WASHINGTON (AP):
TOP DEPARTMENT of Homeland Security officials were told that New Orleans' levees were breached the day that Hurricane Katrina roared ashore, former disaster chief Michael Brown said yesterday, contradicting previous statements by agency officials who said they did not know the levees were toppling until the next day.
BALONEY
"I find it a little disingenuous," Brown, who at the time headed the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told a Senate oversight committee. "For them to claim that we didn't have awareness of it is just baloney."
Brown also told senators that decisions and policies by the parent Homeland Security Department doomed FEMA to "a path to failure" that led to the government's slow response to the storm.
He said that because of a focus on terrorism, natural disasters "had become the stepchild of the Department of Homeland Security."
Brown, who quit under fire as chief of the FEMA just days after the August 29 storm devastated much of the Gulf Coast area, said that FEMA's mission was marginalised when it was swallowed by the newly created Homeland Security agency.
"There was a cultural clash that didn't recognise the absolute inherent science of preparing for a disaster," he told the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. "Any time you break that cycle ... you're doomed to failure."
He added: "The policies and decisions implemented by the DHS put FEMA on a path to failure."
