FEMA official disputes Brown’s testimony
WASHINGTON – The only FEMA employee to ride out Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans painted a grim portrait Thursday of an agency led by officials who were unprepared for the scope of the disaster and failed to respond to his increasingly desperate pleas for help.
Marty Bahamonde’s emotional testimony to a Senate committee, backed by e-mails he sent from New Orleans as floodwaters engulfed much of the city, provided the most detailed eye-witness account yet from an agency official of FEMA’s handling of the disaster.
A veteran public affairs officer with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Bahamonde was its only representative in the city from the Saturday before the flood began on Monday, Aug. 29, until the early morning hours of the next day.
He contradicted testimony FEMA Director Michael Brown gave a House committee in late September and portrayed Brown as failing to grasp the enormity of the catastrophe. In an e-mail he sent to a co-worker on Wednesday, Bahamonde’s frustration with Brown burst through.
Bahamonde had just learned, as he huddled in the Superdome with tens of thousands of New Orleans residents driven from their homes, that Brown’s press secretary was fretting about blocking out time for the director to eat dinner at one of Baton Rouge’s busy restaurants that night.
“OH MY GOD!!!!!!!!” Bahamonde messaged a co-worker. “Just tell her that I just ate an MRE and (went to the bathroom) in the hallway of the Superdome along with 30,000 other close friends so I understand her concern about busy restaurants.” MREs are military rations known as meals-ready-to-eat.
Bahamonde’s effort to sound the alarm began shortly after he arrived in New Orleans on Saturday, Aug. 27. He learned the next day from city officials that only 40,000 of the 360,000 military rations FEMA had promised to deliver had arrived, along with only five of 15 promised water trucks. A promised medical team failed to materialize.
Bahamonde began sending e-mails to senior FEMA officials, warning them of the precarious situation and urging that they send in a medical team before the hurricane struck.
Monday morning, he learned that hurricane-propelled water had broken through the levees in New Orleans, and sent an e-mail before noon warning that this breach was a catastrophic development.
That night, he phoned Brown to tell him directly of the failure of the levees. He told the director that much of the city was under water and there was an urgent need to bring in supplies of food and water. But he said Brown asked no questions.
“All he said was: `Thank you. I’m now going to call the White House,’ ” Bahamonde said.
Senior FEMA officials repeatedly failed to respond to his reports on the deteriorating situation in the days before and after the hurricane devastated New Orleans and much of the Gulf Coast, Bahamonde told the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, the Senate panel charged with investigating the government’s response. He said he was at a loss to explain their behavior.
In his Sept. 27 testimony to the House panel that also is investigating the government’s response, Brown had said that he sent a dozen FEMA staffers, including a medical team, to New Orleans before Katrina struck.
Not true, Bahamonde said Thursday. “I was the only one” Brown sent to New Orleans before the hurricane, he said.
Brown testified that Bahamonde had sent him a “fairly routine kind of e-mail” on Monday, Aug. 29, describing the “general conditions” at the Superdome. Bahamonde also communicated later that day, Brown testified, that the shelter “had plenty of food” to feed those thronging there.
Not so, Bahamonde said Thursday. “Nothing I did was routine as I tried to express in the best way I could the urgency and need for medical teams before the hurricane hit because there was already a critical situation developing there on Sunday.”
He never told Brown, he said, that food supplies were adequate.