White House Knew Scale of Katrina Disaster From Start, Official Reveals

Senior aides to President George Bush were informed on the day Hurricane Katrina hit that their "worst nightmare" had befallen New Orleans, a Senate investigation was told yesterday, contradicting assertions by the White House that they were not immediately aware of the scale of the disaster.

The former chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Michael Brown, said the White House and the department of homeland security, which oversees Fema, had been made aware early on that a breach in the levees had left 80% of the city under water.

Mr Brown told a Senate committee investigating the response to Katrina that he had two conversations on the day of the hurricane, August 29 last year, with Mr Bush’s deputy chief of staff, Joe Hagen, who had accompanied the president to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, where he spent his summer holiday.

"I think I told him that we were realizing our worst nightmare, that everything we had planned about, worried about, that Fema, frankly, had worried about for 10 years, was coming true."

The Fema chief had been given an eyewitness account by an official who had been flown over the city on a coast guard helicopter, and returned with descriptions and pictures of people clinging to roofs to avoid the rising floodwaters.

Mr Brown said he had told the chief of staff, Andrew Card, and thought the president would be informed. "My obligation was to the White House and to make certain that the president understood what was going on and what the situation was, and I did that."

It was not clear why the White House did not seek to restrict Mr Brown’s testimony, but the damage done by the former Fema chief - who is engaged in a struggle to repair his own much-savaged reputation - was considerable.

His testimony was rebutted by White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, who said the president had shown his concern for New Orleans as early as the run-up to the storm. "We knew the flooding that was going on, and that is why our top priority was saving lives," he said.

But Mr McClellan’s attempts to project an image of an administration actively engaged in helping the victims of Katrina were undermined by the vitriol Mr Brown unleashed on the department of homeland security, which absorbed Fema after the 2001 attacks. He said the merger had crippled Fema’s ability to respond to natural disasters because of the focus on terrorism.