Original at DailyKos.
This news is at least a few hours old, from the Associated Press:
A timeline pieced together by Senate Democrats shows that the Bush White House knew as early as 8:30 a.m. EST, August 29.
The first internal White House communication about levee failures came at 11:13 a.m. on Aug. 29 in a “Katrina Spot Report” by the White House Homeland Security Council.
“Flooding is significant throughout the region and a levee in New Orleans has reportedly been breached sending 6-8 feet of water throughout the 9th ward area of the city,” the internal report said.
White House spokesperson Trent Duffy explained that Bush and his aides were fully apprised of the situation. But they didn’t move a muscle.
So how come Bush, as Senator Joe Lieberman put it, “…could have woken up Tuesday morning unaware of this obviously catastrophic situation”?
Update [2006-2-10 11:8:41 by blksista]: Brownie has been testifying on C-Span since 9:30 a.m. EST. Pass the popcorn. Give your impressions of his performance here.
At least 28 local, state and Federal agencies reported to the White House that the levees surrounding the Crescent City had broken.
The Bush administration has said it knew definitively early Tuesday, the day after the storm, that the levees had been breached, based on an Army Corps of Engineers assessment.
Democrats said the documents showed there was little excuse for the tardy federal response.
The revelation comes the day before Michael Brown, the controversial former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), comes before the Senate commmittee investigating the administration’s slow and ultimately killing response to the unfolding devastation. Brown already testified before the House investigating committee in September 2005. However, this time it is believed that he will no longer play the fall guy and start flipping, thus laying blame elsewhere.
Think Progress has a Katrina timeline.
This should be interesting. Perhaps Brownie will lay down a few puzzle pieces that might connect Bush’s New Orleans cronies on the Bring New Orleans Back Committee and in the Garden District to the lackadaisical response to the tragedy that became New Orleans. But I guess that might be asking for too much.
As something like has happened before several times in Louisiana history, with the elites allowing the citizenry–white and black and Latino and Asian–to die needlessly and horribly, so that their property and lives might be spared, so it wouldn’t surprise me that in the 21st century, history would repeat itself.
