The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  On Saturday, in other words, Nagin was in the process of squandering what New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd in a different context called “the golden hour,” a term that originated in combat medicine to describe the time when “acting fast may save those in jeopardy.”79 The mayor’s irresponsible attitude toward the hurricane stood in sharp contrast to the ghastly reports that many people on the Gulf Coast were seeing on their televisions. The Weather Channel, while it may be prone to a certain hysteria at the first sign of a sprinkle in South Carolina or a few gusts in Montana, was rightly forceful on the subject of Katrina, devoting most of its coverage on Saturday to plotting the storm and repeating advisories from the NHC. Early on, when Katrina had yet to grow from a tropical storm to a hurricane, longtime weather photographer Jim Reed wrote to his TV network clients with an educated opinion: “Katrina may strike the southeast coast of Florida as a Cat 1, but we’re becoming increasingly concerned she may become a major hurricane once in the Gulf.”80 Outsiders seemed to see more clearly than City Hall the danger facing metropolitan New Orleans. People who watched WDSU-TV news or listened to WWL radio, bypassing the hesitant drone from the mayor, were the ones who packed their cars and fled to higher ground. Without question Nagin should have ordered a mandatory evacuation twenty-four hours earlier than he did. “I’m not sure Nagin learned a whole lot from Ivan or Pam,” Clancy Dubos recalled. “You would think that he would have but he just learned nothing.”81

  For example, Julie Silvers, an abstract painter from the suburb of Old Metairie, was uncertain what to do, hearing so many mixed messages from City Hall. Her husband was in Rhode Island on a business trip, so she bore the sole responsibility for her eleven-year-old daughter, as well as their black Labrador retriever. “I thought the storm was headed toward the Florida panhandle,” Silvers recalled. “But I called my friend Lawrence Chehardy, assessor for Jefferson Parish. Unlike Nagin, he was direct. ‘Get out of town now,’ he told me. After hearing his voice, I loaded up my Infiniti, got on the I-10, and headed to Houston.”82

  At New Orleans’s City Hall on Saturday, Mayor Nagin and Police Superintendent Eddie Compass—close friends since boyhood—presided over a closed-door briefing on the hurricane. Jasmine Haralson, chief of staff for a city councilman, was at the meeting. She later said that those present were not at all worried about the impending storm, believing it would veer off before it reached New Orleans. She described the meeting, overall, as “routine.”83 With Katrina edging closer by the hour, she could not have chosen a more harrowing word.

  * The nine coastal parishes are Cameron, Vermilion, Iberia, St. Mary, Terrebonne, Lafourche, Jefferson, Plaquemines, and St. Bernard.

  * A Superfund site is a location, such as a warehouse or landfill, abandoned by previous owners that has been designated by the Environmental Protection Agency as hazardous and dangerous because of past dumping of chemical waste and other toxic materials. The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (enacted in December 1980 in response to the Love Canal disaster) authorized the EPA to designate and then clean up such sites. Of 11,281 sites, 160 are in Louisiana.

  † Hazmat is the apocalyptic jargon for “hazardous materials” or, more succinctly, poison.

  Chapter Two

  SHOUTS AND WHISPERS

  Sleep at noon, window blind rattle and bang. Pay no mind. Door go jump like somebody coming: let him come. Tin roof drumming: drum away—she’s drummed before.

  —Archibald MacLeish, “Hurricane”

  I

  IN WASHINGTON, D.C., MICHAEL D. Brown, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, received a briefing on Saturday from the National Hurricane Center on the severity of Hurricane Katrina and the likelihood that it would indeed make a direct hit on New Orleans. Like Nagin, Brown responded by letting the day pass. He didn’t send emergency-response management teams to the region, normally a reflex action for a FEMA director in the face of potential problems. He didn’t send hundreds of buses to the periphery of the Gulf Coast, within easy post-storm striking distance. He sent two public affairs officials and waited to see what would happen. “When FEMA finally did show up, everybody was angry because all they had was a Web site and a flyer,” Senator Mark Pryor (D-Arkansas) told the Select Bipartisan Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina. “They didn’t have any real resources that they could give.”

