The Next Big Story: My Journey Through the Land of Possibilities
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(September 3, 2005, anchoring CNN’s American Morning): This, of course, is the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport. You can hear the choppers over my shoulder. They’ve been coming in all morning. Kind of a little bit of a lull during the night. But really starting up again in the last few minutes. Right now, no firm numbers on the number of people inside of this main terminal. About four thousand is what they’re guesstimating at this point. But it’s very strange, as I’m sure you noticed yesterday, the departures level, where you normally go to get on a flight and get out of town, is full of elderly people in wheelchairs, many of them evacuated out of the hospitals.
The downstairs level—that would be the baggage claim—literally sitting on the baggage claim carousels are thousands of people just camped out, some of them ill, some of them getting help from the medical teams assembled here, some of them lying on cardboard boxes with their small children, just grateful to be out of the City of New Orleans.
We drive into the center of the city just after the show goes off the air. It feels quiet and empty. Most of the tall buildings are missing windows. I have never been to a war zone, but this is what a war zone would look like. There are military vehicles circling and people rolling through with everything they own in shopping carts. The NOPD has cordoned off the street and is stationed outside the Sheraton Hotel.
On September 5, I go live from Bourbon Street, the place America often comes to party. I have always loved Bourbon Street, where an amalgam of cultures and experiences blend in this crazy way. It’s often throbbing with youthful American energy. The streets are full of happy drunks who broke away from schools and jobs to listen to music or celebrate Mardi Gras draped in colorful beads. Today, the only energy comes from a stack of massive generators bringing lights and air-conditioning back to the Sheraton Hotel. That is the craziness of capitalism, that a business can power up days after a cataclysmic storm but government can’t figure out how to hand out bottled water. They have Porta Pottis on Bourbon Street outside the big hotels but people are peeing in unlit hallways of the Superdome.
The water line is still visible on the sides of the buildings but the true damage is away from this tourist zone. The water is still high in low-lying areas. The quiet is disturbing. The rescue effort is winding down and the focus is on all the bodies, but survivors keep turning up. A town known for the beat of jazz music and the hilarity of raucous parades has been bowed. Every person who walks up to me seems to explode with rage. Why did the rescuers take so long? Why were the bridges shut during the evacuation? So much has been lost by the pathetic response in the aftermath of the levee break. I interview Mayor Ray Nagin and channel the anger of the people around me:
“There are people who say your evacuation plan, obviously in hindsight, was disastrous,” I tell him.
“Which one?” he responds.
“Your evacuation plan before—when you put people into the Superdome. It wasn’t thought out. You got twenty thousand people in there. And that you bear the brunt of the blame for some of this, a large chunk of it.”
“Look, I’ll take whatever responsibility that I have to take. But let me ask you this question: When you have a city of five hundred thousand people, and you have a category five storm bearing down on you, and you have the best you’ve ever done is evacuate sixty percent of the people out of the city, and you have never issued a mandatory evacuation in the city’s history, a city that is a couple of hundred years old, I did that. I elevated the level of distress to the citizens.
“And I don’t know what else I could do, other than to tell them that it’s a mandatory evacuation. And if they stayed, make sure you have a frigging ax in your home, where you can bust out the roof just in case the water starts flowing.
“And as a last resort, once this thing is above a category three, there are no buildings in this city to withstand a category three, a category four or a category five storm, other than the Superdome. That’s where we sent people as a shelter of last resort. When that filled up, we sent them to the Convention Center. Now, you tell me what else we could have done.”
God, even the mayor sounds desperate in this town. New Orleans is cut off, and to pierce the American consciousness they need to get their story told. But one night on Aaron Brown’s show NewsNight the evacuating families are called “refugees” and, in an instant, they are reduced to foreigners searching for aid. Kim is furious and tells me repeatedly to report on the people like they are taxpaying Americans. These were people like her family, people who were caught unaware, folks who made a bad decision to stay, home owners whose lifetime of savings had been wiped away by rising waters. The viewers are seeing black folks massing at the Superdome and white politicians ignoring their plight. A slow rage is building and race is part of that equation. But on the ground I see a storm that did not see skin color. St. Bernard Parish took the most direct hit from the hurricane. It is 88 percent white. Everyone has been put in the same terrible situation.
