to do, and I had to back him down and say,
``I may want all of those things done, but until we get
federalized, or however we work this out, I am still in control
and you need to let me know what you want to do, and we can
play this game. I may want you to do all those ten things on
your list, but come and tell me before you do them.'' And he
understood that and respected that.
Senator Warner. Well, also, if I may say, it was not a
game. He is a serious-minded----
Mr. Brown. He is very serious.
Senator Warner [continuing]. And he has handled in his
capacity as a military commander a number of situations. He
recounted some half-dozen disasters in which he actively
participated----
Mr. Brown. That's correct.
Senator Warner [continuing]. On behalf of the----
Mr. Brown. And so I was ecstatic to have him there because
I could now use my military aides that were there with me at
the Command Center to interface with them and whatever troops
might show up. There is an e-mail--again, I assume that this e-
mail has been produced--where I am, I believe it is on Friday,
September 2, screaming in the e-mails about where is the Army.
I have been asking for the Army, where are they? I need the
Army now.
Senator Warner. Now, let's be more explicit. Part of the
Army is the National Guard.
Mr. Brown. Right, but I was----
Senator Warner. You wanted active----
Mr. Brown. I wanted active-duty forces.
Senator Warner [continuing]. Duty forces.
Mr. Brown. Right, because what I needed was I needed the
active-duty military to take over logistics. I needed them to
handle logistics because the civilian side had fallen and
completely failed, and I needed logistical support from the
Army.
We were still also having the problems about control of the
areas, and we had a lot of discussions, both General Honore and
I did, about the whole law enforcement issue. We both, I think,
and I think Secretary Rumsfeld--and I am not going to try to
put words in any of their mouths, but we all had concern about
once you federalize and bring in those active-duty forces, if
they are doing law enforcement, I mean, these guys are trained
to kill, and if some punk decided he wants to take a potshot,
that punk is going to probably end up being dead, and that
raises a whole plethora of issues.
But I was pushing for federalization of National Guard
troops--let's go to National Guard.
Senator Warner. That would be the National Guard of the
States of Louisiana, Mississippi----
Mr. Brown. Mississippi, particularly--I have to parse that
a little bit, particularly Louisiana, because I really felt
that we needed to federalize those Guard troops, but understood
that if we did it in Louisiana, we probably needed to do it in
Mississippi also.
And I really began advocating for that about midweek, and
there is some----
Senator Warner. Well, I think at this point you had better
clearly state to whom did you advocate that because you have
made the case that you were--and I am not faulting you--
circumventing DHS and going directly to the White House.
Mr. Brown. Right.
Senator Warner. So were those requests placed directly to
the White House?
Mr. Brown. Yes, those were being discussed, again, with Mr.
Hagin and Mr. Card.
Senator Warner. Right.
Mr. Brown. And then the discussions on Air Force One
centered around how could we do this, was there a way to do
this--by ``doing this,'' I mean federalizing. Was there a way
to federalize without invoking the Insurrection Act? Is there
some way that we could figure out a way to somehow have a dual-
hatted command system? That was really beyond--I mean, generals
needed to decide if they thought they could have a dual-command
system. I have been in dual-command systems, and they don't
work very well. But if General Honore thought that he could do
that or General Blum thought he could somehow make that work--
--
Senator Warner. Now, let's identify, General Blum is the
head of the National Guard.
Mr. Brown. National Guard, correct. So if they could figure
out a way to make that work, a dual-hatted command, without
actually invoking the Insurrection Act, that was fine with me
because the end that I was trying to get to was I just wanted
active duty in there to start doing things that I needed to get
done.
Senator Warner. Would that include law enforcement? Because
it is a doctrine of Posse Comitatus, as you know.
Mr. Brown. Yes.
Senator Warner. Which explicitly prohibits that.
Mr. Brown. And that is why we were trying to do this dual
hat so that perhaps we could have the National Guard doing law
enforcement while active duty was doing something else.
Senator Warner. All right.
Mr. Brown. That is a messy situation because when you are--
for example, if the National Guard is doing law enforcement on
behalf of the Army, who is doing logistics, the Army is not
going to put down their weapons just because they are handing
out MREs. And so if they are doing that while the National
Guard is doing law enforcement and a firefight starts, the Army
is going to defend themselves, as rightfully they should.
So it presented all sorts of legal and just practical
considerations.
Senator Warner. And I might add that they are all wearing
basically the same uniforms, so those observing or
participating in crime cannot distinguish between the two.
Mr. Brown. That's correct.
So it was my opinion that, however politically they needed
to work it out with the Governor, we needed to federalize this
operation.
Senator Warner. And now, in the course of the questioning
on that issue by the staff, at what juncture did you feel you
had to withhold certain information on the advice of FEMA
counsel?
Mr. Brown. Discussions about what the President said in the
conference room, conversations that I had with National
Security Adviser Hadley.
Senator Warner. Are you now prepared to inform this
Committee what those conversations were?
Mr. Brown. I believe, if I can get a clarification on the
instructions, the instructions go to discussions with, say,
Hadley, Hagin, and Card, but they don't yet go to the
President. Is that correct?
Chairman Collins. That is correct.
Mr. Brown. OK. Secretary Chertoff, myself, National
Security Adviser Hadley, General Blum, and occasionally Karl
Rove was in and out of that particular room, and I think on the
telephone--I don't want to speculate who was on the telephone.
We were on a conference call, and I think it was--I believe it
was back to maybe Fran Townsend and perhaps Andy Card because
Andy wasn't on that particular trip. We were discussing how we
could make a proposal to Governor Blanco to do this joint
command without actually federalizing, and we were having
discussions about, let's just federalize, let's not federalize,
the pros and cons of, how is it going to look if we invoke the
Posse Comitatus Act--I mean the Insurrection Act? How is Posse
Comitatus going to fit into all of this? We were having some
very heavy discussions about how we could do that. And National
Security Adviser Steve Hadley was taking notes and trying to
formulate a construct by which we could have federalization
without invoking the Insurrect Act.
Senator Warner. And what was the result of all of those
conversations?
Mr. Brown. The result was a draft that was sent to Governor
Blanco that evening, I think sometime late at night, about how
we could do that, which is the proposal that she ultimately
rejected.
Chairman Collins. Senator, we will have a second round. I
know that some of the Senators have planes to catch.
Senator Warner. Fine. I think I went only one minute over.
I was allowing him to finish his answer.
Chairman Collins. You were. Only two. Senator Dayton.
Senator Dayton. Thank you, Madam Chairman. I want to thank
you and also the Ranking Member, Senator Lieberman, for your
extensive inquiries into this catastrophe, for the CODEL that
you led, which I was proud to accompany you to Mississippi and
Louisiana.
I appreciate both of you appearing as private citizens
before this Committee.
Mr. Brown, you stated in your testimony previously to the
House committee that you had communications with the White
House ``30 times'' during the weekend before Katrina made
landfall on Monday, August 29, and that included several calls
to President Bush regarding that matter. Could you, since you
are not under executive privilege, comment on with whom you had
those conversations in the White House and what the substance
of those conversations was, please?
Mr. Brown. Yes. The conversations prior to me leaving
Washington DC and going to Baton Rouge--there were at least one
or two conversations directly with the President--I will just
say, generally, about the situation and what was going on.
Senator Dayton. I am sorry. Prior to the actual landfall?
Mr. Brown. Yes.
Senator Dayton. And what was the general nature of those
conversations? You were apprising him of the----
Mr. Brown. Apprising him of the situation. The one that has
been reported in the news that I guess falls outside the
privilege at this point is that I literally called the
President and asked him to call Governor Blanco and to call the
mayor and do everything he could within his persuasive powers
to convince them to do a mandatory evacuation.
Senator Dayton. And the other 30 calls then were to whom,
please?
Mr. Brown. Generally to either Andy Card or Joe Hagin, just
here's what's going on, here's what we've mobilized, we're
moving supplies into Texas, into Tennessee, moving supplies
into Atlanta and other places so we can move in once we know
where it makes landfall.
Senator Dayton. I need to respectfully disagree with my
colleague Senator Bennett--I am sorry he has departed--because
at least according to this report in the New York Times, at
11:05 p.m. on Monday, August 29, it states here there was an e-
mail message from FEMA's Deputy Director to Michael Jackson,
Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security, which says we have just
spoken with our first representative on the ground in New
Orleans who did a helicopter tour and describes the 200-yard
collapse of the levee on the south side of the lake.
Wouldn't you reasonably be able to expect then, if your
Deputy is communicating directly with the Deputy of Homeland
Security, that the Secretary would be informed, if necessary,
of that communication?
Mr. Brown. Oh, absolutely, and that is my point about those
systems are in place--the VTCs, the communications from
headquarters--because I am running around in Baton Rouge trying
to run operations. So absolutely, Senator.
Senator Dayton. So, again, going to the New York Times
article today, can you explain this apparent discrepancy? It
says, ``But the alert''--referring to the prior alerts--``did
not seem to register. Even the next morning''--which would be
Tuesday--``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.''
It would seem that both of these individuals had been
informed, at least in your judgment, directly about the
situation, which contradicts what they have stated here.
Mr. Brown. Correct.
Senator Dayton. OK. You stated in your testimony earlier
today, sir, that--I believe I am paraphrasing, but trying to
quote--``I ask the White House and they happen'' as a way of
getting things to occur.
Mr. Brown. Right.
Senator Dayton. Can you state what in the immediate
aftermath of the hurricane landfall, what did you request of
the White House, and did they, in fact, happen?
Mr. Brown. Great question because I am coming from the
perspective of all the other disasters that I have described,
particularly Florida in 2004, where that direct chain of
command interface took place, and for the first time in this
disaster, Andy Card replied to me at one point--and I don't
remember what the specific request was, but I told Andy on the
telephone I needed something, whatever it was. And his reply
back to me was, ``Well, Mike, you need to feed that back up
through the chain of command.'' And that became----
Senator Dayton. What is the chain of command, sir, at this
point?
Mr. Brown. Well, at that point, that said to me, the way we
had been doing business is not how I am always--I am going to
have to kind of do this on the fly now, was I needed to go get
Chertoff to agree to do that, which bothered----
Senator Dayton. Did you do so, sir?
Mr. Brown. Yes because Chertoff and I had--again, in the
record there is a record of my phone calls back and forth to
DHS constantly.
Senator Dayton. So you went through the chain of command
and then presumably he went to the White House, whatever. Did
what was necessary to happen happen?
Mr. Brown. Well, not always because we would--I was
frustrated because the Army wasn't getting there quickly enough
and things weren't--I mean, I was as frustrated as you were, I
was as frustrated as the American public was, I am sure as
frustrated as everybody in this room about the slowness of the
response. People will tell you that I am a fairly calm
individual, and I was certainly screaming and cussing at people
while I was down in Baton Rouge.
Senator Dayton. What specifically, sir, were you requesting
and when did you request it that did not occur as expeditiously
as you would have expected?
Mr. Brown. I think the best way to answer that in the
hearings is to refer you in particular to the e-mails between
my military aides, General or Colonel Jordan, and I forget the
name of the other Colonel--I apologize to him--that I would
tell them what my priorities of the day were, and they would
come back and say, ``Well, we haven't been able to get this
moving, we haven't been able to get that moving.'' That will
show you what I was frustrated about.
Senator Dayton. OK. Thank you.
In your testimony before the House Committee previously,
you were asked by Congressman Thornberry, ``And so how many
total FEMA people were prepositioned, approximately, at the
Superdome?'' Prepositioned meaning before the hurricane's
landfall.
Mr. Brown. Correct.
Senator Dayton. And you stated here, ``Counting the team
which I will count as FEMA people, you know, a dozen.''
Subsequently, before this Committee, Mr. Bahamonde testified
that, ``I was the only FEMA employee deployed to New Orleans
prior to the storm.''
Can you reconcile that apparent discrepancy?
Mr. Brown. Yes. In fact, I have learned he's right because
I had--we had deployed a National Disaster Medical Team--or I
had specifically authorized an NDMS Team, Marty Bahamonde, and
Phil Parr to go directly to the Superdome. And Marty was the
only one who made it prior to landfall, and the others made it
after landfall.
Senator Dayton. How is it that you were misinformed, even
months later when you made this testimony, as to the number of
FEMA people who were actually in New Orleans prior to landfall?
Mr. Brown. All I can tell you, Senator, is I tried to
review every document I could get my hand on. At the time of
that hearing, I just didn't recall.
Senator Dayton. You stated, again, in an article today,
sir, that the real story is the change in the structure, FEMA
being put in as part of the Department of Homeland Security,
which you say is a factor in this difficulty in response. And
you elaborated on some of those points today. I guess I must
respectfully disagree from my perspective in Minnesota, where
in 1997 there was a serious flood, a major fire in Grand Forks
adjacent to Minnesota, East Grand Forks was flooded. The
response there in my recollection--and I was there just 2 weeks
after. The testimony of the mayor of Grand Forks and others was
that the FEMA response was quite exceptional. Subsequently, in
June 2002, Roseau, Minnesota, in the northern part of the
State, flooded. I was there as well, and this was prior to your
becoming the Director, but the response of those who witnessed
and participated in both situations was very definitely that
FEMA's response in 2002, which is prior to this reorganization,
was not nearly as effective as the one in 1997.
So, I guess I would question whether the real problem here
was this restructuring or whether it was whatever breakdowns
that occurred in the executive agency.
Mr. Brown. Right, and I think it's important for the
Committee to realize that it is not just the folding of FEMA
into DHS, but it has been the--and we should probably go back
through some of my own testimony as Deputy Director and General
Counsel, that FEMA always was really good at making do with
what they had, and FEMA always suffered from this brain drain
of people continuing to leave, an aging workforce, people who
were retiring all the time. It was reaching--I mean, it was
having its problems before it went into DHS, no question about
it.
Senator Dayton. Why was there a brain drain?
Mr. Brown. It was just a function of the aging of the
workforce, and they can make more money--I mean, some of the
most skilled people that I found when I first came to FEMA's
General Counsel had all gone within a couple of years because
they can make so much more money after they put in their 20
years or so by moving into the private sector. It was awful.
Senator Dayton. Mr. Rhode, you had been at FEMA until just
2 weeks previous to today?
Mr. Rhode. Let me say it will be about almost 3 weeks today
or tomorrow.
