Spoken from the Heart

by Laura Bush

  Katrina passed over Florida and then reached the Gulf of Mexico, but instead of heading north, it drifted west, its winds and rains growing stronger over the warm, late summer waters of the gulf. At the end of the afternoon on August 26, weather forecasters began predicting a new path, saying that the storm would now make landfall in the Mississippi-Louisiana region. They also predicted that it would be a Category 4 or 5 storm. A Category 5 is considered a catastrophic storm, with winds in excess of 155 miles per hour. It can produce, as weather scientists clinically put it, "complete building failure" in its immediate path. There are only three Category 5 storms ever recorded in the United States; one of the worst was Hurricane Camille in 1969. When it came ashore in Mississippi, it caused a twenty-four-foot storm tide, about one-quarter the height of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

  At five in the afternoon on Saturday, August 27, New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin called for a voluntary evacuation of the city. Early on August 28, Katrina officially became a Category 5 storm.

  George and I were at the ranch for a late-summer break. Inside the secure federal trailers on the property, White House staff members, including Joe Hagin, deputy chief of staff for operations, were monitoring the storm around the clock. The National Hurricane Center began issuing advisories warning that the levees in New Orleans could be "overtopped" by Lake Pontchartrain and "significant destruction" would likely be experienced far from the hurricane's center. In the morning of August 28, George began calling the governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Blanco; the governor of Mississippi, Haley Barbour; and Michael Brown, the head of FEMA. When he reached Kathleen Blanco, at 9:14, he told her that she needed to issue a mandatory evacuation order for New Orleans. She responded that she did not think everyone could get out in time.

  But by 9:30, Governor Blanco had heeded George's advice; along with Mayor Nagin she did issue a mandatory evacuation call, the first ever in New Orleans's history. Residents now had only hours to leave. By nightfall, heavy rains and high winds began to lash the Gulf Coast. At 6:10 a.m. on Monday, August 29, Katrina made landfall in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, a peninsula that juts out into the Gulf of Mexico. It arrived as a Category 3 storm with sustained winds of 115 miles per hour and gusts of 130 miles per hour. Katrina sliced through Plaquemines with a twenty-foot storm surge, killing nine people. It continued northeast, clipping the eastern edge of the giant Lake Pontchartrain and St. Bernard and Orleans parishes, along the Mississippi border. Its main track was now over Mississippi, and after it made landfall, its force began to weaken. By 1:00 p.m. Monday, Katrina had dropped to a Category 1 storm; by 7:00 p.m., it was downgraded to a tropical storm. And it had passed east of New Orleans. But the damage was done.

  The Gulf Coast storm surge had been as high as twenty-seven feet. Flooding extended six miles inland and up to twenty-three miles along rivers and bays. But all day Monday, the first reports George and the White House received from the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense and Army Corps of Engineers were that New Orleans's levees had held. When Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin asked Governor Blanco for an update on the status of the levees during an 11:00 a.m. conference call, she told him her information was that New Orleans's levees had not been breached. Instead, she reported, the main floodwaters were engulfing another, smaller parish to the east. Not until after midnight, early on Tuesday morning, nearly eighteen hours after the hurricane had swept through, did the Department of Homeland Security report widespread breaches and flooding to the White House. New Orleans's levees and floodwalls gave way; pumping stations that had lost electricity stopped working. Up to 80 percent of the city was filled with water that in low-lying sections was as much as twenty feet deep. First responders could not reach the city, but prepositioned Coast Guard units immediately swung into action. Over several days the Coast Guard rescued and evacuated more than 33,000 people. The first of their teams began searching for survivors just hours after Katrina came ashore.

  On Wednesday morning, the day after we received word that the levees had broken, George returned to Washington. He decided against landing in Louisiana or Mississippi but flew over the devastated region instead. His decision was, on a much larger scale, the same one I had made not to go to Afghanistan in 2002, 2003, or 2004. Whenever a president, or even the first lady, travels, a huge infrastructure of personnel accompanies him or her. And there is another huge infrastructure waiting on the ground. In Afghanistan I had not wanted to use military assets, like helicopters, when they might be needed on the battlefield. With people still trapped in their flooded homes and thousands not yet evacuated from the Superdome, George did not want a single police officer or National Guard unit or any other type of first response team to be diverted from the rescue efforts to assist with a presidential visit. He had visited Ground Zero in New York on September 14, only when he knew that it was highly unlikely anyone else could or would be found alive. He did not want one single life to be lost because someone was catering to the logistical requirements of a president. He did not want his convoy of vehicles to block trucks delivering water or food or medical supplies, or to impede National Guardsmen from around the nation who were arriving to help.

  By Friday, September 2, nearly twenty-two thousand National Guard soldiers and airmen had reached the region. Sixty-five hundred troops were in New Orleans alone. Over fifty thousand guardsmen and -women from all fifty states, as well as U.S. territories and the District of Columbia, would ultimately assist along the Gulf Coast. That morning George traveled first to Mobile, Alabama, and then to two of the most devastated cities, Biloxi, Mississippi, and New Orleans. I flew to Lafayette, Louisiana, to see some of the six thousand people who had fled New Orleans and surrounding towns and were now huddled in the Cajundome.