I travel to St. Bernard Parish on September 8 to punctuate that fact. I am with the U.S. Coast Guard. Where there has not been flooding, there has been looting. They have rescued nine people already just this morning. We follow the winding path of the Mississippi, and immediately the vastness of this disaster is clear. We spot a family on their porch. They don’t look desperate, just depressed. We see another porch, another resident, a man who doesn’t want to leave, even though his street is a lake and a toxic mix of sewage and oil and debris that is black and crunchy and stinks. There are chairs and a sofa alone on a rooftop, an indication of another rescue. I can see the Superdome in the distance surrounded by mounds of festering garbage. The highway leads nowhere, an off-ramp descending into a sea of sludge. The repairs on the 17th Street levee, the critical failure that flooded the city, are clearly visible.
It is September 8 and water is finally flowing back into Lake Pontchartrain. Yet a mile north, we come upon water up to the eaves of the homes. The damage in St. Bernard takes your breath away, even after days of touring this disaster. Everywhere I look, I see homes lost, cars sitting on rooftops. An army of amphibious military vehicles goes door to door marking the homes empty, evacuated, or chronicling the number of deceased. We come up to a family standing on their driveway with a sign that says they are okay and plan to stay. I look around at this murky pool of debris that used to be the neighborhood and I wonder what they’re staying for. A sign on one lonely rooftop just says “HELP US.” The coast guard has performed 3,689 rescues here in its fifty years. This week alone they’ve done 6,584. I do a live shot that day from about three or four miles from the Superdome and show how the on-ramp to I-90 is underwater. As I recount my day, the rescuers drop off people pulled from their homes, leaving them to high ground. Then they go back toward the stench of decaying bodies in hopes of finding more.
The days for us CNN staffers begin and end with the issue of the boots. The muck around Katrina is mixed with oil and toxic debris. We go out each day with new boots. Then we circle back to a drop-off spot in the evening, where we literally step out of them and into a car in our sweaty socks. There are piles of foul boots left behind. Our central location near the NoLa garden district faces a house that had its front ripped off. It resembles a doll-house with all the furniture neatly set up inside. You can see a little boy’s toddler bed in the shape of a car. In the building across the street, we have satellite equipment and supplies balancing atop metal filing cabinets, banks of phones and computers. CNN has built its own command center. If you didn’t know better, you’d think we were running New Orleans in crisis and this was City Hall.
I arrive with my producer, Justin Dial, a guy who always has something lighthearted to say but today can’t think of a thing. He is young and energetic and a master of details and logistics. But today his brown hair cut in the swoosh of the moment is matted with dirt. We both seem to have receded into our CNN caps and grungy clothes. We fall into this odd rhythm together where we just say what’s necessary, the
n throw each other supportive glances. We don’t even have to discuss what to cover because everywhere we look disturbs the senses. There is so much to tell. It’s like being trapped in a haunted house.
We eat at the command center, Cajun food from a local cook who drives in supplies from Baton Rouge. Then we go sleep, at first in a car, then we get upgraded to a recreational vehicle, and later a hotel. I sit at the headquarters one afternoon on a satellite phone trying to get my twin boys into a preschool at the last minute. I am trying to sound relaxed and charming and I am hoping the admissions officer I am talking to can’t hear the sirens wailing behind me. The connection to back home makes me realize how far a distance I’ve traveled from what is sane. There is an enormous disconnect in my head between what surrounds me and what America should be.
The situation in New Orleans is unacceptable, ridiculous. Every reporter is screaming that into microphones, yet no one seems to be listening. The city is nearly 70 percent African-American, and the images of chaos can’t be separated logically from the government response, yet class is the biggest divider around us. Money divided where people lived, their ability to escape, and it will surely divide them when it comes to rebuilding. If it isn’t about race and class, why do we not see the difference?
