The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  Money was tight in the Walker household, but the children never complained. They thanked God for every meal. At age eight, Walker started working for Aquarius Janitorial Service, mopping up dirty floors from the Shell Building on Poydras Street to Jimmy’s Bar on Willow Street. “I was always looking for a dollar,” he recalls of his youth. “I just wanted to sustain some kind of income.” When he turned thirteen, however, a near-death experience changed his life. One evening in October 1979, Walker was crunched in the back of his stepfather’s little burgundy Vega hatch-back as it cruised down General de Gaulle Boulevard near Lake Pontchartrain. Suddenly, there was a collision. On impact, Walker flew out of the car, landing on the roadway, a tire running over his limp body. Because New Orleans’s ambulance drivers were on strike, it took over two hours for medics to arrive. Walker was drifting in and out of consciousness; all he remembers about the tragedy is his mother holding his head, wailing, “Lord, don’t take my child…Lord, don’t take my child” over and over again. “They didn’t know whether I was dead or alive,” he recalled of the accident. “I felt my soul leave my body headed to some beautiful bright light.”

  Eventually an ambulance arrived and Walker was rushed to Jo Ellen Smith Hospital. His face was swollen like a giant strawberry and his teeth cracked. A medic poured peroxide over his head as if baptizing him on the run. His hair turned reddish. His sobbing mother, he remembered, kept chanting “Take me instead, Lord. Oh God, take me instead.” Desperately, he wanted to comfort her. Somehow, he found the strength to softly say, “It’s all right. I’m back.”59

  Through a demanding combination of hourly prayer, intense willpower, and physical therapy, Walker did come back, forever changed. A favorite with the young ladies and a charismatic leader of all, he had a bright New Orleans future, a wide-open canvas in which an ambitious African American with drive could perhaps help break the cycle of poverty. But he had these haunting dreams—visions, really, with Jesus Christ talking to him. It was unnerving. He felt that he had been tapped, that making money (lots of money), his old ambition, was somehow corrupt. Like many people who have had near-death experiences, he knew there was something better than being rich. He decided to become a pastor for the destitute. Hence, in 1998, he took over Noah’s Ark, hoping to give hope to AIDS patients, heroin addicts, and down-and-outers. His new pulpit was located in a small stucco building with a wooden cross on its tiny steeple. On the day he accepted leadership of the 145-member congregation, he made a sacred vow to himself: Never would he shove Jesus down people’s throats like some Elmer Gantry wannabe. He cringed at the very notion of Holy Rollerism, but by his caring, loving ways, by his direct actions, he aspired to show the lost the way out of earthly hell and into heavenly salvation. No matter who you were, no matter how broken down or unlucky you were, Walker, who called everybody “dude,” would offer you a hug.

  Although keeping Noah’s Ark open was always a financial challenge, Reverend Willie lived a charmed existence. He was madly in love with his elegant wife, Veronica, who sang mournful renditions of “I Don’t Worry Tomorrow” and “Thank You Lord” in church. Together they were raising three children in a house near Kenner, not far from the airport. It was a relatively safe suburban environment in which to raise kids. Every day, however, no matter what the weather, Reverend Willie headed into the Magnolia housing project near his church to minister to the needy. Like a door-to-door canvasser, he would wander around and check up on the dudes, particularly those living a marginal existence. If the Morrises were having a marital spat, he tried to ease the tension. If “Big Boy” was selling OxyContin for two dollars a pop to teenagers, Walker turned beat cop, confiscating the bottles and flushing the contents down the toilet. Every time he saw a young man scratching, taking on a fidgety persona, he intervened, instructing him on how to get off crack cocaine. Sometimes in Central City, however, all he could do was cry. On bad days it was a torturous ghetto that sometimes seemed too hard for love. Like when his cousin Wanda Morgan was raped in a vacant lot across from Estelle J. Wilson Funeral Home; the attackers smashed her head with a brick, causing her to bleed to death. “It was horrible,” Walker recalled. “But I didn’t give up on the neighborhood.”60 Whether you liked Reverend Willie or not, he was a fixture around South Saratoga Street, and even his detractors admitted that he “walked the walk.”

