Fats Domino stands in the ruins of his office in the lower ninth ward of New Orleans.
Photograph: Steve Pope/EPA
If you are a public figure in the middle of a big event that has the potential to flare into scandal you may be very well advised to be quite canny about the emails you send.
You would think this was a no-brainer by now, yet emails are increasingly turning up in the media as primary sources for negative stories about officials.
Today the Washington Post reveals that it has obtained emails to and from a key official which provide further evidence of the disarray federal authorities were in when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast on August 29.
The newspaper has copies of 20 emails sent from and to Michael Brown, who was the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), at the time.
Mr Brown resigned shortly after the disaster, which killed more than 1,000 people and left New Orleans flooded. He took much of the brunt of the criticism for Fema's sluggish response, which fomented a political crisis for the Bush administration.
The Washington Post reports that the emails show that Mr Brown appeared to be confused over whether his boss, the homeland security secretary Michael Chertoff, had put him in charge. The paper reports that the emails also show that "senior military officials could not reach Mr Brown and his team became swamped by the speed of the unfolding disaster".
The Post indicates that there may be more explosive emails that it has not seen, but it does not appear to have produced the full texts of the emails it has obtained online.
Mr Chertoff is scheduled to give evidence tomorrow in his first appearance before the congressional committee investigating the response to Katrina. The inquiry has been seeking all of the emails sent between officials - so more revealing information from online communications may come out.
In other news, it was reported today that director Spike Lee is travelling to New Orleans to make a documentary about the disaster examining how politics and race collided.
Meanwhile, music legend Fats Domino, 77, has returned to his home in the city for the first time, discovering that it has been left in ruins, with his piano caked in mud amid the debris from the flooding.
