U.S.

Department of Homeland Security

500 C Street, SW
Washington, DC 20472

July 7,2006

Ms. Melanie Sloan

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW)
11 DuPont Circle
N.W., 2ndFloor
Washington, DC 20036

RE: Freedom of Information Act Request

FOIA Case Number: 05-263

Dear Ms. Sloan:

In compliance with the April 4,2006 schedule agreed upon by the parties in the CREW v.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Civil Action No. 06cv0173 (RJL), this letter is
a final response to your Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request dated September 7,
2005. In your request you asked for the following recordslinformation:

1. What portion of the $3.1 billion appropriated to DHS in fiscal year 2005 for
emergency preparedness to "support the Nation's ability to prepare for, mitigate
against, respond to and recover from natural and manmade disasters" was spent to
prepare for potential hurricanes on the Gulf Coast of the United States and on
potential flooding in New Orleans;
2. The amount of money diverted from emergency preparedness for and response to
natural disasters to emergency preparedness for and response to acts of terrorism
and the rationale behind any such diversion;
3. Studies, assessments, presentations, or scenarios of the potential devastation a
powerful hurricane could wreak on the Gulf Coast, including, but not limited to
the eight-day tabletop exercise conducted in July 2004 and intended to prepare
FEMA for a catastrophic hurricane in New Orleans;
4. Plans created regarding the federal government's response to any such scenarios;
5. The potential breaching of the levees that would lead to Lake Pontchartrain
flooding New Orleans and the response to such breaches; and
6. Communications from anyone employed by or associated with the Army Corps of
Engineers regarding the problems with and weakness of the levees surrounding
New Orleans, the potential breaching of the levees and the consequences of such
breaches, as well as proposed repairs or other construction to the levees.
r.

In addition, your letter stated that "CREW further seeks all memoranda, communications
and records of any lund and from any source, regardless of format, medium, or physical
characteristics, from August 26,2005 through the present, discussing or mentioning in
any way:

1. Requests for emergency assistance from local government officials in Mississippi

and Louisiana in response to Hurricane Katrina;
2. Requests from local government officials in Mississippi and Louisiana for
assistance in preparing for Hurricane Katrina, including, but not limited to
communications requesting assistance in evacuating residents of Mississippi and
Louisiana from the areas in the hurricane's path;
3. Communications between the White House and FEMA regarding the preparation
for and response to the damage caused by hurricane Katrina;
4. Communications regarding the conditions in the New Orleans Convention Center;
5. Communications regarding the need for transportation to evacuate victims of the
hurricane from the city of New Orleans as well as communications regarding the
need for food and water for victims stranded in New Orleans;
6. Communications from Congressman Charles W. Boustany Jr. (R-LA) requesting
federal assistance and any response to Congressman Boustany;
7. Communications regarding offers by corporations and foreign governments to
assist the victims of the Hurricane Katrina and FEMA's responses to such offers;
8. Communications between FEMA Director Michael Brown and cabinet officials
either before or after the hurricane regarding the potential and actual devastation
wrought by the hurricane and the federal government's response to the
devastation;
9. Communications regarding the plan to evacuate victims of the hurricane to
Charleston, South Carolina and the misrouting of the plane carrying the evacuees
to Charleston, West Virginia;
10. Communications regarding the deployment of the National Guard to New Orleans
to assist in evacuation and relief efforts;
11. Communications regarding the inclusion of Operation Blessing, a Virginia based
charity run by evangelist and Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson, on
FEMA's primary list of charities to which people were asked to donate money to
assist hurricane relief efforts; and
12. Communications regarding the limitations placed on journalists and
photographers, including, but not limited to, efforts to prevent photographers from
talung pictures of the corpses of hurricane victims in Louisiana and Mississippi.

In responding to a FOIA request, the US Department of Homeland Security

(DHS)/Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) search will include
responsive records in its control on the date the search began. FEMA's search began
September 24, 2005.

This release is granted in part at no cost to you. Enclosed are releasable portions of
Hurricane Katrina video-teleconference transcripts, e-mails from William Lokey, Patrick
Rhode, Michael Brown, David Trissell, and Jordan Fried as well as other documents that
relate to your request. After thorough legal review of these documents, I have
determined that portions of them are exempt from disclosure under exemptions 2 , 5 and 6
of the Freedom of Information Act of 1974,5 U.S.C. 552, (b)(2), (5) and (6), as amended.
We are releasing a total of 1786 pages, of which 1632 are released in part, and 154 pages
are released in their entirety. In addition, we are withholding 1168 pages in their entirety.

We are withholding portions of the respective emails under the following FOIA
exemptions. We are withholding Government cell phone numbers, FEMA Readiness
Alert Status information, government e-mail addresses, non-DHS government phone
numbers, security information, and internal administrative information under FOIA
Exemption 2("High 2"). FOIA Exemption 2("High 2") protects information applicable to
internal administrative and personnel matters, to the extent that disclosure would risk
circumvention of an agency regulation or statute, impede the effectiveness of an agency's
activities, or reveal sensitive information that may put the security and safety of an
agency activity or employee at risk.

We are withholding information that reveals internal administrative matters under FOIA
Exemption 2 ("Low 2"). FOIA Exemption 2 ("Low 2") protects information applicable
to internal administrative and personnel matters, to the extent that the material is trivial in
nature and is of no genuine public interest.

We are withholding information pursuant to Exemption 5; which pertains to certain inter-

and intra-agency communications protected by the deliberative process privilege,
attorney work product privilege, andlor attorney-client privilege.

We are withholding the name, address, phone number, and e-mail address of non-
government individuals, home phone number and home address of DHS employees, and
personal family information under FOIA Exemption 6. Exemption 6 exempts from
disclosure records the release of which would cause a clearly unwarranted invasion of
personal privacy. The interest of the general public in reviewing these portions of
government documents does not outweigh the individuals' right to privacy. The release
of this information adds no detail about agency activities, the core purpose of the FOIA.

In addition, while searching for responsive records we located several that had originated
from other agencies. We have referred these documents to the respective agency for
direct response to you. We have requested that these agencies expedite their processing of
these documents in their queue. Following are the number of pages referred, and to
which agency they were referred to:

2 pages to the Environmental Protection Agency

50 pages to the U.S. Army
19 pages to the Department of Homeland Security Disclosure Office
7 pages to the Health and Human Services.
"3,
FEMA will continue to search for any additional documents that are responsive to your
request, and, to the extent documents have previously been withheld, we will continue to
review them to determine if any releases are appropriate. If further documents are
located or determined to be responsive to your request they will be forwarded to you
upon completion of a legal review. However, the processing of this request has been
very time consuming and FEMA will contact you about fees to be charged for any future
processing of documents prior to processing them.

I am the official responsible for this determination. You may appeal this determination
within sixty calendar days from the date of this letter. Your appeal should include copies
of your original request and this response, as well as a discussion of the reasons
supporting your appeal. The envelope should be plainly marked to indicate that it
contains a Freedom of Information Act appeal. If you decide to appeal, please send your
appeal to:

Freedom of Information Act/Privacy Act Appeals

U.S. Department of Homeland Security
245 Murray Lane, SW, Building 410
Washington, DC 20528

For your information, your FOIA request, including your identity and the information
made available, is releasable to the public under subsequent FOIA requests. In response
to these requests, FEMA does not release personal privacy information, such as home
address, telephone numbers or Social Security Numbers all of which are protected from
disclosure under FOIA Exemption 6.

Thank you for your interest in FEMA's programs and policies.

Sincerely,

FEMA d i e f Counsel

Enclosures

cc: Peter Bryce

US Department of Justice
 AUGUST 2 5 , 2 0 0 5

Mike Lowder : Let's go ahead and go first

off to the Hurricane Liaison Team at th'e Hurricane

-
Center. Matthew, are you on?

NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER-Matthew: Yes

-
- For those following-along via audio conference call
only, we have a Web site established at fema.gov/hlt

where we are posting still images of everything you

will see for this video-conference. We are also

posting the slosh storm surge runs as they are made

available, and with that, I'll hand i t over to Richard

Pash, the hurricane specialist here at the National

Hurricane Center.

MR. Richard PASH: Good day. Let's start

out looking at the visible satellite image, whlch 1s

Slide No. 100, and one thing that welve_noticedhere

-
- during the morning is the presentation is becoming

more definitive of a strengthening system. the bands

forming here now.

-, - -.- * -
One of the things we look for as an .

identifier that a hurricane has developed is whether

we see an eye on the visual imagery, that's just a
rule of thumb. In this case, we've got a lot of other

- 1
 information to tell us whether this -is going to-become

a hurricane or 1s in the process of becomlng one.

The aircraft is flying in there right now

In fact, they are using an instrument called the Step

-.

Frequency Microwave Radiometer. or SFMR. That

measures the surface wind speed directly. and it's

pretty well calibrated. Right now, we're getting

-
-
winds in the mid-50s in terms of kn-ots. so it's

already a little bit stronger than what we've

indicated a little earlier this morning, probably

about 65 miles per hours.

The conditions in the atmosphere are not --

do not favor rapid strengthening, but we don't think

that they're going to prevent i t from strengthening to

a Category 1 hurricane i f i t reaches the coast here

late tonight.

The steering currents are going to weaken,

-_ and that's another problem I'll talk about in a

moment. but there's a little bit of drier air coming

in from this side, and the upper level outflow is

-, - L_ --
being interfered with a little bit. but having said

all. that, -again, we think this will strengthen to a

hurricane. We don't think it's going to become a

major hurricane before it reaches southeast Florida

 And then later on down the line, of course.
we're concerned about what's going to happen as i t

moves across the peninsula and into the Gulf of

Mexico. We go.to the radar. which is slide No. 200.

-
you can see that the eye is starting to form there in

the radar imagery -- you don't see it in the visible.

- but you can see i t there. Every now and then. we

notice it's wobbled a little bit to the south, could

be we're seeing a slightly south and west'motion. but

in general it's pretty much due west right now. and at

only about 6 miles per hour, and it could slow that

forward speed even more over the next few days. and

it's going to take i t a while then to cross the

peninsula and move into the eastern Gulf of Mexico,

and then in what I'll show next it would be the

steering currents, you'll see that the ridge to the

north st,arts to break down and allows this thing to

. -.

- start turning more to the north

So, i f we go to Slide 300, this is just an

example. I know this is a llttle blt hard to see, but

. - ..- s -
this is sort of the steerlng level of the atmosphere.

and this red area here and extending over to here is a

big dome of high pressure around which the storm has

to -- it can't move into i t , it has to -- i t kind of

 gets blocked by i t . So, with time, if this ridge

backs off, which is what we think is going to happen.

it's going to open up a weakness here in the Gulf of

Mexico, and then allow i t to turn northwacd. Right

-
now, we're concerned of course about the ridge forcing

i t to move a little bit more to the south because of

the steering winds from the northeast. But with time,

-
we think this is going to open up and that's why we're

forecasting the track, and the next slide, which is

Slide 400. are all the different track models -- and

you can't read the individual identifiers -- but the

thing you want to see here is that there's this sort

of cone of uncertainty from the guidance models about

where it's going to move in southeast Florida even.

much less to compare that to over here where you can

see the spread now in the landfall, say, 96 hours or

so from now, is much larger because the uncertainty

- becomes greater. So. the point we're making here is

that we have some uncertainty about what's going to

happen here, but even more as we get down the line

-,,.. -*.-. --
here. We da think, again. it will cross the peninsula

slowly and then turn northward over the Gulf of

Mexico

So. finally, we'll go to the official

.r'
 forecast and, again. the timings heie are approximate,

obviously, that we expect it to emerge into the Gulf

Saturday morning. and then by Sunday morning moving a

little bit faster toward the north-northwest, and then

sometime Sunday evening up into north Florida here.

But that timing, of course, is highly uncertain

. .

- because of the larger errors associated with 96-hour

forecasts. We do think that within. say. 12 to 18

hours, that it will have made landfall here over south

Florida -- that would be more like 12 hours from now.

say, by midnight or so tonight. And. again. it will

probably become a hurricane and then weaken a little

over the peninsula here. Then we expect

restrengthening. We think the environment is

favorable here for strengthening. I don't recall what

we're golng with officially. I believe what we show -

- that's something that we'd be careful about -- we

-_ show it going to 70 knots or 80 miles per hour here.

and then of course down to 60 knots after it's over

land. That does not imply that it's golng to be

rn -
weakening when it reaches the coastline in our

forecast. As noted in Stacy Stewart's discussion, we

expect it to be strengthening right up to landfall

here. so we could be looking at possibly Category 2

 intensity, but there's a lot of uncertainty and-a real

lack of skill in predicting the st.rength of hurricanes

four and five days into the future.

So, that's pretty much the picture

-
(inaudible).

National Hurricane Center MATHEW: Any

- questions for ~ichardbefore we move to HPC?

(No response.)

Hearing none, Bob?

MR. ROBERT (BOB) KELLY: Thank you, Matthew.

This is Robert Kelly at HPC. As Richard explained

the factors controlling the track, as we show the QPF.

is going to be very dependent upon the exact track,

particularly because it's moving through the eastern

Gulf of Mexico.

Slide No. 600 shows the precipitation 2 4 -

hour period ending tomorrow morning, ..8:00 o'clock

-
u

Eastern time, and i t shows the heaviest, of course.

over five inches nearest the landfall area. On these

graphics, we're only showing rainfall of one inch or

greater. and the blue areas are four inches or greater

Slide No. 700 shows the rainfall from 8:00

a . m . Friday through 8:00 a . m . Saturday. and that's as

the storm goes across southern Florida and starts top

 emerge off the western coast in the eastern Gulf of

Mexico., And the maximum extends.from the central part

of the peninsula into the Gulf.

Day 3 reflects the storm still having moved

--
fairly slowly and being offshore. Now. this is where

we get into some real sensitivity. If there is very

-
- much of a change in- the track
I
from what we expect lt
I
to be, the QPF affecting ihe western shore of Florida

could be substantially different.

Let me show you Slide No. 900, which is the

five-day accumulated total. Now, this represents the

track taking the storm all the way up into South

Carolina, into the southern portion of the

Appalachians, the foothills and the piedmont. and

we're looking for a heavier amount -- as you can see.

the track from western Florida up into South Carolina.

the rainfall drops off. That's related-to the speed

- _ of movement. As Katrina speeds up. we have less

accumulated rainfall. but as it moves into the slopes

of the southern Appalachians, we're going to see some

, . e. -
terrain enhancement.

So. that is the really critical point we

want to get across, is the five-day total for this is

very sensitive along western Florida to' the exact

 track of the storm. Right now. the 15-inch -max is

actually over the Gulf of Mexico, not over the State

of-'florida. But as we get into the early part of next

week, we'll be really concerned about t b southern

-
Appalachians.

Back to you. Matthew

National Hurricane Center-Matthew: Thank

you. HPC. With that, we'll go to John at the National

Hurricane Center

FORECAST CENTER-JOHN: Okay. I think

basically what we've been talking about on track --

the flight I have here is showing -- we're going to

show how big Lake Okechobee actually is compared to

some of our other forecast points in central Florida.

A very big component of what happens to Lake

Okechobee is actually rain upon the lake. It's such a

big area that if we get that heavy core-.of rain over

the lake, that could really cause a problem, not just

the inflow.

Right now, there's some question it's very

. . .A.- * .%
.

close whether the heaviest rain will be right over the

. ..
lake, or i t could be, o r more likely, would be to the

south of' the lake. If it is over the south of the

lake primarily. that would be good. If i t develops a

+ .
 little bit more to the northern part of the storm.

that would be bad for the lake. .

We have our projections for Lake Okechobee

right now, this morning, and we look for ab6ut

- a foot

to a foot and a half rise o n the lake. which is

significant for an area that big, primarily for the

- tributaries coming in from the west, which would be

Fishing Creek. the little blue dot there you see

Palmdale. There's not a who;e lot of population

there, but that is a major inflow into the lake

Coming from the north. the Kissimee Basin.

Right now, i t looks like there would be a lesser flow

into that. As Robert l u s t menltioned, as the heavy

rainfall moves into the western part of the State, you

can see a cluster of river sites to the south of the

Tampa area, these sites right now are starting off

fairly low, and with the rainfall predicted right now,

-
- we would see some very significant rises on those

rivers. but right now it looks like i t would be

I

perhaps near flood stage and we,would not be getting

e -*

significant flooding. ,

-It'svery early in this. We'll have to look

. at more rainfall predictions tomorrow and see if that

would change, but right now it looks like over the

 central Florida rivers, for the most part, we're

looking at very strong within-bank rises, perhaps

bringing it to near flood stage at this point in time.

That's today's report. =

--

NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER-MATHEW: Thank

you, John. This concludes the weather portion of the

-
- briefing. Mr. Lowder, I'll turn i t back over to you
for questions.

MIKE LOWDER: Anybody have (skips), Hearing

none, let's go to the State of Florida. Are you able

to get on?

FLORIDA: State of -- (missing) -- State

Emergency Response Team Chief, with Pam Griffin. FEMA

Liaison.

Governor Bush and Craig Fugate at this

present time are holding a press conference, that's

why they're unable to join us on the call.

The State EOC is at Level 1 . We went to

Level 1 activation at 7 : 0 0 a . m . this morning, 24-hour

operations. We have deployed liaisons to impact the

-- .

counties. The Governor has signed an Executive Order

. -
declaring a state of emergency. Basically, we used

the EO for Dennis and rolled Katrina into that

Executive Order.
 At the present time. we have some ~ational

Guard troop deployments in preparation, and we do have

some law enforcement deployments. On the next call,

I'll have specific figures. Based on thsevent and

-
what we're looking at. we're looking at primarily a

rain event. We're focusing on the problems we had

\
- during Hurricane Irene, and we feel that down in that
-
area there's going to be localized flooding. but we're

still waiting to see the impact of the storm in that

area.