Senator Dayton. Having been in New Orleans recently, again,
reading recent reports about the situation there, the fact
that, according to one report yesterday, of the 50 million
metric tons of debris, only 6 billion had been removed, the
fact that utilities have not been replaced, and an article
today in the Washington Post states that FEMA will not make the
decisions until August about what can be rehabilitated and what
cannot, that it is holding up, at least according to this
article, the people's ability to rebuild their houses and the
like. Can you explain what has happened during this period of
time over the last couple of months and help us, illuminate us,
as to what the barriers are that prevent an effective response
by FEMA?
Mr. Rhode. Well, I can certainly talk to some of my
experiences over the last couple of months. I am not certain
that I am familiar with the August deadline. I am not sure if--
that happened after my departure from FEMA. I am not sure I can
speak to that very well. But certainly the recovery of a
90,000-square-mile area, you know, we often concentrate on
Louisiana and New Orleans, but clearly in Mississippi and even
some parts of Alabama, has been incredibly challenging. The
debris alone is something that was on an absolute historic
scale that we have never seen before.
I cannot really speak to all of the challenges, although I
can say that a lot of it has to do with local ordinances and
local desires. I know FEMA tries to work very closely with the
State and the locals as it relates to where they would like
debris to be deposited, some of the local ordinances as to
whether or not you go on private property or you do not. There
are certainly an awful lot of challenges that collectively we
have to overcome together on the table, and that is what the
current recovery is all about in those States.
Senator Dayton. Thank you, Madam Chairman.
Chairman Collins. Senator Pryor.
Senator Pryor. Thank you, Madam Chairman.
Let me start, if I may, with you, Mr. Brown. It sounds like
you have taken responsibility for the things that went wrong
under your watch.
Mr. Brown. Thank you, sir.
Senator Pryor. Do you feel like the designated scapegoat?
That was Senator Lautenberg's term.
Mr. Brown. Why don't you issue a subpoena to my wife and
have her come and answer that question, sir. [Laughter.]
Senator Pryor. I can relate to that. But do you feel that
way? Do you feel like you have been sort of set up to be the
scapegoat?
Mr. Brown. Yes.
Senator Pryor. To be the fall guy?
Mr. Brown. Yes, sir. I can't lie to you, but, yes, I feel
that way.
Senator Pryor. You feel like the Administration has done
that to you?
Mr. Brown. I certainly feel somewhat abandoned.
Senator Pryor. OK. Let me ask this question about FEMA
given your role there, your experience there. In your opinion--
just your opinion as a private citizen--should FEMA be in DHS?
Mr. Brown. I don't want this to sound like a lawyer answer.
How's that for a caveat? There was a time when I was still
idealistic and was really fighting internally to make it work
the way the statute intended, for Emergency Preparedness and
Response (EP&R) to be EP&R. I have since come to the conclusion
that the cultural differences are so wide and so great that it
cannot function within DHS, and the things that have been done
to it now--the stripping of preparedness out into a separate
directorate, whatever is going to be announced next week,
response going somewhere else--is going to drive the final
stake in the heart of FEMA. The country, particularly
governors, particularly mayors, will then be faced with a
situation in a disaster looking around and saying, ``Who do I
go to?''
FEMA suffers from this lack of direct accountability to the
President. All disasters are local, and you know if something
happens in Arkansas or something happens in Minnesota or
wherever it happens, you want to know that the FEMA guy and the
President are on top of it and they are in charge.
Senator Pryor. I appreciate your answer there, and I know
that the previous administration had FEMA, as I understand it,
as an independent Cabinet-level agency. Do you think it should
be restored to that?
Mr. Brown. Yes.
Senator Pryor. And it sounds like from your previous answer
it is the direct accountability that FEMA would have with the
President that makes that important.
Mr. Brown. What has happened, I've described it this way to
both James Lee Witt and Joe Allbaugh, both friends of mine,
that the job they had no longer exists. When they were the FEMA
Directors, they were in charge of their budget; they made their
argument directly to the President and to OMB. Now I make my
case to another Under Secretary and hope to work through that
bureaucracy or directly to the Secretary before it even gets to
OMB. And so without that kind of direct accountability and that
direct way to get things done, I think you marginalize FEMA to
where it becomes ineffective.
Senator Pryor. I appreciate your candor on that.
Let me also ask, you mentioned in previous testimony today
that you had a number of phone calls throughout your time at
FEMA with President Bush, and that was in the context of you
couldn't remember exactly when you talked to him and exactly
what was said. I am trying to get a sense of how involved
President Bush was with FEMA when you were there. Was this a
frequent occurrence where you talked to the President? Are we
talking about once a month or just every time a disaster
happened? Or tell me, how involved was President Bush?
Mr. Brown. I would say he was involved. We developed, I
think, a very good relationship. Unfortunately, he called me
``Brownie'' at the wrong time. Thanks a lot, sir. But we had a
very good relationship where I could--whether we were on Air
Force One or we were in the car together alone, that I could
explain to him or express concerns or issues that I thought
were important. And I always felt like I had a very good
relationship particularly with Andy Card because Andy had gone
through Hurricane Andrew; with Joe Hagin, who used to be a
first responder and understands those issues. I had a very good
relationship with those people. General Gordon, the White House
Homeland Security Adviser, all of those people I had great
relationships with.
But there came a point where I recognized that I could no
longer complain and argue about what needed to be done without
starting to appear to be a whiner, and so I needed to pull
back. There was a new Secretary there, and I think the White
House had the attitude of we have a new Secretary now, Mike, go
deal with the new Secretary.
Senator Pryor. That was actually my next question, and that
is, you served there under two different Secretaries, Secretary
Ridge and Secretary Chertoff.
Mr. Brown. Right.
Senator Pryor. And not to put words in your mouth, but
basically, as I understand your previous testimony today, there
were critical times when, instead of talking to Secretary
Chertoff, you in effect went around him and went to other
people in the Administration to try to get things done. Is that
a fair assessment?
Mr. Brown. Yes, and, in fact, you are going to hear from
witnesses today that I think are going to say Brown didn't
think he worked for Chertoff and Brown didn't think he was part
of the team. And the reason they say that is because I had a
mission, and my mission was to help disaster victims. And I
wasn't going to--I mean, I was going to do everything I could
to prevent bureaucracy or to prevent new layers of bureaucracy
or people who did not understand the relationship between State
and local governments and FEMA to get in the way of doing what
we needed to get done. So, yes, I was an infighter.
Senator Pryor. This may be a little bit of an unfair
question, but had Secretary Ridge been in control during
Katrina, would you have gone through Secretary Ridge, or would
you still have gone around the Secretary?
Mr. Brown. I don't know how to answer that because my
experience with Secretary Ridge was in Florida, he left me
totally alone.
Senator Pryor. Meaning left you alone to do your job or he
abandoned you?
Mr. Brown. Exactly. He left me alone to do my job.
Secretary Ridge during Florida and the entire Department of
Homeland Security apparatus stayed out of my way.
Senator Pryor. And that changed with Secretary Chertoff?
Mr. Brown. What happened was, I think with Secretary
Chertoff the DHS apparatus now saw an opportunity to insert
itself, as they had always tried to do, into FEMA operations,
which necessarily slows things down. The HSOC, for example,
does not exercise command and control. They don't have the ESF
structure. They can't do those things. Yet during Katrina, they
were trying to do that.
There is, again, in the packet of materials that I have
supplied the Committee today, a January 26, 2004, concept
paper, ``The DHS Headquarters Integrated Operations Staff
Capability,'' again, in which they are trying to now move those
kinds of operational controls out of FEMA into DHS. And
attached to that are a couple of e-mails and talking points
about why we think that is a bad deal and is going to cause us
even further problems. I would encourage you to look at that,
Senator.
Senator Pryor. OK. Thank you. I also have a question--there
is a document that I have. I don't think it is in the record. I
will be glad to submit it, if the Chairman would like me to,
but it apparently is in connection with Hurricane Pam, that
scenario there. The document is entitled ``Combined
Catastrophic Plan for Southeast Louisiana and the New Madrid
Seismic Zone: Scope of Work, fiscal year 2004.'' \1\ And it is
interesting because I assume--it says ``fiscal year 2004.'' I
assume it was drafted in 2003 or 2004. But if I can quote from
it, it says, ``The most dangerous hurricane would be a slow-
moving Category 3, 4, or 5 hurricane that makes landfall at the
mouth of the Mississippi River, moves northwest of and parallel
to the river, and then crosses New Orleans and Lake
Pontchartrain.''
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ Document submitted by Sen. Pryor appears in the Appendix on
page 110.
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I will skip down a little bit. ``The Federal Emergency
Management Agency and Louisiana Office of Emergency
Preparedness believe that the gravity of the situation calls
for an extraordinary level of advanced planning to improve
government readiness to respond effectively to such an event.''
And I will skip down a little bit more. ``The geographic
situation of southern Louisiana and the densely populated New
Orleans area would complicate response problems and quickly
overwhelm State resources.''
So, in my view, here is a FEMA document that is screaming
out that we have got to be prepared for this, and it sounds
like FEMA just could not get anyone's attention, I guess, at
DHS to do the proper level of preparedness. Is that fair?
Mr. Brown. Senator, yes, yes, yes. I go back to the $80
million that is being cut, and I specifically--FEMA had never
done catastrophic planning. I wanted to do catastrophic
planning. We got the $80 million to do that. New Orleans was
the first place I wanted to go. The scenario that played out in
Katrina was exactly the scenario we wanted to plan against. And
I was rebuffed in getting the money to do that planning.
Senator Pryor. Thank you.
Mr. Rhode, I just have a few seconds left, and since you
are from Hot Springs, Arkansas, I need to ask you at least one
question.
Mr. Rhode. Well, thank you very much, Senator.
Senator Pryor. And this is an impression I have that I
would just like to get your thoughts on because I know you have
just recently left the Agency. But it appears to me--and I went
down on the CODEL with almost all of us that are here right
now, and it appears to me that there is a difference in how
FEMA has dealt with Mississippi as opposed to Louisiana and
specifically New Orleans. And it appears to me that it may be
because FEMA--and maybe the Federal Government--just does not
have a trust level with the City of New Orleans government and
also the State of Louisiana's government. Is that fair?
Mr. Rhode. Senator, I'm not sure that I've heard it
explained that way at all. I am aware that there have been some
challenges, certainly, perhaps unique in some regards, and
historic challenges particularly within Louisiana and
Mississippi. I know that there is a very aggressive recovery
effort that is going on there, and it can get somewhat
complicated because you are often dealing with many different
opinions, many different voices from the public. You are
talking about a housing situation which you are trying to
determine where best to repopulate areas, where best to provide
housing. It is a very difficult situation.
I would like to believe that the FEMA approach is very
consistent across all States that we deal with. Throughout the
course of any one year, FEMA will administer some 50 to 60
presidential disaster declarations or emergency declarations,
and I would hate to think that the approach globally is
different from one State to another. But I'm certain there are
unique challenges within Louisiana.
Senator Pryor. Well, Madam Chairman, I know that in the
last few days on the front page of our statewide newspaper,
there have been several stories about 8,000 or 9,000 trailers
that are FEMA trailers that are sitting at the Hope, Arkansas,
airport; that apparently Mississippi has received many
trailers, many more than Louisiana has. And I think that is one
reason I have that perception, is because it seems there is
unequal treatment.
And let me say this--I know I am over my time, Madam
Chairman, but I think this Committee has heard--or at least,
speaking for myself, I have heard enough about the problems at
FEMA, and I am ready to fix it, and I hope that this Committee
will get very serious over the next few weeks and few months to
fix it.
So thank you, Madam Chairman.
Chairman Collins. Mr. Brown, over the course of our
investigation, numerous officials have expressed concern that
you were selected as the Principal Federal Officer for
Hurricane Katrina. And, indeed, your own e-mails also expressed
displeasure at your selection for this duty.
A Department of Homeland Security official told us that you
do not agree with much of the National Response Plan and, in
particular, that you oppose the concept of a Principal Federal
Official, a PFO. A key author of that plan, who will be
testifying before us next, Assistant Secretary Robert Stephan,
told our investigators that you opposed the concept of a
Principal Federal Official and that you did not agree with the
concept, thought it was unnecessary, and didn't fully
understand a lot of the responsibilities in the National
Response Plan--and this is a quote--``as evidenced by what Mr.
Brown failed to set up.'' In your own interview with the
Committee staff, you called the concept of a PFO ``silly.''
Now, this is an important issue because that is a major
concept in the National Response Plan. DHS officials have told
us that you were replaced as the PFO on September 9 after it
became clear that you were not carrying out your
responsibilities satisfactorily, and since some of these same
officials will be testifying very shortly before us, what is
your answer to those criticisms of how you performed as PFO?
Mr. Brown. The PFO function, we have done a great job as
Republicans of establishing more and more bureaucracy. It
absolutely flabbergasts me that as Republicans we have come in
and established on top of the Federal Response Plan, a plan
that worked, that States understood, that we have taken that
plan and we have created it in a vacuum. We put it together--I
mean, EP&R was supposed to put the NRP together, and instead it
was given to TSA. Now, explain that one to me, Senator. And
then it shifted over from TSA to some military guys that have
never worked in a consensus way with State and local
governments, who have prime responsibility in a disaster.
I would refer you to a memo dated April 6, 2004,
regarding--it's a legal memo in which they are discussing the
legal issues surrounding the proposed regional structure for
DHS. And it very accurately reflects the conflicts that are
created by the creation of the PFO cell versus the FCO under
the Stafford Act and the FEMA Director and what their roles are
supposed to be.
I can tell you from experience that the PFOs who have been
appointed to date--and since we are not in a courtroom, no one
can object about hearsay, so I am just going to tell you
generally what they have told me. They believe that the PFOs,
that their role is simply to give the Secretary information
about what is going on. Yet in the document itself, it gives
the PFO operational responsibilities to actually do things in a
disaster.
That conflicts directly with the role of the FCO and
directly with the role of the Director of FEMA or the Under
Secretary for EP&R. And those are outlined in that memo.
So what happens is I get designated as the PFO, which means
that I am instructed by Secretary Chertoff to plop my rear end
down in Baton Rouge and to not leave Baton Rouge. You can't run
a disaster that way. You can't run a disaster unless--as I did
atall of the other disasters, going into the field, going out
and seeing what's going on, getting into New Orleans, getting
into Jackson. I was told to not go back to Mississippi. Well,
how can the FEMA Director, because he is now the PFO, how can I
know what's going on in Mississippi if I can't go there and sit
down with Haley Barbour and find out what's going on?
Chairman Collins. But you see no value to having a single
person designated as the Principal Federal Official, as Admiral
Allen was after you were replaced? And he is generally credited
with improving the coordination and response.
