The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  Nobody in New Orleans, not even the hospitals, protested that the Red Cross had blacklisted their city. But in 2004, 270 officials from all levels of government did participate in a FEMA-funded, weeklong simulation of a Category 3 Hurricane striking New Orleans, a fake but very realistic storm called Hurricane Pam based on extensive computer models developed at Louisiana State University. The primary assumption of the Hurricane Pam exercise was that “Greater New Orleans is inundated with ten feet of water within the levee systems as a result of a Category 3 or higher hurricane.”49 The attendees learned that it would not be just water, in fact, but a “HAZMAT ‘gumbo.’”† They heard that the total number of people left stranded in the toxic water “may approach 500,000” if residents didn’t properly evacuate.50 And they were further informed that a monstrous storm such as Pam would leave 30 million cubic yards of debris—not counting human remains—spread out over thirteen parishes in southeast Louisiana. But to most Louisiana officials, discussing Pam was akin to reading A Thousand and One Nights; it was make-believe. “Before Katrina people looked at Pam exercises like kids do fire drills in school,” Clancy Dubos, publisher of the local weekly Gambit, recalled. “They just weren’t going to take it seriously until it happened.”51

  Having lived through Pam for a week, the 270 officials just went home. Art Jones, the head of the disaster recovery division of the Louisiana Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, later explained that the days were well spent, though. They allowed for interaction between the emergency officials who would be working together if—that is, when—the major hurricane hit.52 That sense of familiarity would not prove to be enough on Saturday, August 27, when the moment was upon them.

  New Orleans did not possess a realistic hurricane plan, but it did have an evacuation plan. This document, “City of New Orleans Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan,” was prepared by city officials and various consultants in 2000. A fourteen-page booklet, it devoted about a page and a half to evacuation, but backed away from substantive directives. “It must be understood that this Comprehensive Emergency Plan is an all-hazard plan,” it explained. “Due to the sheer size and number of persons to be evacuated…specifically directed long-range planning and coordination of resources and responsibilities efforts must be undertaken.” In other words, the booklet didn’t have any novel answers or fresh approaches. But it did offer a series of clear-cut guidelines, which Mayor Ray Nagin seemed to ignore. After suggesting that “evacuation zones” based on probable storm flooding should be used as the basis of mass evacuation, it advised that such zones “will be developed pending further study.”53 They never were. Nothing further was done with the vague start offered by this emergency management plan. “The city of New Orleans followed virtually no aspect of its own emergency management plan in the disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina,” Audrey Hudson and James G. Lakely of the Washington Times wrote. “New Orleans officially also failed to implement most federal guidelines.”54

  Apparently unimpressed by the emergency management plan, even though it was posted on the City Hall Web site (it was taken down shortly after Katrina), Mayor Nagin behaved in a hesitant, perplexing fashion. The plan was the collective wisdom of an entire generation of New Orleans political thinking, going back as far as those who had grappled with Hurricane Betsy in 1965. The plan instructed that when a serious hurricane approached, the city should evacuate seventy-two hours prior to the storm to give “approximately 100,000 citizens of New Orleans [who] do not have the means of personal transportation” enough time to leave. Mayor Nagin also ignored FEMA guidelines, which urged City Hall to “coordinate the use of school buses and drivers to support evacuation efforts.” What neither the “Emergency Management Plan” authors nor FEMA’s lawyers could have known was that Mayor Nagin didn’t prioritize hurricane evacuation plans. With his city’s schools floundering and the murder rate rising, he had other more immediate woes to grapple with.