We do have several counties that have issued

evacuations -- Broward, Palm Beach and Martin County.

We have regular shelter -- 16 regular shelters on

standby, and we don't have a population count. and

that should change during the day. We also have four

special needs shelters on standby.

We have had coordination calls with FEMA

-.

- Logistics, and we are putting together plans, We're

-
looking at maybe taking a different track. Going

through what we experienced in Hurricane Irene.

* - ,

instead of going to full-scale PODS. putting in place

conference centers at local areas of flooding, but we

will have to make that decision, The counties

impacted have sent us lists of POD locations, and if

 we have to go the route with PODS, we will use those

locations.

Presently, that's all I have to report. and

I stand by for questions.

-
MIKE LOWDER: Any questions for --
(missing).

Let's go to the State of Alabama.

ALABAMA : -- Level 4 . Monitoring the

situation, we have Mike Boasts (phonetic). the FCD

with Hurricane Dennis with us here in the EOC. and

we've been in on coordination calls with the region to

determine what our need is as far as support is

concerned. We are standing by monitoring the

situation and ready to respond

MIKE LOWDER: Any questions for Alabama?

(No response.)
Is Georgia on?
- GEORG IA : -- Georgia, this is Charlie
-
Dotson, Director of Operations. Department of

Transportation is with us, and some of our Public

-- A £ fairs -folks.

-We'reat a monitoring stage on this storm.

we're not anticipating at the present time a

significant evacuation problem by this storm. We are

 concerned about next week, the rain looks like it's

going to be our biggest concern at the present time.

We're prepared to provide whatever assistance we can.

That's it. =
--
MIKE LOWDER: Any questions?

(No response.I

(Missing.)
-
EVAL 3 2 3 . We stood up the ROC today at

Level 2 , at 1 2 : O O o'clock today. and will continue

that until we no longer have a need. but I'll shift it

over to Tommy Moore to -- in Thomasville, to do the

brief.

MR. TOMMY MOORE: Okay. Thank you, Todd.

Our status of ESFs-1, 3 , 4 , 7 , and DOD has been

activated to include mission assignment letters and

obllgatlons and implements to support Level 2 ROC, as

well as ERD-A for Florida and the second ERD-A

-.

- wherever it's going to be needed. if needed.

The MERS departed this morning at 8 : 3 0 for

Lakeland, to support the ERD-A for Florida. and LTR

* -
ERD-A will arrive, or should arrive in Orlando by

around 2 : 0 0 o'clock this afternoon. We identified two

MACs for LTR in Orlando, and they should be reporting

in there today. b
 As you know. the Response-~iaisonis &-site

for Florida, and we have identified another Response

Liaison for wherever it may be needed.

A second ERD-A has been identified as well.

-
and we are stacking that. We received several Rs.

received from the LTR in Florida. One was for

- logistical support, - a ten-person team. request for an

-
ESF-4 Type 1 planning section. and PRTs -- power,

lighting, water and ice -- for Florida. and the use of

Homestead as LSA, do fill in as well as an L S A . 1

We've also sent to Headquarters four Rs for

mobile DRCs, two for Suffle Field and two at

Lakeland, and we're standing by that action We also

are planning for Region 9 to support Region 4 for RD-

A. ERD-A and for other state, if necessary. and

coordination is ongoing with them.

We've identified PDA teams and placed on

-
- standby. Our RNA coordinator is conducting equipment

checking and making preparation for deployment, i f

needed. One team has been identified and rostered. We

-- ,

are transferring the response back to Level 3 in

~tl&ta. 'when they are fully operational. And the FRC

staff will continue to participate in the conference

calls, logistics calls, when necessary, and will

 continue to support field staff.

Our objective is to satisfy any State need

that comes our way, and our priority is to position

resources required for Florida. I'll turn,it over to

-
the MERS chief, Mr. Sam Silvers' comments.

MR. SILVERS: As Tommy said. we have the ERD

-
- support package en route to Lakeland. It's my

understanding that package will support the MOB center

operation, or the Log cell there, until such time as

they are needed elsewhere, I have another package

that's currently at Kings Bay, Georgia, supporting an

exercise over there. I expect it to arrive back here

Saturday a . m . ,and it will be available of any other

ERD-A or any other support requirements. Other than

that, we stand ready to provide any support, as

required.

MR. MOORE: Any questions?

M R . SILVERS: Tommy, we've also got some

advance liaisons identified. should the State ask for

them in advance of an ERD-A, also for the other

. *.. --
States

MR. MOORE: Okay. Any questions?

(No response.)

If no questions. I ' l l turn it back to Level

15
 2 . Todd?

TODD: Nothing further here. Thanks.

Tommy. Back to you, Mike.

MIKE LOWDER: Any questions? %

(Missing.)

Region 6 , are you on?

REGION 6 : -- the storm track, based on this

-
morning's forecast, obviously it looks good for Region

6 . but we're continuing to take readiness actions in

the event the storm moves westward.

MIKE LOWDER: Any questions for (missing)

SPEAKER: (missing) -- we're talking to

Region 4 , and we are in the (inaudible) In the event

that we get called to back them up for a third state.

Other than that, no other issues

MIKE LOWDER : Okay . '

FLORIDA: -- we're just preparing for the-.

-- double-hit and working closely with the State right

now, and we have our PDA teams rostered and ready to

go should we need to drop them in down south

, . a - a --
initially. I think we're in good shape
. "

MIKE LOWDER: Okay.

BILL LOKEY: -- trying to, in essence.

mirror the same levels as the RCC in Region 4 , and

I .
- 16
 we'll continue the duration and other special teams

are ready to move and start the process of activation

i f any requests come in.

MIKE LOWDER: Logistics? =

--

LOGISTICS: Logistics is happy to report we

have the commodities and it appears we have the

transportation in coordination with the region, at a

-
2:00 o'clock LOG call. and we're standing ready

looking green. very green.

MIKE LOWDER: Any other ESFs have anything

to add?

(No response.)

Hearing none, we'll continue to move on.

Anybody else have anything we need to add for today's

call?

(No response.)

If not, then let's plan on having tomorrow.

-.

-
- 12:OO noon. and hopefully we'll be able to

(inaudible). Thank you very much. We' 11 see you

tomorrow at 1 2 : O O noon.
- *.- * -
(Off the record.)
 CERTIFICATION. .

The foregoing text was transcribed from audio

--
recordings provlded by the Department of Homeland

Security, and is as true and accurate a representation

of the oral discussion as possible.

-

PHYLLIS P . YOUNG
 AUGUST 26. 2005

NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER: For those just

joining us, we have the Hurricane Liaison Team Web

--

site up and running where you can collect -- you can

view the still images of each one of the radar loops

- that you'll see here, at www.fema.gov/hlt, Also, we

wili be conducting the HPC and river forecast portion

here at the Hurricane Center. So, with that, I'm

going to turn it over to Max Mayfield for the

briefing.

MR. MAX MAYFIELD: Good morning. The first

slide here, Slide 100, is the visible picture of

Katrina. You can see it goes off the southwest coast

of Florida. The center is under this little

(inaudible) it's overcast here. We still have a lot

of banding features southern semicircle,

Let's go .to Slide 300. the (inaudible)

radar. This is a pretty good depiction considering

. - .%.- -- it's so far to the northwest of Key West. The good

news for Key West is that the 'storm is pulling away

from the lower Keys here. The bad news is it's still

traveling very (inaudible) down here. They have had

sustained tropical storm force wind for sometime now.

- 1
 for several hours in the Keys, even gusts up to

hurricane force out here in Key West

Let's go to Slide 300, to give you a.little

feel for what happened last night. It tpas a long

-
night here at the Hurricane Center. The eye made

landfall right about here on the Miami Dade-Broward

- County line. We had a good forecast of the landfall

point, but then it took a dip to the southwest, and

that really brought the eyewall of Katrina over both

Broward and most of Miami Dade County. We were

actually in the southern part of the eye here at the

National Hurricane Center. The strongest winds here

or on the back side, we had gusts to 87 miles per

hour. We've had some minor damage here, but nothing

to keep us from continuing to put out the advisories.

A lot of trees down. both Miami Dade and

Broward Counties. There were three people killed that

-
- I know of, from falling trees up in Bsoward County,

three direct deaths and one indirect death. Somebody

, * 6.- - *.
drove their car into a downed tree on the side of the
,

road.
. -
The rainfall is the other big concern

These are the storm totals at least up through this

morning, and everything you see here in red represents

 about 10 inches of rain. And this is the s;uthern
two-thirds or so of Miami Dade County right here, that

little white spot, represents a maximum at least

estimated by radar of 20 inches, which unfartunately

-
is pretty near my house. We've had some staff members

that couldn't get in because of downed trees or tress

- smashing trucks or cars, and people just couldn't get

in because of floods. We've had some serious

(inaudible) flooding in Miami Dade County

Okay. Let's go to Slide 400. and the center

is down here on the edge of the picture. It has

turned left. it's more rampant now after that

southwestern motion during the night. A little bit

south and due west, but we're very confident that it

will turn now more towards the north. We issued the

11:OO a.m. advisory based on the aircraft (inaudible)

that we had at the time and we have the wind speeds up

-
to 80 miles per hour. After we pushed the button we

got a drop right in the eyewall that showed surface

winds there 100 miles per hour So, we did a special

. -. --
within minutes there. until right now we have a solid
. .

Category 2 hurricane and the bad news is that I see no

reason since there's very warm water with favorable

upper level environment forecast (inaudible) remains a

 . -
hurricane. Right now we're forecasting it to be a

strong Category 3 hurricane. . It's going to be

stronger than that.

Now, based on our current tTack. the

-

landfall will be sometime during the day on Monday,

early Monday morning, however. given the radius and

- storm force winds, the most likely scenario is that

those storm force winds will be hitting near the coast

Sunday evening or late Sunday afternoon. It's also

way too early to really focus on that landfall

position. This cone is on here for a very good

reason. We have a couple of very good models.

including the Navy model that takes i t over here and

has landfall at southeast Louisiana. We also have a

couple of very good models that are to the east of us,

over here closer to Appalachiacola. So this whole

area from southeast Alabama all the way- over toward

- Cedar Key needs to pay very. very close attention

Another very big concern that I have is a it

gets up here close to the coast and starts making this

. *.- --
turn more to the northeast, when it makes that turn to

the northeast it's really going to begin accelerating.

The upper level reading that we had to the northwest

and the hurricane that approached this to the

 southwest during the night is to retreat. and

upper level trough is going to slide in here and

that's going to pick it up. and when it does start

moving. we expect to see that acceleratiom. If that

turn starts a little bit farther to the south, they

will get to the coastline earlier.

So, a lot of unknowns here. but (inaudible)

we're going to have a very significant (inaudible) and

last time I heard from Dennis from last month. we

would expect very significant storm surge from

wherever the system makes landfall, all the way over

through (inaudible) into Appalachia Bay, over

(inaudible).

It's too early to get too specific on the

storm surge or the rainfall, but I want to go ahead

and toss to Bill Reed. who is the meteorologist in

charge of the Houston Weather Service Office. His

- flight was canceled. He got into Orlando last night

and drove down here from there, so I appreciate Bill

being here.
, - *
.
A
. m -
MR. BILL REED: Okay. Thanks, Max, and I'm
glad to be here because, if I ' m here, i t means they

don't think it's going there.

QPF, this is Slide 500. Today. we're fairly

 certain on the rainfall. That big rain band you saw

on the radar feeding across the.lower keys and the

slow motion of the center to the west is going to

allow tremendous amounts of rainfall. We'-re showing

--

average amounts of 6 inches in there. It could easily

be in the 10-15 inch rain that Max showed that fell

-
- here yesterday.
The good news for the Keys is that it all

runs off fairly quick, so we're looking at street

flooding and ponding during the rain event. quickly

going away once the raln ends.

Turning to the eventual track of the storm,

on Slide 600 -- now, keep in m'ind all the

uncertainties that Max just talked about. This

graphic shows the onset of the landfall -- second

landfall rain in the Sunday through Sunday night time

frame based on the current forecast. It-could easlly

- be more than that. or less. depending on how fast it's

moving and exactly where it goes. This is just a

first pass trying to give you some Idea of what might

. - *._ --
happen as the storm moves up there.

Moving on to Slide 700 where it gets really

speculative is up the spine oi the Appalachians. and

exactly where the storm goes. If it's east o f the

 Appalachians, those on the west shouldn't have much

trouble. Right up the spine, you're going to have

tremendous potential for flash-flooding all along the

Appalachians, and maybe even spill over onko the west

--

slopes that goes west of the Appalachians, and that

would bring a problem in the Ohio River Basin areas.

- Way too soon to speculate on those, and if the storm

-
accelerates as fast as the models currently indicate,

it might not be too big a problem because of the rate

of speed the storm is moving.

NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER: Okay. Thank

you.

MR. REED: Ed (inaudible) just handed me the

new model run that is still coming in from this

morning. The National Weather Service Global Forecast

System now has this again as a major hurricane. It

has definitely shifted well to the west towards New

- Orleans. So, I just want to make the point here that

we've really got to pay attention all the way from

Louisiana over into the Florida Gulf Coast.

^.-, - _._ .,.-
NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER: This concludes

the weather portions. Any questions for us here at

the Hurricane Center?

(No response.)
 NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER: Hearing- none.

Mr. Lauer (phonetic), back to you.

MIKE LOWDER: Okay, thank you. Wonderful

news (missing). Let's go to the State of =Florida.

-.

FLORIDA : Good morning. (Missing)

Operations in the Florida EOC. The report from the

Sunshine State this morning, the State EOC i s at full

-
activation 24/7 operational under a Governor's

Executive Order. Obviously, we're assessing

conditions down in south Florida right now. after the

impact of Katrina overnight.

Some indicators I can give you this morning

immediately, we've got regular shelters, 27 open at

this time. approximately 1,550 in those shelters down

south. Special needs shelters open, 7. with 133

people in those shelters. Florida National Guard is

standing upwards of 1,000 troops today for logistical

-
- support activities that we've got in the planning

phase. Population without power, our power outages at

this time, approximately 1 . 2 million broken down as

- -.
follows: Miami Dade just over 700.000. Monroe 4,500,

Broward 489,000, Palm Beach 23,000. We're still

getting assessments on power outages -- 1 . 2 million

total.

-
8
 Major damage that we've been able to

identify thus far: We've got severe flooding reported

around the Homestead, Kendall, and Cutler Ridge areas

of Miami Dade, significant. We've got vessels

= sunk in

the intercoastal waterway off Key ~iscayne. We've got

three key hospitals impacted in the south Florida area

right now, with either flooding or damage 'of other

-
types -- Jackson and Homestead in Miami Dade. and

Kendall Hospital in Broward County. A1A in the

Sunrise area of Broward County is completely covered

in sand at this point. Those are major items right

now. I'm available for questions.

MIKE LOWDER: Anybody have -- (missing).

The question for you was can you give us the

status of the -- you said the hospitals that were

impacted, are they -- (missing) -- any indication of

the level of impact?

-- FLORIDA: Flood -- (missing) -- have had to

move some patients up t o higher floors in the

hospital, that sort of thing. It's being addressed by

,, - 6- e -
our medical folks, but the hospitals are impacted and

there has -been some efforts to move patients and so

forth as necessary. I won't tell you that medical

h.
services are diminished at this point, but obviously
 the facilities are.

MIKE LOWDER: Okay. Thank you. Any other -

- (missing). Hearing none. let's go to Alabama.

ALABAMA: Good morning. (Missirfg) -- here

-

in Alabama. I also have Bill Filter with me, the

Operations Officer. We are currently at a Level 4 ,

- which is our lowest level of activation. We plan to

go to Level 1 tomorrow morning at 9:00 a . m . .bringing

all the State EMCs in to assist us in dealing with

this storm.

We have requested a FEMA Liaison. We

understand one will be here later today. We've also

made a request earlier today for an ERD-A team based

on the current track of the storm.

Our operational priorities for today would

be to look at the evacuation potential out of Florida

and how that would impact Alabama as far as traffic

- and so forth. In addition to that. look at mass care

needs to accommodate the evacuees out of the State of

Florida, and a predeployment of our resources into

- +.- = -
those counties that may be impacted as a result of the

track of the storm.

That's all we have now.

MIKE LOWDER: Okay. Any -- (missing).

- 10
 State of Georgia.

GEORGIA: Good afternoon. (Missing) --

Office of Homeland Security Emergency Management. The

State Operation Center here in Georgiat is in a

monitoring storm posture. We're looking at some

tracking (inaudible) participating in these conference

calls.
- .
We are coordinating at the present time

internally with our state agency. We'll be doing a

conference call in just a few minutes with our

southwest Georgia counties.

We are working right now, we are

coordinating with the Governor's office to issue a

companion Executive Order to Governor Bush's order

expediting the movement of emergency supplies and

equipment. We're in a wait-and-see mode here, very,

very concerned about that track. and as the gentleman

.-

- from Houston talked about, the rain accumulation along

-
the spine of that track have us -- cause us our

greatest concern. We're very much looking at a

- - *.- --
flooding event for the State of Georgia
. -
Subject to your questions, sir. that

concludes our briefing.

MIKE LOWDER; Thank . you very much.

 (Missing.)

Let's go to Region 4 .

REGION 4 : (Missing) -- our RRCC 1s at a

Level 2 of evacuation, with ESF-1. 3 , 4 , 6 , 7 . 1 0 . 1 4 .

