by Gary Rivlin
A meeting was held on the roof parking lot later that morning. Deville asked Robichaux to explain his idea, but this no-nonsense manager who was so adept at making the buses run more or less on time wasn’t necessarily the best messenger in the midst of a crisis. Robichaux admitted they had no idea how deep the water was to the ramp. He then told the group to split into two. He asked those who could swim to gather on one side of the roof and those who couldn’t on the other. “They’re leaving us to drown,” some of the nonswimmers called out.
Deville stepped up on the back of a pickup truck. “No one is leaving anyone behind,” he assured them. They had air mattresses, he said. They would float people who couldn’t swim. He also made a promise: “I’ll stay with anyone who doesn’t feel up to the walk.” Afterward, people patted him on the back for his bravery, but he felt like a fraud. “I was scared to death,” Deville confessed. “People thought I was a hero for volunteering to stay behind, but I can’t swim. Plus there was no way I was stepping another foot in that water.” While still standing on the flatbed, Deville told the crowd of a conversation he had had that morning with someone in the governor’s office. He’d promised to send helicopters as soon as any were available. Maybe those who remained at the barn would be the first ones rescued.
A LITTLE PAST NOON on Tuesday, August 30, 2005, the first RTA employees dropped themselves into the dark, murky waters that were chest high on a six-foot man. Around two-thirds of their group—two hundred people—chose to walk rather than remain. Children were hoisted on air mattresses, along with most everyone standing under maybe five feet five inches tall. Those tall enough to walk sloshed through the smelly, oily water, guiding the others on the makeshift rafts. Sharon Paul, a fifty-year-old RTA dispatcher, was a diabetic who had already gone more than twenty-four hours without her insulin. But Paul was a strong swimmer. She helped a pregnant woman heft herself onto an air mattress along with a pair of toddlers. Paul then tied a rope around her waist and towed the three of them. “I’m done,” she said, collapsing once they reached the elevated highway. She’d need to walk another six miles to make the park ’n’ ride on the West Bank.
Some had thought they were strong enough to make it the half mile to the interstate but were not. Others froze in place. Ruben Stephens, an NOPD lieutenant who headed up the RTA’s police unit, helped with the stragglers. “People were petrified of the water,” Stephens said. Wilfred Eddington was already sitting on top of the interstate with his boots off when Robichaux asked him and another officer to help coax people to the interstate. He laced up his boots and headed down the ramp and into the muck. “Our job was to make sure that we got everybody to that bridge,” Eddington said.
Staying together was a challenge. They had imagined walking as a single group toward the twin cantilevered bridges looming a couple of miles away. Ruben Stephens, the police lieutenant, ordered Eddington to the front of the line. Stephens and several other officers retreated to the back of the group to wrangle any strays. People passed the Superdome, standing like a giant spaceship next to the highway, and stared. Some in their contingent had been at the dome as recently as Sunday, where orderly lines of people were waiting to be patted down (people were being checked for weapons) before they were admitted to this “shelter of last resort.” Now thick crowds of people milled everywhere while nearby the National Guardsmen stood holding weapons. Pieces of the Superdome’s roof had peeled off. The giant Hyatt Regency next door—where the mayor and his top people were—looked worse. Almost every window on the northern face of the hotel was shattered.
They passed clots of five or ten people, but no other contingent was nearly as large as theirs, and none seemed to be walking with the same purpose. The temperature was in the nineties and the humidity high. From the interstate they had an expansive view of watery New Orleans—a perfect vantage point for contemplating a drowned-out home. A torpor took over all but the strongest among them, but they kept walking. The bridge ahead led to Algiers, the New Orleans neighborhood on the other side of the Mississippi. Only later did they appreciate that it was also the route to white-flight suburbs such as Gretna, the first town they would reach once they had crossed the Crescent City Connection. At least one of them was in a wheelchair, and their ranks included grandmothers, toddlers, and several police officers. None seemed to be thinking about what it meant that theirs was an almost all-black group heading into a predominantly white community.