I feel an anger inside that projects while I’m on TV. I have trouble watching what I say. A part of me feels like I am following a great American tradition. One great thing about this country is its loud mouth. We’re people who can’t hold their tongues, who explode from an existence of prudence when pushed too far. I feel like I should tamp down my emotions or I’ll lose my credibility, but it’s very hard. I think often of interviewing people outside the Superdome. A line of people angled for the mike, black people who had been humiliated and humbled in a town they own. They did not fall to a natural phenomenon but were let down by their country’s inability to help them out. Now they’ve ended up standing in ninety-degree heat, half naked, hoisting their children up for the cameras and crying out for attention. People can only wait so many days before they begin to snap. I feel some moments as if I may snap myself, like when the tenth person asks me where the buses are to get them out and I have no answer. “Just go here,” I tell one poor man, mad at myself that I don’t know and even madder that there may be no buses on the way.
The story of America has always been that we help each other, but Katrina is a moment when some folks were just left out there on their own. When they called for help and no one came. When a human dividing line was drawn in the midst of crisis. This was a moment when people had to decide whether they’d become the looter or the volunteer. The grotesque water pooling everywhere reflects the image of the lost and weary. They walk about like these dark green figures, absent race or class or any perceivable difference. They are just people left abandoned with a choice of what to do next. Police officers are caught stealing things, yet two cons are released the day of the storm and spend forty-eight hours rescuing people from rooftops.
I ask Mayor Nagin what he’s been promised by the federal government in the wake of a visit from the president. The mayor is black, born in Charity Hospital to poor parents, raised as a reflection of the possibilities available to someone like him in the city of New Orleans. Now he looks drained of life. His eyes are dark with anger and frustration. He recounts pressuring the president and the governor on Air Force One to come together to make a decision about what to do next, to step off the plane and promise that more help is finally on the way. He says they told him they needed twenty-four hours to think about it.
I go back to St. Bernard Parish, where Sheriff Jack Stephens is at his command center. He is working out of what is basically a floating houseboat. He’s sitting in an easy chair with folding card tables around him. He has walkie-talkie radios and cell phones lined up on top of everything. He is a good old boy, white and big and friendly, out of central casting for a movie about New Orleans. He is presiding over the safety of a nearly all-white community of seventy thousand that felt the brunt of the storm. Justin notes that the small number of black people in the parish seem to have gone suddenly missing, segregated even in the midst of chaos.
Sheriff Jack takes us to St. Rita’s nursing home, where he believes thirty people have died. There are still three feet of the maybe ten feet of water that consumed the place. Cars have landed willy-nilly around the lot outside. Sheriff Jack says he believes nearly fifty people were able to get out, but no one can answer why the staff left these folks behind. A refrigeration truck pulls up and removes people’s grandparents to a morgue as choppers stir the hot air above. There is still a rescue going on and we keep bumping into folks who’ve just been pulled from their homes. One is an eighty-nine-year-old attorney who complains of being forced to leave.
At Chalmette Slip, which the locals call Camp Katrina, Sheriff Jack breaks into tears recounting how people died there waiting to be rescued. His officers took some three thousand people there but not all of them survived the wait to be evacuated. It is heartbreaking for his officers to rescue people just to see them die waiting. I ask him to estimate the percentage of the parish damaged by the storm. “One hundred percent,” he says. I ask him what he needs. “Money to pay my officers,” he says. A national tragedy is unfolding that requires local police to abandon their families and undertake hazardous rescues, and no one in the federal government has thought to help the city make payroll.
One thing I learned in New Orleans is that ours is a land of individuals, not institutions. The grace of this nation is that people rise up above what surrounds them. Angela Cole is a public health nurse who lives in upstate New York and works for medical marketers. She is not a rescue worker or a government official or even the type of person who gives up weekends for anything as organized as the Red Cross or the National Guard. A storm blows over a slice of our country, no one responds, and the victims send out a cry of distress. But there are people like Angela who hop in their SUVs and drive down to answer the call.