' *

15 and DOD present. We have a liaison pTesent in the

Florida EOC. We have an ERD-A from Region 9 en route

. to Atlanta sometime-this afternoon. They wi-11 depart

. -
California for Atlanta, and we are working on getting

an E m - A together to put into Alabama by noon tomorrow

per a request from Bill Filter just before we came in

here.

Our objective right now, based on calls

we've had with the-state of Florida and the Long-Term

Recovery Office, our objective here now is preparing

for the second landfall of this storm somewhere in

Florida, as well as potentially Mississippi, Alabama.

Georgia, and where we're looking at the Carolinas

-.

- because of the rain forecast, we recognize that if it

-
goes up through the mountains of the Carolinas. we

have a potential flooding situation up there that

. +.-. = - carries over from what we had last year with Hurricane

Ivan. And we're working with Headquarters Log and the

Long-Term Recovery Office on plans to move and

preposition supplies. That's it from Region 4 . Any

12
-
 questions?

ESF-12: (Inaudible) from ESF-12. Do you

need us down there?

GEORGIA: Probably on Sunday. We're re-

-1

evaluating our operational status. and we will make a

call sometime this afternoon. In fact, we're hinging

that on the forecast this afternoon. to make -our plans

-
for the rest of the weekend. so we'11 know when to

bring us up to Level 3 -- I mean Level 1 -- excuse me.

I'd like to go to Level 3. Does that answer

(missing).

ESF-12: Sure does, thanks.

GEORGIA: Okay.

MIKE LOWDER: Any other questions for Region

4?

(No response.)

BILL LOKEY: (Missing) -- evacuation

- posture.
FLORIDA: (Missing) -- Florida area, is that
what we're talking about, the second approach?
-., - *.. * - BILL LOKEY: Yes.

.FLORIDA: Underway right now in terms of

planning. Our Highway Patrol law enforcement in our

counties we're conducting conference calls with those

13
 .-

right now. Planning is underway on those. Obviously,

what Max has described with the. tracks, that has a

significant influence on i t .

We brought in Alabama on our confgrence call

--

this morning, obviously, because of the necessity to

have them involved in 'it, but I will tell you that

. .

- that is a strong issue that I didn't mention earlier

that is underway in the EOC right now. as we deal with

the south Florida response. We'll have more on that

later today.

Anything else related to that I can answer?

(Missing.)

GEORGIA: This is Georgia. (Missing) --

conference call this afternoon, is that correct?

SPEAKER : That ' s correct. there wi 11 be one (

at 3 : 0 0 o'clock.

(Missing.)

MIKE LOWDER: Long-Term Recovery Office.

ERT-A: (Missing) -- ERT-A en route to

Tallahassee. We received the State's request for a

declaration. and
. -
we're also coordinating with the State in regards to

PDA teams for south Florida. . Those should begin

tomorrow. and also looking at locations of potential
 DRCs. That's all we have right now.

MIKE LOWDER: Any questions?

(Missing.)

SPEAKER: (Missing) -- to indicate that

-

you're looking at preliminarily six (inaudible) in the

panhandle and 10 fixed DRCs in south Florida

FLORIDA: Right now -- all I've heard is

right now for south Florida.'theytrejust looking for

some potential sites in the Miami Dade and Broward

Counties.

SPEAKER: That makes more sense to me.

(Missing). Can you also bring me up to speed on

(inaudible) logistics, the mobile DRCs that we're

. .

bringing in. did those additional four arrive?

FLORIDA: Those have basically been staged

in Atlanta. Drivers have been sent in. and we've been

told that they'll be departing this afternoon, two to

-.

-
- go to Lakeland and two to report to the EOC in

Tallahassee. In addition to which we're told that

there's four drivers being located for four units

currently in Texas, and that those units might be

deployed early next week. That's all coming from our

Headquarters contact in Logistics,

SPEAKER: Thank you.

 FLORIDA: Any other questions?

MIKE LOWDER: Okay. Let's go -- (missing).

EVAL 323: -- this morning. and of course

we've got staff down there on that new di%aster, so
-
we're ready to respond, if necessary, and we've got

our staffing and all ready to go. Thank you

. .

- MIKE LOWDER: Thanks, Gary.

OPERATIONS-BILL LOKEY: -- will be up 2 4 / 7

supporting the region, We'll have a little more

robust ESF-5 staff tonight to maintain the situational

awareness in the reporting. We also have ESF-12

activated here and I believe -- ESF-12, do you have

anything to add?

(Missing.)

OPERATIONS-BILL LOKEY: I guess not. That's

i t from Operations. Thank you

LOGISTICS: Logistics has plenty

- of product
-- uploaded with power sitting -- ( inaudible). We

currently have about 10-12.000 tarps onhand, but that

is definitely a shortfall.
- *.- * -
MIKE LOWDER Any questions for Logistics?

(No response.)

Do the ESFs have anything?

(No response.)
?'
 Anybody out there have an;thing else-to add

for this call?

(No response.)

-- the latest -- looks like it's=continuing

-
to develop, probably change a few ideas and a few

plans, so let's make sure we're all communicating up

- and down. Let's plan on another call tomorrow, 12:OO

noon. Hopefully we'll have better news.tomorrow. If

nobody else has anything, then we'll close.

(Off the record.)

CERTIFICATION

The foregoing text was transcribed from audio

recordings provided by the Department of Homeland

Security, and is as true and accurate a r'epresentation

-.

-
- of the oral discussion as possible.

PHYLLIS P . YOUNG
. - *... * -
 AUGUST 2 7 . 2005

NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER. This is the

track forecast, and I decided to show you this because

-
i t looks like we're tighter back together, and you

might think when you see that that means we have more

- confidence In lt My experience has been that there's

not always that good correlation. I wouldn't give up

monitoring this anywhere from the Florida Panhandle

westward 'to certainly Lake Charles, Louisiana.

All you folks to the east of where this

track goes. if there's the slightest amount of error

back to the right, you're going to be in the dirty

side of the storm, get the high surge and the high

winds and the bad conditions. So, just because it's

been tracking a little further west. the Florida

Panhandle shouldn't let down their guard at this time

-.

The next one should be 500, which is the

"hurr-evac". Because of the vulnerability of

southeast Louislana, the New Orleans area, we've

. - *- --
posted the hurricane watch already from Morgan Clty

over to Pearl. it's lust for Louisiana but the

anticipation is that this afternoon's package will

have to expand the watch either to the east or

 possibly even to the west, depending on what the new

data we're looking at today shows.

What this timing right now. what we're

looking at is also in the immediate = southeast

-
Louisiana coast as early as Sunday night, with gale

force winds, During the day on Monday. daylight hours

- Monday, you're going to get the full impact along the

path of the storm. I can't pinpoint exactly when. but

plan on a dayllght even for the Gulf Coast as the

storm makes landfall And it could be speeding up.

If i t starts speeding up. starts'moving faster to the

north. it's golng to come in quicker than what we

showed here. So, i f I we trylng to make a declslon on

l t , I would err on the side of ~t maybe moving faster

than we forecast. That will give you more time for

maklng your decisions.

Okay. At thls point, if. Ed Danaher

-
- (phonetic) from HPC is on. I'd like to turn i t over to

him to talk about the rainfall potential which at

landfall will certainly be an issue

-. . *.. --
FEMA: Ed Danaher. HPC, are you with us?

MR. DANAHER: Yes, I am. ~ o o dafternoon,

everyone. On Slide 600, I believe. is the QPF

forecast, and that is a forecast for the next five

- 2
 days. So, that's the storm total we're looking for

for the next five days.

Now, initially, we're seeing some

precipitation over Florida. Notice, we h a w rainfall

-
amounts of 2 to 3 inches along the East Coast. That's

actually not going to he as serious as you might think

- as that's going to be spread over the entire' f rve-day

period. As the storm moves to the northeast, west

coast of Florida will be getting the occasional

convection from the eastern fringes of the storm. So,

even though we're forecasting fairly significant

amounts over the next five days. we don't expect more

than a half an inch to a quarter-inch any given day.

. .

The main precipitation is 'going to be over

the Gulf states as the storm moves inland, and we can

expect some precipitation to begin over the Delta area

and southern Mississippi and Alabama probably as early

-.

-_ as midday tomorrow, but the heaviest precipitation

will be later, probably late Sunday night and during

the day on Monday. In general, we're looking for 5 to

-. .....- --
10 inches near the center of the track and to t h e east
. -
of the track, so this precipitation axis is very

closely related to the track of the storm. If the

track were to move a little farther east or west, this

 axis would probably shift with i t . -

The amounts are going to be dependent on the

speed of the storm. The heavlest amounts are near the

southern coast where the storm will be moving inland

I

and have ample moisture from the Gulf. and as i t

accelerates to the northeast the amounts will be

gradually diminishing.
- We have a second axis of preclpltatlon along

the Appalachlans Wlth the track that we're currently

forecasting we're looklng for about 3 ~ n c hmax along

the eastern slopes of the Appalachians. If the track

were to track further to the east, those amounts could

increase significantly as the strong molst winds off

the Atlantic, coupled with the strong hurricane winds

could bring more molsture along the eastern slopes of

the Appalachlans. But based on the current track,

we're looking for the heaviest precipitation to be in

- the mld-west near and along the track of the storm

-
Back to you

NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER Thank you, HPC

- -. -- Thank you Real quickly. Bill Reed would like to

clarify something about the forecast.

MI? REED' I neglected to tell you the other

important bad news, I guess, is the intenslflcatlon of

4
-
 possibilities. The storm is forecast to move right

over the loop corner, which is a pool of very deep

warm water in the central Gulf of Mexico. About the

same time as doing that is when the wind shear is

-
supposed to be at a minimum. So, there's a lot more

confidence than I ' v e usually seen in the forecast for

it to go up to a.~ategory4 . and once you've gone that

-
far, it's not that far a stretch for i t to increase 5

or 10 more knots and be a Category 5 So, we've got

to take the intensification aspect very seriously with

the current storm we're dealing with. And Brock

mentioned one other thing I want to clarify, Ed

pointed out also, with the expanding wind field and

the amount of mo~stureavailable, we're golng to start

seelng a lot of rain bands well out ahead of tropical

storm force wlnds. which will only aggravate your

evacuation processes.

NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER: This concludes

the National Hurricane Center's weather briefing. Any

questions for us here at the HLT?

.-..,.-.a # -. ,

MR. RYDER DOMBROWSKI: Bill, this 1s Ryder

~orntlrowski'up at the HSOC. Do you have any comments

on the storm surge potential along the coast?

BILL RYDER: Well, obviously, where i t 's

 headed, you're at the worst possible locations for

storm surge. You remember Camille and its 26 feet. I

would advise all the folks that are in the potential

path of this storm to be looking at their-maximum off

the surge models, the meows and whatnot off of a

Category 4 or 5 storm, and plan accordingly.

NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER. The National

- Hurricane Center will start to issue official forecast

storm surge forecast runs 24 hours befbre landfall.

and then it will decrease to 12 hours and 6 hours just

before landfall. And we will be placing those on our

HLT Web site as they are made available. Any further

questions for the HLT?

(No response.)

Hearing none, Mr. Rhode, I'll turn i t back

over to you

MR. STEVE VAUGHN: Excuse me. T h i s is Steve

Vaughn, at the State Operations center in Texas.

-
Earlier Wednesday. we were told -- the State

Coordinator was told that there was no probability for

- -.- ,, this hurricane to impact Texas. Now as we're

watching, we' must ask the question again, what's the

probability of this storm impacting Texas?

 SPEAKER. We're going to start seelng a lot
of rain bands well out ahead of tropical storm force

wrnds --

NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER. -- &he storm.

-
the heaviest amounts are near the southern coast where

the storm will be moving inland and have ample

molsture from the GuIf, and as it accelerates toward

-
the northeast, the amounts will be gradually

diminishing.

We have a second axis of precipitation along

the Appalachians, with the track that we're currently

forecasting. we're looking for about 3 inch max along

the eastern slopes of the Appalachians. If the track

were to track further to the east. those amounts could

increase significantly as the strong moist winds off

the Atlantic coupled with the strong hurricane winds

could bring more moisture along the eastern slopes of

-

- the Appalachians. But based on the current track.

-
we're looking for the heaviest precipitation to be in

the mid-west near and along the track of the storm.

- *.- - -.
Back to you. Brock

MR. REED. Hi, Steve, this is Bill. You're

used to hearing me from Houston. Well, I wouldn't --

being that I ' m paranoid that it's my place you would

7
 take i t to, I can't totally rule i t out, but there's

nothing we're Looking at now either from a

meteorological sense or the storm guidance sense that

would take i t far west, but until it actually makes a

f

turn north, I wouldn't let your eyes wcnder too far

from what we're puttlng out every six hours

MR. VAUGHN: Okay. With that in mind, we'll

- go ahead and begin our series of conference calls at
4:00 p . m . today.

NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER: Any further

questions for the HLT?

(No response.!

Mr. Rhode. back to you at Headquarters

PATRICK RHODE: Thank you very much, Mike.

thank you, Bill. I ' m going to ask Mike Lowder

from our Response Group to take us through the state

reports .

MR, MIKE LOWDER: Okay. With the focus

-
- being in Louisiana, let's go to the State of Louisiana

first.

- ADJUTANT GENERAL. MAJOR GENERAL BENNETT C.

LANDRENEAU: H i , Mike. This is Col. Bill Doore, and I

have with me Gen. Leandreno. and Col. Smith as well as

Phil Bowen as our FEMA rep here.

 Currently our EOC is at ~ e v e l1 activation,

it's going to be as of 1400 today We're at Level 3

right now. We've got evacuations In process that are

Phase 1 . started at 9 : 0 0 o'clock thls wrning for

--
areas outside the levee protection district. We're

going to go into our Phase 2 and Phase 3 evacuations

. this afternoon, to include contra-flow at =bout 1600

-
local this afternoon

The GC~vernorhas dlrected staglng of assets

of National Guard. State Police. and DOTD to work the

contra-flow issue, as well as coordinate with the

Governor in the State of Mississippi. We've been

conducting conference calls with our parlshes and the

Natlonal Weather Service, with the Southeast Task

Force, Southwest Hurricane Task Force. and Shelter

Task Force within the State, and currently standlng by

as we watch this thing come in, and continuing with

- preparations. Any questions?
-
MIKE L W E R : Anybody have any questions for

Louisiana?
*. -.. .
TEXAS: This is the State of Texas. - At 4:00

o ' clock t'his afternoon we ' 11 be condi~cting a

conference call just to let Louisiana know that we'll

also discussing mass care issues and preparation or

9
 preparing shelters In the event that evacuations from

Louisiana have needs - the evacuees from Loulslana

have needs in Texas. So, just to let you know we are

starting that process. I

LOUISIANA: We appreciate that from the

State of Texas, thank you.

MIKE LOWDER: Anything else for Louisiana?

COLONEL JEFF SMITH: This is Louisiana one

more time. We'd also like to thank Mississippi for

all the cooperation they've give us with the contra-

flow efforts, they've been standing shoulder-to-

shoulder with us, and again the cooperation.

'The other thing I would like you to know

nationally is we have sent in a request for emergency

declaration. That was given to the Region I think

probably about an hour ago, so if you haven't received

i t yet. we are requesting a pre-landfall declaration.

-.

-- So. I j u s t wanted to make sure that I gave you a

heads-up on that. That's all I have

P ATR ICK RHODE : Jeff, this is Patrick.

. -.- * -
We've got that request, and we'll be circllng back

with you. - Thank you.

COLONEL SMITH: Thank you. Patrick.

MIKE LOWDER: Okay. Let's go to the State

 of Mississippi.

MISSISSIPPI Thank you. Patrick. First of

all, Governor Barber has signed a state of emergency

and Executive Order to deploy Guard resources. We're

I

preparing to do that at this time. -

The FEMA EHD-A has arrived, they arrived

about 30 or 45 minutes ago. Voluntary evacuations are

. .

- being encouraged along our coastal counties. As Col.

Smlth sald, we're also worklng wlth the State of

Loulslana to implement contra-flow beginning at 4 00

p.m thls afternoon on 1-59 and 1-55 Governor Barber

dld talk wlth Governor Blanco early thls morning, and

commlt whatever resources the state had to support

that, and we're prepared to do so Department of

Transportation is putting those resources in place so

we can pull the trigger at 4 : 0 0 p . m . thls afternoon.

FEMA Liaisons have been deployed to our

three coastal counties and our three tler counties,

-
also have deployed liaisons to Forest County. which is

the hub for evacuations from not only Alabama and

,. . +.- *- Mississippi hut Loulslana as well We're also

preparing to send an LNO to the Louisiana State EOC.

National Guard resources will be onsite, and our

County EOCs as well as composite search and rescue

 teams from the Guard late tomorrow afternoon

Addltlonal Guard resources are belng ldentlfled for

deployment as early as Monday, to take the water and

~ c edlstrlbutlon misslon We have water and ~ c e

I

dlstrlbutlon for the flrst 24-36 hours- ln storage,

left over from Hurricane Dennls

Search and -rescue assets from other parts of

-
the state are being identified and prepared to deploy

late this afternoon or early tomorrow. Also asking

locals to identify alternate power needs for critical

resources

Any questions of the State of Mississippi?

(No response.)

Patrick,

MIKE LOWDER: Thank you very much. Bob,

-- we'll definitely circle back, appreciate it

Any other questions for Mississippi?

(No response.]
- *.- - Y

Let's go to the State of Alabama

-ALABAMA: Good morning. Mike, morning,

Patrick. We've got our PSE activated at Level 1 .

we've got an EFU-A here, we've got Ron Sherman arrived

 at 8 : 3 0 this morning. We just briefed the ~dvernor

downstairs in our Ops Center on our operational

priorities. The Governor has made contact with the

Governors of Mississippi and Louisiana- to offer

-
assistance there, and that,'sabout all from here.