A bus driver named Malcolm Butler and his wife, Dorothy, were among the first to notice the blockade. Initially, Malcolm Butler thought his eyes were playing tricks on him in the hot, midday sun. Butler was set to retire, after thirty-three years on the job, on August 31—the next day. Their home in New Orleans East had most certainly flooded, and then there were the fresh horrors of their walk from the Canal Street barn to the interstate. Butler, who is not tall, had walked through greasy water up to his neck, his nose and chin pointed upward, guiding Dorothy, who clung to an air mattress. They had probably been on the interstate for less than an hour—enough so that their clothes had dried out even if the stink of the water remained—when Butler stopped and asked Dorothy if she was seeing what he was: a pair of police officers brandishing weapons, blocking their passage. “They was standing up there with their automobiles blocking the bridge with shotguns and M16s and told us we couldn’t go no further,” Butler recalled.
Wilfred Eddington, the police officer assigned to walk point as they headed toward the West Bank, figured he was around one thousand yards from the foot of the bridge when he saw the two police cars parked nose to nose, forming a wedge to block their passage. Eventually, he heard them yelling, “Go back! Go back! Get off the bridge!” He noticed their black uniforms—they were members of the small force responsible for policing the bridge.
Eddington was dressed in jeans but wearing a dark T-shirt stamped with the word POLICE in large letters. He wore a holstered gun on his belt. He asked the others to slow down while he approached his counterparts. The smaller of the two bridge cops, a young black woman, didn’t seem to care what it said on Eddington’s shirt. The closer he got, the louder she seemed to scream. “She was out of control,” Eddington said. “She was irate.”
“You gotta bring it down a few notches,” Eddington said, looking at the female officer. “You’re now at around ten. We need you to bring it down to three.” He was a cop with two decades on the job, counseling a less experienced officer. “But she remained belligerent,” Eddington said.
Ruben Stephens, the police lieutenant, jogged up from the back of their ranks. He introduced himself and explained that a group of city workers on duty at the time of the storm had gotten trapped by the flooding. They were only trying to reach their facility in Algiers, where some buses would be picking them up.
“You’re not crossing my damn bridge,” the female officer responded.
“You better get your rank,” Stephens snapped.
“Pedestrians are not permitted on the bridge at any time!” she countered, as if this was any other Tuesday.
“She was hollering, ‘I lost my house, I lost everything,’ ” Wilfred Eddington said. But she was also adamant. “You all ain’t going nowhere,” she repeated.
At the back of the line, Sharon Paul, the diabetic dispatcher, looked uncomprehendingly at the police cruisers parked to block their way until someone told her, “Police say we can’t cross.”
“Don’t they know we’ve got water where we came from?”
A SUPERVISOR FOR THE bridge police arrived at the scene. So did Gerald Robichaux, who had been preoccupied tending to those at the back of the line needing help. A stalemate lasting between thirty and sixty minutes ended when several suburban-line commuter buses arrived to pick them up at the foot of the bridge. For the moment, everything seemed a crazy misunderstanding, and the RTA people boarded the buses. Sitting at the front of the bus, Lieutenant Stephens assumed they were heading to the RTA’s park ’n’ ride in Algiers. The coaches had instead brought t
hem to the bus depot in suburban Gretna.
Stephens heard the Gretna police officers before he saw them. “Don’t get off that bus,” they barked. “Don’t get off the damn bus.” Stephens stepped down the stairs, thinking he could talk to them, cop to cop. “I’m a police lieutenant,” he tried to say. But they were yelling too loud to hear him. Each pointed a weapon at him.
“Where the fuck y’all think you’re going with all these people?”
“Who the fuck told y’all to bring these people here?”
“Y’all need to get the hell out of here.”
Stephens had grown up in the Desire housing project in New Orleans’s Upper Ninth Ward. He had served in the army and worn a police uniform for more than two decades. For the last five years, that uniform had been dressed with a lieutenant’s star. He had probably five or six feet of water sitting in the modest place he owned in New Orleans East—a single-story ranch home—which guaranteed that most everything he owned had been ruined. “I ain’t going nowhere,” Lieutenant Stephens said. He had a gun strapped to his belt and told himself he was ready to use it, if necessary. “I feared one of them might start shooting,” Stephens said, “and then you’d have a massacre.”