The wonder of Katrina is that there are scores of Americans like Angela. They drive solo into places the Army Corps of Engineers claimed it couldn’t get to quickly. They paddle in small boats to waterlogged neighborhoods not found by the coast guard. They create tent cities of volunteers with construction gear and open hearts. They grab the hands of poor, dirty, distressed, and dismayed survivors and pray for a better day.
Angela Cole somehow finds a place called Pearlington, Mississippi, that everyone has overlooked. The community is so lost in the thick pine forests that it barely exists on a map. The downtown is one paved road with a cash machine, a church, and a convenience store—all flattened by the storm. The people have only their poverty in common. They are black and white, low on education and opportunity, yet high on resolve. Katrina blows in an ocean of salt water while the town holes up at a NASA facility on higher ground. The people emerge to see the landscape reorganized, the crawfish gone, a lifetime of savings for a tiny one-bedroom vanished in a flash. Angela drives in after the agencies on the ground tell her they will never make it to Pearlington. The town has no organized government to advocate for them. So Angela arrives with food, water, and clothes and immediately begins lobbying to get them help.
Until Angela, Pearlington’s families are camping in tents and tarps. Then by some miracle of the American imagination, her appeal gets out there and volunteers begin to arrive. Christian missionaries erect tent cities and begin to rebuild. Volunteers transform an abandoned schoolhouse into a clearinghouse for donations and supplies. Angela’s work is emblematic of an effort going on all over the Gulf. She sees people in need of medical care so she enlists a group of doctors to supply her with tetanus and hepatitis vaccines. She walks tent to tent giving shots and bandaging wounds. Her e-mails reached a Georgia couple, Suzanne and Reggie Lybrand, who send in a tractor-trailer loaded with supplies. I meet Angela on the day of one of her big deliveries. She is a fireplug of a woman with short hair and thin glasses, the kind of person who shoves her
feet in a pair of hiking boots every morning and walks out with a sense of purpose. It makes her downright ecstatic to see supplies roll in that require no paperwork or lines for people to pick up.
Angela takes me up a dusty road and introduces me to the people she is trying to help as if they are her long-lost relatives. First up are Denise Martin and her four kids, crammed into a trailer provided by FEMA that smells of construction glue. The trailer is parked next to what used to be their house, a soaking little structure that looks like it was slapped by a wave. The youngest, Lisa, takes my hand and shows me where she sleeps. It takes me a minute to comprehend that she is pointing to the kitchen cupboard as her bed that she shares with her older brother. She sleeps on a shelf. The trailer is so crowded that her mother and older sister are still camping outside a full four months after Katrina. There is no plan to move them anywhere and the adults are seething with frustration. Angela has outsized dreams of someday building Denise a house, but they embrace her because she is the only person making any promises.
We meet an old man with skin the color of ink living out of a tent nearby. He kicks over cans with his cane as he tells us the storm has shortened his life and flattened his resolve. He looks haggard, like a homeless person. Angela promises to work on getting him on the list for a trailer. The whole scene would make loads of sense if she was employed by some relief agency, but she is just a nurse from New York, an individual who answered a call for help.
Angela turns us onto another story. There are 100,000 FEMA trailers housing families in the Katrina zone at an expense of a half billion dollars to taxpayers. I meet a guy named Paul Stewart, who has one sitting empty outside the wreckage of his home. He and his wife, Melody, moved into it shortly after the storm. But they wake up with this heavy feeling in their chests. They can barely breathe. Paul does some research. He discovers that the types of campers given out by FEMA have a history of leaching formaldehyde used to glue together the particleboard. He tells FEMA he is worried but they ignore him. So he tests the air in his camper. He finds a formaldehyde concentration of 0.22 parts per million in the air. That’s more than twice the concentration several federal agencies say is unsafe. The EPA says anything over 0.1 parts per million can harm the respiratory system and may even cause cancer.