MIKE LDWDER: Any questions for Alabama?

(No response.)

Thank you, Bruce. Let's go to the State of

Florida.

FLORIDA. Good afternoon. It's Mike

DeLorenzo, State Emergency Response Team Chief of

Florida. With me is Justin DeMello, our ERD- A Team

leader. Give you a synopsis of what we have ongoing,

we have one shelter open with 6 0 individuals in it.

We have one special needs shelter open with 8 people

l n it. Currently we have approximately 700 Guard

personnel deployed to the operational area. We have

- had four confirmed fatalities, and the population

wlthout power 1s 883,000

Our focus today is establishing logistical

- -.
supply lines to the lmpacted area and continuing

damage assessment. In that regard, we have opened two

points of distribl~tion, one in Miami and one in

Homestead. at 8 : 0 0 a.m. this morning. We are planning

 for a possible second impact in the Panhandle, and in

that regard two counties have issued voluntary

evacuation orders, Okaloosa and Santa Rosa County. We

are also identifying assets that we can support the

=
other states with a possible impact. and I stand by

for questions.

MIKE LOWDER. Any questions for Florida7

(No response.)

Let's go to Georgia.

GEORGIA: Good afternoon. This is Charlie

Dawson, Director of Operations in Georgia Office of

Homeland Security. We are very encouraged by the

current projected storm track We're continuing to

monitor this storm at State Operations Center, and we

are at this tlme putting on hold our response

activities. We'll be monltorlng the Emergency

Management Assistance Compact broadcast for assistance

to what we can do to h e l p the impacted states. At

this time, we're standing down our response

actlvlties. Subject to your questions

- -. -- MIKE LOWDEF Thank you Georgla Let's go

back to Texas Texas do you have anything else that

you wanted to add7

TEXAS: Basically, we're just continuing to

 monitor. We did receive a not ice' yesterday,-Texas

Task Force 1 is mobilizing to stage in Shreveport.

They're undergoing their physicals today and will be

onsite no later than tomorrow in Shrevepor=t, to work

under the direction of FEMA to support those that are

impacted Texas Forest Service is ldentifylng

lncldent management teams and personnel in the event

-
that they are called upon to support any of our slster

states. And in addition to that, we're just

continuing to monitor.

MIKE LOWDER: Thank you, Texas. Now let's

go to Region 6

REGION 6 : Tony Robbins will give our update

from the Regional Operations Center here. Tony?

MR. TONY ROBBINS: Good afternoon. Mike

The Regional Response Coordination Center is activated

to Level 1 as of 1 1 0 0 today All our ESFs have been

-

- activated. As you heard. we have a liaison in place

at the State EOC as of this morning. Our ERD-A will

be in place at the EOC this afternoon. Scott Wells

. - &.. * - will be the ERT-A team leader We've been in

coordination with Bill Lokey on the ERD end. The Blue

Team wlll be deployed. scheduled to arrlve at the EOC

thls afternoon Barksdale Air Force Base is belng

 established as a mobilization center. The Denton MERS

detachment 1s en route to Barksdale, should be in

place thls afternoon. We've also asked the Denver

MERS detachment to deploy to Denton to serve as a

backup for Denton.

Three urban search and rescue teams are

being deployed to Barksdale, that's Texas, Tennessee.

- and Missouri. On the NDMS, we have three teams

schedule for Houston, three teams that are going from

Atlanta to Alabama, and three teams in Memphis, for a

total of nine DMAT teams that should be on alert

We are coordinating presently the emergency

request that Col. Smith referred to, been coordinating

wlth headquarters on that. We have established an

operational staging area at Camp Beauregard. We

currently have pre-stage commodities there at Camp

Beauregard. We have 15 traller loads of water. 17

trailer loads of ice, 15 trailer loads 0-f M R E s , and 6

-
trailer loads of tarps. We've asked for an additional

10 trailer loads of water, 8 trailer loads of ice, 5 0 -

. - +.- - pack generators, and heavy generators as wel.1, and

material handling kit In additron to those

commodltles, we have some preposltioned disaster

supply containers for rooming and houslng at Camp

16
 Beauregard as well.

We're in the process of evacuating our joint

field office that we had established for the recent PA

declaration in New Orleans. That staff is evacuating

=
to Baton Rouge, and they will be avai-lable to be

utilized for the ERT-A, if we need them.

We've coordinated with our backup regions,

. .

- Regions 10 and 1 . and have made staff requests to have

staff mobilized. We've asked Region 1 to staff an

ERT-A for Texas in the event that the storm continues

to move westward.

Lastly, we've worked with the Corps of

Engineers and done modeling on this storm, and we'll

be using their current modeling for three-day needs

for commodities for Louisiana. We have shared that

with Louisiana, and everybody is in agreement with

those figures at this time. Any questiins for Region

. .-
6?

LOGISTICS: Just a correction there. Tony.

You actually have 30 water on the ground at Camp

Beauregard.

.
MIKE LOWDER: Any other questions for Region
.

6?

MR. ROBBINS: Thank you, Maryanne, that's

 better news than I had.

MIKE LOWDER: Let's go to Region 4

REGION 4 : Morning. ~ i k e . As previously

indicated, we have ERD-As in Mississippi and Alabama.

I

but we're also supporting them with additional staff

moving in today, as well as the ESFs. getting all

those folks up to full ERD.

- We have a Rapid Needs Assessment Team moving

into Mississippi, as well as in Alabama and Florida.

We already have one team there that will serve both

Alabama and Florida. We have PDA teams on standby for

Mississippi and Alabama. We also are looking at a

Federal staging area in Meridian, and also MERS

support to the ERT-As in Mississippi and Alabama.

We've had calls this morning wlth the LOG

out of Headquarters, and I'll let Headquarters go

through the commodltles of what's located where

That's all we have, unless there's questions

MIKE LOWDER, Any questions for Reglon 4?

MR. ROBERT LATHAM This 1s Robert Latham. a

- -.- - question for Meridian. Is Region 4 pushlng forward

any heavy generators free stage for Mississippi?

MIKE LOWDER: LO3 out of Headquarters.

LOGISTICS: Say again?

 M R . LATHAM. Any generators pushing to

Mississippi.

LOGISTICS. No requests yet, but we can

certainly make that happen from Atlanta over to

*
Mississippi. -

MIKE LOWDER: We'll get those moving this

afternoon.

MR. LATHAM: Thank you.

MIKE LOWDER. Any other questibns for Region

(No response.)

Florida Long-Term Recovery?

REGION 4 : Good afternoon. Mike. We've got 8

IA-PA-PDA teams currently canvassing the Broward-Miami

Dade areas. We're also working the declaration

package, so when the PDA lnformatlon comes l n we can

get that right up to you

We are currently supporting our ERD-A team

-
in Tallahassee, and otherwise we're standing by for
further assignments, That's all we've got

. -... -- MIKE LOWDER. Thank you. Any questions?

LOUISIANA: This is the State of Louisiana.

We'd like to echo that January request. We're

probably going to be in the same boat there, may need

 to request from Region 6 to -preposition some

generators at Camp Beauregard

LOGISTICS: That's already been done,

there's 50-pack en route.

I

LOUISIANA: Roger. Do you know arrival at

LOGISTICS: 1200 Monday.

-
LOUISIANA: Roger. Thank you.

MIKE LOWDER Any other questlons7

(No response.)

Okay Let's go around here, turn to

Operations

OPERATIONS The EFT-A ~n blue has been

activated and 1s I n process of proceeding to Baton

Rouge The (inaudible) Bill Lokl 1s In charge. and 1s

already en route The estimated arrlval tlme of the

total team is being worked with the FEMA Deployment

-- Center. We are staffed at the NRCC at Level 1 24/7.

MIKE LOWDER: Logistics?

LOGISTICS: As stated, we've been in
-,, . .,.- -- constant conference calls this morning with the

Region, dolng coordination and moving all the product

around. The good news is we have the product and the

transportation. In addition to what Tony reported for

 Louisiana, Kent has requested an additional 10.-water,

10 ice. the MAG kit and a 50-pack into Beauregard. In

Alexandria, Loulslana, In a warehouse, we have 17

trailers of ice that will be uploaded by 8.00 o'clock

f
-
Monday. We are going to send another additional 10

down to Beauregard from Fort Worth. Fort Worth has

102 trailers uploaded with water and MREs. We have 60

- power that will be there by noon on Monday. Sof le

Field sald they wlll stand up a MOB center there. We

have a 50-pack en route there. We have 45 power unlts

at Sofle. with 30 MREs, 30 water, 15 MREs and tarps.

They will have the MOB center team in place by noon on

Sunday

Looking at Meridian, once that's stood up.

we'll fill that. The good news is we have the

product, and as soon as they're u p , we're just going

to fill all of the staging areas and the MOB centers.

Any questions f o r LOG?

-
- (No response.)

MIKE LOWDER: Okay. Let's go to Recovery.

-,. _ -.. -- , RECOVERY: Community Relations is setting up

their staging
.
. areas for Atlanta and Birmingham over

the next three days. The National Processing Service

Centers will go 24/7 as of Monday a . m . We're working

 with the Corps of ,Engineers to start prestaging for

the Blue Roof mission, in case there is one. and we're

also looking to prestage our housing inspectors,

pending any applications in any disasters.

*
MIKE LOWDER: Any questions? -

(No response.)

Any other ESFs that have any update that you

- want t.o give us?

(No response.)

Hearing none, anybody else out t h e r e have

any questions or anything else that you want to add?

(No response )

Okay. I'll turn lt back to the Under

Secretary.

MIKE BROWN Good afternoon, everybody I

know I'm preaching to the choir on this one, but I've

learned over the past four and a half, five years, to

go with my gut on a lot of things, and- I've got to

-
-
tell you my gut hurts on this one. It hurts. I've

got cramps. So, we need to take this one very, very

- *.- -- seriously.

I ' v e spoken to Bob, I spoke to Haley this

morning. I've talked to Governor Blanco and assured

them that we will do whatever we need to do. So. what
 that means is that I want you guys to lean forward as

much as possible. This is our chance to really show

what we can do based on the catastrophic plannlng that

we've done, based on the teamwork that we've developed

f

around here, this is our chance to really shine.

Why is that important? Because I worry

about the people In New Orleans, Louisiana and

- Mississippi right now, and they're really going to

need our help, I think. I hope I'm wrong. I hope

that Max's models and Brock's models have totally

missed the mark on this one, and this one goes

somewhere else or just dissipates, but I don't think

it's going to. And I know all of you can do i t . and I

know it's been stressful the past couple of years with

everything else, but there's no question in m y mind we

can do it .

The attitude I want you to take is whatever

i t takes to get i t done, I want us to--geti t done.

-
- You're not going to catch any flak from me. As I told

Loki and Lauder this morning, i f you lean forward and

- -- get right to the edge of the envelope, you're not

going to hear
-
.
me screaming about i t . So, go right

ahead and get as close to that envelope as you need to

get to to get i t done.

23
 The last thing I want to do before we leave

is my good friend. Joe Hagan from the White House --

Joe. are you on the line?

MR. JOE HAGAN:

MIKE BROWN:
-
I ' m on the line, Mike.

Anything you w a ~ t to say to

encourage the folks? Hello Crawford

MR. HAGAN:. . Coming t o you from Crawford,

- Texas. We're here, and anything we can do. obviously.

to support you, but it sounds like the planning. as

usual. is in good shape. and good luck to the States

and just know that we're watching, and we'll do the

right thing as fast as we can.

MIKE BROWN. I appreciate that I want to

say that I appreclate all the support that Joe and the

Whlte House have always given us, they've always been

great supporters of FEMA, and I greatly appreclate

that Thanks, Joe

Okay Next call, 12.00 noon tomorrow I

don't know whether I'll be here or l n Baton Rouge or

someplace b u t , guys, go for it.

. - .- -- (Off the record.)

 *
The foregoing text was transcribed from

audio recordings provided by the Department of

Homeland Security, and is as true and accurate a

- representatlon of the oral discussion a s possible.

PHYLLIS P . YOUNG
 AUGUST 2 8 . 2005

Mike Brown: Everyone,.let's go ahead and

get started. It's noon, and we have a lot of business

to cover today. f

Before we get started. I wanted to very

briefly introduce Michael Jackson. Deputy Secretary of

- Homeland Security, and my good friend from the old

days. So, Michael ,, welcome to our lit-tle operation

here.

MR. JACKSON: Hi.

Mike Brown: Let's get started immediately.

National Hurricane Center. do you want to give us an

update?

NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER: For those

following along on the website, we have made some last

minute adjustments, so please refresh the website at

f ema . gov/hl t . We have both the Mobile-.Bay and New

- Orleans official storm surge slosh model best track

runs posted on this website, and we will continue to

post them as they are made available as the storm

.. . *.-. ,...s ,

comes closer to the coast.

With that, we'll turn it over to Max

Mayf ield.

MR. Max MAYFIELD: Okay. Good afternoon. I

 don't have any good news here at all today. Th-isis,
as everybody knows by now, a very.dangerous hurricane,

and the center is about 225 miles south-southeast of

the mouth of the Mississippi River. =

-
Putting the visual loop up here, Slide 100

here, just so you can see the size. You know. i f

- there was ever a time to remind people not to focus on

th'at skinny, black line, this is it. This is a very.

very large hurricane, and you can even see some of

these outer rain bands have already moved across the

southeast Louisiana coast and are moving into the New

Orleans area right now. That band will dissipate, and

additional bands will start coming in later this

afternoon.

Let's go to Slide 200, the infrared

satellite loop. And I show this to really emphasize

the eye. Right now, this is a Category 5 hurricane,

-.

-_ very similar to Hurricane Andrew in the maximum

intensity, but there is a big, big difference. This

hurricane is much larger than Andrew ever was.

And for the folks in Louisiana. in

Mississippi, and Alabama, and the Florida panhandle,

when we're talking about the intensity -- in fact,

especially the folks in Louisiana, if you remember

 Lily. Lily had been a Category 4 hurricane - in the
central Gulf of Mexico. It had.a very, very small
pinhole eye, and those small eyes usually don ' t
,

maintain themselves very long. =

-
Lily weakened down to a Category 1 hurricane

by the time it made landfall. This one is not going

-
- to do that. When you have a large diameter eye like
this, and as strong as this one is. I really don't

expect to see any significant weakening. So I think

the wisest thing to do here is to plan on a Category 5

hurricane.

Okay. Let's go to Slide 300, which is the

water vapor animation. and I'm just going to spend a

minute on this to talk about the steering currents.

All of the computer models are developing high

pressure here to east of Florida. The winds go

clockwise around that high. That will help turn

-.

- Katrina to the north, but there is also a drop -- a

low pressure, as you can see, moving in on the ends of

the loop here from the northwest.
. *.- --
And this is where there are some differences

in how the models handle that. If this drop were just

to continue to sweep in, it will turn more toward the

north and even northeast faster. If it stays back

 here and. you know, farther removed from the
hurricane, it will allow it to.come in more in a

north-northwesterly track.

No one can tell you exactly where that

-
landfall is going to be, but this hurricane is so

large that no matter where it hits it's going to have

- an impact over a very. very large area.

Let's go to the HRVC (phonetic) slides.

Slide 400. This is our forecast at the present time.

takes the center over southeast Louisiana, just east

of Lake Poncetrain and on up into Mississippi,

Tennessee, Kentucky. into Ohio, in the three-day time

period

I want to say that -- and I know I ' m

preaching to the choir here -- that the -- this

hurricane in particular is not just a coast event.

The strong winds, the heavy rains, and the tornadoes '

- will spread well inland, along this path that you see

here. Having said that. I also want to make

absolutely clear to everyone that the greatest

~. - *.- * -
potential for large loss of life is still in the

coastal areas from the storm surge.

So let's go to Slide 500, where i t says the

storm surge forecast. This is the actual forecast

- 4
 based on the last forecast that came out about an hour

ago that has the center coming over here, passing just

east of the city of New Orleans. and covering the

=
eastern side of the lake.
-
I really want to emphasize that, you know,

and I think FEMA are staying here in southeast

- Louisiana, but Robert Latham and Bruce Bowman here,

Mississippi and Alabama, these valleys-that you see

here along the Mississippi coast, those valleys are up

over 20 feet. We're talking about a Camille-type

storm surge here, even on the ~ i s s i s s i ~coast.

~i And

we'll talk about Alabama here in a minute

On the west side of the track, this is very.

very complicated. You know. there's a very complex

system of levies there in the New Orleans area. Some

of the valleys that we see -- and I'm sure that all of

these areas are already going under water out near the
-- mouth of the Mississippi River. The colors that you
see here show inundation over the land areas.

One of the valleys here in Lake Poncetrain.

- *.. -- ,

we've got on our forecast track. if i t maintains its

intensity, about 1 2 - 1 / 2 feet of storm surge in the

lake. The big question is going to be: will that top

some of the levies? And the current track and the
 forecast we have now suggests that there will be
minimal flooding in the city of .New Orleans itself,

but we're -- we've always said that the storm surge

model is only accurate within about 20 per'cent.

--

If that track were to deviate just a little

bit to the west, it would -- it makes all the

- difference the world. I do expect there will be some

of the levies over top even out here in the western

portions here where the airport is. We've got valleys

of 10 feet that can't overtop some of those levies.

The problem that we're going to have here --

remember, the winds go counterclockwise around the

center of the hurricane. So if the really strong

winds clip Lake Poncetrain, that's going to pile some

of that water from Lake Poncetrain over on the south

side of the lake. I don't think any model can tell

you with any confidence right now whether the levies

-
- will be topped or not, but that's obviously a very,

very grave concern.