  V

  At noon on Saturday, forty-nine-year-old Mayor C. Ray Nagin staged a press briefing at City Hall in New Orleans. Casually dressed, his shaved head shining in the media lights, Nagin strained to seem like a man in charge. A careful observer of human nature could detect, however, by his twitching neck and glazed eyes that he was already unnerved by the prospect of Katrina. A state of emergency had been declared by Louisiana’s low-key governor, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, on Friday, August 26, at 11:00 P.M., and the mayor was nervous. Reports from the NHC insisted that Katrina was growing in menace by the minute. “Although the track could change, forecasters believe Hurricane Katrina will affect New Orleans,” Nagin said tepidly, scratching his trimmed goatee. “We may call for a voluntary evacuation later this afternoon or tomorrow afternoon.”55 In emergency preparation, the three levels of evacuation are voluntary, recommended, and mandatory.56 Only the third carries real weight—and places the responsibility for evacuation on state and local government officials. A halting, soft-spoken Nagin said that he needed to talk with his lawyers about what his options were. By stopping short of making a citywide exodus mandatory, he was squandering precious time. Even as Nagin dawdled, the first Louisiana SPCA pets were en route to Houston.

  As politicians go, Nagin was an energetic show horse, not a nuts-and-bolts workhorse. That very Saturday, in fact, New Orleans Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose reported on the mayor’s latest venture: acting. Just days before Katrina hit landfall in Florida, Nagin had made his film debut in an independently produced thriller called Labou. For five hours—in the thick of the tropical storm season—he hung around Gallier Hall, New Orleans’s old city hall, rehearsing lines (on taxpayers’ time). He had been cast to play a corrupt Louisiana mayor. “I thought I was just gonna show up, do a cameo, say my lines and get out of there,” Nagin complained on the set. “And they only pay a buck fifty for this.” Rose interpreted the gripe for the Times-Picayune readership, explaining that “a buck fifty” was “Ray Speak” for 150 dollars. New Orleans residents were already familiar with “Ray Speak,” a confusing inversion of words and ideas, all gathered up in tortured syntax, typically producing a mixed message, but marketed to his constituents as candor. You might call it pandering with seemingly earnest zeal. The net effect of “Ray Speak” was to sell his inaction as a form of action. After leaving the set, a boastful Nagin called out, “Hollywood South, baby!”57

  A native of New Orleans, Nagin had been interested in business at the start of his adult life, earning an accounting degree at what was then Tuskegee Institute and an MBA from Tulane University. He rose through the corporate ranks to become a vice president of the cable television company Cox Communications, overseeing operations in southeast Louisiana. He also made a reputation for himself as a part owner of the New Orleans Brass, the local minor-league hockey team. In 2002, at the age of forty-six, Nagin suddenly jumped into politics and entered the New Orleans mayoral race. He was an unknown candidate with no record whatsoever. Suddenly the leading Democrat in the race, he constructed his campaign around a pointedly pro-business, Republican-sounding platform. He soon became a darling of the Times-Picayune and the conservative business elite, an African American who was a virtual Chamber of Commerce cheerleader when it came to New Orleans’s future.

  Always deferential to whites, Nagin broke with the civil rights tradition of the city’s black leadership. At the same time, he worked hard to distance himself from the left-leaning legacies of such previous Democratic mayors as Sidney Barthelemy, Moon Landrieu, and Marc Morial. “I took great pains to bring in every segment of the community,” Nagin later said of his campaign. “I got attacked. I was called ‘Ray Reagan,’ and that white man in black skin stuff. I had a stigma that Ray Nagin does not care about black people.”58 He campaigned for mayor claiming that he would sell Louis Armstrong International Airport to make money and build a new city hall. (After his election, neither happened.) He spewed anticorruption jive, going on about purging all the “bad guys” from city government: no more cronyism u
nder his administration; the iron heel of justice had arrived. He was going to weed out the villains. He was a reform candidate, baby.

  Even as Nagin represented oil and gas millionaires, shipping magnates, blue bloods, and nouveau-riche developers, he was a buffer zone between New Orleans’s blacks and whites. He marketed himself as an African American with whom upwardly mobile Texas-Louisiana whites would feel comfortable. The popular Bishop Paul Morton of the Greater St. Stephen Full Gospel Baptist Church spoke for many in the African-American community of New Orleans when he called Nagin “a white man in black skin.”59 That was harsh and unfair: Nagin was a midlevel corporate manager who believed he could charm voters and move them in the direction he wanted. Nagin’s self-promotion—combined with “Ray Speak”—worked. In the 2002 mayoral election, he defeated a strong adversary, Richard Pennington. While Pennington was the chief of police from 1994 to 2002, the murder rate in New Orleans fell by 50 percent. Under Nagin’s leadership it subsequently skyrocketed to ten times the national average. On Saturday, December 27, in fact, a local weekly, Gambit, reported that New Orleans was on pace to end 2005 with 316 murders (71 per 100,000 residents). In 2004, New Orleans was the number two murder capital of America.60 When it came to good governance and fighting crime, the glamorous CEO mayor was, in Texas parlance, all hat, no cattle.

