September 4, 2005, Meet The Press Appearance
The most famous of Broussard's post Katrina interviews was one on the television program Meet the Press. In the course of that interview, he was critical of the disaster-response effort. He finished with a tearful account of the death by drowning of his emergency services manager's mother. Broussard's account of that incident was subsequently shown to be inaccurate, in that the long sequence of telephone calls to the mother that he described as having taken place in the aftermath of the hurricane could not have happened, since she apparently drowned before the dates in question. In an appearance on Meet the Press three weeks later, Broussard was questioned about his account. He said that the story had been relayed to him by his staff, and that he had chosen not to ask his emergency manager for the exact circumstances of her death.
Broussard and his employees were directly involved in the initial disaster-recovery efforts that followed Hurricane Katrina. On September 4, 2005 he was interviewed on NBC's Meet the Press, still inside his parish. Broussard called the response to Katrina “One of the Worst Abandonments of Americans on American Soil Ever” and went on to say that FEMA had not only failed to meet his parish's need but actively withheld aid and cut his lines of communication:
- Three quick examples. We had Wal-Mart deliver three trucks of water. FEMA turned them back. They said we didn’t need them. This was a week ago. FEMA, we had 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel on a Coast Guard vessel docked in my parish. When we got there with our trucks, FEMA says don’t give you the fuel. Yesterday — yesterday — FEMA comes in and cuts all of our emergency communication lines. They cut them without notice. Our sheriff, Harry Lee, goes back in, he reconnects the line. He posts armed guards and said no one is getting near these lines…
after this, Broussard began to break out in tears.
He said:
- The guy who runs this building I'm in, Emergency Management, he's responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home, and every day she called him and said, 'Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?' And he said, 'Yeah, Momma, somebody's coming to get you. Somebody's coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Thursday. Somebody's coming to get you on Friday' — and she drowned on Friday night. She drowned on Friday night. Nobody's coming to get us, nobody's coming to get us. The secretary has promised, everybody's promised. They've had press conferences — I'm sick of the press conferences. For God's sake, shut up and send us somebody!
Other local politicians criticized the way the federal government handled the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Parish Presidents Junior Rodriguez from St. Bernard and Benny Rousselle from Plaquemines are among the most notable ones.
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