, - +.- * - Now, let's go to the next slide. This is

Slide 600. I really want to make sure that various of

the folks in Alabama know what can happen here. If

you remember back Hurricane Jorge in '98. i t made

landfall in Mississippi as a Category 2, and you had

 five to eight feet of storm surge way up into the

northern part of Mobile Bay.

You're going to have likely more than that

from this hurricane. So we are, indeed, wopried about

-

the Mobile Bay area, and, of course, Dolphin Island

and the Gulf Shores area there.

- Now, let me go to the next slide. Slide 700.

We have shifted the track here. Thi-s is not our

official forecast right now, but if that track eases

eastward just about 30 miles, which is almost to the

noise level for us here. you could have much higher

storm surge values both well up into the northern

portion of Mobile Bay. And, you know. I'm showing 10

and 11 feet right now. We like to say we're within a

couple of -- you know, 20 percent. So you could have,

you know. 12 or 13 feet of storm surge there.

This is a -- this is going to have a real

impact well out to the east, and I don't want to

forget about Florida either. Even the northeastern

Gulf there. east of the hurricane warning area, we

full expect three to five feet of storm surge and wave

setup that will have an impact on coastal areas. And

I know some portions of Highway 98 there around

Appalachia (inaudible) are already.being eroded.

 So big, big impact from the storm surge well

out to the east. We need to understand that.

Okay. Any specific questions for me before

I toss to the Hydranet Prediction Center an8 Jim Hope.

-

Mike Brown: Any questions for Max?

MR. Max MAYFIELD: Okay. Thank you very

- much.
Mr. JIM STETHKOVICH: We do have a question

here in Al.abama.

MR. Max MAYFIELD: Yes, sir.

MR. JIM STETHKOVICH: Hey. this is Jim

Stethkovich, National Weather Service. We're getting

some reports out of the Mobile office that they're

starting to have projections of over 15 foot in

northern Mobile County. We're wondering. based on

what you just told us, Max. if that might be a little

bit high.

- MR. Max MAYFIELD: Well. you know. they may

have centered the track farther east, and just -- you

know, that's almost to the (inaudible). We've heard

= -
about 12 feet. Yes, two or three feet higher than

that, that's certainly possible. That's not what

we're forecasting --

MR. JIM STETHKOVICH: Thank you.

 MR. Max MAYFIELD: -- but there is certainly

that possibility. This is -- you know, this one is

not just the intensity. but it's the size that really

has us concerned, too. *

-
(Inaudible.)

MIKE BROWN: Okay. Mr. Buckley?

MR. Mike BUCKLEY: (Inaudible.)

MIKE BROWN: Max, there's a question coming

from the audience,

MR. MIKE BUCKLEY: This is Mike Buckley from

Headquarters. Can you comment on the forward speed

and what might affect the track as well as the

intensity of the storm surges?

MR. MAX MAYFIELD: Well, we've got it going

about, you know, 10 knots, about 12 miles per hour.

Once it makes that turn to the northeast. it's going

to start accelerating. If that motion occurs earlier,

.-

-- you know, that -- that would speed everything up. But

right now, we're talking about the center, you know.

the actual center being on the coast tomorrow morning

~ - *.- e -
But we really -- again, we ,don1t want to focus on

that

I mean, the storm force winds are going to

be there, you know, later this afternoon and this
 evening. So. you know. people are already running out

of time. And, quite frankly.. for the folks in

Louisiana. if you can't get people out, you know. i f

you're ever going to, you know, talk abou% vertical

-

refuge, this is the time to do i t .

MIKE BROWN: Thanks. Max.

Other questions for Max? If not, let's go

to the HPC.

JIM HOOK: Thanks, Mike. This is Jim Hook

from the HPC. Good morning -- good afternoon.

I apologize for the quality of our video

this morning. We have lost one of our video feeds. so

I'm going to show you the presentation across the

other feed. If you could follow along on the website.

that would I think improve the quality of that feed.

The problem is on our end and not on your

end. We expect considerable precipitation

-- with Katrina over the next 48 hours. Fortunately, the

storm is expected to move quickly once i t makes

landfall and move up through the central part of the

. *.. * -
United Sates. If you'll go to Slide Number 900. which

is our Day 1 forecast, which is this morning at

Cr

7:00 a.m. Central Daylight Time 'until tomorrow morning

at 7 : 0 0 a . m . ,we're looking for precipitation amounts

 of greater than four inches in the area in the

vicinity of New Orleans and slightly to the east of

On this graphic. amounts greater than four

--

inches are indicated in blue, with a maximum amount

over the next day or so expected up to maybe seven

- inches in the lower Mississippi Valley area.

In the next slide. Slide Number 1000. we're

looking at the precipitation from tomorrow morning at

7:00 a . m . CDT to Tuesday morning at 7 : 0 0 a . m . And

this is once the storm is now on land. is producing a

considerable amount of precipitation, amounts greater

than -- we're expecting greater than four iriches over

a sizeable part of eastern Mississippi, western

Alabama, and eastern Louisiana during that time

period.

Then, the next day the storm will be quickly

- moving north and producing precipitation primarily In
-
the Tennessee Valley and the Ohio Valley, and the

storm will then continue up through the eastern Great

s - ,

Lakes. So for the three-day period. i f you'll look at

Slide 1100; you'll have our totals. We're looklng for

amounts of five to ten inches in the lower -- lower

central U . S . , with maximum of over 15 inches in

 isolated spots. That should then proceed be

followed by smaller amounts, on the order of four to

eight inches, in the Ohio Valley, with lesser amounts

then as the storm moves into New England. =

So the good news from this storm once i t

makes landfall is that we expect the storm to continue

- to move fairly quickly through the central United

States.

Max, that's all from the Hydranet Prediction

~ s n t e r . Back to you

National Hurricane Center: Thank you, HPC.

\

We'll turn it over to John Smith, our hydrologist

here at the Hurricane Center.

Mr. JOHN SMITH: Good afternoon. As we get

a little bit closer to landfall, we wanted to start

talking a little bit about some of the hydrologic

implications as the storm moves north and east. This

- is just a quick slide of soil moisture. You can go
*

back to Slide 1200, please.

What you can see is over July and August we

s
-,. ,

had a lot of heavy rains through southern Alabama and

nor-thern Georgia. That area is very wet right now.

Earlier in the week. the track of Katrina was kind of

troubling towards a flooding perspective, because of

 the storm moving over that wet area-.
As the storm goes ahead and makes landfall

somewhere along the Louisiana/Mississippi coast, and

moves north and then east and accelerates like Max and

Jim just talked about, that eases the riier flooding

(inaudible) a little bit. If you go to Slide 1300.

- the River Forecast Centers in both Slidell and

-
Peachtree City are calling for the possibility of

significant river flooding all along the corridor of

Katrina as it moves north,

If it starts to turn east and accelerate.

the rainfall totals ought to'come down a little bit.

Flooding ought to be more localized when that happens.

Down here is where we're really starting to get

concerned. Much of this is storm surge flooding and

is expected to reach well out to some of the rivers,

some of the coast rivers.

Add to that the 10 inches of rainfall that

might be possible, especially down along the

Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana coast, and we're

, . *.- a -
looking for some -- the likelihood of significant

river flooding in that area.

Are there any questions?

MIKE BROWN: Any questions?

 NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER: Hearing-none.

this concludes the weather portion of the conference.

MIKE BROWN: Thank you very much.

At this time, I'd like to go to* Crawford,

Texas, Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like 30 introduce

the President of the United States.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Yes, Mike, thank-you very

-
much, I appreciate so very much the warnings that Max

and his team have given to the good folks in.Louisiana

and Mississippi and Alabama. Appreciate your briefing

that you gave me early this morning about .what the

Federal Government is prepared to do to help the state

' and local folks deal with this really serious storm

I do want to thank the good folks in the

offices of Louisiana and Alabama and Mississippi for

listening to these warnings and preparing your

citizens for this -- this huge storm. I want to

- assure the folks at the state level that we are fully
-
prepared to not only help you during the storm, but we

will move in whatever resources and assets we have at

* -.
our disposal after the storm to help you deal with the

loss of property. And we pray for no loss of life, of

course

Unfortunately, we've had experience at this

 in recent years. and I -- the FEMA folks have done

great work in the past, and I'm confident, Mike, that

you and your team will do all you can to help the good

folks in these affected states. =

--
Again. I want to thank Governor Blanco and

Governor Riley and Governor Barber, Governor Bush of

- Florida.. for heeding these warnings, and doing all you

can possibly do with your state folks and local folks

to prepare the citizenry for this storm

In the meantime, I know the nation will be

praying for the good folks in the affected areas, and

we just hope for the very best.

Mike, thanks for letting me speak to the

people I know who are working long hours. Again, I

want to thank everybody involved in this effort. I

appreciate the long hours you're keeping. I expect

you to keep more long hours until we've done
-- everything we can in our power to help -- to help the

folks in the affected areas

Thank you, sir.

MIKE BROWN: Mr. President, thank -you. We

appreciate your support of FEMA and those kind words

very much. Thank you, sir.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Okay.

 MIKE BROWN: Okay. We'll move on now-to the

states. Louisiana?

COLONEL SMITH: Good morning. Mike. This is

Colonel Jeff Smith here in Louisiana. We, certainly

--
, appreciate those comments from the President, because

I can tell you that our Governor is very concerned

- about the potential loss of life here with our

-
citizens, and she is very appreciative of the federal

resources that have come into the state and the

willingness to give us everything you've got, because,

again, we're very concerned with this

I'm going to turn the briefing over for a

moment to our Operations Officer, just to kind of give

you a quick laydown of things. This is Colonel Bill

Doriant .

COLONEL DORIANT: The Emergency Operations

Center is at a Level 1 , which is the highest state of

- readiness. We've got currently 11 parishes with
-
evacuations, and climbing. Eight are mandatory.

including a first-ever mandatory for New Orleans.

. - *.- * -
We've got 38 parish declarations of emergency; also

the state 'declaration and the Presidential declaration

of emergency.

Evacuations are underway currently. We're

 planning for a catastrophic event, which we have been

plannihg for, thanks to the help of FEMA, when we did

the Hurricane Pam exercises. So we're way ahead of

I
the game there.
-

Our priorities right now are sheltering, and

then planning for search and rescue and commodities

. .

- distribution after recovery.

That's all I have at this time

COLONEL SMITH: I'll just tell you that the

evacuation process is going much better than i t did

during Hurricane Ivan. Nobody anticipated that it

would be easy. Nobody anticipated that there wouldn't

be traffic jams. But by and large, i t has gone much

better than it did with Ivan. And, of course. we

still have a contraflow in effect at this particular

point in time, and we do still have heavy traffic

coming out of New Orleans, but by and large that

-- process is going very well.

We have established a unified command here

with our federal coordinating officer. Our ERD-A

-. - a
., --
team, ERD-N team is on the ground here. ~ n d lagain

as our Operations Officer pointed out, we're spending

a lot of time right now with the search and rescue.

making sure that we marry the appropriate state assets

 and the federal assets, so .we can -have an effective

search and rescue effort just as quickly as possible.

..

We're also taking a look at our sheltering

needs, long-term sheltering needs, looking at sites to

-
start bringing in the temporary housing. So we're not

only fighting the current battle, managing

expectations here with our local parishes, but we are

-
also working with FEMA and our other federal partners

to have the most effective response and recovery that

we possibly can during this time

So, again, I want to say thank you very much

for all that you're doing. I think that at this point

in time our coordination is as good as i t can be, and

we just very much appreciate the President and your

commitments to resourcing our needs down' here.

Any questions that you have, we'd be glad to

take them now, unless you want to hold that until

- later. That's your call, Mike.

-
Mike Brown: Any questions? Colonel, do you

have any unmet needs, anything that we're not getting

.~ - *.- = - to you that you need or --

COLONEL SMITH: Mike. no. (Inaudible)

resources that are en route. and it looks llke those

resources that are en route are going to -- to be a

 good first shot. Naturally. once.we get into this

thing, you know, neck deep here; unfortunately. or

deeper. I'm sure that things are going to come up that

maybe some of even our best planners hadn't even

f

thought about. So I think flexibility is going to be

the key.

And just as quickly as we can cut through

-
any potential red tape when those things do arise, you

know. we just need to look at i t . We appreciate your

comments. I think they were to lean as far. far as

you possibly can, you know, without falling, and your

people here are doing that. And that's the type of

attitude that we need in an event like this.

So, again, thank you very much.

Mike Brown: All right. I'll be in Baton

Rouge probably about 4 : 0 0 this afternoon, so I'll see

you sometime this evening.

COLONEL SMITH: Okay. i is sing) as far as

-
coordination

Mike Brown: All right. Any (missing)?

*.. .- Mississippi?

MISSISSIPPI: Mr. Secretary, little did we

know less than a week ago when we had the opportunity

to meet that we would be sitting here today facing the

 challenges that we face. I appreciate you listening.

appreciate you being there, Mike. FEMA has been

great. You're leaning forward, and we appreciate

that. We're going to need everything that we can

-
possibly muster, not only in this state and the

region, but the nation, to respond to this event

I was on the coast yesterday, and what I saw

-
was. quite frankly, exactly what existed before

Camille. People were not evacuating. I feared that.

It seems to be now today we're in the middle of a

panic evacuation. I can say that it's going well.

The numbers are picking up. We're preparing to open

shelters in all 82 counties. Search and rescue

resources from within t,he state are being predeployed

to the Jackson area today, will be predeployed to the

coast this afternoon

National Guard liaison teams will arrive no

-
- later than 1800 this afternoon for the three coastal

counties. We also have been in close contact with our

other assets in the region to see what we can bring

. - *.-. - ...
in, should we need lt, specifically search and rescue,
wat'er and"ice and food . We had resources left f Tom

Dennis that we can carry over probably 24 to 36 hours.

We know that FEMA has got resources they can

 predeploy to help us. We're prepared to distribute

those once the storm clears and we can get in there.

The priorities right now are evacuation for

us, Mike. We just -- we think that people $re finally

starting to heed the warnings. I hope i-t's just not

too late.

The sheltering. obviously, is a big issue,

but the shelter spaces are there. Search and rescue.

as I said, is a priority. National Guard -- we ' re

also preparing to deploy some additional Guard

resources to the Hattisburg/Camp Shelby area to get on

the ground post-landfall for search and rescue, and

even security purposes.

%

FCO is onsite. ERD-A is onsite. EMAC-18 is

onsite. We've got everything that we need from the

Federal Government.

And, again, we appreciate wha't you and FEMA

-- are doing. Mr. Secretary. I appreciate you being

there. It shows the support at that level. We really

do appreciate i t . We certainly appreciate the words

, - .,- - .-.
irom the President.

'That'sall I've got, Mike. unless you've got

some questions for me.

MIKE BROWN: Questions for Bob? All right,

 Bob. (Missing.)

ALABAMA: (Missing) still at a Level 1

operations. We do have the ERD-A in place. Ron

Sherman is team leader. We've been doing some joint

I

planning. We 've got 1iaisons down -our coastal

counties, We're still -expecting a substantial storm

surge in our two coastal counties.

We've got our search and rescue teams on

standby. I have also volunteered help to Mississippi

if they need some also. We've got our water rescue

teams. Because of the flood problem, we've got

sandbags stockpiled, so we're in pretty good shape.

Water. ice, the other emergency commodities, we've

been working with Ron on that, and we've got

sufficient on hand to meet what we think are -- will

be our initial requirements, Mike.

The Governor is signing an emergency

-.

- proclamation today, We'll be going in with a request

-
for an emergency declaration for about six counties.

The Governor will also be issuing a mandatory

-- evacuation for parts of Baldwin County. We do have

voluntary -evacuations going on in Mobile County at

this time. So we're in good shape.

MIKE BROWN: Good. I'm glad (missing).

 MIKE BROWN: Oh, yes. When should we-expect

your request in, Bruce?

-
ALABAMA: (Missing) right now, Toby Roth.

-
the Governor's Chief of Staff is here, so we've got
=
all.the documents ready to go, Mike. So as soon as
t

tha,t happens, we'll get it to Ron and get it o n up t o &'

you.
-
MIKE BROWN. All right

Okay Great (Missing.)

FLORIDA : (Missing) responding. South

Florida, we're maintaining that, and we're getting

ready with t'he evacuations that are now occurring in

the panhandle.

More importantly, I am not anticipating any

FEMA assets other than the recovery assets we

currently have. We're not going to put in a request

- for resources in lieu of the greater n e e d to the west

-
of us.

In addition, we're planning our search and

. . +.. s - rescue missions for our counties. also building our

task force structures to provide assistance to the

neighboring states in EMAC, and pretty much are

gearing up with Governor Bush's direction to support

 our neighboring states as well as our initial

response.

So other than what we already have. we're

not going to ask for anything additional. %'re going

-

to try to do as much as we can in-house.

FEMA : Let me just (missing) Alabama,

- Mississippi, and (missing) Florida to be used. So i f

we need them, don't hesitate to let us know. so we can

bend Craig's ear, move them out of Florida

Thanks. Craig.

Are there any questions for Florida? Hearing

none, we'11 go to Georgia. Georgia? Texas? Do we

have Texas on? You'd better. You're about to --

TEXAS: (Missing) Texas here. And we are

basically preparing to move into a mass care

assistance mode, standing up our capabilities to

provide sheltering for evacuees who are moving into

- Texas.

