It now develops that reports of major flooding from Homeland Security personnel in New Orleans were ignored by the department's Washington headquarters because the people staffing it were watching television.

“In the French Quarter on television they were dancing and drinking beer and seemed to be having a party,” Gen. Matthew Broderick, then the director of the Homeland Security Operations Center in Washington, explained to Eric Lipton of The New York Times. Apparently no one at headquarters realized that most of New Orleans is lower and more susceptible to flooding than the French Quarter, so the people could be dancing in their streets there while thousands of their fellow citizens were scrambling to their roofs as their homes were engulfed by rising water.