According to information obtained by Knight Ridder Newspapers, and published in an article titled
"Failure at Every Turn", federal officials in New Orleans and Vicksburg knew at 6PM on the night of Monday, August 29th, that at least one levee had failed in New Orleans and that the city was in the process of flooding. Yet, armed with this critical life-saving knowledge, officials did nothing to warn the public of the impending deluge.
It was not until a full 13 hours later, at approximately 7AM on Tuesday morning (the 30th), that people learned of the flooding in New Orleans. Even then, it was not the government that made this announcement; it was the morning TV news anchors, who had discovered the rising waters outside of their hotels, that spread the alarm. During this critical delay of 13 hours, hundreds of New Orleanians - maybe even thousands of them - were drowning in the dark and murky waters of Lake Ponchatrain that were gradually engulfing the city. Many of these people could have been saved if FEMA had taken the simple precaution of activating
Emergency Broadcast System at 6PM on Monday night to warn of the rising waters. Many, many more people could have escaped. If the President had used these 13 hours to mobilize the military, evacuations could have begun on Tuesday when the most lives could have been saved.
Though several government agencies were certain by 6 p.m. on Aug. 29 that New Orleans' levee system had given way, no official screamed for urgent help when daylight hours might still have facilitated a rescue effort.
By that time, water had been pouring from the damaged 17th Street Canal for up to 15 hours. A National Guard timeline places the breach at 3 a.m. Aug. 29, and an Army Corps of Engineers official said a civilian phoned him about the breach at 5 a.m., saying he had heard about it from a state policeman.
But officials sounded no alarm until the next morning, after the city had been flooding for at least 24 hours.
Perhaps the most startling failure came in the reaction - or the apparent lack of one - from federal, state and local officials to the discovery that New Orleans' fragile levee system had collapsed hours before Katrina even made landfall. Engineers and emergency planners had warned for years that such a collapse would be catastrophic for the below-sea-level city and the people who lived there.
Yet the 5 a.m. first report of the breach failed to spark action. The commander of the New Orleans district of the Army Corps of Engineers, Col. Richard P. Wagenaar, finally confirmed the breach between and 3 and 6 p.m. Aug. 29 and reported it to headquarters in Vicksburg, Miss.
The mayor had told reporters during a 1 p.m. news conference that there was an unconfirmed report of a levee break, but he quickly turned to other topics. Shortly before nightfall, a FEMA official, back from a helicopter survey of the city, reported the breach to his colleagues in Baton Rouge, then broke the news to the mayor.
Still, no concerted effort was made to reach the thousands of people whose houses were rapidly filling with water. As many crawled from their flooded bedrooms into attics, and some hacked their way onto their roofs, much of the world went to sleep thinking that New Orleans had survived the worst.
Not until Aug. 30 dawned, and morning news anchors expressed surprise that the once-dry streets around them were filling with water, did the magnitude of the disaster become evident.
So here we have a timeline that indicates that the Corps of Engineers in New Orleans had verified by 3PM on August 29th that a levee breach had occurred. By 6PM, just 3 hours later, the Corps of Engineers headquarters in Vicksburg had been notified of the situation. A local FEMA official also learned of the flooding at about 7PM on the 29th and advised his superiors as well. Nevertheless, FEMA would fail to follow the emergency management plan that they had agreed upon with the City of New Orleans and the State of Louisiana:
Why the news of the first breach - several others were visible by dawn Aug. 30 - didn't produce a bigger response baffles Ivor van Heerden. As the head of a hurricane center at Louisiana State University, he oversaw a simulation last year, known as Hurricane Pam, in which a slow-moving Category 3 storm swamped the city.
"What's very obvious," van Heerden said, "is that the powers that be either didn't recognize how bad the flooding would be from breached levees or totally misunderstood what the impacts would be."