  Because the advance plans in Louisiana were nebulous, where they existed at all, hour after hour on Saturday evening was devoted to telephone calls between officials, none of whom seemed to be moving at the same speed. Governor Blanco stepped up to try to advance the preparations. She had proclaimed a state of emergency on the statewide level the day before.1 On Saturday, she wrote to President George W. Bush, requesting that he declare a federal state of emergency in southeastern Louisiana.2 The letter was a formality, written according to a prescribed text by which governors exercised emergency provisions in the federal-state relationship. Blanco even neglected to omit prompts suggested by the federal government for such letters. On the second page, Blanco’s letter ran, “I request Direct Federal assistance for work and services to save lives and protect property. (a) List any reasons State and local government cannot perform or contract for performance (if applicable). (b) Specify the type of assistance requested.” On the latter subject, Blanco filled in: “I am specifically requesting emergency protective measures, direct Federal Assistance, Individual and Household Program (IHP) assistance, Special Needs Program assistance, and debris removal.”3

  Blanco’s requests were as boilerplate as the rest of her letter. The Individual and Household Program and Special Needs assistance both referred to FEMA programs that provided grant money to those displaced by a disaster. It was right that she included them in her pro forma list. Both, however, were to be activated well after Katrina passed. So was debris removal. A suddenly overwhelmed Blanco failed to indicate that the region needed federal help with transportation in advance of the storm, and rescue boats immediately thereafter. She failed to fully abide by Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz’s famous 1945 warning to future leaders on the grave perils of hesitation: “Preoccupation with the job at hand, or a desire not to disturb the skipper, should never result in disregard of a rapidly falling barometer.”4

  If Blanco’s message to Bush had been an emphatic letter or frantic telephone call, and not merely a legal form—if it had actually communicated what wasn’t happening in Louisiana (i.e., evacuation)—various U.S. government agencies might have mobilized more quickly. Just as New Orleans wasn’t properly communicating with Baton Rouge, Baton Rouge wasn’t properly communicating to Washington, D.C. There was a chain of failures. “The federal government does not have the authority to intervene in a state emergency without the request of a governor,” Bob Williams, a Washington State legislator from the district most devastated by the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980, wrote in the Wall Street Journal, helping readers understand post-Katrina relief. “President Bush declared an emergency prior to Katrina hitting New Orleans, so the only action needed for Federal assistance was for Governor Blanco to request the specific type of assistance she needed. She failed to send a timely request for specific aid. In addition, unlike the governors of New York, Oklahoma, and California in past disasters, Governor Blanco failed to take charge of the situation and ensure that the state emergency operation facility was in constant contact with Mayor Nagin and FEMA.”5 Blanco did send a request on Saturday, two days too late. Besides late timing, it was not much of a letter and not much of a list.

  President Bush, who was vacationing at his 1,583-acre ranch in Crawford, Texas, responded in turn to the governor’s form letter. In a legally correct fashion, he complied with her request for federal assistance, authorizing FEMA “to coordinate all disaster relief efforts which have the purpose of alleviating the hardship and suffering caused by the emergency on the local population.”6 Unfortunately, FEMA Director Brown wasn’
t entirely convinced of the urgency. After receiving notification of the president’s action, he released a statement that didn’t even mention the importance of evacuation for Gulf Coast residents. “There’s still time to take action now,” his Saturday afternoon statement read, “but you must be prepared and take shelter and other emergency precautions immediately.”7

  Governor Blanco wasn’t as passive as the hours went by. She attended local news conferences in both Orleans and Jefferson parishes that Saturday, encouraged New Orleanians to go door-to-door to persuade neighbors to flee, and held a conference call with Louisiana officials (including sixty-five legislators) in the coastal parishes trying to coordinate last-minute programs. “There was certainly a sense of urgency about the situation,” Blanco’s communications officer, Bob Mann, explained. “We knew this was perhaps the Big One. This was an urgent situation. I think she communicated that pretty well.”8