People walked off the bus, despite the threats. Gail Davis, a fifty-three-year-old grandmother whose husband, Woodrow, worked for the RTA, was on that first bus with her daughter and three grandchildren. Davis found herself staring at guns as she got off the bus. “They was putting them in our faces and saying, ‘If you move, if you breathe, we’re going to shoot you,’ ” Davis said. “I’m trying to hold on to my grandchildren because they was nine, ten, eleven years old.” Mary Ann Ruth, a forty-nine-year-old cashier at the Boomtown Casino just outside New Orleans (her fiancé was a driver for the RTA), was also on that first bus. She, too, was a grandmother, there with her fiancé’s nine-year-old son and a two-year-old granddaughter. “We were hungry, we was wet after walking in that nasty water,” Ruth said. “We wasn’t trying to harm nobody. They had their guns cocked. They say, ‘If they move, shoot them.’ ”
The second and third buses pulled up, and they, too, disgorged their passengers there at the Gretna bus terminal. There, on this large patch of sidewalk under a highway overpass, the police pointed shotguns and other long guns, yelling “motherfucker this” and “motherfucker that.” On her bus, said Sharon Paul, the diabetic, people felt a sense of relief when out the window they saw all the police. “We really thought they was coming to assist us,” Paul said. And why not? Gretna, a town of eighteen thousand whose official motto is “Small City, Big Heart,” had lost electricity but still had plenty of food and water on stock. Its roads were passable, providing people a path to safety. Paul said she heard one cop yell, “Get on the curb now or we’re gonna shoot,” but she couldn’t take the command seriously. “They cocked their guns,” Paul said, “and then everybody paid attention.
“They was being ugly and all rough and rude with us,” Paul said. “And it ain’t like we was throwed-away people. We was working-class people trying to get where we had to go.”
GRETNA POLICE OFFICER DWIGHT Dorsey was on patrol when he heard a staticky message over the single emergency channel available to all first responders in the area. “It was a call for assistance over the radio saying that they had a large group of subjects loitering,” Dorsey said. Dorsey says six to eight police cars were at the Gretna bus terminal that afternoon. Louis Alvarez, another cop on the scene, said there were five patrol cars, but allowed that the number might have been higher. Mary Ann Ruth, the casino cashier, said at least ten cops were watching over their klatch of grandmothers, children, and civil-service lifers. Wilfred Eddington, the longtime NOPD cop, put the number of officers who “semicircled around us” at between eleven and fifteen.
Chris Roberts also responded to the call for reinforcements. Roberts was a member of the Gretna City Council, not a sworn peace officer, but he later described himself as eager to help protect his town from looters and other bad elements from New Orleans. “He was this little, short white guy getting into people’s faces,” Brandon Mason, an RTA supervisor, said. “He’s yelling at people, ‘This is my city,’ telling us how it’s martial law and we have no business being in his city.”
Wilfred Eddington was the first person Roberts encountered at the scene. The police officer had removed himself from the group and was sitting on the curb, smoking a cigar he had secreted away.
“Who in the hell ordered this?” Eddington heard the man’s high-pitched, loud voice before he saw him. “Who said these people could get off here?” Eddington turned and saw a short white man walking his way, jabbing his finger at him.
“I’m like, ‘Dude, what are you talking about? I’m just sitting smoking a cigar.’ ”
“I want to know right now who ordered this.”
“Who ordered what?” Eddington stood up. He towered over Roberts.
“Who told you to bring these people over here under this bridge?”
