We’re nearing the first anniversary of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe. Two Wall Street Journal reporters have a new book out, and it gives some necessary attention to an under-appreciated figure in the debacle: the former director of the Homeland Security Department’s 24-hour watch command with the unlikely name of Matthew Broderick.
As head of the 24/7/365 Homeland Security Operations Center (HSOC), Broderick controlled the “eyes and ears” of the Department. As reporters Christopher Cooper and Bobby Block point out, administration officials relied on his reports of events unfolding in the Gulf. Focusing on Broderick, the authors attempt to explain one of the key frustrations of the Bush administration’s response: Why did it take them so long to figure out what was going on?
The answer: Broderick. (To his credit, Broderick has accepted blame for failing to properly inform his superiors. He resigned in March to take “an offer I couldn’t refuse” from a private company, according to CQ.)
The ops center Broderick ran features 24-hour watchstanders, 16 50″ flat-panel monitors, and access to real-time information from all over the government and the nation. DHS describes it this way:
The Homeland Security Operations Center (HSOC) serves as the nationâs nerve center for information sharing and domestic incident management. . . . [T]he HSOC provides real-time situational awareness and monitoring of the homeland, coordinates incidents and response activities. . . . HSOC staff can apply imagery capability by cross-referencing informational data against geospatial data that can then pinpoint an image down to an exact location.
As the world has since learned, New Orleans’ levees and floodwalls were collapsing in the early morning of Monday, Aug. 29, 2005. However, Broderick insisted for the next 30 hours that no breaches had occurred, and the levees had merely been “overtopped” — “normal, typical, hurricane background stuff,” he later told Senate investigators.
It wasn’t until noon the next day when he confirmed news of the catastrophe to DHS Secretary Mike Chertoff.
Block and Cooper write (excerpted by the Wall Street Journal):
By 5:00 p.m. Washington time on Monday, Broderick’s shop had received no fewer than nine reports that the city’s flood control system had been breached. Moreover, the HSOC had received at least eight other reports that huge swaths of the city were underwater and that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people were awaiting rescue in the sultry summer heat.
But Broderick’s final report of the evening, sent out at 6:13 p.m. Washington time, shot down the idea that floodwaters had pushed their way through the city’s levees. “Preliminary reports indicate the levees have not been breached,” his report declared.
Months later, when congressional investigators asked him why he refused to report the breaches, the watch center chief said it was because he never heard about them:
When Broderick was asked months later by Senate staffers why he had stated so declaratively late Monday that the city’s flood control structures were intact, the former Marine general said, improbably, that he had never received a single report during the day that suggested otherwise. The Senate investigator asking the question, Jeffrey Greene, was so stunned at the response that he initially asked if Broderick had misheard him.
But Broderick hadn’t misheard. “If I had heard there was a breach in a levee Monday evening, I would have — had I been aware of it, I would have been all over it,” he said.
But we know now that numerous reports of the breaches — and catastrophic suffering — had come in to the watch center. What information was Broderick relying on? Again, Cooper and Block:
Broderick [told] investigators that he rarely looked at his e-mail and had received seven hundred e-mail messages during the disaster that he had never even bothered to open. He admitted that he didn’t read the New Orleans newspaper, the Times-Picayune, which on the day Katrina hit had treated the collapse of the 17th Street Canal as fact and had written a long story describing the scene after two reporters on bicycles had visited the area. . . .
Finally, asked by exasperated Senate investigators what evidence he had collected showing the levees had not breached, Broderick said he had relied exclusively on two sources. The first was the Army Corps of Engineers, but the former general suspected even that agency of hyping the situation, since it had reported “extensive” flooding in New Orleans and “‘extensive’ is all relative,” Broderick said.
The second source, Broderick allowed, was unimpeachable: CNN Headline News. Late Monday afternoon, the network aired a report from New Orleans. The focus of the video snippet was a scene on Bourbon Street, near the highest spot in the city, where people “seemed to be having a party,” Broderick said.
“The one data point that I really had, personally, visually, was the celebration in the streets of New Orleans, of people drinking beer and partying because — and they used, they came up with the word — ‘we dodged the bullet,'” Broderick said. “So that’s a pretty good indicator right there.”
For months after the disaster, Chertoff and Broderick both insisted (“in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary,” the authors write) that the breaches occurred when Broderick reported them, 30 hours after they had actually given way.