Mr. Brown. Because Admiral Allen was then given the
wherewithal to leave, to go do things, if he needed to be in
New Orleans, to go to New Orleans, to be able to go to Jackson,
Mississippi, to be able to go wherever he needed to go. I was
literally constrained by Secretary Chertoff and told to stay in
Baton Rouge after my first trip to Jackson, Mississippi. My
hands were tied by him.
Chairman Collins. One final question in my remaining time.
You stated earlier that, in retrospect, you should have called
in the Department of Defense earlier to take over the logistics
because you knew that FEMA would be overwhelmed by Hurricane
Katrina. If you knew that FEMA's logistics system would be
overwhelmed, why didn't you recommend to Secretary Chertoff
that he exercise his authority to call in DOD sooner?
Mr. Brown. I take blame for this. But on August 30, we
issued a mission assignment to DOD for airlift and for other
capabilities. I don't know whether that mission assignment was
ever implemented or ever done. But as early as August 30, I
made that request back to headquarters for that to be done.
I still stand by my earlier testimony that what I wish I
had done was even prior to landfall, which then--and I'm not
trying to be flippant here, Senator, but had I requested
active-duty military to move in there, and Katrina had made a
slight move to the left or to the right and gone somewhere else
and we didn't have this--and I mean this in all due respect--
you would have been having me up here testifying about why I
wasted money having the military come in and preposition
itself.
So I'm trying to balance those two things off. Do I really
step out on a limb prior to landfall and demand active-duty
military for something I may not need, or do I do it after it
has made landfall? And that is just a judgment I made, and in
hindsight, I wish I had just rolled the dice and said do it
now.
Chairman Collins. Senator Lieberman.
Senator Lieberman. Thanks, Madam Chairman. Thanks again,
Mr. Brown.
I want to come back to Monday night after the day of the
hurricane hitting, Marty Bahamonde calls you, you call Joe
Hagin, who is with the President at Crawford. You are not sure
if the President was on the conversation. You inform them that
New Orleans is underwater. Does Joe Hagin at that point ask
you, ``Do you have everything you need?'' Do you ask for
anything from them?
Mr. Brown. I don't recall on that particular conversation
asking for anything in particular. I know he asked me. He
always asked me do I have everything I need.
Senator Lieberman. Right.
Mr. Brown. But I don't recall specifically saying that
night I need X, Y, Z because literally the storm had just made
landfall, the levees were just breaking, and we were trying to
get a handle on what we needed.
Senator Lieberman. OK.
Mr. Brown. And as I testified in front of the House, I was
still, naively so, thinking that I could get this unified
command structure established within Louisiana and that we
could get things done.
Senator Lieberman. Right.
Mr. Brown. I was still in that mind-set at that point.
Senator Lieberman. And that Monday night, again, after you
spoke to Bahamonde and then Hagin, did you have any other
conversations with the White House?
Mr. Brown. Oh, every single day.
Senator Lieberman. No, but I mean Monday night, on August
29, the day of landfall, after you called Hagin, when the
President may or may not have been on the phone, did you----
Mr. Brown. Yes. I had a late evening phone call I think
with Hagin, and I had an e-mail exchange with Andy Card.
Senator Lieberman. And can you describe the tenor of those
exchanges?
Mr. Brown. I can tell you the e-mail to Andy Card basically
says this is what we expected and we're going to have----
Senator Lieberman. Yes, actually I have seen that one. This
is the big one, you said.
Mr. Brown. Yes.
Senator Lieberman. Right. And pretty much the same exchange
with Hagin.
Mr. Brown. Yes.
Senator Lieberman. I want to go back because a part of what
we are looking at here is whether the Federal Government could
have done--obviously we reached some conclusions that it should
have done more in preparation. Senator Dayton referenced a
comment you made to the House Select Committee in the fall that
you thought you might have talked to the White House before
landfall on Monday, maybe as many as 30 times. By your
recollection, when did those calls start? Was it Thursday?
Friday?
Mr. Brown. Probably speculating--if the records prove me
wrong, they'll prove me wrong, but probably on Thursday because
we had literally started doing--FEMA had already started
ramping up Monday or Tuesday of that week.
Senator Lieberman. Based on weather forecasting, obviously.
Mr. Brown. Right.
Senator Lieberman. And do you recall--there is, in the
transcript of the video teleconference that occurred on
Sunday--incidentally, you begin it, for the record, by
welcoming Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Jackson
to the conference call, so at least there was a direct call--
and one would hope, and we will ask, that the Deputy Secretary
told the Secretary in that call Dr. Mayfield was very alarmed,
and you said this is a catastrophe within a catastrophe.
But when the President is on the call from Crawford, he
thanks you, and he says to you, ``I appreciate your briefing
that you gave me early this morning about what the Federal
Government is prepared to do to help the State and local folks
deal with this really serious storm.'' That was a private call
or a personal call, I assume, that you had Sunday morning with
the President of the United States.
Mr. Brown. Correct.
Senator Lieberman. And, again, in that call you were
telling him how serious the situation was based on the weather
forecasting and reporting, as he says in the transcript we
have, that you think you are ready to handle it.
Mr. Brown. Senator, the best that I can explain to this
Committee--I don't know how to put it into words. I sat in
those VTCs on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and I think I was
there for the one Sunday before I left----
Senator Lieberman. And these are all--and this is very
important. These video teleconferences are happening Thursday,
Friday, Saturday, and Sunday before the Monday on which the
hurricane hit.
Mr. Brown. That's correct.
Senator Lieberman. And on those video teleconferences, you
probably got the Homeland Security Department, the Weather
Service, the White House----
Mr. Brown. They are all tied in. You don't always
necessarily see them on the screen, but they are all tied in.
Senator Lieberman. Yes.
Mr. Brown. And they all have the opportunity to tie in.
Senator Lieberman. Let me go on and just ask you, do you
remember any other personal calls with the President that
weekend, except for the one on Sunday morning?
Mr. Brown. I don't think I talked to him personally once I
landed in Baton Rouge. I was only talking to Hagin.
Senator Lieberman. How about before, during that weekend?
Mr. Brown. Oh, yes, on Sunday--I left on Sunday, as I
recall.
Senator Lieberman. Yes, I know about the call you had with
the President on Sunday. Was there anything on Friday and
Saturday?
Mr. Brown. I don't think so Friday, but I do believe there
was on Saturday.
Senator Lieberman. One direct with the President? And to
the best of your recollection, what did you say?
Mr. Brown. Just I was expressing my concern, as I was in
the VTCs all along, that this is a big storm, this is the one
we have all worried about, and depending on where it goes, it
could be catastrophic.
Senator Lieberman. And, again, were you asked by the
President or Mr. Card or Mr. Hagin, ``Do you have everything
you need?''
Mr. Brown. I'll say it again. I can't ever think of a
conversation where--I never ended a phone call, with
particularly Joe or Andy, where they didn't say, ``Do you have
everything you need.''
Senator Lieberman. I want to ask you one more question, but
I will ask rhetorically whether, looking back at it, you may
have mislead them because as it happened, FEMA, DHS, not to
mention the State and local governments, didn't have everything
they needed to respond to Hurricane Katrina.
Mr. Brown. And that gets back to Senator Collins' point
about me asking for the Army earlier. In hindsight, which, of
course, is perfect, knowing my fears and the planning we have
done for New Orleans, I do wish that I had called for and
talked to either Rumsfeld or England prior to it even making
landfall and requesting those DOD assets at that time.
Senator Lieberman. Madam Chairman, since Senator Lautenberg
has left, I am going to ask one more quick question. It is my
last.
One of the more perplexing allegations made about FEMA's
failure to deliver in the aftermath of Katrina came from
General Bennett Landreneau, the head of the Louisiana National
Guard, and it also came from Governor Blanco last week, but
very strongly yesterday from General Landreneau, that seeing
what was happening on Monday, the day of landfall, during the
day, they said, ``We desperately need a means to get people out
of New Orleans who have not been able to evacuate on their
own.'' And you told them, ``I'm going to get you 500 buses.''
And General Landreneau said, ``Monday night they didn't come.
We spoke again Tuesday. FEMA said they're on their way.
Wednesday, they're still not there.'' And we find in our
investigation that it wasn't until 1:47 a.m. on Wednesday that
FEMA actually asked the Department of Transportation to provide
the buses, which last week the DOT person told us they were
ready to do.
So they begin to arrive late Wednesday night, mostly on
Thursday morning. Meantime, as I said before, we are seeing
these horrific human conditions, embarrassing to our country,
not what we are all about, in the Superdome and the Convention
Center. So why didn't FEMA deliver those buses on Monday when
you said you were going to do it?
Mr. Brown. I wish I knew the answer to that, Senator. I
think it goes back to what we saw in the Mitre study, again,
that I asked for, because I knew that the logistics system in
FEMA was broken and that we couldn't do some of those things. I
knew that and was desperately trying to fix it. All I can tell
you and all I can tell the country is that those nights I would
sit in my room crying sometimes, screaming, arguing, because I
was as frustrated as the country.
Senator Lieberman. So let me just----
Mr. Brown. Because I'm asking for this stuff, and I can't
make it happen.
Senator Lieberman. I got you, and I hear you, and that is
what you are saying, that, in fact, when you told General
Landreneau, ``I am going to get you 500 buses''----
Mr. Brown. I was going to get him 500 buses.
Senator Lieberman. You, in fact, asked somebody.
Mr. Brown. Yes.
Senator Lieberman. On Monday, to the best of your
recollection?
Mr. Brown. That's right.
Senator Lieberman. Well, later on, when you come back to
the staff, we're going to ask you why you think it took until
Wednesday morning for that e-mail to go to DOT. Thanks, Mr.
Brown.
Thanks, Madam Chairman.
Chairman Collins. Senator Warner.
Senator Warner. Thank you, Madam Chairman.
What is your overall assessment of the professionalism that
the military was able to bring to bear on this situation? And
if you wish to separate Guard from active, but generally
speaking.
Mr. Brown. Senator Warner, I'm so doggone jealous of their
planning capabilities I could scream. Their ability to--one of
the fallacies in FEMA pre-DHS, and I believe one of the
fallacies currently within DHS, is a robust planning cell that
can do the kind of planning that I've been screaming about for
3 years, and they can do it. And by having two military aides,
just two planners, two colonels come in and sit down with me so
I can turn to them and say I need X, Y, Z, they can start
planning how to make that happen. And we didn't have that.
My interfacing with Honore was absolutely the most
professional at all times. I consider the man to be a friend
now. He was a lifesaver to me. My relationship with Secretary
Rumsfeld, to a certain extent, but even more so with Deputy
Secretary England, a personal relationship there, I admire
those guys. They have got the kind of things that we need.
Having said that, I am one of these that I don't think the
military needs to be involved in disasters, like maybe some do.
But we need to replicate and duplicate and perhaps adopt some
of their methods of doing things within Homeland Security.
Senator Warner. Well, let's talk specifically about what
occurred in this instance. You say you don't think they should
be involved, yet you are requesting them and you have
recognized they have assets, from helicopters to trucks and
heavy lift capacity. And they have got a turnaround time--often
within hours they can produce. So I think you want to go back
and revisit they should not be involved in these things.
Mr. Brown. We have to be very careful because they have a
mission, and if I were Rumsfeld or England, I would be very
concerned about diluting that mission by giving them these
additional responsibilities.
Senator Warner. Well, I would have to differ a little bit
with you there. When we consider the amount of suffering and
destruction here and the military has a very vital role in
homeland defense--Admiral Keating was before this Committee the
other day. I work with Rumsfeld and England on a daily basis,
and Keating.
Mr. Brown. Right.
Senator Warner. And they are there and trained, and the
President of the United States and the people want them
involved.
Mr. Brown. In a catastrophic event, no question.
Senator Warner. Right.
Mr. Brown. But there is a slippery slope that we go down
where suddenly State and locals will become more and more
dependent upon active-duty military to respond.
Senator Warner. All right. Let's go back to this particular
incident. What grades do you wish to give them?
Mr. Brown. Oh, I give them an A.
Senator Warner. An A, all right. Well, that is consistent
with what others have stated here. Did you from time to time
make the decision to bypass Chertoff and go directly to the
White House on requests for the military?
Mr. Brown. Yes.
Senator Warner. And do you feel that those requests were
responded to, to your satisfaction?
Mr. Brown. Yes.
Senator Warner. So that chain of communication was
effective and results were delivered.
Mr. Brown. Right. And I think the other thing that--again,
as in almost any disaster, which is why you need to train as
you fight and fight as you train and you need to have
preparedness tied to response, which is my mantra. It is
because you need to know those people when you actually get
into the battle. You need to know who you are dealing with. And
that is one of the fatal flaws within DHS right now, is
separating this preparedness from response. Go back to 1978--I
don't think you were in the room when I mentioned it, but there
is a 1978 NGA report which talks about that very issue. Tom
Ridge wrote a letter to the Washington Times in 1989 saying if
you separate response from preparedness, it is a fatal flaw. We
need to keep those together, and I think if we can learn from
the military and tie those together, we can make it work.
Senator Warner. I was listening to the hearings elsewhere,
and I did follow that colloquy that you had.
Do you feel that the inability of the President, as I
understand, trying to work with the Governor of Louisiana to do
a certain degree of maybe bifurcated federalism, i.e., the dual
hat, as a consequence of that not occurring, did that
contribute to some of the problems?
Mr. Brown. Absolutely, no question. I think it contributed
to two things: The continued delay in response and my demise.
Senator Warner. I understand the delay in response, and now
your demise, you mean in terms----
Mr. Brown. Because as long as I was not able to get that
done, I still couldn't get a unified command structure
established within New Orleans because I didn't have the
capability to do that. James Lee Witt comes down and actually
says to the President--once he is hired by Governor Blanco,
James Lee stands behind me and says, ``Mr. President, now that
I'm here, Mike and I are going to establish a unified
command.'' But by that time, it was too late.
Senator Warner. It was too late.
Mr. Brown. Too late.
Senator Warner. And had it been done, you feel that much of
the suffering could have been spared, and the devastation----
Mr. Brown. The suffering could have been alleviated. I may
or may not still be the Under Secretary, but----
Senator Warner. Well, facts are facts.
Mr. Brown. Right.
Senator Warner. General Honore, working with you and the
TAG from Louisiana, more or less worked this out even though
there was not a formalization of a dual hat. They did it by
sheer force of their own personality and their understanding of
what a military person must do when they face extreme
situations. Whether they have orders or not, they are trained
to act.
Mr. Brown. That is the best description I have heard of how
it came about. We did it without--I mean, they just did it.
Senator Warner. But it would have been better if it had
been formalized and earlier on.
