FEMA Official Says Agency Disregarded His Warnings
For 16 critical hours, Federal Emergency Management Agency officials, including former director Michael D. Brown, dismissed urgent eyewitness accounts by FEMA’s only staffer in New Orleans that Hurricane Katrina had broken the city’s levee system the morning of Aug. 29 and was causing catastrophic flooding, the staffer told the Senate today.
At 11:20 a.m. Aug. 31, Bahamonde e-mailed Brown, "Sir, I know that you know the situation is past critical . . . thousands gathering in the streets with no food or water . . . estimates are many will die within hours."
At 2:27 p.m., however, Brown press secretary Sharon Worthy wrote colleagues to schedule an interview for Brown on MSNBC’s Scarborough Country and to give him more time to eat dinner because Baton Rouge restaurants were getting busy: "He needs much more that 20 or 30 minutes."
Bahamonde e-mailed a friend to "just tell [Worthy] that I just ate an MRE . . . along with 30,000 other close friends so I understand her concern."
Incredible stuff that comes out about the FEMA response, more here in this WP article.