  Already, people from across the country had arrived to help. As soon as the storm hit on Sunday night and Monday morning, Red Cross volunteers, many of them retirees, had begun driving from Iowa and other states to Louisiana and Mississippi, prepared to live out of their cars if necessary. By the end of the week, thousands of men and women from the Southern Baptist Convention began to arrive. The Southern Baptist Convention has the third largest disaster relief organization in the United States, after the Red Cross and the Salvation Army. Like many Red Cross volunteers, with whom they often partner, the Baptists rolled out sleeping bags and unfurled hard cots inside local churches. When one team of sixty first arrived, the only dry and empty place they could find to stay was a local jail. For weeks these volunteers cooked thousands of meals each day, sometimes on generators that they had hauled themselves in the backs of trucks. When they could, they used donated food from Walmart and Subway, but knowing supplies would be tight, they also brought their own. A single team of Baptist men and women from Oklahoma cooked sixteen thousand meals a day in Louisiana. Other sites routinely made ten thousand hot lunches and dinners. Red Cross volunteers helped distribute this food and also began gathering clothes for families who had lost everything.

  Inside Lafayette's Cajundome, 137 miles west of New Orleans, many Katrina victims had been separated from friends and family; in some cases, mothers could not find their toddler children. And in these early days, they did not know if they would ever see their loved ones again. I served up plates of jambalaya and sat with elderly men and women who were struggling with the thought of a lifetime of memories having vanished and who were stunned by the prospect of having to start over again.

  Sixty miles away, in Baton Rouge, I visited Acadian Ambulance, an ambulance service that covers a wide swath of Louisiana and Mississippi. Because it was in Baton Rouge, Acadian's communications facilities had not been knocked out by the storm or the flooding. When patients were left stranded, and state and city officials had either disappeared from New Orleans or were completely unreachable by e-mail or phone, Acadian and its volunteers almost single-handedly evacuated hospitals and spent days treating the sick and injured at the packed Superdome. The company, helped by spouses and siblings of its empl
oyees, located more than forty military and out-of-state helicopters, as well as 150 ambulances from other parts of the country, to transport critically ill patients, some of whom exhausted doctors were keeping alive by manually squeezing oxygen into their lungs. They packed newborn babies into cardboard boxes to fit more of them inside the helicopters. With their satellite telephones, a mobile antenna, a portable generator, and incredible determination, Acadian employees and volunteers saved hundreds, if not thousands, of lives. I wanted to thank Richard Zuschlag, the chief of Acadian Ambulance, and his team, who had done what some professional city, state, and federal disaster management officials had failed to do: help people and save lives in some of the most horrific conditions imaginable.

  On Sunday, George and I traveled to the American Red Cross National Headquarters in Washington, D.C., to ask for donations of blood and for volunteers. On Monday, I returned with George to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for a briefing on the emergency operations and then visited with more evacuees at the Bethany World Prayer Center. In total, after Katrina, I made twenty-three visits to Louisiana and the Gulf Coast; the first year, I traveled there nearly every month.

  At the Bethany Prayer Center, I sat on the ground with children, and I saw in their eyes the same devastation that I had seen in New York after 9-11. For the kids in New York, the fears were loud noises, traveling on planes, or riding in the subway. Here, the fear was of water. Some children were terrified of getting in a bath, or even of the sound of the tap running. I heard stories about people who had driven out just as the storm hit, people in pickup trucks who had been caught in the flood surge and spent a day or a night trapped inside, with water up to their doors. And in the chaos, thousands were still missing.

  In tragedies there are heroes, and Hurricane Katrina produced a tremendous share, from the volunteers who came not just in the first weeks but also in the first years. They helped build new homes and fed and clothed the displaced. There were the heroic Coast Guard rescuers who had maneuvered boats and helicopters to pick people off of rooftops as the floodwaters engulfed their homes, and the National Guard troops and airmen who saved lives and brought order and relief, as well as the volunteer medics and ambulance crews. But there was also a group of retired law enforcement officers, including former sheriffs and former Secret Service agents, who volunteered to find the missing. They were activated as part of a special project run by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Alexandria, Virginia. On September 5, the center opened a Katrina missing persons hotline. It processed over eleven thousand calls in its first nine days of operation. Five thousand eighty-eight children were reported missing; by September 15, the retired lawmen had resolved 701 cases.

  One reason there were so many missing kids was that when evacuation boats and helicopters arrived, there were often only a few seats left. Without hesitation, parents and grandparents said, "Take the children." But frequently families were evacuated to different centers, even different states. One child who was plucked from the top of a New Orleans apartment building amid the floodwaters was two-year-old Gabrielle Alexander. But no one knew her name. She was evacuated to a children's center in Baton Rouge, where she would not speak a word. Volunteers from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children traveled to Baton Rouge and photographed the children. Their pictures were repeatedly broadcast on television, particularly by CNN and CBS News. When a center volunteer knelt down to photograph Gabrielle, he turned the camera over to show her the digital image, hoping to get her to speak. She pointed at her picture and said, "Gabby." Now the volunteers had a name to put with a face. They began combing the lists of missing children and found an entry for a two-year-old Gabrielle Alexander. Her mother had been evacuated to San Antonio, Texas. After confirming with law enforcement that these were mother and child, the center arranged for a special Angel Flight to fly Gabby to her mom. They raced into each other's arms on the tarmac in San Antonio.