Mr. Brown. Clearly.
Senator Warner. That is clear. Now, again, I return to the
record. The Chairman has indicated that you will be given an
opportunity to go back over several questions. But this is a
unique moment. You are here, and the eyes of many are upon it.
Do you wish to at this time go back and reflect on some of
those dozen different questions where you followed the advice
of FEMA counsel and did not give a full response and give your
responses at this time?
Mr. Brown. If we have questions that they would like to
pose, I'd be willing to do that, sir.
Senator Warner. All right. But I do not have the full
litany of questions before me. I understand you will have the
opportunity. But at this time, there is nothing further in the
context of what you withheld that you would like to proffer at
this time?
Mr. Brown. No, sir.
Senator Warner. Good. To you, Mr. Rhode--you have been very
quiet here, but I would like to direct just sort of a general
question to you. You have followed very carefully the responses
given by Mr. Brown to the series of questions propounded by the
Senators here. Do you feel that there is any additional
information on any of those colloquies that you would like to
provide?
Mr. Rhode. It's hard for me to say, Senator. I appreciate
the question very much.
Senator Warner. We are trying to build a record, and it is
important that we get in as much as we can.
Mr. Rhode. Absolutely, sir. I appreciate that, and I have
appreciated the opportunity to work with staff over the last
couple of months, too, when I was employed with FEMA. I do
believe that this was an absolutely incredible challenge that
faced our country, one perhaps unprecedented, it goes without
saying.
I would like to see in addition to potential FEMA
efficiencies that need to be improved--and I think we all agree
that there are certainly some that need to be improved--it was
true before I arrived and is certainly true after I left--in
the way of logistical tracking, in the way of improving
situational awareness, some of these items that I know have
been talked about before this Committee.
I would also like to see greater accountability as well,
too, within the National Emergency Management System, and in my
opinion, that means perhaps greater protocols, greater
understandings of roles and responsibilities between the local,
the State, the Federal system, greater accountability within
all levels of government and government agencies. I think we
need to take a hard look at the Emergency Support Functions, as
they currently exist, when FEMA calls them together, and how
they perform and what they are expected to do, and perhaps
build in greater metrics and goals and deliverables together
with that.
I think that the system is one that has worked very well
and served the country very well, but I think it's one we need
to take a very serious look at as it relates, obviously, to a
catastrophic event.
Senator Warner. Thank you very much. My time has expired,
Madam Chairman.
Chairman Collins. Senator Akaka.
Senator Akaka. Thank you, Madam Chairman.
Mr. Rhode, when Mr. Brown was named the PFO the day after
Katrina made landfall, he relinquished his role as Director of
FEMA, according to the National Response Plan, NRP, which made
you temporary FEMA Director. Were you aware of this provision
in the NRP when Mr. Brown was named PFO? And if not, when were
you made aware of your new role?
Mr. Rhode. Senator, I'm not certain as I sit here that I
was made aware that Mr. Brown's title as Director had been
removed, even temporarily. I honestly can't say that I remember
hearing that.
Senator Akaka. Was there ever a time when you knew that it
was your responsibility?
Mr. Rhode. Senator, I'm not certain that I've heard that,
to be completely honest and candid. My role was one as the
chief of staff from the time that I joined FEMA until the time
that I left FEMA. I joined FEMA in April 2003, and I left just
recently in January 2006, with the exception of roughly an 8-
week period where I was also given the title as well, too, as
Acting Deputy Director. I'm not aware during the time of the
early days of Katrina, as Mr. Brown was initially named
Principal Federal Officer, I'm not aware of any additional
impacts to me or how I was conducting myself in the office.
Senator Akaka. Mr. Brown may have chosen to ignore the NRP,
but according to that plan, he was no longer the FEMA Director
for that disaster, and this may be contributing to the problems
that we are talking about.
Mr. Rhode, when you were asked during your interview with
the Committee about the resources FEMA could have made
available to New Orleans once the city began to flood, you
discussed search and rescue capability. Is it your
understanding that search and rescue is the only resource FEMA
could have provided to New Orleans once the city flooded?
Mr. Rhode. Senator, my understanding is that there were
many resources that were applied to the City of New Orleans and
the entire 90,000-square-mile area that FEMA had within its
command, whether they were assets that FEMA perhaps could
federalize or assets that other agencies were contributing
through the FEMA Federal system.
Senator Akaka. Now, when you discussed the rescue and
search capabilities, you were aware that you were acting as the
Director, were you not?
Mr. Rhode. I was not aware that I was acting as the
Director of FEMA, no, sir, but I was aware that while Mr. Brown
was away that I was acting, as best I could, to lead FEMA, yes,
in Washington, DC.
Senator Akaka. Mr. Brown, I noticed an e-mail in the
documents you released only this morning dated September 1. The
e-mail was from Brooks Altshuler. Who is he?
Mr. Brown. Brooks was my Policy Director at FEMA, and I
think he may have held a dual title of Deputy Chief of Staff
also.
Senator Akaka. In the letter, you are told to, ``Please
talk up to the Secretary'' in your press conferences. You were
also told to say that there was a ``solid team with solid
support from the Secretary.''
What was the reason for this e-mail?
Mr. Brown. I don't know. In fact, I asked Brooks about
that. I wanted to know what was going on. I was getting very
frustrated. There is also an e-mail in there where I tell them
that I have told Mr. Chertoff that the number of phone calls
and--I called them ``pings''--the pings that we were getting
for things was literally driving us nuts, that we had
operations to run, and that there were channels by which you
could get information, but we needed to be doing things.
I was particularly upset one time when there had been a
request for a briefing of the Secretary one morning. He had
called me late in the evening for numerous things to be briefed
about the next day. I pulled the team together. They spent the
night getting their briefings together, and then they twiddled
their thumbs for about 2 hours that morning, waiting for him to
get off some phone calls or something. And I finally dismissed
the briefers and just told them to go back to work because you
can't have two people in control. Either somebody's going to
run the disaster or somebody's not going to run the disaster.
And I think that just stemmed from the inability to understand
that there was a catastrophic disaster going on, people had
things to do that they needed to be doing.
Again, drawing the difference between, say, Florida and
Katrina, I never had a decision second-guessed in Florida. Yet
in Katrina, there were times when I would make a decision and
find out that the decision hadn't been carried out because
somebody above me, either on the Secretary's staff or the
Secretary himself, had made a contrary decision or that there
had been conferences, conversations with people in the field,
that would contradict either FEMA policy or what we should be
doing. And it became an absolutely unmanageable situation.
I'm not very good at hiding my feelings. I don't play poker
for that very purpose. And so I imagine at one point Brooks was
frustrated that maybe it appeared that I was a little ticked
off about some stuff.
Senator Akaka. I want to thank you so much for being as
responsive as you have been, both of you.
Mr. Brown. Senator, I am here to get the truth out.
Senator Akaka. I really appreciate that. Did you perceive
that this e-mail--do you interpret that e-mail as being more
perception than substance?
Mr. Brown. Clearly. But perception is reality sometimes,
too.
Senator Akaka. Well, again, I want to thank you. As I
mentioned earlier in my first statement, you should not be held
a scapegoat and we cannot look only at you and Mr. Rhode, but
at the whole system.
Mr. Brown. May I say something, Senator?
Senator Collins. We are getting very late on time.
Mr. Brown. I just appreciate the fact that this has been
bipartisan, and to have that come from you, Senator, I greatly
appreciate that.
Senator Akaka. Thank you very much, Madam Chairman.
Chairman Collins. Thank you. Senator Dayton.
Senator Dayton. Thank you, Madam Chairman.
Mr. Brown, just to try to make sure that this chronology as
described today in the New York Times is accurate, Monday,
August 29, it states here, 9:27 p.m., an e-mail message from--
with the subject FYI from FEMA was sent to the Homeland
Security Secretary Michael Chertoff's Chief of Staff. It says,
``The first reports they are getting from aerial surveys in New
Orleans are far more serious than media reports are currently
reflecting.''
10 p.m., in a conference call, Mr. Bahamonde describes the
levee breach and flooding to FEMA operational staff.
10:30 p.m., a Homeland Security Situation Report states,
``There is a quarter-mile breach in the levee near the 17th
Street Canal.'' The report reaches the White House later that
night.
11:05 p.m., an e-mail message from FEMA's Deputy Director
to Michael Jackson, Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security, it
says that the breach has occurred.
Do you know when it says here the report reaches the White
House later that night to whom that report reached?
Mr. Brown. Only based on what I've read in the papers, and
I would disagree with you, based on my personal experience,
just because it's in the New York Times doesn't mean I believe
it.
Senator Dayton. That is why I am asking you. Do you know
whether the White House or anyone in the White House was
informed on that Monday night by any communication----
Mr. Brown. What I understand that report is about, it is
about, it is about a SIT report, a situation report that went
to the White House situation room. I can tell you and in my
testimony is, from my conversations directly with Hagin and
Card and others, that they were aware of what was going on.
Senator Dayton. They were aware as of when?
Mr. Brown. I have to go back and look at my cell phone----
Senator Dayton. When were they aware of the breach, to your
knowledge?
Mr. Brown. Sometime that day.
Senator Dayton. Monday?
Mr. Brown. Monday.
Senator Dayton. Monday sometime. Afternoon? Evening?
Mr. Brown. My guess is afternoon because I was still--we
were still debating at the EOC between the State and the Feds
is it a breach or is it a top. And not until later that
afternoon would I have expressed that it was actually a breach
to Hagin or Card.
Senator Dayton. But Monday afternoon.
Mr. Brown. Yes.
Senator Dayton. According to this chronology in the New
York Times, which is not always perfect or correct, the
Homeland Security Chief of Staff was informed Monday evening as
well as the Deputy Secretary Monday evening about the reality
of this breach of the levee. Again, this same article quotes
Russ Knocke, if that is the right pronunciation, a Homeland
Security spokesman, said that although Mr. Chertoff had been
``intensively 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.''
Was he intensively involved in monitoring the storm?
Mr. Brown. I don't know because I wasn't with him. I was in
Baton Rouge.
Senator Dayton. OK. And he was where?
Mr. Brown. I don't know where he was.
Senator Dayton. OK. Is this typical that in this kind of
serious emergency that the Deputy Secretary and the Chief of
Staff of the Department would not inform the Secretary
immediately or very soon thereafter of receiving that kind of
information?
Mr. Brown. They would have had the same information because
they would have been on the VTCs, and they would have had the
same SIT reports. So they would have or should have been just
as informed.
Senator Dayton. And then subsequently, you stated in your
testimony previously that the Secretary, ``tied your hands by
not allowing you to go back to Mississippi or New Orleans.''
When did that occur? And how were you prevented from----
Mr. Brown. I want to say it was Wednesday when I made a
quick trip to Jackson. But I'm not certain of the particular
day. And on the flight back, he reached me on Mil Air, and we
had a discussion, and he was quite irate that I had been in
Mississippi. And I was explicitly told to go to Baton Rouge and
not leave Baton Rouge.
Senator Dayton. And why did he--what reason was given for
that?
Mr. Brown. Apparently because cell phones were down and he
had a hard time making contact sometime. I don't know what the
rationale was.
Senator Dayton. OK. And, similarly, you can't reconcile the
fact that you informed the President's Chief of Staff Monday
afternoon about the breach in the levee and the President then
subsequently stated that he was not aware on Tuesday morning?
Mr. Brown. I don't know.
Senator Dayton. OK. Yesterday, in our hearing, the
Assistant Secretary of Defense, Paul McHale, stated that it was
on Thursday, September 1, that FEMA made a request for DOD to
accept the responsibility to provide ``full logistic support''
throughout the entire area affected by Hurricane Katrina.
Again, according to published reports, you toured by helicopter
the New Orleans area on Tuesday. Who would have provided that
full logistic support, if not DOD, prior to that request? And
then why was it 48 hours later before that request was made?
Mr. Brown. It would have been the Louisiana National Guard
who would have done it, plus FEMA's team, such as Urban Search
and Rescue Teams or any other rapid needs assessment teams that
we might have had on site would have been doing it. And that
fits in pretty well--I had not heard that comment from Paul
McHale, but that fits in pretty well with my recollection that
on August 30, indeed, there is a mission assignment, and my
understanding, by August 30, I was requesting active-duty
military.
Senator Dayton. August 30, which is 2 days prior to when he
is testifying here that the request is----
Mr. Brown. Right, and based on what I've seen so far, the
timeline of these things, that wouldn't surprise me.
Senator Dayton. It wouldn't surprise you that it takes 2
days for a request from FEMA to reach the DOD?
Mr. Brown. I guess.
Senator Dayton. Well, I would suggest, Madam Chairman, that
is something we should inquire--I would ask--my time is almost
up here. For the record, I appreciate, again, both your
appearances. If you could help us--the critical thing here is
we need to look ahead. We need to understand why FEMA was
unable to respond, and I just want to put in the record here
this quote again today of the papers to clarify. It says,
``Everybody is waiting''--this is as of today--``for the FEMA
maps like they were the oracles at Delphi. The maps will tell
residents and businesses where and how they can rebuild. Those
maps will tell people whether or not they can get flood
insurance. And if they can't get flood insurance, they may want
to sell. But there may not be a market for the house, so the
government may swoop in, raze the house, and build a park.
Preliminary FEMA maps are scheduled to come out in the spring,
but final Federal guidelines for rebuilding may not be released
until August,'' etc.
I mean, these--not just the immediate aftermath--but these
alleged bureaucratic delays seem to be at the crux of why more
progress has not been made in clearing away and rebuilding New
Orleans. And to the extent that if there is anything that we
can do legislatively, or whatever, that empowers FEMA to be
more efficient in its response, I would appreciate it if you
would direct us to that in writing.
Thank you, Madam Chairman.
Chairman Collins. Thank you. I want to thank the two
witnesses for their testimony. We will have additional
questions for the record. We appreciate your voluntarily being
here today, and I would now like to call the second panel to
come forward.
We will now proceed with our second panel. Robert Stephan
is the Department of Homeland Security's Assistant Secretary
for Infrastructure Protection, a post which he assumed in April
2005. Matthew Broderick is Director for Operations Coordination
at the Department of Homeland Security. At the time of
Hurricane Katrina, he was the head of the Homeland Security
Operations Center.
I would ask that you both stand so I can administer the
oath. Do you swear that the testimony you are about to give the
Committee will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but
the truth, so help you, God?
Colonel Stephan. I do.
General Broderick. I do.
Chairman Collins. Mr. Stephan, we are going to start with
you.