We, in fact, already have several shelters

that are open. and we are bringing on -- the Governor

- *.- s -
has ordered 200 members of the Texas State Guard.

which is the Texas State ~ ~ 3 rmilitia

d under the

direction of the Texas Army National Guard, to duty to

provide volunteer assistance with shelter management

 operations.

So we are working closely in conjunction

with the American Red Cross and Salvation Army to

provide that service, along with gur local

-
jurisdictions on the eastern part of the state.

The Governor has dispatched to Louisiana a

-
liaison officer to work in the State operations Center
-
there, try to provide a liaison and make us -- or give

us a better understanding of what -- some of the needs

we might be able to supply there. The Texas Army

National Guard is inventorying their assets in

expectation if we get requests for assistance from

them to mobilize.

Our Texas Building and Procurement

Commission, which helps us manage the contracts that

we do with private vendors. has sent a representative

to the State Operations Center to begin to monitor and

. -.

-- to work with contract operations in the event that

that type of assistance is needed anywhere other -- in

our sister states

Of course, under the direction of FEMA,

Texas Task-Force I has been mobilized and is staged at

Shreveport under the direction of FEMA to provide

assistance. and we continue to monitor this situation.

 We have got the mass care ESF corn-ing to

active duty at the State Operations Center beginning

tomorrow morning. We have increased our staffing

level in the State Operations Center.

-
MIKE BROWN: Thanks, Texas.

Any questions? Okay. Let's go to the

regions. Region (missing), Gary?

-.
GARY: (Missing) that's in Louisiana with

Colonel Smith to kick off this presentation. Bill?

BILL LOKEY: Thank you very much, Gary. The

-- we've got the ERD-N and the E m - A established here,

and also some of the FEMA staff members who were

evacuated from the Disaster 1601 helping, working with

the state. The basic priorities are life-saving

missions. life-sustaining missions, and then moving to

immediate and long-term recovery.

In essence, we formed planning groups in

- various areas, the priority being for search and

-
rescue and some of the medical issues in supporting

that, and refining some of the plans that were left

- *.. a - over from the catastrophic planning efforts that were

done here -that have been helpful in getting things

organized.

We have a number of other efforts going on

 in the distribution and staging. power, rapid needs

assessment, debris clearance. temporary housing and

roofing, external affairs, specialized needs. and

setting up disaster recovery centers, *and we're

working on a safety plan for our own folks for riding

out the hurricane.

We're meeting all of the state objectives as

-
last we heard, and'planning is going well

That's kind of a summary, Gary, of what

we're up to.

GARY: We'll go ahead and give a couple more

updates here from the region, Undersecretary Brown.

Go ahead, Tony

SPEAKER : Yes. Our Regional Response

Coordination Center has activated a Level I with all

ESFs on a 2 4 / 7 basis. We do have an operational

staging area that has been established at Camp

-- Bureaugard with commodities of ice water , MREs . and

tarps onsite. We are initiating actions to work with

the Corps of Engineers to potentially some quarter

. - 6.- -- boats to house workers as housing will become an issue

in the Baton Rouge area.

We are moving requested commodities forward

to support some state requests in Orleans Parish. We

 have established Camp Menden as a -temporary housing

staging area.

The Department of Energy is here in the RRCC

and has started running modeling to provide estimates

-
on the potential effects to the power infrastructure,

and when we could potentially look at restoration, so

we can identify where we need to move our most

-
critical assets the quickest

We've gotten a heavy generator kit that's

scheduled to arrive in Barksdale at the Mobilization

Center along with USAR task forces are to be in

Barksdale as well today. All the Region 6 permanent

staff are being made available for any response and

recovery duties that will come up.

We have the Denton MERS Detachment that's

onsite at Camp Beauregard and also in Baton Rouge.

The Denver MERS unit is en route to stage here in

- Denton for further deployment. along with an emergency
-
response team advanced element from Region 1 Boston is

due in here this afternoon to Denton. in case we are

_._ . . a.- =. -- ,

needed to move them forward

And we just continue to coordinate with the

National Response Coordination Center, the ERD. and

the state to refine our response plan and finalize

 getting our resources in place prior to tropical. storm
force winds.

MIKE BROWN: Any questions? (Missing) on

the commodities that I want to see that supply chain

-
jammed up just as much as possible. I mean, I want

stuff (missing) than we need. Just keep jamming those

- lines full as much as you can with commodities.
-
My gut tells me we're -- that's going to be

one of our biggest needs. So just (missing) up tight

Any questions for (missing)?

Region 4?

REGION 4: (Missing) supporting the ERD-A in

Mississippi and Alabama. and also rapid needs

assessment teams are on standby and in place in

Mississippi and Alabama.

We also are running our models for our

Cat. 5 for Biloxi and Mobile in the panhandle. We

- were planning for anticipated increase i n commodity
-
flows. We are monitoring and identifying status and

locations of teams and commodities. We ' re

- *.- * -
coordinating logistics and operations support with the

Hea.dquarters, as well as the field.

We have Region 9's support in the lead in

Mississippi, and we also have Region 4 en route and

 supported by Region 10 in Alabama. .We also have MERS
support at both Alabama and Mississippi.

We're working with the NDMS folks in

identifying potential areas of critical facilities

*
that we may need to. look at after impact-.

And at this time, I'd like to turn to our

team leaders in Mississippi and Alabama - for any

-
additional comments they may have.

Mr. Carlisle?

MR. CARLISLE: Well. Paul, as you indlcated.

we're on the ground here. A s the Undersecretary said,

we also believe the commodities are going to be a

major issue, and we're trying to get visibility over

the things that are flowing to the states. But other

than that, our biggest concerns. of course, are the

urban search and rescue teams. We've got two of those

moving into Meridian today

-- Of course, DMAT and VMAT. with the large

potential for loss and pollution down -- and carcasses

down in the southern counties are also a concern.

. - -.- -- We're working that issue now.

But other than what has been covered by

Robert. we're in pretty good shape in terms of where

we are right now.

30
 PAUL: I'd like to call bn Mr. ~herkan in

Alabama for any additional comments he may have.

SPEAKER: Just one, Paul. One of the things

we're going to finish working on today is clarifying

-
the process we're going to use for transferring the

commodities from FEMA to the state as the requester

- generated. That's it.

SPEAKER: Sir. that's all we have from

Region 4 . We're open for comments.

MIKE BROWN: Okay. Thanks, Paul.

(Missing.) Hearing none. let's go to

~ l o r i d a(missing), Scott, are you there?

FLORIDA LOG-SCOTT: I am here. (Missing.)

We clearly are doing whatever we can to support the

operation over in Louisiana and Mississippi. Just got

off the phone with Mayor Croddy's office, and they

have given us the go-ahead to use the Orange County

-.

-_ Convention Center to bring in all the DAEs as a

staging area, so we can process those and get them all

of the -- all of their credit cards and everything

,. - .
% .
. --
taken care of down here.

And I think that's the best way we're going

to be able to support now. as well as whatever

personnel you all think you would need from us. We

 are willing to support whatever we*need to do,
MIKE BROWN: Good. (Missing) issue an

advisory to everybody. Everyone 1s on call. So it ' s

all (missing). So, Scott, we'll fill up the

=
Convention Center in Orlando. Tell them -to get ready.

FLORIDA LOG-SCOTT: They're ready for i t .

MIKE BROWN. Any questions (missing)?

- Hearing none, let's go to Headquarters. Operations?

OPERATIONS: The National Response

Coordination Center has activated 2 4 / 7 , a Level I .

All of the emergency support functions are

represented. So together (missing) we're all here to

support life-saving and protecting property.

The Movement Coordination Center Branch has

been activated at Headquarters to support all

operations with ESF-1. The NDMS and national' urban

search and rescue resources are (missing). We have

made arrangements for pre-landfall satellite imagery.

-
- and we have completed that (missing) Louisiana and

surrounding parish area down to one meter and in

- ..- - color.

We also have ready Aviation and Maritime

Office P3 flights arranged for post-event vlsual

imagery.
 We have made arrangements with the Coast

Guard and EPA to prepare for Katrina's second

landfall, to respond to flooding conditions and

potential oil spills and hazardous material releases.

-
The NCS is working with industry around the

clock to make sure that we identify what resources are

- pre-staged and available. We are also working on

-
taking care of requests for wireless priority

services. The Corps of Engineering is very actively

involved In preparing (missing) New Orleans

(inaudible) missions for post-landfall.

In addition to that. we are assessing the

potential impact of the storm on the critical

infrastructure. and we stand by to proactively support

requests for assistance as necessary.

MIKE BROWN: Good. Any questions for Ops?

Logistics?

LOGISTICS: As reported, we have been in

constant communication with the (missing) and the

field elements in our positioning of our commodities.

,I - .%.- * -
Just to give everyone a rundown (missing) on hand by
-- water,' 619 trailer loads, (missing) million

gallons. flve-day supply. (Missing) 17 mlllion

pounds. (missing) supply (missing), which is about

-
33
(missing) half a million MREs, which is a two-and-a-

half day supply.

We have additional mission assignments and

procurement actions in place for all'of those

-

commodities. All of the field elements when you're

(missing) these commodities, order them, but (missing)

quantities that you can realistically distribute

(missing) tie up our (missing).

Any questions for Log?

MIKE BROWN: Any questions? Recovery?

RECOVERY: Number one priority for recovery

is housing mission. We have sent Brad g are and Kevin

Suza down there to lead i t up and meet up with the

ERD-N team. They will be setting up the Housing

Command Center in Baton Rouge to start. and working

out the IOF. (Missing) Logistics to start moving

housing entities down towards the southeastern area of

the country to prepare post-hurricane

(Missing) is to ensure that the call centers

are up and running. They will go 2 4 / 7 tomorrow

morning (missing) will be ready. Their priority is

. -
ensuring that we have IA staff, PA staff in the field.

and they are surging down to Orlando like we heard

earlier. And it's (missing).

- 34
 MIKE BROWN: Questions for Recovery?
Others? Mike?

MIKE : Mr Undersecretary, let me just

mention that given the predictions on the wind speeds.

*
it's possible that some of the shelters =- that those

wind speeds may exceed the design level of some of the

shelters. So there does need to be some attention

-
paid to those areas that might not be up to a design

standard, and be prepared to deploy any medical

resources to (missing),particularly in those shelters

that are closer to the (missing) where the wind speeds

are expected to be higher.

MIKE BROWN: In fact, let me just go ahead

and (missing) and tell you what my priorities are and

what my concerns are. Number one, you know that the

Mayor has ordered the Superdome to be used as a

shelter (missing) first r e s o r t . I didn-'thear about

- any other shelters for people to go to as they left

New Orleans

As you may or may not know. the Superdome is

- - *... -- about 12 feet below sea level, so I don't know what

the-heck (missing). And I also am concerned about

that roof. I don't know whether that roof is designed
to stand -- withstand a Cat. 5 hurricane
 So not to be (missing) kind of gross here,

but I ' m concerned about NDMS and medical and DMORT

assets and their ability to respond to a catastrophe

within a catastrophe. So if I could get sqme sort of

-
insight into what's going on in that Superdome. I

think it would be very, very helpful

While we're on (missing), I want- to make

-
sure that NDMS and the DMORTs and DMATs are ready to

go. as soon as, because I do believe I also heard

there is no [missing) mandatory evacuations. They're

not taking patients out of hospitals, taking prisoners

out of prisons, and they're leaving hotels open in

downtown New Orleans. So I'm very concerned about

that. So let's just keep that in mind (missing).

I've already mentioned a lot of these. I am

concerned (missing) there's going to be a huge demand.

I think the point that Log made about making

- realistic requests resources and commodities 1s good.

But my point to Gary and the others is I want lines

jammed up. So whatever those requests are, that we
-- can fulfill those.'

And then, finally, we need to reach out to

i

all of your colleagues in the Departments, that this

is really all hands on deck, and I really do expect to

 be able to call everyone -- everyone within FEMA is
.
actually on call. and we may need you to deploy and go
somewhere

I don't want anybody to self-deplsy. but be

-
ready to go. And while I have the Deputy Secretary

here at some point we may want to reach out to the

broader DHS and ask-for -- putting some men and women

-
down there.

My gut tells me -- I told you guys my gut

was that this (missing) is a bad one and a big one.

And you heard Max's comments. I still feel that way

today.

Now, the good thing about this is we've got

a great team around here that knows what they're

doing, and they (missing) to do it. I want to

emphasize what I said yesterday, get to the edge of

that envelope. And. in fact. i f you feel like you

- [missing), go ahead and do it. I'll figure out some

-
way to justify it. some way (missing) tell Congress or

whoever else i t is that wants to yell at me. just let

. - +.- -- them yell at me. (missing) not to worry about -- in

fact, I don't want any of these processes in our way.

We're going to do whatever i t takes to help

 these folks down there, because this is. to put i t

mildly, the big one I think. All right?

MIKE BROWN: Yes.

SECRETARY CHERTOFF: (Inaudible.)' Yes. Hi.
-
this is Secretary Chertoff. And. again. as it relates

to the entire department. if there's anything that you

- need from Coast Guard or any other components that

you're not getting, please let us know. -We'lldo that

for you. OK

Mike Brown: I appreciate it. (Missing.)

Having been through many of these, the Coast Guard and

ICE and all of the others have been incredibly good to

us. And I hope we never have to call you and tell you

that I can' t get help from the Coast Guard or

somebody. Thank you for those comments.

SECRETARY CHERMFF: Secondly. are there any

DOD assets that might be available. Have we reached

-- out to them, and have we I guess made any kind of

arrangement in case we need some additional help from

them?
. - - -.- * -
MIKE BROWN: We have DOD assets over here at

the EOC. They are fully engaged, and we are having

those discussions with them now.

SECRETARY CHERTOFF: Good job.

 MIKE BROWN: (Missing.) .

SECRETARY CHERTOFF: I did, yes. Thank you.

(Missing.)

(Laughter.)
=
MIKE BROWN: Are there any other questions

or comments anyone needs to make? If not. carry on

Next meeting noon tomorrow. I'll see you from Baton
-
Rouge.

(Whereupon, the proceedings went off the

record.)

CERTIFICATION

The foregoing text was transcribed from

audio recordings provided by the Department of

-- Homeland Security, and is as true and accurate a

representation of the oral discussion as possible

PHYLLIS P . YOUNG
 AUGUST 3 0 , 2 0 0 5

PATRICK RHODE: Good morning, everyone.

Let's go ahead and begin. I'm Patrick Rho&(phonetic)

-

here with FEMA. We've got heavy operations going on

in the Gulf States. We want to immediately go down to

. .

- the latest forecast track. Gentlemen, can you take it

away down in Miami?

NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER: Thank you, Mr.

Rhode. Just so everyone knows, the National Hurricane

Center issued it's last advisory for Katrina at 1 1 : O O .

0

Control of it will turn over to HPC. and with that

I'm going to it over to Jesse Horro (phonetic) for a

recovery forecast and current forecast of Katrina.

MR. JESSE HARROW: Good day. everybody. If

we start off with Slide 100. we can see a current loop
of the Mobile radar, and essentially this is the type
-
_ of weather we can expect over the recovery area today:

isolated to scattered showers and thunderstorms. with

the coverage a little bit denser as we move over to

- . ~ - *.- *

the Florida Panhandle. Probability of precipitation

generally ranging from 10 percent over southeast

Louisiana to about 30 percent over the Florida
Panhandle for today and tonight,
 Proceeding on to Slide 200, we can see here

is what remains of Katrina, currently Tropical

Depression Katrina, continuing to move on

northeastward, as was previously forecast. I

And at

this point, Katrina is primarily a threat for heavy

rain and tornado production,

As we proceed to Slide 300, we can-see that

-
the Storm Prediction Center currently has tornado

watch boxes in effect for portions of northern

Georgia, eastern Tennessee. and the Carolinas. The

box on your left expires at 1:00 p.m. Eastern, and the

one on your right expires at 3:00 p.m Eastern. and as

Katrina continues to move northeastward, it wouldn't

be surprising to see tornado watch boxes get issued

for the Virginias, Pennsylvania, perhaps Maryland,

over the next 12 hours or so.

Proceeding to the next slide, Slide 400, we

see the weather depiction sharp as produced by the

Hydrometeorlogical Prediction Center for the recovery

area. and the good news for the recovery area is that
over the next few days we'll see an intrusion of dry

air that will result in hot, muggy conditions, but

generally dry conditions for the rest of the week.

high temperatures in the lober 90s. that in

 combination with dew point values -ranging from the

upper 60s to middle 70s will result in heat index

values between 100 and 105 degrees over the next

several days, which will be a hazard f p r people

involved in .the recovery

As far as chances for precipitation. we

won't see those until- later in the week and the early
-
part of next week for the recovery area as another

weather system approaches.

That concludes the weather presentation.

Are there any questions at this point?

(No response.)

National Hurricane Center: If no questions

for Jesse, we're going to turn it over to John Schmidt

for a Hydro update.

MR. JOHN SCHMIDT: It you guys would look at

Slide 500. please. Unfortunately, we lost the Slidell

(phonetic) and Jackson radars yesterday morning as the

--
eye passed nearby, we lost communications with those.

What we ended up getting here is a band of 5

- +... -- inches of rain, rainfall total, that went up about

like this (indicating). Although the graphic here

doesn't really depict 5 inches in total, that's

because of loss of the radar, and these are based on
 gauge observations. The 5-inch corridor weht about

like this for the storm total-: The 8-inch-plus

corridor looked about like this

If you go to Slide 600, what*

- that has

resulted in is. as you guys know from the storm surge

flooding and from some rainfall runoff, southeastern

- Louisiana coast. southern Mississippi, the Mobile Bay

-- there's a gauge at the north end of Mobile Bay at

Seraland (phonetic] -- that gauge crested overnight

last night. so the worst flooding is over for that

area. But flooding continues in this region. The

Biloxi River gauge crested near about 25 feet, the

tide gauge last night, so that matches in well with

the storm surge forecast. That was a combination of

rainfall and storm surge that far up the river.

