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Louisiana National Guard communicated by sending text messages on cell phones.
The death and destruction multiplied as looters armed themselves and residents languished waiting for rescue.
Brown was the first bureaucratic casualty in the massive governmental breakdown in responding to Katrina.
He resigned last week amid criticism that he responded sluggishly to the hurricane. Brown lashed out a few days later, telling The New York Times that Blanco and her staff were "incapable of organizing a coherent state effort."
Brown said that, on the day before the storm hit, he asked Blanco and Maj. Gen. Bennett Landreneau, head of the state's National Guard, what resources they needed.
"The response was like, 'Let us find out,' and then I never received specific requests for specific things that needed doing," Brown told The New York Times last week.
Blanco said it shouldn't have been up to her to provide a list.
"Specific things, my God," she said. "(If) they didn't know that we were in the middle of search and rescue and needed to evacuate people, then they were not on the ground with us. We needed buses and helicopters."
Besides, Blanco said, she thought Brown was in control of the situation.
"I had security in the knowledge that there were 500 buses," she said. "Mike had emphasized the buses to me personally. That was not my first concern until I realized that they were not there."
Meanwhile, the state continued to send school buses into the affected areas.
One of Blanco's aides, Leonard Kleinpeter, said FEMA told him at one point that the state could stop sending school buses because the agency was going to bring in helicopters and use them instead of the commercial buses that still weren't there.
Blanco told Kleinpeter to ignore those instructions.
"She said, 'I'll be damned. You keep loading the wagons on the school buses,'" Kleinpeter said.
Kleinpeter said he now wonders if FEMA temporarily halted its buses because the agency thought helicopters would work better.
By Tuesday, the day after the hurricane, Brown was ready to cede control of state and federal relief efforts to the White House.
Two days later, President George W. Bush met with Blanco on Air Force One and asked her for control of the troops that were finally pouring into the state. Blanco asked if Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour would be under the same regime. The answer was "No."
Blanco told Bush she'd get back to him in 24 hours. The president didn't wait. That night, the White House faxed a memorandum of understanding for her to sign to cede control of the troops. Her answer was "No."
"If I thought that it was going to bring one more resource to bear, if I thought that he was denying me resource because of it, and I don't think he was, then it might have been something that I would have considered," she said.
"By that time, we were already getting the resources and commitments," the governor said.
It wasn't the response that the White House wanted. People close to the Bush administration started criticizing Blanco, saying she bungled the state response.
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