  That Saturday, with Katrina brewing in the Gulf, Nagin grew concerned and huddled with his team of lawyers, bodyguards, developers, and sycophants. His most pressing worry? “Nagin said late Saturday that he’s having his legal staff look into whether he can order a mandatory evacuation of the city,” Bruce Nolan reported in the Times-Picayune, “a step he’s been hesitant to do because of the potential liability on the part of the city for closing hotels and other businesses.”61 That hotels would be in a position to sue the city if the tourist trade were disrupted because he called for a mandatory evacuation—that was Nagin’s worry. As a protector of businesses—particularly ones of national stature—he couldn’t have that. He stalled around on Saturday, trying to verify his legal position. Meanwhile, personnel had to be marshaled, resources deployed, and plans initiated. Direct action was necessary on a dozen fronts and Nagin was hesitating like a schoolboy afraid to receive his report card. “The assumption that poor people would be trapped was met with inaction, when it should have been met with a determination to save as many as possible,” editorialized the Times-Picayune. “The words ‘mandatory evacuation’ mean nothing when state and local officials won’t or can’t deploy the resources necessary to make the mandate stick.”62

  According to the office of the Attorney General of Louisiana, a mayor was fully authorized by the law to “direct and compel the evacuation of all or part of the population from any stricken or threatened area.” Nagin’s imagination, however, was sorely limited. He could envision lawsuits, but apparently not Wilma Jones, stuck at the Magnolia Development off Claiborne Avenue. Besides sending around twelve buses to poor neighborhoods in a haphazard pickup and drop-off fashion, Mayor Nagin implemented no comprehensive plan to evacuate vulnerable people. Debbie Este, for example, sat in her wheelchair in her one-story Arts Street home with her infirm sixty-eight-year-old mother and two teenage daughters. She had no idea what was coming. Nagin had no list of people with special needs like Robert Green, who awaited Katrina’s fury in his Tennessee Street house in the Lower Ninth Ward with his seventy-three-year-old mother (who had Parkinson’s disease), his mentally handicapped cousin, and his three granddaughters. Both Green’s mother and his granddaughter, Shenae, would be dead before Katrina passed. “They keep telling me I’m gonna break down from it,” he told CNN as he searched for his mother’s body in October 2005. “I won’t break down, and I can’t break down, not until it’s over.”63

  Obviously Mayor Nagin cared about these special needs residents; just not enough. He was all Booker T. Washington, pull yourself up by the bootstraps, with a touch of Hollywood showboating, for good measure. There was little W. E. B. Du Bois in his repertoire. Furthermore, tourists didn’t come to see the unemployed, of whom there were many, or the ill, the toothless, the elderly. Visitors came to gawk at nude shops along Bourbon Street and eat bread pudding at Commanders’ Palace in the Garden District. Five-star hotels with spas as big as Canyon Ranch in Las Vegas—those were things Nagin cared deeply about. He had little interest in the 112,000 adult New Orleanians who didn’t own cars. They were, in his mind-set, a secondary concern.64 “We didn’t do enough to help earmark the special needs people,” Terry Ebbert of Homeland Security admitted. “We will next time.”65