  One person who really catapulted Governor Blanco into action mode that Saturday was Cedric Richmond, the president of the black caucus in the Louisiana legislature. He spent the entire weekend telling everybody in New Orleans East, part of the Ninth Ward, to “get the hell out.” Only thirty-one years old, he had grown up in NOE, throwing rocks into Lake Ponchartrain as a kid, and later hanging out at the video arcade at Lake Forest Plaza. Richmond was a cautious lawyer and workaholic; his great indulgence was eating baby back ribs dripping in fat at the City Club once a week. On Saturday morning he had attended a Little League game in Gorretti Playground, with about eight or nine hundred people in attendance. “It was incredible,” Richmond recalled. “Because the mayor’s warning was so soft, nobody was taking Katrina seriously. Baseball. That’s what they were up to. So that night I went from barroom to barroom saying, ‘Y’all need to go.’”9

  When Richmond told Blanco that afternoon about the blasé attitude at the ball game, the governor grew alarmed. Telephoning her assistant chief of staff, Johnny Anderson, she requested that all African-American ministers in below-sea-level areas dedicate their Sunday sermons to the need to evacuate at once. They would be called “pray and pack” sessions.10 “She really tried to help,” Richmond recalled. “But Nagin just ignored everything. He should have called a mandatory evacuation earlier; the governor was having to do his job.”11

  II

  To those driving around New Orleans that afternoon, the sky pale and sunless, it was clear that the business community was taking Katrina seriously. All seven of the city’s Starbucks coffeehouses closed early. The massive Wal-Mart on Tchoupitoulas Street locked its doors. Gas stations started shutting down their pumps. ATM machines were empty. Minimarkets sold out of Spam and Planters peanuts—survival snacks. The Audubon Zoo began safeguarding gorillas and bears. The aquarium exterminated its piranhas, worried that if they got loose they’d breed in the Mississippi. The Whitney Bank had not only closed, it had evacuated computers and files to Chicago. Delta Air Lines, in a wrongheaded corporate bungle, canceled all flights into or out of Louis Armstrong International Airport as of 1 P.M., leaving hundreds stranded in New Orleans (by contrast, Continental Airlines evacuated people up until the last possible minute on Sunday). Production was suspended on several film projects, including The Last Time with Michael Keaton, The Reaping with Hilary Swank, and Vampire Bats starring Lucy Lawless. The Hollywood stars and crews left town.12

  Tulane University was holding its orientation weekend, when incoming freshmen are squired around campus and Mom and Dad get to see just what a $32,000 tuition check meant. Normally, it is an exciting event for everyone. The approach of Katrina, however, forced Tulane President Scott Cowen to make a wrenching decision. Even though it wasn’t good public relations at the time, he did the right thing and officially closed the campus at 5 P.M. The school encouraged all students, parents, staff members, and faculty to leave the city for safety. Most other colleges in the vicinity—including Xavier, Loyola, and the University of New Orleans—did the same. “We closed Saturday so our people could board up and get out of town fast,” Nick Mueller, director of the National D-Day Museum, recalled. “Having lived through Camille, I knew Katrina was going to be an ordeal.”13

  Most of New Orleans’s political bigwigs, both past and present, congregated that Saturday in the Lawless Memorial Chapel at Dillard University for the funeral of Clarence Barney Jr., the longtime leader of the local Urban League. As the Associated Press reported, the funeral was a who’s who of Louisiana politicians. The Landrieu clan was there in force: Senator Mary Landrieu, Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu, and the family patriarch and former New Orleans mayor Moon Landrieu. Those in attendance couldn’t help but wonder what Ray Nagin was doing at the Dillard chapel when the poor and elderly needed to be evacuated out of the bowl. They thought, “Ray has it under control,” or else “he wouldn’t be hanging around.”14