TESTIMONY OF COLONEL ROBERT B. STEPHAN,\1\ (USAF, RETIRED),
ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR INFRASTRUCTURE PROTECTION, U.S.
DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY
Colonel Stephan. Good morning, Madam Chairman, Senator
Lieberman, and other distinguished Members of this Committee.
Thank you very much for the opportunity to address you today
and also for your ongoing support to the Department of Homeland
Security's very important mission. I am pleased to come before
you to discuss the activities of the Department in relation to
preparation for and response to Hurricane Katrina.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ The prepared statement of Colonel Stephan appears in the
Appendix on page 85.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Currently, I am the Assistant Secretary for Infrastructure
Protection at DHS. By way of background, I retired from the
U.S. Air Force, after 24 years of experience, at the rank of
Colonel. I have extensive experience in contingency operations
from a joint special operations community perspective. In my
24-year military career, I organized, trained, and equipped Air
Force special operations forces for contingency operations in
Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Croatia, Liberia, Colombia, and
Kosovo. My duties also included during this period extensive
responsibilities for the planning and execution of complex
combat search and rescue, air traffic management, terminal
attack control, medical evacuation, and noncombatant evacuation
operations.
Following my Air Force career, I joined DHS at its
inception on Secretary Ridge's staff in March 2003 and served
as a Special Assistant to Secretary Ridge and later as Director
of the Department Integration Staff. In August 2004, then-
Secretary Ridge commissioned me to lead or integrate the
Department efforts to coordinate the development of the
National Incident Management System document as well as the
National Response Plan. In this capacity, was responsible for
leading an interagency writing team comprised of more than a
dozen principal representatives across the Department and other
key Federal agencies and for coordinating the development of
the NRP document, in fact, with hundreds of State and local
government, private sector, and other Federal agency and
Department partners. I also had lead responsibility for
developing an initial program of education, training, and
awareness regarding the NIMS document and the NRP in
partnership with FEMA's Emergency Management Institute at
Emmitsburg, Maryland. Following issuance of the NIMS in March
2004 and the NRP in December 2004, at Secretary Ridge's
direction, I transitioned responsibility for the ongoing
management, maintenance, and training of both the NIMS and the
NRP to FEMA headquarters, specifically the NIMS Integration
Center under Director Brown.
The National Response Plan is the core operational plan for
national incident management. It adopts an all-hazards approach
integrating natural disasters, terrorism, and industrial
accidents, for the most part, and provides the structure and
mechanisms for national-level policy and operational
coordination for a cross-spectrum of domestic incident
management concerns. It is actually signed by the heads of 32
Federal departments, to include Cabinet Secretaries and agency
heads and national-level presidents of private volunteer
organizations. Prior to final implementation, the NRP was
tested during the Top Officials Exercise 3, conducted during
the period of April 4-8, 2005, and involving complex mass
casualty scenarios in two State venues--New Jersey and
Connecticut.
The NRP is implemented--and this is important to understand
this for our discussion--in a cascading fashion according to
the situation at hand. It is not a document or a system that is
turned on and off in a binary fashion like a light switch; in
fact, certain core coordinating structures of the NRP and
information sharing mechanisms, such as the Homeland Security
Operations Center, are indeed active 24 hours a day every day
of the year. Other elements of the NRP can be fully or
partially implemented in the context of a specific threat, the
anticipation of a significant event, or in response to a
specific incident. Selective implementation of core elements of
the system allows flexibility in meeting the operational and
information-sharing requirements, again, of the situation at
hand, as well as ensuring and enabling interaction between
Federal, State, local, and private sector partners.
With the onset of Hurricane Katrina, I focused my attention
and responsibilities as Director of the Interagency Incident
Management Group, as specified and assigned in the NRP.
By way of background, this group, the IIMG, is a multi-
agency Federal coordination unit which reports directly to the
Secretary of Homeland Security to facilitate strategic response
to a domestic incident as opposed to tactical response that is
facilitated at the local level by Federal, State, local, and
private sector partners. Its membership is flexible and can be
tailored to provide appropriate subject matter expertise
depending on the nature of the threat or situation or incident
at hand. The IIMG works in concert with other NRP coordinating
structures such as the HSOC and FEMA headquarters National
Response Coordination Center, as it did during Hurricane
Katrina. In terms of division of labor, this Interagency
Incident Management Group at DHS headquarters is intended to
focus on strategic-level issues and medium-term courses of
action--that is, the medium-term/long-term fight--while the
HSOC and the NRCC at FEMA headquarters work in partnership to
maintain situational awareness and solve operational and
tactical level issues--that is, the near-term/near-horizon
fight.
As IIMG Director, I asked my staff in the early evening of
Thursday, August 25, to alert all IIMG members regarding the
approach of Hurricane Katrina and to request them to maintain
readiness for possible activation within a 90-minute time
window as directed by the Secretary in accordance with our
standard headquarters protocols. I also directed my staff to
send regular HSOC situation and spot reports regarding Katrina
to all IIMG members to help promote situational awareness and
prepare them to assume their duties if recalled.
During the weekend period, Saturday and Sunday, I stayed in
close contact with HSOC Director Broderick; I received regular
verbal and electronic updates on the situation, information as
it became available on the hurricane. Based upon the available
information regarding the storm, it was decided not to activate
the IIMG during the weekend period and that the fully activated
and robust HSOC and National Response Coordination Center
activities at FEMA were up and running at 100 percent or
greater in order to handle the emergent incident management
pre-deployment considerations and initial incident management
responsibilities. The IIMG membership remained on a 90-minute
recall posture throughout the weekend to afford the Secretary
an additive layer to these initial coordinating structures that
were very robust and already stood up at our headquarters and
at FEMA headquarters, along with the regional FEMA headquarters
elements that had been in place as well as the FEMA
headquarters elements that had now been in place in Baton Rouge
at least since Saturday and Sunday.
As Hurricane Katrina approached, FEMA and other Federal
agencies tactically prepositioned significant assets, to
include essential equipment, supplies, and specialty teams, in
critical locations throughout the projected hurricane footprint
and established initial NRP-related coordinating structures at
the national, regional, and State levels. Through these
actions, the Department was leaning forward to prepare for a
significant hurricane, informed by lessons learned from the
previous hurricane season, the Hurricane Pam planning, and
emergent analysis from the National Infrastructure Simulation
and Analysis Center, as well as, of course, by specific
requests and requirements that were pushed to us from the
States of Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.
Additional Federal assets were deployed into the region
following the issuance of the Presidential Emergency
Declaration on Saturday evening. The type and quantity of
prepositioned Federal assets were based upon previous hurricane
experience as well as specific State and local government
requirements. It should be noted that the NRP Catastrophic
Incident Annex was not implemented at this time because it was
designed and constructed to be a no-notice--or to support a no-
notice incident scenario that would not allow time for a more
tailored approach. Subsequent FEMA analysis has indicated to us
that as a minimum, 100 percent or greater of assets called for
in the Catastrophic Incident Supplement were, in fact, deployed
to the region some time during the course of the weekend prior
to landfall.
Through the mechanism of the Presidential Emergency
Declaration, the Federal Government had sufficient authority
and time to take action to determine and deploy a full measure
of appropriate assets prior to landfall pursuant to the
Stafford Act and associated State and local requests.
On Monday morning, August 29, the Deputy Secretary of
Homeland Security directed me to convene a meeting of IIMG
members for the purpose of conducting a situational awareness
update and pulsing the IIMG members regarding individual agency
capabilities and operational activities in the hurricane impact
area. At this point in the unfolding scenario, much of the
information being reported from the field was understandably
preliminary, incomplete, and unconfirmed. Throughout this day,
there were many inconsistent and uncertain reports regarding
the extent of hurricane damage in New Orleans and the status of
the levee system there. This is fully consistent with the Day 1
pattern established during previous hurricane episodes that we
had gone through since the Department's inception.
On the following day, Tuesday, August 30, at about 11:30
a.m., I was first advised by my staff of confirmed reports of
irreparable breaches to the levees in New Orleans and that
there was now considerable flooding confirmed to be occurring
in various parts of the city. As a result, the IIMG membership
was recalled to DHS headquarters, and the IIMG was officially
activated at approximately 2 p.m. on that day. This decision
was based on the fact that the potential long-term flooding of
New Orleans represented a ``catastrophic crisis within a
crisis'' and that the Secretary would now require the
additional layer or additive layer of incident management
capability provided by the IIMG. Secretary Chertoff shortly
thereafter also issued a formal memorandum designating Michael
Brown, the FEMA Director--already on the ground in Baton
Rouge--as the Principal Federal Official under the NRP.
As the events of that first week unfolded, I believe
honestly three factors combined to negatively impact the speed
and efficiency of the Federal response.
The first was the sheer amount of unbelievable physical
destruction, devastation, and disruption caused by Katrina
regarding both wind damage and subsequent flooding. Response
teams had to cope with the very severely restricted geographic
access issue to core parts of the New Orleans downtown area due
to the extent of the flooding. This significantly hampered
response activities.
Second, the tenuous initial security and law enforcement
environment in New Orleans during the first several days of the
response significantly impacted and impeded rescue and response
efforts until a level of stability was achieved later during
the first week.
Finally, as the week progressed after landfall, failure of
various Federal officials to fully implement key aspects of the
NIMS and the NRP impeded the Federal response. Specifically,
the designated PFO, FEMA Director Brown, and core staff
deployed with him did not after landfall establish a robust
Joint Field Office and Emergency Support Function structure as
called for in the National Response Plan. According to the NRP,
the Joint Field Office serves as a key hub of Federal incident
management coordination at the local level and enables
integrated interaction with key State and local officials, as
well as, very importantly, other Federal departments and
agencies with considerable resources to assist in the response.
Although the NRP envisions this operation normally to become
fully activated in a 48- to 96-hour period after the initial
occurrence of an event, the completely functional JFO in Baton
Rouge, in fact, was not activated until much later, in fact,
until some time during the middle of the second week of the
response.
Moreover, the Principal Federal Official failed to
establish a robust Federal unified command structure in Baton
Rouge or in New Orleans as called for in the National Incident
Management System. The concept of unified command is absolutely
paramount as it provides for the coming together of senior
representatives from each agency involved in incident response
to enable informed, collective decision-making, resource
allocation, and coordinated multi-agency operations. While many
support agencies had liaisons co-located at the Louisiana,
Mississippi, and Alabama Emergency Operations Centers, full
unified command was not accomplished in the first week. And,
again, I will give Mr. Brown credit in that the sheer amount of
devastation and destruction that he had to cope with to
establish this certainly impeded his ability to do so. But that
should not have gone on and dragged out into the middle and end
of the first week of the response.
The lack of eyes and ears on the ground in New Orleans
significantly hindered the ability of NRP entities at DHS
headquarters to put together a common situational awareness and
common operating picture for the Secretary and other DHS
headquarters leadership. This situation was dramatically turned
around following the arrival of Vice Admiral Thad Allen in
theater and his assumption of overall Principal Federal
Official responsibilities.
Madam Chairman, as we move forward, the Department is
aggressively looking at identifying additional shortcomings
associated with the Federal response and to design and begin to
implement appropriate solutions. A key focus area--and I
believe my colleague will discuss this in a little bit more
detail--is improving tactical-level situational awareness and
command and control connectivity within the Department
headquarters for catastrophic incidents. The Department
leadership has also been working very closely with FEMA
headquarters and field components to restructure FEMA logistics
and mission assignment processes for catastrophic events. More
details will follow from the Secretary regarding this effort in
the coming weeks.
The Department is committed to taking also a close look at
the NRP and its associated education and training processes and
programs and making the adjustments necessary to make sure we
have a full and robust response capability prior to the advent
of this year's hurricane season. We look forward to continuing
to work with you, this Committee, and our other partners, to
look back retrospectively in order to operate more efficiently
and effectively during future situations.
If I can just have one more second, I would like to really
close by recognizing the extraordinary efforts of the men and
women of FEMA who worked diligently and continue to work
diligently to provide a wide variety of assistance to those
whose lives were impacted by the hurricanes of 2005. The
situation they faced at all levels was extremely complex and,
in some cases, heretofore unprecedented. I hold these folks in
absolutely the utmost regard. They deserve our continued
respect and support in the road ahead.
Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak with you
today. I will now defer to my colleague.
Chairman Collins. Thank you. Mr. Broderick.
TESTIMONY OF BRIGADIER GENERAL MATTHEW BRODERICK,\1\ DIRECTOR
FOR OPERATIONS COORDINATION, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND
SECURITY
General Broderick. Good afternoon, Chairman Collins,
Senator Lieberman, distinguished Members of this Committee.
Thank you for the opportunity to address you today and for your
ongoing support of the Department of Homeland Security and its
operations. I am honored and pleased to be before you to
discuss the activities of the Department of Homeland Security
relating to the preparation for and response to Hurricane
Katrina.
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\1\ The prepared statement of General Broderick appears in the
Appendix on page 94.
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Currently, I am the Director of Operations for the
Department of Homeland Security, but to be clear, at the time
of Hurricane Katrina, I held the position of Director of the
Homeland Security Operations Center, HSOC. By way of
background, I am a retired Brigadier General in the U.S. Marine
Corps after serving for 30 years. During that time, when not in
command, I was in charge of operations centers at all levels of
the Marine Corps, including battalion, regiment, brigade,
division, and then later, as Director of Operations for the
Marine Corps, I commanded the Marine Corps National Command
Center.
Following my career with the Marine Corps, I served for
3\1/2\ years as a regional vice president of operations for an
international corporation and then as an adjunct consultant for
the Institute of Defense Analysis working on command and
control and situational awareness systems and on projects
aiming to standardize and modernize joint deployable operations
centers for the Department of Defense.
In May 2003, I was asked by the Department of Homeland
Security to help improve the then-fledgling Homeland Security
Operations Center. At that time, the Operations Center
consisted of five or six DHS headquarters employees and
approximately 100-plus detailees working in austere conditions
with limited capabilities. Since that time, the center has
grown into one of the largest 24/7 operations centers in the
United States, with about 45 Federal, State, and local agencies
represented and approximately 300 personnel. Last October, the
Secretary, following his Second Stage Review of the Department
and in consultation with Congress, established the Office of
Operations Coordination, of which the HSOC is a core part of
that organization.
The Office of Operations Coordination is responsible for
coordinating operations across all DHS organizational
components, for coordinating activities related to incident
management, for collection and dissemination of terrorist-
related threat information, and for providing domestic
situational awareness on a daily basis. Its major components
are the HSOC, future operations, current operations, and
incident management operations. This was an important step
within the Department because it consolidated the operational
efforts of what were previously shared by other DHS components.