  VI

  Sometimes it was hard for City Hall or the Chamber of Commerce or the New Orleans Visitors Bureau to visualize the life of a poor person in New Orleans—someone like Tonya Brown of the Lower Ninth Ward. Brown was a single mother earning a meager wage deep-frying at a restaurant and buying used clothes at the thrift shop while praying that the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans wouldn’t cut service to her household. Occasionally, the New Testament gave her genuine comfort. She was a proud Baptist. Most of the time, however, her love gave way to hurt. There were bad-luck days when only pain was real. Tears often swelled in her brown eyes, but she waved them off, not wanting her six kids exposed to weakness. For all of her can-do attitude, she was still and all a scared mother. Self-pity was a loser’s mask and she wanted no part of it. Quiet strength, like that of Rosa Parks—that’s what Brown prayed for, kneeling down in church. Sometimes, when dusk hovered over the Lower Ninth Ward as she talked to Jesus, her anxiety dissipated. She was a covenant woman. Twilight, she said, was the best time to ask and listen. Long before, she had stopped asking City Hall for anything. Too proud for welfare, she walked to work across the St. Claude Avenue Bridge most mornings, declining to pay a dollar to ride the bus. She was on a shoestring budget, just trying to make ends meet. She jokingly referred to these walks as “dead marches,” daydreaming that someday she’d make it to a better life—where the humidity index was zero. When she saw the Times-Picayune headline on Saturday, “Katrina Ends Lull: Leaving N.O. on Edge,” she knew the city would forsake the old and poor. Mayor Nagin—“Chromedome,” as she preferred to call him—had long since abandoned her people. The truth was obvious: her family would have to weather Katrina out in the Lower Ninth and pray that the Industrial Canal didn’t break or that the Mississippi River levee didn’t top. She had confidence in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; she believed the levee was built to endure hurricanes. Meanwhile, there were no evacuation buses coming for them. On the eve of Katrina, thousands of the poor, like Tonya Brown, were left to their own resources and God’s blessing.66

  But it wasn’t just the poor who decided to stay in the New Orleans bowl. One lifelong Louisianan who never even thought about evacuating was Jackie Clarkson. Her entire life was centered on Algiers, the West Bank community on the opposite side of the Mississippi from the French Quarter. Algiers was part of New Orleans and yet a world apart. Having grown up there in the 1950s and 1960s, Clarkson knew it well. Her Algiers was a kind of Mayberry by the river. Grandma would rock on the porch, fried chicken was served on Sunday, and the ferryboat at Algiers Point brought them to the French Quarter’s great open markets. “We were very geographically removed from the rest of the city,” Clarkson said, “and we’re buffered by Jefferson Parish and Plaquemines Parish, so we were both New Orleanians and West Bankers.”67

  During the early Cold War years, Algiers started getting a lot of U.S. military personnel assigned to the district. Algiers Naval Base became a mainstay. Unlike the more aristocratic Garden District, Algiers opened its arms to sailors and oil executives, and as a result an entwined middle-class community developed. If you moved to Algiers, no matter where you came from, there was a 90 percent chance you wouldn’t leave. It was in this friendly environment that Clarkson and her husband, Arthur, raised five daughters (including the actress Patricia Clarkson). To bring in extra money, Clarkson became a real estate broker, and did exceedingly well. She
was also a Girl Scout leader, Little League coach, Sunday school teacher, PTA regular, and member of the foundation board of the University of New Orleans. Simply put, Clarkson was a combination supermom and busybody.

  Then in 1989, she made the plunge into electoral politics, running for the New Orleans City Council from District C, which contained Algiers, the French Quarter, Faubourg Marigny, and Bywater. They were all neighborhoods above sea level. People in them weren’t sure whether a flood in the rest of the city would be a danger or merely an inconvenience. But when they elected Clarkson every four years from 1990 to 2002, it wasn’t because she was a levee expert. She had heart—that’s what they admired about her. With a Lucille Ball hairstyle, conservative suits (almost always red), and a belief that all U.S. soldiers were the epitome of goodness, Clarkson was a throwback figure. A self-described Truman Democrat, she cared whether a little Bywater park had a bench or whether an Algiers basketball hoop had a net. Voters elected her over and over again because they knew when an inconvenience like a Caribbean hurricane blew into town, she would be looking out for the citizens of District C.