  Hanging over the funeral, like a dark shroud, was the specter of the Big One. While eulogies paid homage to Barney’s twenty-five years as the executive director of the Urban League in Greater New Orleans, virtually everybody in attendance was distracted by the storm. Everyone knew the “bowl” analogy. Was New Orleans going to fill up? Was the Great Deluge just around the river bend? Even as Bible passages from Luke and Isaiah were being read in the chapel, mourners could hear the sound of plywood being hammered over building windows and traffic helicopters flying overhead. Amid the prayers, trepidation was the collective sentiment; Nagin gave out handshakes and hugs, seemingly in a calm and carefree mood, until he made an early exit to get back to City Hall. “In a surreal way it seemed like almost a funeral for the city, or at least an era in the city,” Jacques Morial, the brother of the former mayor, recalled. “Another interesting thing about the funeral was everybody was on edge, because something else was in the air. Usually, after a funeral service, people hang around and mingle and visit for a long time. That really wasn’t the case on that Saturday. After three hours of services, people bee-lined it out of town right afterward.”15

  During the service, a staffer came up to the pew where Lieutenant Governor Landrieu sat and whispered in his ear that Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin needed him at a City Hall meeting. “I didn’t go,” Landrieu recalled, “because I didn’t want to leave the funeral early.” After the funeral at 2:30 P.M. he immediately drove home to Octavia Street, in the Uptown neighborhood, and prepared to evacuate his five children. “My wife, Cheryl, and I had a discussion about when we should be leaving,” he recalled. “I wanted to leave soon. She didn’t want to leave, so we compromised and got up Sunday at 6:30 A.M. and drove to Baton Rouge. Dropped my kids off and then went to the EOC.”

  The Emergency Operations Center, built in 2002, featured the latest radio, computer, and Web-based communication systems for emergency management. Once Governor Blanco activated the EOC, at 7:30 A.M. Saturday, it was where state, parish, and city emergency directors met with military and FEMA officials, along with the governor’s staff and scores of others. That Saturday afternoon Mitch Landrieu went to the EOC and began monitoring the storm. He was particularly worried about a Katrina surge damaging Plaquemines and St. Bernard parishes. The high-tech “command table” was in an underground overview room, which resembled NASA’s mission control during the Apollo moon shots of the late 1960s. A large electronic map of Louisiana was on a ten-foot wall. Just studying the map while the NHC was telephoning in cyclonic data was disconcerting to Landrieu. You didn’t have to be a meteorologist to recognize that 145 mph winds blowing water up the various rivers, canals, and waterways of Louisiana was a recipe for disaster. Wisely, Landrieu, without informing the understandably busy Governor Blanco, established pre-Katrina cell phone contact with government and emergency officials in most of the coastal parishes. His message was essentially twofold: keep evacuating the residents and then let him know where the officials were going to hunker down. If Katrina hit hard, and communications vanished, at least Landrieu would know exactly where the Coast Guard, state police, and Louisiana National Guard were congregat
ed. They would be the state’s first responders. He could get frank assessments from them on where further evacuations via helicopter and boat needed to take place. “Now I’m in a bit of a difficult situation because my role in the EOC is to be passive and to pay attention and to basically just watch,” Landrieu said. “It’s Governor Blanco’s show and the governor as the commander in chief dictates what everybody is supposed to do, at the advice and consent of [Louisiana National Guard General Bennet C.] Landreneau and [Colonel Henry] Whitehorn and her cabinet secretaries and other people who are basically in charge. So basically there was no role for the lieutenant governor at EOC except educate yourself before the storm. That’s what I did.”

  City Councilman Oliver Thomas, a hulking, soft-spoken, lighthearted Creole with a face full of freckles, had also made an appearance at Barney’s funeral, but it was a brief one. With Katrina coming, he was on a mission to evacuate his boyhood stomping grounds, the Lower Ninth Ward, a tight-knit largely African-American community nestled along the Mississippi River across the St. Claude Avenue Bridge on the way to St. Bernard Parish. Growing up there in the 1960s, Thomas had the river for a backyard, whether he was sprint-racing along the levee, poling for the fattest catfish, or hunting for wild pigs behind the Florida Avenue Bridge. Because whites had dynamited the levees back in 1927, causing the Lower Ninth Ward to flood, African Americans in the two-square-mile neighborhood didn’t trust government authority to take care of them. “We had trouble with law enforcement,” Thomas recalled. “Even when we were little kids, the wrong deputy would show up and shoot over our heads and run us back just for sport.”16