The lower Pascagoula -- well, the entire

Pascagoula drainage as i t goes down into -- towards

-.

-- the Gulf, is expected to have moderate river flooding. ,-

As we move up into the Tom Bigbee Basin -- this is

where some of the heavier rain was -- there's a little

- .
e s - bit dryer conditions in that area. so the flooding is

expected to be minor. There are a couple of spots

that could receive moderate flooding in that region.

Otherwise, flooding through the upper Yazoo (phonetic)
 and the upper Pearl Basin in central and northern

Mississippi is expected to be minor. with

' some

localized moderate flooding perhaps.

=
As the storm moves north and eas-t, the river

flood threat diminishes and the flat flood definitely

still persists as the storm exits to the north and

- east .
NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER: Mr-.Rhode, this

concludes the weather briefing for us. 1'11 turn it

back over to you for questions.

PATRICK RHODE: Any questions on the

forecast?

(Inaudible.)

One question from the group here is whether

or not there are any other tropical threats at this

time .

MAX'MAYFIELD: This is Max. There are two

-- pretty strong looking coastal waves in the far eastern

Atlantic. The western most one, i f it does develop,

will likely turn up to the north and not be a threat

. m *.- e -
to land. The other one we'll watch, but it's days and

days -- you know, p r o b a b l y ten days away, even if it

does develop. So. nothing on the immediate horizon

anyway.
 PATRICK RHODE: Thank you, Max. Please keep
those as far away as possible
I believe that Director Mike Brown may be on

the call with us as well. Sir, are you with us?

=
(No response.) -

Maybe not We'll see if we can't circle

back with him.
-
Gentlemen, thank you very much for that
forecast. Let's go on right now to the most heavily

impacted States, who are obviously involved in heavy

operations with our State partners. Let's begin with

Louisiana, Louisiana?
COLONEL JEFF SMITH: Y e s . This is Col. Jeff
Smith, and I'm going to be very brief because. as you
indicated. we're up to our ears with operational

issues. The bottom line is the search and rescue

efforts down in Orleans and in other parishes -- it's

-- not just Orleans -- we've got Orleans and we've got

St. Tamany (phonetic). By the end of this afternoon.
with the resources that we're getting through EMAC
.,... -.-., e .%
. the resources thr~ough FEMA and our own State

resources,.we should have approximately 300 boats that

are working these areas.
We've also requested and have on the ground
 additional airlift capability, helicopters. to again

fly search-and-rescue missions. . W e are having some

issues with our collection points. A lot of the

points that were pre-identi f ied for collec<ion

- points

are inundated, they are under water. So, that part of

the operation. while it's going, it's going not as

- smoothly as we would like to see it.

We're basically having to use the Super Dome

as a collection point at this time, and water is

continuing to rise in New Orleans, which is something

that for a while it looked like it was going to

stabilize. but with levee breaches and so forth. we do

have water that's starting to rise, so it's greatly

impacting the ability to collect the people. That

basically is the recovery piece. As far as saving

lives and getting out there,, we're pushing as hard

and as fast as we can.

The last count that I have, which was as of

a couple hours ago, is that we have pulled over 1,000

i

people out to this point in time, but again that

-. . *.- -- number is stale. Don't take that as to be more than

that at this particular point in time.

We are receiving pushes of supplies.

cokodi ties and so forth into Camp Beauregard. We ' re
 pushing them down into the affected areas, however.
in many of the affected areas right now they are still

under water. so we can't actually push supplies in

great quantities. We've had to take cornmockties that

-
were staging at the Super Dome and airlift them into

St. Bernard Parish accomplishing that mission.

We're having severe problems in ~ e Orleans

w
-
with the flooding. We've got New Orleans Parish Jail,

for instance, the water is rising there. The power is

out. We have our Department of corrections that is

currently evacuating 4,000 prisoners. They think they

can leave a couple thousand there in facilities for a

while, but we're going to encourage them to just go

ahead and evacuate the facility because we realize

what a long-term effort this would be.

We've got several hospitals now that water

is starting to rise. and if it continues to do what

- it's doing, they're going to lose generator support.

-
so a lot of those patients are now being moved over

and collected at the Super Dome. And so what our

- -.- . plans are is to contlnue to move those patients to

that collection point, and then we want to start

pushing them out of the area. In fact, we were having

a planning meeting to try and get that process started

 in a big way. We're actually using some bus

transportation. We can use some helos to start

getting them out, but we feel like that we need some

fixed-wing aircraft that will come into* the New

-

Orleans Airport, which we've already identified to the

public it's closed -- we can get the thing open -- and

- then we would helo them from the Super Dome to that

airport. But, again. we had to stop t-hat piece at

this .point. planning. to come to these things. but

we're going to pick that planning piece up as soon as

we finish.

, I will tell you that that's basically where

we are at this point, We're starting to do some

future planning, but our focus right now is saving

lives and getting a way to evacuate the affected area.

primarily Orleans Parish and St. Bernard Parish. I

think Tammany has its issues and problems as well.
-

- That's the end of my report at this time.

*

PATRICK WODE : Jef f , we know that you 've

got to run. We certainly appreciate you hoping on

-- .this call real quickly. We've chronicled every one of

those issues you've been talking about, and obvious.ly

people have been working through the overnight hours

here. Rest assured that we're doing everything we

 can, and there will be further reports on Louisiana
.
throughout the portion of this broadcast this morning.

Thank you. Jeff.

COL . SMITH: We appreciate every:hing that

you all are doing for us, and all I would ask is that

you realize what's going on and the sense of urgency

- here needs to be ratcheted up. Everybody is being

fully cooperative, but in the deployment of some of

these Federal assets. especially transportation for

the evacuation effort that we're trying to coordinate

we don't need anything to slow that down. The push of

the resources and so forth to date has not been an

issue. but we don't need to let i t become an issues

because we're going to literally have tens of

thousands of people that we've got to push these

supplies too. Of course. we've requested Federal

assistance on the distribution sites, and those people

-

- are supposed to be inbound now.

-
I guess one other piece to this, and we're
having the same issues, is that the coordination of
^ .. - *._ * - when the assets are arriving and so forth has been a

lit-tle b.it.of an issue, but communications are always

tough. and we do understand that. but anything that we

could help improve the communications on inbound
assets, whether i t be medical assets. whether i t be

commodities, whatever, it would certainly be a

tremendous benefit. Don't take that as a complaint.

. .

Again, you're all working with us very sell, but we

-,- - -.
need to do something to improve that communic~t~ion

piece just as rapidly as we possibly can. I need

visibility of the assets to be able to control_this

-
thing the way that we need to do -- I should say the

controlled chaos -- anyway. thank you.

GEN. DON RILEY: Patrick, this is Gen. Don

Riley at Corps of Engineers down here in Louisiana.

Let me just give you a short update on the overtopping

and the levee breach. The Federal levees are in place

along the 17th Street Canal in the northern part of

New Orleans. which drains into the lake. There was

the T-walls on top of the earthen level fell over and

the water is coming in from the Lake through that

breach, over the top of that levee into New Orleans.
-
So, what we've- got to do is one of- two

things: As quickly as possible, get some rock to

block
-
the lake water from coming into that -- back up

in20 that canal, or -- and depending on how fast we

can do that. we're also watching the lake level. The

lake level may recede quickly enough before we can get

 anything in there. and then we can turn that pump

station on with the city. and turn that water around

and pump it back into the lake. So, we're watching

that lake level as well.

The other overtopping also because o-f- the . - -

rising lake level is near the Inner Harbor Canal, over

that local levee into St. Bernard Parish. So, those

are the two that we're watching closely. We're trying

-

(
to move contractors into'that area. but for watching.

it's going to really depend on the lake levels and how

quickly that recedes.

PATRICK RHODE: Understood. At this point,

I may go a little bit out of order on the agenda

because we are talking obviously Louisiana issues. I

might ask our FCO Bill Lokey. i f he's on the call, to

provide the additional information at this time.

Bill?
MR. LOKEY: Okay, I can, Patrick. I'm
- here,
and we've got several critical situations, but I.'11
brief you quickly on what we're trying to do to

resoLve them. First of all. from the communications

=
aspect, it has been extremely poor. We've had poor

connectivity with the region. A lot of the land-lines

that are up are just overcrowded, but we're bringing
-

in one of the EOVs from MERS that we're going to set

up here at the EOC, and we hope it will resolve that

communications invisibility issue when that occurs.

and it shouldn ' t be long until that does

..* .
We are moving a command and control erehent

down to the Dome. The Unified Command that they had

working down there coordinating the search and rescue

&

-
effort was impacted by the flooding, so they are

moving that to the Dome. We're moving some of the

additional -- the Red October down there to support

that. and an advanced ERD team that one of the FCOs

Phil Parr will be leading will be down there, so we

can partner up and coordinate the search and rescue

efforts from on-scene. That should help some of the

coordination there, plus give us some eyes-on

visibility of some of the issues down there.

We also have two of the DNATs operating at

the Dome at this tlme, and we have more headlng in

-
that direction. And one of the major issues and

challenges we have right now is this patlent movement.

A number of the hospitals have critical issues with

fleoding and backup power. and we're working with the

State Medical Officer and in progress of a way to

evacuate patients from the hospitals to the Dome and

13
then to a staging area the State has established. and

getting them moved to the air bridge that we're hoping

to establish with the Air Transport, to get these

. .

folks into hospitals around the State and the nation,

.." - -,I

and planning is taking place on that as we speak:

We have the -- as I said, a number of our

Urban Rescue teams are now engaged in the water

-
rescue. We understand that approval was given by IYJD
.-

to bring some of the California assets here. We're

hoping to get them in today. And will bring some

additional urban search and rescue assets, plus

working to coordinate the EMAC call the State made

with the additional swift-water assets that have been

coming in and getting that coordinated. and that

operation is going fairly successfully.

Also, working with the NDMS system to being

in additional medical people and supplies to back up

as that becomes a higher issue. And we've- been

working with Logistics to continue the flow of- the

commodities, especially into the Dome. to at least

have - the food and the ..water issues stable there

P l G s , developing the distribution plan that we can get

them out to the communities as the water does recede

in some areas and we get the visibility and planning

where the highest needs are. So, that's the major

life-saving and life-sustaining things we're working

on now, Patrick.

PATRICK RHODE: Very good, Bill. We

.-* - '
certainly appreciate all of the conditions and a l l of

the concerns there in Louisiana. and that's shared

here around the table and all throughout this entire

-
VTC.- I might add that we're going to have some
additional briefs by some of our emergency supports

functions throughout the remainder of this VTC. but

for purposes of moving along, I will ask quickly i f

anyone has any specific question of Louisiana. noting

the fact that we're obviously working a lot of

questions today. Thank you.

With that, I'd like to move on. Mississippi

is obviously involved in very heavy operations today.

Mississippi, are you with us?

(No response.)
-
Anyone from the State of Mississippi?

I think I'm looking at Mississippi, I don't

know- if I hear you.
Z
(Inaudible.)
I'll tell you what, while you're working

your audio issues right there. let's move on to the

-

State --

MISSISSIPPI: I think we've got it. How

about now? Hello, can you hear me now?

PATRICK RHODE: I can. Please continue.

, --- -,. - ,
MISSISSIPPI : The situation is this, Hancock

County, our county closest to Louisiana, was the most

dramatically affected by the storm. It is cut, off

-
from-the rest of the State, with the exception of one

road -coming in from Stennis Space Center. and we're

not sure that we can get traffic down on 1-59 to the

Stennis space Center, but the rest of the county is

totally cut off because of the -- we believe the

bridge at Bay St. Louis was cut. I need someone to

confirm to me that the bridge going into New Orleans

on 1-10 is cut,.so there's really nothing that we can

get from or going into there

A s far as the other two coastal counties, we

are able to get into Jackson County next to Mobile on

-
1-10, at least into Pascagoula and Moss Point. We're

not sure that we can get into Ocean Springs, which is

right
-
up near Biloxi.
L
As far as Harris County, there's one road in
and that's US 49. We're having significant problems
with congestion just trying to get the responders in
 and resupply.

Our most critical problem right now seems to

be fuel, gasoline and diesel. Those responders'

vehicles that are down there. we just can't

-
get them

resupplied because there's no way to get in there.

Our priorities right now is search and

- rescue. We have numerous people that are still in the

dramatically affected area. absolutely no shelter

whatsoever. They somehow survived the storm surge and

the winds. And we're doing quite a few -- having to

do in and taking care of those victims that perished

during this. Large numbers. we don't really have a

good handle on it at this point

If you can look at Gulf Port. basically Gulf

Port all the way to the Louisiana line, greater damage

possibly, if possible, than Camille, it's that type of

an event for us.

We know that there are tens or hundreds of

thousands of people in Louisiana that need to be

rescued, but we would just ask you. we desperately

-.' - *.* * - need to get our share of those assets because we ' 11

have people dying not because the water is coming up.

but because we can't get them medical treatment-in our

affected counties.
 PATRICK RHODE : Understood. This is

Patrick. We've obviously been working a lot of those

issues through the overnight hours and through this

I

morning. WE recognize that your medical -situation is

very similar to what we're looking at across the

border, if perhaps not worse.

. -

I believe I see Jesse Munoz sitting right

next to you -- and. Jesse -- representing FEMA -- is

there anything else you'd like to add?

MR. MUNOZ: I just wanted to relay that Bill

Cardwell is on his way down to the Gulf area. He is

joined by Robert Latham. the Director for FEMA, and

also Governor Barber. They will assess the situation

and, of course, be sending out any important

instructions from down there. I have also sent out a

mobile command center down there. They are en route.

however, the only route right now that is open down

- there is open to one-lane traffic. and I understand it
-
is very heavily congested with all types of utility

vehicles and rescue vehicles. So, I don't know how

. - *.- * - quickly Bill Cardwell will have communications down

t h w e other than his cell phone, and that cell phone I

understand will be very limited in service. depending

on how close he is to a working tower.
 Some of the issues that of course the

Governor asked me to make sure that we get on as soon

as possible is to get water down there to the

residents of Biloxi, Gulf Port, and ail of

-.
the

coastline area, and also to get generators for the

hospitals because all of those generators in the local

- hospitals suffered losses due to the surge.

And, also, the Response Branch headed by

Nick Russo, is on his way down there. He will be set

up in the southwestern corner of the State. at the

Stennis Space Center, that is the Federal property

down there. But other than that. we have some issues

right now, but we think we have them pretty well under

control. Any questions?

PATRICK RHODE: Jesse, this is Patrick, and

we certainly recognize all those issues very similar

to what we saw within Louisiana. there's no question

-- about that. Please rest assured that the commodities

that are distributed throughout the Gulf States are

very heavily targeted towards those critical areas

. - a
,.
. --
there in Mississippi -- the transportation issues, the

urban search and rescue issues. the disaster medical

assistance teams issues are all being worked very

aggressively, and there are many support functions

19
 around this table who will speak further to thdse. and

we certainly will be carrying those on throughout the

rest of the day. So, thank you very much.

Are there any specific questions for

-
Mississippi, just in the interest of time and their

operations this morning?

QUESTION: What is the situation in the

-
back-bay area. the Biloxi back-bay area? Has the

water begun receding back there?

MR. IVfUNOZ: We quite frankly don't know. We

still have very limited communications with anybody

that's on the coast. We're using one satellite radio.

that was the only one that was not damaged as far as

all of our vehicles are concerned. We're hoping as

soon as we can get our mobile operations center to

Gulfport, that we can then get a better assessment of

what's going on down there. But we've effectively

- been -- we've been blind to exactly what the current

situation is down there, other than to know that we do

have people starting to flow into the area. and of

, - *.. --
course the responders have been doing all they can,

but I donqt have a good idea on the back bay areas of

Biloxi, Gulfport and that part of i t .

PATRICK RHODE: Jesse, this is Patrick. I

 wanted to ask you just real quickly. have we heard

anything back from the Rapid Needs Assessment teams

yet?

MR. MUNOZ: We have not. T h e y a r e still

--

doing their initial assessment. We will get those

reports up to you just as quickly as we have them in

- hand.
PATRICK RHODE: Understood. Know that we're

building out contingencies, obviously, for what we're

hearing and seeing at this point.

In the interest of time, are there any more

specific questions for the State of Mississippi? We

certainly want to allow them to get back to their

operatlons.

(No response.)

Mississippi, thank you very much. We'll

certainly be back in touch. Let's move on to Alabama,

- _ if we can. at this point. Alabama?

ALABAMA: Good morning. This is Bill Filter

(phonetic), With me I have Toby Roth, Chief of Staff

.. - *.- --
of the Governor's Office. Phil May. and Mike Bolch.
. .
Currently, the storm system moved through

late last night. We still had winds this morning

across the State. Damage along: the western side of

 Alabama was primarily wind, as opposed to the damage

down in Mobile/Baldwin was primarily water. We still

have counties on the west and northwest side of the

State that we've not been able to communi;ate

--
with.

and we're still working on doing that.

Approximately 20 counties have their schools

- closed at least for today. and as we get the debris

clearance, get access. we're getting a better

assessment of that. The primary focus this morning

has been from the Governor, Senators, the F a , and EMA

Directors go down to Baldwin County. Mobile County. do

an assessment from the air. Our Public Assistance

Officer and those folks are down there doing a closer

damage assessment to let us know what that is. and

work their way north.

