A FE-MAil Story : New Orleans Dies, Brownie Dines

I couldn’t find this written up anywhere else here. Please let me know if I missed it.

Yesterday, Marty Bahamonde testified before the Senate Homeland Security Comittee. Included with his testimony were several emails sent from his blackberry. These emails are quite damning, to say the least.

Like many of you, I sat watching my television in horror on that Sunday night, wondering why I was seeing people streaming into the Superdome, but no supplies.

It turns out that Marty Bahamonde, the ‘eyes and ears on the ground’ for Mike Brown, was in the SuperDome at that time. And he was extremely concerned as well.
First, a little bit about Marty (from his Senate testimony):

Since 2003, I have often been tasked by the Undersecretary of FEMA Mike Brown and his staff to do advance work for the Undersecretary in preparation for or responses to large disasters. My assignments included Hurricane Isabel in 2003, Hurricane Charley in 2004, Hurricane Dennis this past June and others.

(…)

I have worked for FEMA for 12 years and have been a full-time employee since 2002. I have spent most of that time in the field, not behind a desk. I have responded to numerous hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, tornadoes and fires. At the personal request of Under Secretary Brown, I deployed to Bam, Iran in 2003 in support of the medical team that worked miracles in a city that was totally destroyed and resulted in more than 30,000 deaths.

He sounds to me like just the kind of person you would want on the ground. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that anyone with any influence listened to him.

I’m going to go through the timeline now, culling together bits from his testimony and the emails that were sent.

Marty arrived in NOLA on Saturday night (Aug 27). On Sunday, he spent the day shuttling back and forth between the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) and the Superdome. You can see that even in the early afternoon, he was very worried:

(click on pics for larger versions)

Even at this early stage, he knew the situation in the SuperDome was precarious at best, and that fast planning and successful execution would be necessary to avoid disaster.

Despite his knowledge of the potential catastrophe, he sounded cautiously optimistic after starting to plan things out with the National Guard.

On Sunday evening, I was at the Superdome to do media interviews and afterwards I met with the National Guard inside the Superdome to discuss a range of things including the expected arrival of a FEMA Disaster Medical Assistance Team (DMAT) from Houston. The National Guard also told me that they expected 360,000 “meals ready to eat” “MRE’s” and 15 trucks of water to arrive that night.

However, despite their planning, the required supplies did not arrive in time:

As the storm intensified outside, a series of critical events began to unfold. Instead of 360,000 MRE’s, only 40,000 arrived. Instead of 15 trucks of water, only 5 arrived, and the medical team did not arrive either.

Marty weathered the storm back at the EOC. At around 8am the next morning, he witnessed many of the downtown hotels getting their windows blown out, and the roof starting to peel off the SuperDome (I can only imagine how sick he must have felt watching that. My God.).

There were no signs of the catastrophic flooding yet, but Marty warned that they were not out of the woods yet.

At about 11am, they got the news that they had been fearing: the levee at the 17th street canal had been breached.

At approximately 5 p.m., I rushed over to the Superdome because I had been notified that a Coast Guard helicopter was able to take me for a short flyover so that I could assess the situation in the city and plan for Under Secretary Brown’s visit the next day. My initial flyover lasted about 10 minutes and even in that short time I was able to see that approximately 80 percent of the city was under water, and I confirmed the 17th Street Canal levee break.

(…)

About 15 minutes later, I went back up on a second Coast Guard helicopter for approximately 45 minutes, and during this flight, I was able to get a real understanding of the impact of Katrina on New Orleans and the surrounding area.

He was then able to communicate back to FEMA headquarters via telephone the extent of the damage he had seen. He believes that he communicated exactly how dire the situation had become; still, the national director of FEMA was not spurred into action.

You can get a sense of Marty’s frustration, when on Tuesday morning Mike Brown had still not arrived.

He then wrote to Mike Brown directly to try to get through just how desperate this was.

Now, you might be wondering, what was the man who was tasked with managing emergencies in America doing while one of its largest cities was drowning and rotting off the face of the earth?

Well, he was planning to eat dinner and go on TV, of course.