Eddington asked who was asking, and Roberts identified himself. “Okay, Chris Roberts of the Gretna City Council, you have a few seconds to back off and just get out of my face.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Get the hell out of my face,” Eddington yelled, then heard the unmistakable crack of someone racking a shotgun. A Gretna officer, apparently, did not like the manner in which this black cop from New Orleans was talking to an elected official. Roberts kept jabbering at him (“He was this little gnat,” Eddington said of the councilman, “a pain in the ass”), but Eddington was no longer listening. “I mean, I was tunnel vision, looking at this one particular police officer.” He stomped over to confront the cop holding the shotgun. “As I’m walking to him, I’m breaking leather,” Eddington said. “I’m coming out.” He had a police revolver on his right hip. And he was unholstering his weapon.
Ronnie Harris, the longtime Gretna mayor, arrived and demanded to know who was in charge. All eyes turned to Harris and also to Gerald Robichaux, who was talking on a cell phone, seeing if he could find any buses and drivers to get them out of there. Robichaux had run the transit agency on this side of the bridge before taking the number two job at the RTA. He and Harris knew one another. If Harris had not shown up when he did, Lieutenant Stephens said, “God only knows where it would have went.” The mayor promised a few Porta Potties and ordered someone to get some water for their “guests.” Stephens ordered Eddington to the other side of their group to put distance between him and the shotgun-wielding Gretna cop.
The Gretna police still didn’t holster their guns. “We had weapons pointed at us the entire time,” Lieutenant Stephens said. The violation of the blue-brotherhood code seemed to aggravate Stephens more than anything else. “I would never have treated a fellow police officer the way they treated us,” he said. “We felt like hostages.”
Some part of the RTA contingent refused water when it was offered, including Brandon Mason, the RTA supervisor, and Cindy Crayton, Gerald Robichaux’s executive assistant. For Crayton, the declined water was her small protest over how they were treated. “Mr. Robichaux was trying to explain that we were there doing a job and helping the city of New Orleans, not folks coming over to loot,” she said. Yet they were treated as nothing but a mostly black group invading a predominantly white enclave. A pair of older black women, each in a wheelchair, arrived not long after the others. The women had been rescued by boat from the Canal Street barn and transported across the bridge on the back of a flatbed liberated from the agency’s Napoleon Avenue facility. With no way to secure the wheelchairs on the flatbed, a pair of RTA employees gripped the legs of the chair with all their might, including Charlie Veal, the sixty-five-year-old assistant director for rail operations. “Nobody off!” the police yelled at them when they arrived in Gretna. “Nobody gets off this truck.” Rather than risk another confrontation, the driver was told to drop everybody off at the RTA’s park ’n’ ride in Algiers, which had been their original destination.
After a couple of hours of forced detention for the RTA contingent, several RTA coaches—between three and five, depending on who is telling the story—pulled up at the Gretna bus depot. They stopped by the park ’n’ ride to pick up anyone who had ended up there. Their caravan then headed to Baton Rouge. A few, including Sharon Paul, would be dropped off at a hospital, but most were brought to an evacuation center. There they were reunited with many of those rescued from the Canal Street barn by the boats Bill Deville and his people had scavenged up. The group of them slept on canvas cots that week in a huge auditorium crowded with hundreds of other evacuees. But they also had access to a bathroom when they needed it. Their shelter had electricity and plenty of food and water. They were among the lucky ones.
WEDNESDAY
The Gretna police brass split their force into two. Those on the early shift began work at 7:00 a.m. Those on the late shift took over at 7:00 p.m. An ex-marine named Scott Vinson, a sergeant on the late shift, was responsible for patrolling that first exit ramp people would reach on the West Bank side of the bridge. For anyone in the vicinity of the New Orleans central business district, the Crescent City Connection—a pair of steel bridges stretching across the Mississippi, the fifth-longest bridges of their type in the world—pointed the way toward freedom. Vinson’s job was to see that people didn’t walk aimlessly through Gretna in search of an escape route.
Tuesday night had been quiet at the bottom of the exit. But all Wednesday evening and into the night, a steady procession of people in clusters of twos and threes and fives walked down the ramp. Vinson stationed two patrolmen at the bottom of the highway. They lined people up and kept order while he used his radio to scrounge up buses—anything to transport people to an evacuation point. He did the same shortly after daybreak on Thursday, when a “second wave” of evacuees, Vinson said, came trudging over the bridge.