Katrina: The latest on the failed response

The following continues our special coverage of the one year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which will be marked on August 29, 2006.

Volumes have been written on "what went wrong" in the federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina in August/September 2005. As we approach the one-year anniversary, there will be a host of retrospectives that try to capture the full story, of which much more is now known than came out after the storms.

For example, Wall Street Journal reporters Christopher Cooper and Robert Block, in their new book "Disaster," give a thorough accounting of the information available and decisions made that led to federal inaction. One is that federal leaders ignored information being sent their way, as this excerpt from the book, which appeared on the WSJ website last week, reveals:

In the days after Katrina's landfall, Secretary Chertoff, President Bush and others would justify the slow federal response by claiming that the breaching of the levees was "a second catastrophe" that occurred long after Katrina passed. But this simply wasn't true. A subsequent investigation by the Army Corps of Engineers found that in some cases, breached levees began flooding New Orleans even before Katrina made landfall.

Indeed, news of the levee breaches came as early as 7:30 a.m. on the Monday Katrina hit, when the city's disaster chief, Terry Ebbert, told Washington officials in a phone conversation that the storm "came up and breached the levee system in the canal," according to Senate documents gathered afterward. A half hour later, the Transportation Security Administration made a written report directly to HSOC, confirming that the Industrial Canal levee adjacent to the Lower Ninth Ward had been breached and that floodwaters "have already intruded on the first stories of some houses." Fifteen minutes after that, the National Weather Service issued its own levee-breach warning, advising retreating residents to take an ax with them to their attics so they could chop their way out if the waters rose.

One also learns of a new character who has escaped much public scrutiny, but who likely bears more responsibility than anyone else in the slow response: Matthew Broderick, the director of the Homeland Security Operations Center.

The retired Marine brigadier general seemed obsessed with not appearing "hysterical," and down-played flooding in New Orleans as "normal, typical, hurricane background stuff." In the process, he also ignored critical information that would cost over a thousand lives:

By nightfall in New Orleans on Monday, HSOC had received nearly a dozen definitive reports that the city's flood-control system had been breached and eight other reports suggesting as much. But Matthew Broderick's final report of the day said exactly the opposite. "Preliminary reports indicate the levees have not been breached," it said.

When Mr. Broderick was asked months later by Senate staffers during a formal briefing why he had stated so flatly late Monday that the city's flood-control structures were intact, the former Marine said he had never received a single report suggesting otherwise. The Senate investigator asking the question, Jeffrey Greene, was so stunned at the response that he asked if Mr. Broderick had misunderstood.

But Mr. Broderick hadn't misunderstood. "If I had heard there was a breach in a levee Monday evening, I would have -- had I been aware of it, I would have been all over it," he said. He also conceded in his deposition that he had seen very few reports from New Orleans newspapers and routinely ignored email that day and in the days that followed, leaving unopened as many as 700 missives sent to him during the disaster's early days.

Asked by bemused Senate investigators what evidence he had collected showing the levees had not been breached, Mr. Broderick named two sources. The first was the Army Corps of Engineers in Washington, but the former general said he suspected that agency was hyping the situation because it had reported "extensive" flooding in New Orleans, and " 'extensive' is all relative."

The second source, Mr. Broderick said, was a video segment on CNN Monday showing a tipsy crowd on Bourbon Street, near the city's highest point.

"The one data point that I really had, personally, visually, was the celebration in the streets of New Orleans, of people drinking beer and partying because-and they used, they came up with the word-'we dodged the bullet,' " Mr. Broderick said. "So that's a pretty good indicator right there."

Mr. Broderick declined repeated requests to comment on what he told investigators.

Broderick resigned on March 31, 2006.