It is also important to point out that the headquarters focus
of the Office of Operations Coordination, both during Hurricane
Katrina and now, is at the strategic level and, therefore, acts
in a supporting role to assist with additional national assets,
as required.
The HSOC is the primary national-level nerve center and
conduit for information flowing in and out of these events.
However, it does not become decisively engaged with any single
event or incident so that it might monitor several different
events at any one time. In the case of an incident like
Hurricane Katrina, the HSOC continues to provide situational
awareness to the Interagency Incident Management Group, while
the Incident Management Division, a component of the IIMG,
assumes responsibility for coordinating the Federal response
specific to that incident.
The HSOC began its involvement with Hurricane Katrina prior
to the first landfall in Florida, on or about August 24, 2005.
About that time, the HSOC started issuing daily situation
reports, and we were closely monitoring the latest developments
relating to the storm, especially the meteorological reports
from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Over
the course of Friday, August 26, the hurricane shifted its
directional path and its intensity. There was a level of
uncertainty as to where the storm's eye would make landfall, as
well as its intensity, magnitude, and impact.
The Department knew that a significant hurricane could
cause potentially grave damage to the Gulf Coast. Various
reports forewarned of an impending disaster and suggested the
possibility of a storm surge from Lake Pontchartrain and the
overtopping of the levees.
As a result, we began to take appropriate actions. The
Secretary dispatched the FEMA Director to the area on Sunday,
August 28. The President made emergency declarations for
Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, and the IIMG was advised
to maintain readiness over the ensuing weekend. The HSOC was on
high alert as well and was carefully monitoring the approaching
storm. The IMD was also focused intently on the storm's
development, in the event the IIMG needed to be activated. The
IMD's function is to coordinate the Federal response to a
specific event when an incident reaches national significance,
and in that case, the IMD helps guide the efforts of the IIMG.
In addition, DHS/FEMA had tactically prepositioned significant
assets in critical locations outside but near the intended area
of impact, and it had initiated their National Response
Coordination Center.
As the eye of the storm made landfall on Monday, August 29,
information from that area was understandably sparse. At that
time, it was difficult to ascertain accurate ground truth as to
the extent of the damage. Our standard operating procedure is
not to disturb the operations of field commanders in the middle
of a crisis. Instead, we relied, in large part, on the good
judgment of the information providers in the field and the NRCC
to push relevant, pertinent information to the HSOC as
information became clear.
As the day wore on, the HSOC began to receive information
from a number of sources and began to gather, sort, and verify
information and reports. There were many inconsistent and
uncertain reports about the extent of flooding in New Orleans
and the status of the levee system. We knew a certain amount of
flooding could be expected in almost any hurricane.
Nevertheless, the HSOC alerted others to those possibilities
and potential occurrences, while we were making our best
efforts to verify the accuracy. We were desperately pursuing
all avenues in an effort to obtain confirmed reports from
knowledgeable, objective sources. It is our job at the HSOC to
distill and confirm reports. Based on my years of experience,
we should not help spread rumors or innuendo, nor should we
rely on speculation or hype, and we should not react to initial
or unconfirmed reports, which are almost invariably lacking or
incomplete.
Prior experience had shown that as the storm cleared over
the next day or two, the ground truth would begin to
crystallize and a common operational picture and more frequent
and accurate reporting would emerge. Unfortunately, this did
not happen.
At about this time, it became clear that the Department
needed to call upon significant additional Federal resources to
respond to this event. As a result, the Department began to
consider a greater role for the Department of Defense.
Lieutenant General Russel Honore was already leaning forward
proactively and moving assets and personnel into the region.
The HSOC began receiving regular situation reports from the
U.S. Northern Command regarding DOD's specific deployment
activities responding to Hurricane Katrina.
While the military was providing this ongoing support, the
two departments were working to ascertain the precise language
of what additional support could be requested and what could be
provided. DOD needed to consider and balance these priority
missions in light of their other military responsibilities and
also needed a clearer understanding of exactly what was being
requested. This effort was an example of excellent interagency
coordination between two large agencies working collectively
under significant pressure.
In addition, the Secretary deployed U.S. Coast Guard
Admiral Thad Allen as the Deputy Principal Federal Official in
New Orleans. The situational awareness and reporting vastly
improved, and the response efforts began to stabilize.
The Secretary has stated on several occasions that one of
his primary goals is to improve situational awareness for such
incident response efforts, and the Office of Operations
Coordination, established under the 2SR, is one way to foster
and promote this worthy goal. Since the early days following
Hurricane Katrina, the Department continues to review the
things that went well and the things that warrant improvement.
I am proud to report that DHS has made great strides toward
improving the information flow and situational awareness for
incident management.
In particular, as the Secretary noted previously, DHS has
established a six-person national reconnaissance team that can
deploy in the immediate aftermath of an incident. In this way,
the Department can receive real-time reporting of the facts on
the ground, and the team can help us understand the priority
concerns and allocate resources accordingly. A prototype of
this concept was tested during the past Super Bowl with
excellent results.
In addition, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has
provided 26 two-person teams from offices throughout the
country which can be deployed immediately to an incident
anywhere within their region and use assets to report
situational awareness directly back to the HSOC. They will
begin their initial training next month.
Another step is the Secretary's designation of ``Principal
Federal Officials in waiting.'' The idea is that these
Principal Federal Officials will have the opportunity to work
cooperatively with State and local officials on an ongoing
basis to plan and train together. In this way, we can develop
and build the kinds of relationships that one needs to rely on
when an emergency strikes.
These are just some of the initial changes to begin to
address some of the lessons we learned from Hurricane Katrina.
We continue to develop our comprehensive recommendations for
the Secretary, and the Department looks forward to continuing
its cooperative relationship with this Committee and other
stakeholders.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today, and
I would be happy to answer any of your questions. Thank you.
Chairman Collins. Thank you for your testimony.
Mr. Stephan, you led the development of the National
Response Plan, and Katrina was its first major test. Did key
governmental officials responsible for executing the plan
believe in it, understand it, and correctly use it as the basis
for the Federal response?
Colonel Stephan. Yes, ma'am. It is widely known throughout
the U.S. Government that this plan was issued during the month
of December 2004. The plan officially went into effect, I
believe, on April 14, 2005. Secretary Chertoff sent a memo out
at that time to his Cabinet colleagues, actually to all NRP
signatories, that the plan was in effect, and, in fact, we had
just used the plan to kind of measure government performance or
kind of test-run it during the TOP-OFF 3 exercise April 4-8, as
I described in my testimony.
There was a clear understanding on the part of all
signatories to that plan, our State and local government
partners, that the National Response Plan was the governing
document that would govern the Federal response and how the
Federal Government would support State and local and private
sector response, recovery, and restoration activities.
It is my belief, based upon a series of interactions that I
had personally with Mr. Brown over the course of the past
couple years, that he personally did not believe in key
coordinating structures associated with the National Response
Plan, specifically those associated with the Department of
Homeland Security headquarters, and that he, in fact, either
did not or chose not to accept his responsibilities in full
measure as the designated Principal Federal Official for the
event and continued to perform duties as if he were the FEMA
Director as opposed to rising up to a much higher level of
responsibility that involved integrating all mission aspects
that were ongoing during the response and recovery ops in the
tri-state area, as was prescribed by the Secretary.
Chairman Collins. I want you to be specific on that point.
In what ways did Mr. Brown fail to execute his responsibilities
as the Principal Federal Official under the plan?
Colonel Stephan. Yes, ma'am, I believe the plan itself
calls out about a dozen very specific responsibilities that he
had to follow. I will highlight two of those. The rest are
available. One is providing real-time incident information to
the Secretary of Homeland Security--who designated him to
perform that responsibility through the Homeland Security
Operations Center and the Interagency Incident Management
Group, No. 1.
No. 2, ensuring that adequate connectivity is maintained
between the Joint Field Office, which failed to be established
in an appropriate amount of time, and the HSOC, local, county,
State, and regional Emergency Operating Centers,
nongovernmental Emergency Operating Centers, and relevant
elements of the private sector. Those are two key pieces that
left us more or less at various times during this response at
DHS headquarters virtually blind to certain key events that
were happening as the response unfolded throughout the first
week.
Chairman Collins. Mr. Broderick, that is a good segue into
the first question I have for you. A key concept, as we have
just heard, within the National Response Plan is the concept of
sharing important information with decisionmakers. Yet in the
case of Katrina, absolutely critical information was not shared
promptly with key decisionmakers.
Now, in the case of Mr. Brown and what we have just heard
from Mr. Stephan, I can only conclude that he let his poor
personal relationship with Secretary Chertoff interfere with
his clear responsibility to communicate to the Secretary. But
the best example of this failure to communicate is the breach
of the New Orleans levees. Secretary Chertoff stated that he
did not learn of the collapse of the levees until Tuesday,
arguably 24 hours after it happened. Deputy Secretary Jackson
has told us in an interview that he did not learn of the
collapse of the levees until Tuesday. Admiral Keating told me
personally that he did not learn of the breach of the levees
until Tuesday. Mr. Stephan has just testified that he did not
learn of the collapse of the levees until 11:30 a.m,
approximately, on Tuesday.
Whose responsibility was it to inform these key officials
that the levees had collapsed and, thus, the city of New
Orleans was in tremendous danger?
General Broderick. Madam Chairman, it was my responsibility
at that time as the Director of the Homeland Security
Operations Center to inform these key people, these key
personnel. If they did not receive that information, it was my
responsibility and my fault.
I would like to point out, though, that getting that
situational awareness and getting the correct information was
very difficult. Monday, we knew that we had a lot of
conflicting reports. We expect flooding during hurricanes, and
we know that. There were no urgent calls or flash messages
coming up from anyone during the day of Monday that gave us any
indication. We did get reports that there was breaching and
overtopping. It's my job to make sure that these individuals
all get the correct information, and that's what we were trying
to do, is get ground truth.
There is a big difference between breaching, which means
water's going to be streaming in at a rapid rate, and
overspilling.
Chairman Collins. Absolutely.
General Broderick. There was also a question if there was a
breach, could the Corps of Engineers quickly plug that breach?
And we didn't know that, and we were having trouble finding
that out.
There's also a question, if there's overtopping, can the
pumps--and I believe there were 33 major large pumps within the
city of New Orleans that could evacuate that water, and we
didn't know to what extent. If water was overtopping, it could
have been exiting as fast as it was coming in. The reports we
were getting were very confusing. Some parts were flooding. We
got word that some parts were up to 10 feet and some parts were
up to rooftops.
We had other conflicting reports that said there were no
breaches and that only certain parts of the city were taking
water. Ascertaining to what degree was what we were trying to
do and get ground truth.
We finally got a report that I remember at--I think it was
the last SITREP of that evening that said there were no
breaches to the levee systems in New Orleans, and that's what
came up to us.
Chairman Collins. But from whom? And who was responsible on
the ground in New Orleans to communicate the information to
you? You are not down in Louisiana or Mississippi. You are up
in headquarters at the Operations Center and deploying the
information from there. But who is the person who is
responsible for communicating accurate, timely, vital
information to you?
General Broderick. At that time, it was Mr. Brown,
Secretary Brown, Under Secretary Brown. There's an obligation,
from my experience in the military--I've been doing this a long
time, from Vietnam, to evacuating Saigon, to evacuating Phnom
Penh. I ran southern Somalia for a while. I went back and
evacuated Mogadishu. I've been in a lot of this stuff a lot of
times. Juniors or subordinates have a responsibility to keep
their seniors informed. There was a prevailing attitude from
Mr. Brown that he did not want Homeland Security to interfere
with any of his operations or what he was doing, and that came
through loud and clear. So we trusted, based on their past
record, that they would do the proper thing, take the proper
actions, and keep us informed. We were not getting that
information.
Chairman Collins. And it is completely unacceptable that
Mr. Brown did not communicate to you. But I want to really
focus on this issue because it was the flooding of New Orleans
that made the difference between this being a bad hurricane and
a catastrophic disaster for the city of New Orleans.
General Broderick. Yes, ma'am.
Chairman Collins. We know that Marty Bahamonde was so
alarmed when he heard the reports of the breach in the levee
that he called Mr. Brown on Monday morning. We know that he e-
mailed a number of FEMA officials. And then later that day, he
had a firsthand, eyewitness account to verify what he saw.
Did any of those reports get conveyed by Mr. Brown to you
at the Operations Center?
General Broderick. Not by Mr. Brown, and Mr. Brown should
have picked up the phone and called the Secretary right away if
that happened.
Now, there were reports coming in from other agencies, and
that's what we were trying to confirm. I remember leaving
Monday evening, though, knowing that Mr. Brown had said that he
could handle situations down there and asked us to stand back.
And in the French Quarter, on television, they were dancing and
drinking beer and seemed to be having a party in the French
Quarter of New Orleans that evening. So it led us to believe
that the flooding may have been just an isolated incidence, it
was being handled, and it was being properly addressed because
we were not seeing it.
Now, later on that evening, we had significant reports that
came in later that then led us to the conclusion we had a
serious problem. And by the time I came in Tuesday morning and
read those reports, I knew we had a catastrophic event and we
had to get moving, and I needed a few hours to get some ground
truth to this very quickly, whatever means I could, so that I
could get hold of Mr. Stephan and tell him we need the IIMG and
the IMD in here.
Chairman Collins. Thank you. Senator Lieberman.
Senator Lieberman. Thanks, Madam Chairman. Thanks to both
of you.
General Broderick, let me begin with some questions for
you. As you have indicated, at the time of Hurricane Katrina,
you were the head of the Homeland Security Operations Center,
HSOC, which describes itself, appropriately, as ``the primary
conduit to the White House and the Secretary of Homeland
Security for domestic situational awareness during a
catastrophic event.'' It houses a number of agencies, a large
number. And this was one of the gems that we wanted so much to
create after September 11 within the new Department of Homeland
Security, the place where the dots could be connected. And that
is why what happened leading up to Katrina and on the day of
landfall is so perplexing to us. And I presume--because I know
you have served your country, you are a patriot, you are
capable, I presume they are also of great concern to you.
I assume that, like everyone else in the Department of
Homeland Security, you were generally aware of the so-called
New Orleans scenario, that it was a bowl and if the levees
broke, it would flood. Is that correct?
General Broderick. Yes, sir.
Senator Lieberman. And were you involved at all in the
Hurricane Pam exercise, or anybody for you?
General Broderick. No, sir.
Senator Lieberman. You were not. But during the weekend
before Hurricane Katrina hit landfall, I presume you were
involved in briefings such as those that Mr. Brown or others
have described, including the very public warnings by Dr.