  Within six months center volunteers located and reunited every missing child on the list with his or her family. The center volunteers came from around the country and worked, many of them, eighteen to twenty hours a day, because they had the skills to help. And they did it solely from the goodness of their hearts. The following spring, I had the center volunteers and some families that they had helped to reunite, including Gabby's, come to the White House to meet in person and to share their stories.

  Other heroes were the teachers and the principals in schools throughout Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Many of them had lost everything. They were living in their cars or with relatives, yet from the first days after Katrina struck, they were back at their schools, using buckets to clear the mud from the floors and walls. I spoke with one teacher who had to throw out every book from her second-floor library; they were entirely mildewed by the time she reached the school. In Pass Christian and Southaven, Mississippi, and Chalmette, Louisiana, and New Orleans, I saw so many teachers who were stressed and weakened and, if not crying, on the verge of tears. They could cry with me when they could not at other moments or in other settings. The rest of the time, they were trying so very hard to be strong for their students, their schools, and their communities. And they knew that if parents had schools for their children to attend, they would be more likely to return home.

  There were countless lessons to be learned. Katrina was in many ways the perfect storm; everything that could go wrong, did. There was virtually no communication on the ground. The New Orleans mayor had retreated to the Hyatt Regency hotel, where phone service was lost even before the storm hit. For three days his command center could not receive e-mails or incoming calls. The White House gave him a mobile phone on Friday, September 2, but he had to lean out a window to get a signal. Police officers in New Orleans didn't have cars; they broke into the local Cadillac dealership and drove off with whatever they could find. During the first few days, George and the White House repeatedly offered to send thousands of additional federal troops to stop the looting and violence in New Orleans, but Governor Blanco declined the offer because she wanted her office to be in charge, rather than the federal government. No one in a position of authority for emergency planning at the state or city level had envisioned anything like Katrina, and when it came, almost no one was prepared for the devastation.

  Perhaps there was never any way to be fully prepared. The destruction was so huge, a near tsunami-size surge and violent storm covering an area larger than all of Great Britain. Over the next few years, when I landed in New Orleans and drove into the city, I would pass street after street where the houses were boarded up and marked with orange X's to show that they had been searched. Sometimes they had another code, a black circle, spray-painted alongside, to show that the body of a person or an animal had been found within the walls. The National Hurricane Center's official estimate is that, in Louisiana and Mississippi, fifteen hundred people died as a direct result of the Katrina storm.

  When I landed in New Orleans on October 10, I saw packs of abandoned dogs running through the streets, barking and scavenging. Some eight hundred abandoned dogs and cats were rescued in a special airlift organized by Madeleine Pickens, wife of the oilman T. Boone Pickens. Volunteers located watermelon trucks to ferry the weak and dehydrated animals to the airport, where they were flown to shelters as far away as California. About 50 percent of the animals were reunited with their owners; the others, some whose owners could no longer care for them, were fostered and adopted. One New Orleans man spent seven days with his dog on the roof of his house, until he ran out of heart medication and had to be airlifted out of the city. The dog, Brutus, was transported to San Diego for care. A female volunteer at the San Diego animal control office located the hospital where the owner had been taken, but the man had been released. She began combing phone books and calling every number with the same last name, eventually finding the man's cousin. The owner was flown to San Diego for a tearful reunion with his dog--the reason he had spent seven days on his roof was
that he had not wanted to abandon his pet. To this day, every two months a New Orleans animal shelter worker drives to San Diego with forty animals in need of adoption, in a custom van donated by Madeleine.

  But as bad as New Orleans was, the devastation was often worse in other places along the Mississippi Gulf. In parts of Louisiana, houses had been flooded, perhaps moved slightly off their foundations, but inside something might be salvaged. In Mississippi, for miles on end, there was nothing but bare foundations. I drove through coastal towns where hundreds of gorgeous antebellum homes, houses that had withstood over 150 years of other storms, had been completely washed away. Blocks were empty except for the debris. Week after week I met young mayors in these towns; many of them had been in office only since January. Now their homes and stores were wiped out; there were no businesses, no economy. They were presiding over ghost towns. All knew that, no matter what, some residents would never return.

  I visited with those who had lost their homes, and I came back as communities were rebuilt, as they opened schools or cut the ribbons on playgrounds. But I wanted to do more. In 2001 I had started, with the help of some very good friends, the Laura Bush Foundation for America's Libraries. Money was raised to provide small grants for school libraries around our country so that they could purchase books and research materials; many times these grants would double or triple a library's annual book budget. By May 2005, the Laura Bush Foundation had given grants to 428 school libraries nationwide.