We're using remote sensing with Civil Air

Patrol, trying to get some photographs so we can

- document, to take a better look at what i t is. Our

a priority continues while we're doing the search and

rescue. We're still using our water through the
, - - *.- * -.
conservation and swift-water, to go in and look into

the areas-that can still only be accessed via water.

and then get power restored. particularly on the

' western counties. if we can 'do that. We had

 approximately 740,000 people without power this
mornlng. We're currently at about 5 4 3 , so we are
gaining some restoration throughout the morning

period. and are going to try to continue- t o do that.

We have conducted a session with all the

counties that we could talk to. to get an assessment

. .

- of their damage and requirements, primary logistic

requirements. Large quantities are going to be down

in Mobile/Baldwin County area. Most of the other

counties are one or two trucks to establish initial

distribution. Many of the counties have evacuees from

Louisiana and Mississippi that I have told them to

plan f 0 r . a longer period to have to take care of them

because they don't have the funds, to stay wherever

they're at, and we're going to have to pick up the

support. so that's going to draw some additional

logistics to do that, but we're encouraging them to

- stay where they're at, sheltered in Alabama until we

hear differently from Louisiana and Mississippi. So.

emergency power restoration. damage assessment.

- ,. - *.- * -
security, and keeplng or establishing communication

with those counties that we don't have.

.
~

We have a significant hazmat issue that's

going to be occurring in Mobile Bay, and we have our

 environmental folks trying to get a handle on that and

determine exactly the extent of it'. Cochran Bridge is

closed, and other than that the main interstates are
=
open. Subject to your questions. -

PATRICK RHODE: Alabama, very similar to the

other two States, we are very well aware of your

- issues. Thank you for that report. I know that we're

all collectively aggressively working many of those

issues right now around this table and-throughout this

VTC .

In the interest of time, noting that you

have a lot going on today, does anyone have any

specific questions of Alabama at this time?

MISSISSIPPI: This is Mississippi. Earlier

today on a conference call, I asked if there would be

possible some resources that could be pushed into

Jackson County, since that's the only way to get into

. -.

-- that part of Mississippi is through Mobile. And I

know Alabama is in the middle of their own response.

but is there a possibility that we can get water and

. - ..- * -
possibly food in through 1-10 coming through Mobile

today? -

ALABAMA: I woyld think that that would be a

capability. I'm not sure exactly where the resources
are stacked at, but that avenue should be open,

particularly i f they come down 65'

MISSISSIPPI: I would ask for anyone's help

.that can give it . Florida has got a lot of

--
;esources.

I don't know possibly if Florida had some pre-

positioned stockages of i t , but water particularly,
. .

but possibly food as well, but the question is can we

get through to get it into Mississippi, - I don't want

to take a lot of time to work the issue, but i f we're

not going to be able to, then we'll continue to try to

get down there to support them, but if someone

honestly thinks they can get some water particularly

into Jackson County, then we'll stop trying to push it

down there.

ALABAMA: I don't see any reason -- i t can

come from Atlanta. down 85. 65 to 10, and -- or it can

come down 20. I mean, I think there's not a problem

doing that.

SPEAKER: And we have 120 truckloads of

water coming from Atlanta into Meridian.

MISSISS.IPPI: I need it to be rolling right

now from a s close as possible, and get it into the

county this afternoon or tonight. i f possible, and I

guess if we work it through the normal systems and

 take it to Meridian and then try to go back down the

highway system, it's just not going to work

I guess what I'm asking is. can Florida

maybe take this mission and give us some

--
&upport on

it. or is there anybody else that could do it?

LOGISTICS: Headquarters Log. we have that

. .

- as an action. We'll redirect.

FLORIDA: pass that mission and move it. We

have teams on the ground. I'd like to give you a

search and rescue report from our teams already that

are in Jackson and Harrison County. We are in that

area now, as we speak, and we can move more resources.

Colonel?

COL. JULIE JONES: This is Col. Julie Jones,

with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation

Commission. We moved at 6 : 0 0 a . m . this morning. 245

member USAR search and rescue teams into Mississippi.

-.

-- We stopped in Jackson and then moved on to Pascagoula

and set up about a third of that team. Now, this is a

Type I heavy 120-member USAR team -- started in

. * *.. s -
Pascagoula, found downed buildings, and have

leapfrogged a third of that secondary team into

Biloxi. and we're in Biloxi now. And what we found is

a lot of downed'buildings. They've had no outside

 contact. They're desperate for fodd and water. And

really we haven't found a clear area to set up our

equipment, let alone a place to fly equipment into

We're going to take a thirg of this

-
remaining element and push forward to try to see if we

can get to Hancock County from this side, or at least

- get as close as we-can to Gulfport. But we've got

-
resources already moving that way and can push more

search and rescue, and i f we got there with our

tractor-trailers, we can bring water in right now

PATRICK RHODE: Florida, thank you very

much. I know that a lot of us are working this issue

with Mississippi right now. Mississippi, please rest

assured that this is being worked very, very

aggressively at this moment

Florida, Craig, do you guys have anything

additional you'd like to report?

FLORIDA: Florida will maintain its own

response down here. PDA teams are in the area. We

are pushing our search and rescue teams, security

* -- .
teams, intermediate teams. as far as we can into

Mississippi. We are currently supporting them in those

six coastal counties -- the three on the coast, three

inland. We are merely awaiting additional taskings to

 continue moving resources, and we will send anything

and everything as it's requested.. . .We are currently in

contact with the Governor of Mississippi. What we'd

like to get is just get the mission to cofltinue the

support, as our commanders need stuf f , is task it

through the State EOC and continue sending i t under

- EMAC .
MISSISSIPPI: That's great. As you can see,

because of our lack of COMs up here and the 100-mile-

an-hour winds that came through Jackson, you've

probably not even able to tell us what you're doing.

That's great news that you're in through to Biloxi. we

had no idea. You may want to work through the MERS

band to try to communicate with us, i f you can't get

through on our commercial numbers. And thanks for the

help.

PATRICK RHODE: Thank you, Florida, for that

-- report.

FLORIDA: All right. we'll just keep sending

it.
-.- - e.- s -.
PATRICK RHODE: Thank you, Florida. Thank

you very much. Mississippi, thank you as well, too

In the interest of time, are there any specific

questions for the State of Florida?

28
 (No response.)
Hearing none, let's move on. Texas?

TEXAS: The Texas primary mission is to

support the State of Louisiana. To that entl, we have

--

38 shelters available, 17 occupied with 2,192

occupants. Our plan today in sheltering is to

- transition from evacuation shelters to temporary

she1ters .

We have previously deployed a Type I USAR

team to Louisiana. Yesterday, we deployed a 35-member

water rescue team, with five boat squads. We just

talked to them. They are being actively employed in

the French Quarter in New Orleans.

.-
We previously deployed a L&O team to Baton

Rouge to coordinate support. We're deploying today

six UH-60 Blackhawks with search and rescue

capability. to include onboard rescue teams. These

- teams are trained. They actually are in the
-
helicopters and will be available for immediate

deployment on arrival
. - 4.- -- We have two CH-47 cargo aircraft en route

this morning. We deployed one C - 2 3 short-takeoff and

landing aircraft. This is aircraft that can literally

land on a highway somewhere. We've deployed on C-26

 with thermal capability, and in that package also is

all the fuel capability. We're told there's a

shortage of fuel. so we're deploying hemit (phonetic)

fuelers along with bladders to support that aviation

-
package.

We deployed this morning one 40-man

catastrophic overhead team. This is a team that's

-
designed and very experienced with a shuttle in

Florida and several other operations to be a self-

contained incident-management team. We deployed 50

game wardens with trucks and boats. We also deployed

a very sophisticated satellite communication package

we have here in Texas, to allow them to get COM

activity both with phone and Internet.

We have on standby-prepared to deploy a task

force consisting of logistics capability, one with a

mobile medical unit with eight doctors, five nurses,

- ten physician assistants, and 30 nurses. That's all
0

in one package, and it's ready to deploy on any

request.
.. - *.- Q.'. ,

We have additional aircraft we've ident~fied

to deploy'on request, from the private sector. There

are ten rotary wing medical helicopters and two fixed-

wing medical evacuation aircraft that we have

-
30
 available. We also have additional four CH-47s

available, and we have additionally two UH-60s

available. We also have 100 ambulances we have on

standby. We are deploying 50 of those to'louisiana

-
now. And we've identified 40 ICU nurses that we're

prepared to deploy to Louisiana upon their request.

- We're also working a pretty extensive

request in the medical arena, of doct.ors. nurses.

trauma type response. We'll fill that requirement,

it's a pretty extensive one, and we're working with

Louisiana to fill that today. Our primary mission is

to support the State of Louisiana, and to that end

we're doing everything we can to do that. That's the

report from Texas.

PATRICK RHODE: Texas, that's absolutely

£antastic work. We certainly appreciate all the

support. Any specific questions for the State of

- Texas?
-
(No response.)

I believe we might also have Tennessee on

.- - .".- = - the line, is that correct?

. - TENNESSEE: Yes, sir, this is Tennessee

here. Our Governor just came by this morning, just

got through with a press conference. We were very

 fortunate in that we just have some sporadic power

outages and some localized flooding. We have five

shelters open. We are getting some folks from the

south coming up, and we're prepared to,open more

-
shelters. So. basically, we're gold as a State, and

we're ready and preparing to support States to our

. .

- south.
PATRICK RHODE: Tennessee, thank you very

much. Any specific questions of Tennessee?

(No response.)

Are there any other States on the line?

(No response.)

Hearing none, let's immediately go to our

Region 6 report. Region 6 ?

REGION 6 . Patrick, Gary just had to step

out of the office to take a call from Scott and Bill

Loki. This is Dick Harmon. - elaborate a

Just to
-- little bit on the challenge that Bill talked about

earlier, the communications, he's given you the update

on the EOV and the minis. We also worked with ESF-2

* --
early this morning to establish these communications.

They had one portable cell tower that Headquarters

approved immediately for us, that has arrived at the

State EOC and should be up and operational within

 about the next five or six minutes very probably

They've also deployed .an additional cell

tower system to the JFO. and we have one en route to

Baton Rouge to support that ERD-A that's going

-

forward. So, we think by mid-afternoon we should have

the communication problems that we were suffering

- through last night and this morning resolved.

We also worked last night to get those

helicopter rescue assets to the State, and they did a

yeoman's job all night long and continue to do that

today. to support the rescue operations there

primarily in the greater New Orleans area.

Again, for us. one of the critical

priorities is to keep that logistical flow. the

pipeline, going, It seems to be working real well for

us. We're getting backfilled. We're able to push it

forward. Have no problems there at this point. We

-- have great communications, again, thanks to the

portable cell towers up at the operational staging

area, so the commodities continues to work well for us

,. - +.- e - at this point.

It was mentioned -- Bill mentioned it and it

was mentioned also by Col. Smith, some of the issues

.- with the aviation and other fuel types. We're working
 that issue right now. We're establishing ~ o r tPolk

working with our military liaison here, to get them as

a BSI for us, and they have basically every type of

fuel there that we need to support us. And i t will

--
also service the staging area. We have about 200-250

BellSouth employees that have been forward-deployed to

-
start re-establishing communications for the State of
-
Louisiana, and we'll stage them there, start pushing

them out to do what BellSouth employees do.

Bill also mentioned the DMAT assets that we

have at the Dome. We just wanted to point out that

we're also able to re-supply them with food and water

last night, and will continue to push the food and

water forward to those folks there, as needed. We

continue to work housing issues for our FEMA and our

other ESF partners issues, trying to determine at this

point where we're going to establish that base camp so

- we can get i t set up and operational

Col. Smith mentioned the distribution

points. We do. in fact, have our eight U . S . Forest

- - *.-. * -
Service teams that are on the ground at the J F O . just

waiting to be assigned and pushed out to where they

need to support the State with the distribution of

assets. And Col. Riley mentioned the mission that the

 Corps is doing in the dewatering and what they're
trying to do with the levees. and.welreworking hand-

in-hand with our partners on that, Gary is back in

the room

REGION 6 : Any questions, Patrick? I was

pulled out to talk with Scott and Bill Loki. I think
. .

- we're going to try to have a separate conference call

after this, on several issues.

PATRICK RHODE: Understood, Gary. We know

that you guys are obviously involved with some heavy

operations right now, and a lot of the issues relate

to medical and urban search and rescue and commodity

distribution, it's being spoken to here as well, and

will be spoken later through some of the ESFs. We

appreciate i t .

Any specific questions of Region 6?

(No response.)

Thank you all for your work. Let's

immediately go to Region 4

REGION 4: Sir. I'll try to keep mine short.

- 4.- s - ' Just a couple of things in support of the RNA, I just

want ta point out that we do have aircraft that's

looking at the Mississippi and Pearl River. One of

them is looking at the coast between Alabama and

 ..

Mississippi, 1-10. and also the bridge assessment.

We've got one A-star (phonetic.) that's with the

National Medical Needs team that's looking at the

hospital assessment, and then we have an' RNA team

-

that's en route to four of the Mississippi counties.

. . doing the rapid needs assessment. We expect to be

. .

- getting some reports in.

We're also working with the ERD-As and

pushing the resupply of the commodities. And another

thing is we're working to identify aircraft both fixed

and rotary. to move medical rescue equipment as well

as commodities. And that's all I'll report right now.

sir. Any questions?

PATRICK RHODE: Very good. Obviously, your

issues are being worked very aggressively as well

there and here as well. Does anyone have any specific

questions right now for Region 4 ?

(No response.)

Thank you very much, appreciate all your

work.
. - *.- s -- ,
Florida Long-Team Recovery Office, Scott?

-FLORIDA: Thanks, Patrick. Just want to let

you know, our DAE ln-processing unit is fully

operational. We are prepared for and ready to receive

 a tremendous flux of DAEs as qui~kiyas possible.
*-

PATRICK RHODE: Thank you very much, Scott.

we appreciate that's going to be critical.

At this point, I'd like to a s k z d Buikema

-
(phonetic), our Director of Response, to take us

through some of the emergency support functions and

give some granularity there. Ed.

-
MR. BUIKEMA: Thank you, Patrick. Here at

FEMA Headquarters, we have all of the ESFs working and

they are fully engaged, and for today's VTC, I've

asked several of them to brief out a little bit more

detail, and I'm going to start with ESF-1.

Transportation.

ESF-1: Good afternoon. ESF-1. We've taken

a look, first of all, at the infrastructure, and we've

determined we have New Orleans International Airport

which we find is going to be very critical in part of

-- our response as a staging area for supplies and

everything, They are back-up operational limited.

however, just to a day VFR, and we do have FAA

. .- -
personnel that are working to bring that up to where

we can get-that to a 24-hour operation.

We're showing that Lake Charles, Baton

Rouge. Mobile downtown and Regional, are open. and

 Pensacola Regional are also open. These airports are

critical for our response there.

In the process of trying to deliver our

resources that we've been tasked to transfer forward,

-
we've done an assessment of numerous roads, and we

found that we have a lot of damage out there on

Interstate 10, and so what we've done to try to ensure

that we can get the resources to you both there in

Mississippi and Louisiana and the other areas. that

we've brought over a FHWA representative, and we've

got a team that's coordinating with the FEMA

Logistics, and we are looking at alternate routes to

at least deliver the resources to a point. And we may

reach a point where we can go no further on the ground

and. with that, the Movement Coordination Branch has

actually begun coordination with both DOD and the

National Guard Bureau on establishing helicopter bases

so that we can provide a backup to what you as the

States are already doing with your National Guard

resources. And so we are providing some medical
- *.- - %.

evacuation helicopters that we hope to have in place

here in -the next 24 hours, with medium-lift

helicopters and also heavy-lift . That should also be

ready to assist you.

38
 As far as other air resources that we've got

in u s e right now. we have -- the Coast Guard is

providing us with six H-60s. They are assisting in

the search and r e s c u e effort, along with 14H-65s. We
-.

also got four Falcons and three to five of our C-130s.

We've got three P-3 aircraft that are up. and we've

got two of them that have broken the area down for
-
Louisiana and Mississippi to provide us with safety of

flight. and the third P-3 is actually out now doing

aerial photography of the area, and we've got one

Cheyenne and two Blackhawks that's helping us also in

the rapid needs function.

We did have 23 trucks that were at the

Superdome a n d as the water started to build up to a

high level, we actually directed those trucks to

retreat to a safer l e v e l , but they do have sufficient

commodities, I think, that would help relieve some of

- the issues that you have there at the Superdome. And

-
at this point, I have nothing further, unless you have

any questions.
- ED BUIEKEMA: Reggie, the question that was
raised by the State of Mississippi bout 1-10 from New

Orleans. can you address that?

MR. JOHNSON; Yes,,sir. We're showing that

 1-10 east, between New Orleans and slidell, hai really

suffered heavy damage, including .possible loss of the

.

major bridge known as the Twin Span over eastern Lake

Ponchatrain, that connects New Orleans =Parish to

-
Slidell. And we've also been reported that 1-10

throughout Mississippi is actually showing it being

closed.
-
MR. BUIKEMA: Thank you, ESF-1. Are there
any specific questions for ESF-1 at this time?

(No response.)
If not. we'll move on. We've heard a lot of

issues about communications, and ESF-2, National

Communication Systems, can you give us an update,

please?

ESF-2: Yes, sir. Good afternoon. and thank

you. The positive note is that we do have the SAT CKlM

van installed at the EOC in Baton Rouge. We have

-- secondary and more communications vans standing in the

ready for sites that are going to need those, and they

can deploy rapidly to' the site, providing up to 96

, . - *.- * -
channels of voice and data services for those sites.

In the area of bad news, we have now 275

central off ices throughout the area on backup

generator. Out of that, 137 are in Mississippi. 81

40