Mayfield on the TV that this could be a Category 4 or 5 storm
and that would be the big one that New Orleans had been worried
about. Is that right?
General Broderick. Yes, sir.
Senator Lieberman. OK. So we go into the weekend with that
in mind, and in the interview with our Committee staff, you
said, quite correctly, that one of the responsibilities of the
HSOC, the Operations Center, is to develop plans for monitoring
events, big events like the Super Bowl and the national
political conventions, and in that sense maintaining all
important situational awareness, what is going on and how can
we, therefore, be prepared to respond.
Yet when you were asked what type of plan the HSOC
developed for maintaining situational awareness during Katrina,
your answer was, ``There was no plan developed.''
So in light of your office's, the center's, and DHS's
primary responsibility with regard to catastrophes, how do you
explain why there was no plan going into that weekend for
trying to maintain situational awareness?
General Broderick. The usual reliance, sir, on a major
contingency is when the Principal Federal Official is
appointed, the Homeland Security Operations Center and other
departments at the headquarters send the communications and the
people with that Principal Federal Official to go to that
incident. Because Secretary Brown owned significant assets down
range and he could draw upon them, he would actually--we
actually did not end up sending people from the headquarters
with them because he had the resources to draw down there. So
right there that severed what would normally be my own people
down at that site with my own communications.
Senator Lieberman. Normally, you would have sent in your
own team to try to the best of their ability to maintain
situational awareness, and because you thought that Director
Brown was doing that, you made a judgment that you didn't need
to, that in some sense he was occupying the field.
General Broderick. Yes, sir. He had the assets. We will
take a Principal Federal Official from across the country and
ask him to be the Principal Federal Official. He needs to be
supported, so we will take communications and people from the
headquarters, and those people will pass that back.
Senator Lieberman. Here is the painful reality that we have
discovered, and if you have been following this, you probably
have, too, which is that Michael Brown didn't have the assets.
He had Marty Bahamonde and a few other people down there. And
he himself had a hard time maintaining situational awareness.
Let me take you through some of the other steps which are
so troubling to all of us. I appreciate that you took some
responsibility in your answer to Chairman Collins' question
because generally people don't do that. Here is part of the
problem, and I want us to look at this together self-
critically, constructively, because the next time, very
different, it is going to be a terrorist attack or another
disaster. And on that blue chart--you don't have to look at it.
It is Exhibit Q.\1\ But I referred to it earlier. Beginning at
8:30 a.m., there are public statements, local, State, and a lot
of Federal agencies are saying basically the levees have
broken, New Orleans is flooding. 9:08 a.m., the National
Weather Service has reported that a levee broke--I am reading
from this--and Transportation Security Administration--which I
presume is part of HSOC, am I right?
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\1\ Exhibit Q appears in the Appendix on page 205.
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General Broderick. TSA, yes, sir.
Senator Lieberman. Right. They put out a bulletin at 9:08
saying that a levee has broken in the uptown area of New
Orleans on the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain, flood waters
have already intruded on the first stories of houses, and some
roads are impassable, heavy street flooding throughout Orleans,
St. Bernard, and Jefferson parishes. And it goes on from the
National Weather Service again, from HSOC Spot Report,
continuing very agitated reports from the National Weather
Service, one from FEMA. 12:40 p.m. on that day, Monday, the
National Weather Service puts out a flash flood warning:
Widespread flooding will continue across the parishes along the
south shore of the lake. This continues to be an extremely
life-threatening situation, so much so that they add--you
wouldn't think it was the Weather Service's responsibility,
but, of course, it is--those seeking refuge in attics and
rooftops are strongly urged to take the necessary tools for
survival. And they go on to tell them to take an axe or a
hatchet with them. And, of course, National Weather Service is
part of NOAA--which I also believe is part of the Operations
Center, correct?
General Broderick. I have a NOAA representative at the
Operations Center.
Senator Lieberman. Right. So it doesn't necessarily mean
that the representative got this, but he certainly should have.
General Broderick. I would assume that he did get it, sir.
Senator Lieberman. So here is the really troubling
situation, and having some sense of who you are, I imagine
today you have to be really furious about it. All this is
happening and coming into component agencies of your Operations
Center, and yet you go home Monday night, and you have seen on
the television that in the French Quarter in New Orleans they
are drinking beer, and you conclude that there is maybe some
minor flooding, when, in fact, all these reports coming in are
telling you that it is quite the contrary. It turns out the
French Quarter, as we know, is a little higher elevated, so it
was one of the few places that did not get badly flooded.
How do you explain that to yourself? And is that part of
the reason why Secretary Chertoff and the President said that
they didn't know about this--Mr. Stephan, too--didn't know
about the flooding until Tuesday morning?
General Broderick. Yes, sir. They wouldn't know until I
passed it on.
Senator Lieberman. What did you--I am sorry. Go ahead.
General Broderick. I was extremely frustrated. I had been
there a thousand times in situations like this. I honestly do
not remember the official I called, but I called a senior
official at FEMA and said we have a President, we have a
Secretary that are seeing things on television, we are getting
reports, what is going on down there?
Senator Lieberman. You did that on Monday, the day of
landfall?
General Broderick. Yes.
Senator Lieberman. And what was the answer you got?
General Broderick. The answer that I received, sir, was
that FEMA SOP says, ``We tell you early in the morning and we
tell you early in the evening on a situation report, and that's
what you're going to get.'' And I said, ``That's
unacceptable.'' This looks significant, it looks serious, and
that was repeated again: ``We give you a report in the morning,
and we give you a report in the evening.''
It was extremely frustrating, and we were trying to go--
now, I asked a senior official, Mike Lowder, later on----
Senator Lieberman. A FEMA official.
General Broderick. Yes, sir. I asked him several weeks ago
why that happened and what broke down. He told me that he had
called Secretary Brown on numerous occasions and recommended
that he needed to call Secretary Chertoff and that they needed
to push that information up, and he was told that they work for
the White House and not for DHS.
Senator Lieberman. And as we heard, he was telling the
White House--Mr. Brown was--although Mr. Jackson was on some of
the calls that he was making from New Orleans. I have been to
the Operations Center. It is an impressive place. They are
essentially sitting around getting information in the same
general area, and it is coming in from a lot of the people at
the table there. Why didn't any of them go up to you and say,
``General Broderick, this is a catastrophe. We have got to
mobilize our forces quickly and respond to this? ''
General Broderick. I can't answer that, sir, but I can tell
you that some of that information--and I don't remember
specifically--was coming toward me. That was my frustration
with trying to find out were these significant breaches, was
this overtopping, was it just a small section of the city that
was flooding, were the pumps handling it. We could not get
ground truth. We were getting nothing out of Louisiana.
Senator Lieberman. Have you taken steps now as Director of
Operations to make sure that the next time something like this
or a terrorist attack happens that this doesn't happen again?
General Broderick. Significant steps, sir, including a
National Reconnaissance Team that's ready to go with satellite
communications and streaming video that we can insert within 8
hours and people within 4 hours from 26 different ICE
locations.
Senator Lieberman. OK. My time is up. Thank you.
Chairman Collins. Senator Akaka.
Senator Akaka. Thank you very much, Madam Chairman.
I raised the issue of the NRP and the Principal Federal
Officer with the first panel, and I want to follow through with
you on this topic.
Colonel Stephan, you were one of the principal authors of
the NRP, National Response Plan----
Colonel Stephan. Correct, sir.
Senator Akaka [continuing]. Which established the position
of Principal Federal Officer, PFO.
Colonel Stephan. Correct, sir.
Senator Akaka. The NRP states that once an individual is
named PFO, he or she must ``relinquish the conduct of all
normal duties and functions.''
Colonel Stephan. Yes, sir.
Senator Akaka. Do you think it is problematic for the
Director of FEMA to relinquish his or her normal duties during
a disaster?
Colonel Stephan. Sir, let me answer that question by saying
recall Mr. Brown, by the time the Principal Federal Official
designation was made by the Secretary, was already on the
ground and, for all intents and purposes, performing Principal
Federal Official duties as the senior person from the
Department headquarters. However, without the formal
designation, he, Mike Brown, was only able to direct FEMA
resources.
A FEMA official, through the Presidential Declaration of
Emergency on Saturday evening, was designated as the Federal
Coordinating Officer for resource coordination purposes. Mr.
Brown and his FCO, who actually is also a FEMA employee, worked
together as FEMA Director, FCO, to push the initial--or get
pulls of the initial resource requests and requirements coming
in, push them up to their headquarters and to other places
throughout the food chain.
When now Mr. Brown--all the Secretary really did by
designating him PFO is say, look, Mr. Brown, you are already
deployed, you are here, you are on location, you have no more
responsibilities back in terms of your day-to-day
administrative control of FEMA headquarters, you're exclusively
focused on the Federal Government's principal representative
designated by me to do what needs to be done to bring this
situation under control, determine State and local government
and private sector requirements, get them resourced, and
identify any shortfalls in that process as a result.
Senator Akaka. Who was this FCO that was designated?
Colonel Stephan. Sir, that would be William Lokey, part of
the Federal Coordinating Officer cadre that was in place on
Saturday, I believe, concurrently with the Presidential
Emergency Declaration, with full authority to bring in and have
financed any Federal resource that was supported by a State and
local request through the State-level validation process.
Senator Akaka. Just to get the facts straight, was Mr.
Rhode ever designated as Director?
Colonel Stephan. Sir, I don't have clarity on that, but it
would be incumbent upon Mr. Brown to designate an individual of
his choice to perform in the FEMA headquarters director
administrative duty as long as he was, in fact, designated to
perform the Principal Federal Official duty, focusing
exclusively on the Katrina response.
Senator Akaka. Are there any changes to the PFO concept
that you would like to recommend now that all of this has
happened?
Colonel Stephan. Sir, I think the concept is a good one. It
is a necessary one. I would not throw the baby out with the
bath water, so to speak. If one individual did not perform up
to that level, that does not mean the concept is bad. I think
the concept is good. I think the country, not the Department of
Homeland Security that help put this National Response Plan
together, thought highly of the concept enough to put it in
this document and all support it, it ought to stay in there.
But we ought to examine it to make sure that the PFO does have
all the authorities that he or she would require during a
similar incident or one of greater magnitude.
Senator Akaka. Yes, it appears that the confusion regarding
the shift of responsibilities probably played a part in what
happened there.
General Broderick, as you know, geospatial technologies
such as satellite imagery and aerial photography provide first
responders with timely situational information during a
disaster. I understand that there were multiple and
uncoordinated efforts by the HSOC and FEMA to obtain aerial
images of New Orleans from the Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
immediately after Hurricane Katrina hit land. I am especially
interested in this because I authored legislation that created
the DHS Office of Geospatial Management specifically to
coordinate such information requests.
How was geospatial information obtained during the response
to Hurricane Katrina, and was the Office of Geospatial
Management ever involved?
General Broderick. Yes, sir. The following day, Tuesday,
when we realized that we had a catastrophic incident, the first
thing we did was ask NGA, the National Geospatial Agency, to
start overflying that and giving us whatever picture they
could. There was also a request from one of the parishes that
had significant pipelines underground and aboveground if they
could fly those routes and see if there were any significant
breaks or leaks that they could detect, both subterranean and
on the surface. We also wanted to get as much photography as we
could of the actual site itself, and eventually, we were able
to get that, sir.
One of the problems that I think in the future you run into
with NGA--and we're trying to work that out now because I am a
big believer in geospatial technology--is that usually when
NGA, our primary source, does something like that, all the
photography comes out as stamped ``Secret,'' and you can't pass
it on. So we're trying to work through that on how we can get a
level below the secret level.
Senator Akaka. Well, thank you for that. From the reports I
received, I wondered what role the GMO had during that period
of time.
Is it your understanding that FEMA was making requests of
NGA at the same time the HSOC was?
General Broderick. I actually asked someone to help
coordinate the efforts. There is no sense in duplicity and
running the same missions. And we were trying to work that out
with them, sir, as best we could. There were requirements
coming up from the field. There were requirements from FEMA
headquarters. There were requirements from us. Because of that
and one of the lessons learned in that is we need, as the
military does, to have one belly button that can coordinate all
those efforts so that there is not a waste of assets and time.
Senator Akaka. General, in your interview with Committee
staff, you stated that on Wednesday, August 31, you tried to
obtain buses to evacuate the remaining residents of New Orleans
at Secretary Chertoff's request. I realize that Secretary
Chertoff tasked you with this responsibility even though
locating buses clearly was not your job.
Was your ability to oversee the HSOC hindered by your
involvement in operations?
General Broderick. Sir, I'm sorry if I confused the record.
That may have been a misquote. Secretary Chertoff asked me to
find out the status of the buses and what was taking place and
what Mr. Brown was doing to get more buses in there and, if
they were having trouble, for us to step in and check with the
Department of Transportation TSA to help support that.
Senator Akaka. Thank you for that response, General.
General Broderick. Yes, sir.
Senator Akaka. Colonel Stephan, in your interview with the
Committee staff, you described the Department of Homeland
Security as a place where everyone wore multiple hats,
fulfilling many roles. Do you believe this multi-tasking caused
confusion and made it more difficult to accomplish tasks during
Hurricane Katrina?
Colonel Stephan. No, sir, I do not. Once we had a
verifiable confirmation of a levee breach--and, actually, the
weekend leading up to that, there was no dual-hatting or
triple-hatting that in my estimation across the Department
leadership caused anyone to not be able to focus. We identified
pieces of the response in a cascading fashion. We rolled in
FEMA teams down into the area. We activated the FEMA response
structure at their national-level headquarters, brought
interagency players into their headquarters to facilitate the
response to the Emergency Support Function cadre. We had done
outreach with the State and local government officials at all
levels. We had done outreach with the private sector at all
levels in the projected impacted zone. Secretary Chertoff made
numerous personal phone calls to governors and other key
officials in the potentially impacted zone to figure out
whether or not there were any resource requirements that were
not being met.
I wore multiple hats, but I knew which hat was most
important during this response, and it was focusing on Katrina.
And I may have been performing parallel duties, for example, as
the Assistant Secretary for Infrastructure Protection, while
serving simultaneously as the Interagency Incident Management
Group Director. But I only did those activities such as
reaching out and making sure the private sector, for example,
had the National Infrastructure Simulation Analysis Center
analysis of the potential infrastructure cascading impacts
inside the projected hurricane footprint, getting those things
out, for example.
So I don't think triple- and dual-hatting of any individual
leader within the Department caused any slowness or lack of a
response.
