US: Louisiana's governor asked President George W Bush to send "everything you've got" to New Orleans the day Hurricane Katrina hit but the White House ignored her request for days, according to documents released to Congress.
More than 100,000 pages of records, ranging from official reports to notes written by hand at the height of the storm, show governor Kathleen Blanco frustrated by the slow delivery of promised federal aid.
Ms Blanco's aides feared that the White House was trying to shift the blame for the chaotic handling of the storm's aftermath onto the governor and other Louisiana officials.
"Bush's numbers are low, and they are getting pummelled by the media for their inept response to Katrina and are actively working to make us the scapegoats," Ms Blanco's communications director wrote.
On August 29th, the day Katrina made landfall, the governor told Mr Bush: "We need your help. We need everything you've got." The following day, after three levees broke, leaving most of New Orleans and its surrounding parishes under water, Ms Blanco told the president "the situation is extremely grave" and asked for 40,000 troops.
It was four more days before Mr Bush deployed just 7,000 active service soldiers to New Orleans.
Ms Blanco compiled the documents at the request of two congressional committees investigating the handling of Katrina.
"As we move forward, I believe the public deserves a full accounting of the response at all levels of government to the largest natural disaster in US history," she said.
The New Orleans Times-Picayune reported yesterday that inspections of the city's levees before the storm were superficial and haphazard, taking the form of a five-hour drive past the 100-mile system.
"Annual inspections take many forms, but any way you slice it, you couldn't inspect 100 miles in five hours - not properly, anyway. You certainly couldn't meet the requirements by looking down those levees with binoculars from a roadway," Thomas Wolff, a member of the National Science Foundation team that investigated the levee failures in New Orleans, told the paper.
Every level of the official response to Katrina, which killed more than 1,300 people in Louisiana and Mississippi, has been criticised. The Red Cross has launched a campaign to recruit more volunteers from ethnic minorities after complaints of insensitivity towards the mainly African-American victims of Katrina.
In early September, the organisation was housing 143,000 people in more than 500 shelters throughout America. Most of the evacuees were black and almost all the volunteers were white and some evacuees felt "herded like cattle", according to one black pastor.
The Red Cross plans to work with black church groups and Hispanic community organisations to attract more volunteers from ethnic minorities and to help white volunteers to avoid unintentionally offensive behaviour.