Senator Akaka. Thank you for your clarification, and I want
to thank both of you for your responses.
Thank you, Madam Chairman.
Chairman Collins. Thank you. I am going to turn over the
gavel to my colleague, Senator Lieberman. Don't do anything
that I wouldn't do. [Laughter.]
Senator Lieberman. I can't promise. I will try not to.
Chairman Collins. I apologize for having to leave. I want
to thank our witnesses for your very candid testimony. It has
been helpful to us, and we will be submitting some additional
questions for the record, but thank you for your cooperation.
Senator Dayton.
Senator Dayton. Thank you, Madam Chairman.
Both of you have military backgrounds. What is the chain of
command between Mr. Brown and the Secretary or whomever? Is
that a direct connection?
Colonel Stephan. Yes, sir.
General Broderick. Yes, sir.
Senator Dayton. Where do the two of you then fit into that
chain?
General Broderick. We are staff officers, sir.
Senator Dayton. Meaning you are parallel or you are----
General Broderick. I am a direct report to the Secretary.
At that time, I was not. I worked for an Under Secretary of
IAIP, but I had a very close relationship with the Secretary.
Senator Dayton. Does Mr. Brown have a direct report to
either of you--did he at that time?
Colonel Stephan. Sir, may I answer that in two ways?
Neither one of us had a direct reporting day-to-day
administrative chain of command that in any way, shape, or form
involved Mr. Brown. However, with the designation of Principal
Federal Official, Mr. Brown now has an operational chain of
command that, in terms of sharing information, the
responsibility is clear and direct in the National Response
Plan to inform the HSOC and the IIMG about everything that is
going on of major import in his area of responsibility and also
directly to the Secretary of Homeland Security.
So although day-to-day administrative chain of command was
not a factor, in the operational sequence of this, I would say
the answer is yes.
Senator Dayton. OK. Understanding that--and, again, I am
going by a published report here from the New York Times, and
it may be that, understandably, neither of you are in a
position to corroborate or dispute these accounts. But it says
here that on that Monday evening, 9:27 p.m., an e-mail message
with the subject FYI from FEMA sent to Homeland Security
Secretary Michael Chertoff's Chief of Staff says, ``The first
reports they are getting from aerial surveys in New Orleans are
far more serious than the media reports are currently
reflecting.'' And then at 11:05 p.m., an e-mail message from
FEMA's Deputy Director to Michael Jackson, Deputy Secretary of
Homeland Security, says, ``We just spoke with our first rep on
the ground in New Orleans, who did a helo tour and describes a
200-yard collapse of the levee on the south side of the lake.''
Now, we have two communications that this is accurate, one
to the Chief of Staff of the Secretary, the other to the Deputy
Secretary of the Department. You are saying that Mr. Brown
didn't communicate with the Secretary or with you or whatever.
What else should have been done? Could he reasonably expect
that if the Chief of Staff and the Deputy Secretary are both
informed, that the necessary subordinates in the agency are
going to also be informed?
General Broderick. Sir, those were e-mails sent in the
middle of the night----
Senator Dayton. No, not in the middle of the night. 9:27
and 11:05 p.m.
General Broderick. Yes, sir, in the late evening. I don't
disagree, but all I'm saying is if they were urgent messages
that needed to be conveyed, I would have thought they would
have called and not sent an e-mail. That person may not, for
whatever reason, have been near their computer. I had 500 to
600 e-mails on my computer after the----
Senator Dayton. There is an emergency going on. People went
home and just left their computers----
General Broderick. No, sir. What I'm saying is they may
have been engaged in other activities and not reading their e-
mail. I think if the urgency of the call----
Senator Dayton. I understand that neither of you can
corroborate. I would like to find out from those two
principals, Mr. Chairman, whether they received those, and if
not, when they received them, and your point is well taken,
although I don't know what the communications capabilities were
at that point in time.
Senator Lieberman [presiding]. Senator Dayton, you are
right on. I was going to say that. They probably had difficulty
with the phone service, but a lot of the BlackBerrys were still
working so that the e-mail really mattered in that moment.
Senator Dayton. I would think in the middle of this kind of
emergency--and, again, you both have been in military combat
situations where, if somebody departs, somebody else is
monitoring the situation.
General Broderick, you then returned, you said, Tuesday
morning and became whatever it was at that time when you
returned. Mr. Secretary, you testified that you didn't become
aware of the situation of the breaches there until 11:30 a.m.
Tuesday morning. What was transpiring from the time you arrived
until the time you were informed?
General Broderick. Again, I say that's a failure on my part
not to have informed Mr. Stephan earlier. It's my job to make
sure that everyone knows what's going on. I was trying to--when
I came in that morning about 6 o'clock, I realized the gravity
of the situation, or what I perceived to be the gravity of the
situation, and I was trying to get some quick ground truth
before we activated the IIMG and brought all those people in.
Senator Dayton. Well, the quick ground truth was apparent
if you turned on the television, with all due respect. It was
5\1/2\ hours later before--I am trying to understand because we
have set the structure up, and the structure has been
criticized. I don't fault either of you individually, but if
the structure is such that you can't get an e-mail at 9:27 p.m.
or 11:05 p.m. communicated to the Secretary until after he
arrives in Atlanta midday the next morning or next day, and if
you don't find out until 11:30 a.m. what is transparently clear
just by anybody looking--you don't need to send satellites,
just turn on CNN.
I don't understand where all this disconnect occurred, and
I don't think it is appropriate or fair to criticize Mr. Brown
for that failure. I think he is being made the scapegoat, and I
think that is very inappropriate. He communicated--somebody
communicated to the Chief of Staff, to the Deputy Secretary.
And if that wasn't communicated to you, if somebody didn't read
their e-mail until whenever, and you came in at 6 a.m., and you
became aware of this information, and Colonel Stephan wasn't
informed until 11:30 a.m., that is not Mr. Brown's
responsibility, in my judgment.
General Broderick. I wasn't aware of the information that
you mentioned, sir. I was aware that there was a serious
situation, and it was my job to get some clarity. And, yes,
sir, in hindsight, I probably should have notified Mr. Stephan
earlier.
Colonel Stephan. Sir, I'd like to add on to that. The first
time I saw that particular message was actually in the
newspaper this morning, so this is the first time I'm being
informed about that particular correspondence. If you've ever
been inside one of these Operations Centers, there's just a lot
of information coming in. On Monday, the first day--I'm sorry,
the day of landfall, in all of the other 3 years of experience
I've had at DHS headquarters in terms of storms hitting, there
is a very real lack of clarity, a very real lack of accurate
assessments coming in from the field. They range in status from
there is nothing going on here that's out of the normal to the
sky is falling. And it's a question of trying to figure out
what is the truth in all of that.
And, sir, I would like to just say one more thing. I'm a
professional guy here. I've got a 24-year military background.
I'm not putting anybody on the stand as a scapegoat. But in
that training, I've learned that I'm accountable and
responsible for certain things in my area. And if I knew
something as a squadron commander and I didn't immediately
notify my wing commander personally, that guy should fire me. I
mean, that's just unbelievable.
Senator Dayton. Well, we are Monday morning quarterbacking
here. As I said yesterday to the Secretary of Defense, I
paraphrased President Eisenhower--any eighth-grade student of
history can make better decisions with perfect hindsight than
any President or General can at the time in the middle of the
battle. So I acknowledge that. But it seems to me very
different to say that you have conflicting reports or different
information, and you are trying to sort through that, from
saying that, as you said here in your testimony, there is lack
of situational awareness on the ground. Mr. Bahamonde was on
the ground. Mr. Brown, according to published reports, is in a
helicopter on Tuesday flying over the situation. I mean, you
may have been getting different information, and I can
understand if that is information paralysis. But that is very
different from saying that there weren't people on the ground.
I am trying to figure out what is it about this that we can
apply to the future. I am not trying to blame anybody as much
as I am trying to understand--but we had the same thing happen
on September 11. I mean, both of these were catastrophic
events, but that is what the Department is set up to do. And
you had people on September 11 who didn't turn on the
television and see that the World Trade towers were down. They
were with FAA, not related to you.
So here we have a situation were people are not--either
they think they are communicating and other people are not
getting the communications. We have a President of the United
States--and I take him at his word--who didn't know until
Tuesday, midday, what people in his--according to testimony,
his top aides were told Monday night. We have a Secretary who
went to Atlanta, evidently didn't know what was being
communicated, reportedly, to his Chief of Staff and Deputy
Secretary.
So, you can set up any structure you want in the world, but
if people don't communicate to one another, don't act, as you
know, in a military situation immediately and don't communicate
that instantly, then they don't have an effective response.
Colonel Stephan. Sir, according to Mr. Brown's own
testimony that I watched in another room here this morning, he
admitted that he was running a parallel information system that
had nothing to do with the National Response Plan.
Senator Dayton. Well, he was communicating directly with
the White House, with the top aides there, he said himself with
the President. But, again, I am going by this report here that
they're also e-mailing. I mean, at some point somewhere along
the line, somebody gets these. Maybe he should have picked up--
you are saying he should have picked up the phone and called
you out of bed in the middle of the night, General. I am just
trying to understand. What did he fail to do?
Colonel Stephan. Sir, I am going to say if he had a
critical information piece that's the whole nugget that we're
all waiting for, confirmed, catastrophic flooding of the entire
New Orleans downtown area, that to me is something that you
just casually don't post to an e-mail and send to
administrative headquarters somewhere light years away. You
pick up the phone and say, ``Boss, Secretary Chertoff, this is
going down right here. It's serious. This is the one we've all
been waiting for.'' Why did he not do that?
Senator Dayton. Fair enough.
General Broderick. And, sir, just to clarify that, too, put
a little more clarity on that, when we came in Tuesday, we
realized it was serious. And we are taking a lot of steps now
to fix that. But the problem was we knew there was flooding,
but we didn't know what steps were being done to take care of
that flooding and to what degree, and that was a major problem
we were trying to find out. Is the Corps out there? We found
out later that the Corps couldn't fly immediately with their
helos to drop the 15,000-pound sandbags because of the flight
restrictions of the weather. There were a lot of things that we
found out later, and we were trying to find out--we know it's
bad, but who's doing something about it and what's being done?
Senator Dayton. I know, Mr. Chairman, when September 11
occurred, all of us Members of the Senate, except for a couple
who were whisked away to various locations, were totally out of
communication. This BlackBerry doesn't tell me half the time
when we have a vote, and I certainly don't expect it is going
to tell me if anything else occurs what is really going on. We
had at that time agencies like the FAA and NORTHCOM and others
who weren't able to communicate. Somebody called one line and
the line was busy.
I mean, one of the critical questions I would have here,
again, trying to apply this to the future, is, Do you have a
secure means of communication, a reliable means of
communication with whoever is there, with somebody else?
Because, again, if people don't communicate effectively with
one another, then it doesn't matter what the structure is.
General Broderick. I agree, sir, and that's my job. And
believe me, we've made some significant push since then.
One little footnote. The e-mail to John Wood never mentions
a breach in the levee.
Senator Dayton. I am sorry. John Wood is who, sir?
General Broderick. The Chief of Staff.
Senator Dayton. OK. Thank you. Thank you both.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Senator Lieberman. Senator Dayton, thank you for an
excellent line of questioning and for some statements that
express certainly my feelings about what happened here. And I
appreciate hearing that you are working on making it better
because the totality of our investigation, including the
testimony today, is unsettling because it shows us that the
systems that we set up after September 11 failed us on that
day.
These are two pictures that Marty Bahamonde \1\--talk about
ground truth. You can see the levees are broken. This is as
clear as day. He is up in a helicopter. This was taken about
5:30 on the day of landfall, and then, of course, the second
picture is the ground-truth reality, which is New Orleans, 5:30
Monday afternoon, is flooded. And for the reasons that we have
all gone over today, the system didn't adequately tell the two
of you or apparently the President or apparently the Secretary
of Homeland Security that this was happening, so that on that
day you would have had more situational awareness to respond.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ Photographs taken by Marty Bahamonde, Exhibit S, appear in the
Appendix on page 335.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
So I simply thank you for your testimony today and your
willingness to accept some accountability, and I hope you have
the same urgent sense that we do that we better get this right.
Part of the problem, ironically, is the extraordinary flow of
information coming in. But we have to figure out how to see the
warning lights when they go off and share those warning lights
so we can protect the safety and in this case the lives of the
American people.
Anyway, I thank you. The hearing record will remain open
for 15 days.
I now have the unusual pleasure as Acting Chairman of
declaring this hearing adjourned. Thank you.
[Whereupon, at 1:54 p.m., the Committee was adjourned.]
A P P E N D I X
----------
PREPARED STATEMENT OF SENATOR GEORGE V. VOINOVICH
Today the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs
holds its 18th hearing on the preparation and response to Hurricane
Katrina, the costliest natural disaster in our Nation's history.
The impact and wake of the storm devastated New Orleans and the
Gulf Coast. For example, it was noted at yesterday's hearing that
Hurricane Katrina's high winds and subsequent flooding caused what the
FCC called ``extraordinary'' destruction of communications facilities.
Almost three million telephone lines were knocked down, 38 emergency
call centers were put out of action, and more than 1,000 cell towers
were left useless. This is but one illustration of the damage caused to
the region's critical infrastructure.
In the days immediately following the hurricane, I urged people to
refrain from allocation of blame. Finger pointing and political attacks
are not constructive. Instead, we must objectively identify our
weaknesses and learn from our mistakes to better prepare for the
certain event of another disaster.
Madam Chairman, I commend the thoroughness of the full Committee
investigation. I am confident that these hearings will provide us with
the information necessary to better guide preparation and mitigation
efforts in the future.
I am most interested in learning from today's witnesses what
happened to FEMA during the last several years. Specifically, did the
agency's merger into the Department of Homeland Security damage its
institutional capabilities to respond to disasters? Did FEMA have the
necessary resources in terms of budget and experienced personnel to get
the job done? I believe that these questions are just as important as
examining FEMA's leadership role and response in the days leading up to
and following the land-fall of Hurricane Katrina.
It is likely the senior career leadership at FEMA will need to be
replenished and rebuilt. I understand that following FEMA's integration
with DHS, several individuals in leadership positions within FEMA left
the agency. The number of full time permanent senior executive service
employees decreased from 50 in FY2002 to 31 today. It is unclear what
effect this may have had on FEMA's response in the Gulf Coast.
Madam Chairman, it is clear that rebuilding the workforce and
institutional ability of FEMA to swiftly and comprehensively respond to
disasters of all types is one of the challenges before us. I look
forward to working with you to accomplish this goal.
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