  Reverend Willie hustled around Central City at dusk on Saturday, August 27, trying to broker rides out of New Orleans for those without cars. He knew before he started that there was no way of saving everyone. The city would have to send buses, but so far, City Hall hadn’t said anything about organizing convoys to help those still left in the city. He had heard that FEMA had prepositioned buses at Camp Beauregard in Alexandria, Louisiana, ready to evacuate stranded New Orleans after the storm; true, it was only a rumor, but the mirage of such a fleet made him feel better. Reverend Willie was frustrated and frantic as night fell, with no help in sight and so much left to be done; he said prayers over and over again as an incantation against evil.61

  By then, the 263 pets from the LSPCA on Japonica Street had already reached Houston and were warm, dry, and safe in their temporary home.

  Chapter Three

  STORM VS. SHORELINE

  Day breaks through the flying wrack, over the infinite heaving of the sea, over the low land made vast with desolation. It is a spectral dawn: a wan light, like the light of a dying sun.

  —Lafcadio Hearn, Chita: A Memory of Last Island

  I

  JOSEPH CONRAD, ONE OF the greatest writers of sea tales, offered an unforgettably vivid depiction of a storm’s fury in his 1903 novel Typhoon, with headstrong Captain MacWhirr guiding his battered steamer Nan-Shan through a China Sea tropical storm against the advice of his chief mate. “It was something formidable and swift, like the sudden smashing of a vial of wrath,” wrote Conrad of the typhoon’s first wind and rain. “It seemed to explode all round the ship with an overpowering concussion and a rush of great waters, as if an immense dam had been blown up to windward. In an instant the men lost touch of each other. This is the disintegrating power of a great wind: it isolates one from one’s kind. An earthquake, a landslip, an avalanche, overtake a man incidentally, as it were—without passion. A furious gale attacks him like a personal enemy, tries to grasp his limbs, fastens upon his mind, seeks to rout his very spirit out of him.”1

  Ships usually sail around a hurricane, but inevitably, they sometimes get caught. Airplanes have more of a chance, even when the pilot, as in the case of Captain MacWhirr, chooses to take a storm head-on. At 3 A.M. on Sunday morning, a 1965-vintage WC-130 Turboprop airplane was flying from the Mississippi Gulf Coast straight into the swirling skies of Hurricane Katrina, 8,500 feet above the Gulf of Mexico. Meanwhile, the storm itself was continuing to press toward New Orleans at about 10 mph. At a distance of 300 miles, it was just over a day away. The WC-130 had taken off from Keesler Air Force Base, located near Biloxi. Home to the second-largest hospital facility in the Air Force, Keesler boasted an array of high-tech training facilities, including wide-band maintenance, ground radio, and cryptography. At any given time, the base—once host to the famous Tuskegee Airmen of World War II—employed approximately 4,700 military personnel. Most important, on the weekend of August 27–28, 2005, Keesler was the base camp of the Fifty-third Weather Reconnaissance Squadron—the “Hurricane Hunters.”

  While Navy and NASA planes also flew research missions into Katrina’s eye wall, it was the small fleet from Keesler that gathered data for the National Hurricane Center.2 Formally created in 1944, the Hurricane Hunters were charged with gathering firsthand information on tropical storms, including readings on barometric pressure, sustained wind speeds, and upper-level circulation patterns. Such information was essential in the effort to warn the American public about a storm’s fury before landfall. The dramatic flights were typically bumpy as they burst through thunderclouds, but they were safe for the propeller-driven planes and the brave individuals who s
ent back meteorological data from them.

  When the WC-130 known as Miss Piggy took off from Keesler at 2:30 A.M., Katrina was rated as a Category 3 storm, with winds of 115 mph surrounding a barometric pressure of 945 millibars (the lower the measurement, the more potent the storm’s energy). Just after four in the morning Miss Piggy was nearing the eye, having rocked and rattled its way through the coiled air of a monstrous hurricane, that was almost 500 miles in diameter. While the eye was an area of perfect calm, it was protected by a wall composed of the strongest winds in the storm. Miss Piggy, crammed with equipment, took readings as it flew. The winds tightening around the hurricane eye were clocked at 200 mph.3 The combination of low pressure and high winds made Katrina the most ferocious storm that any of the sixteen crewmen onboard had ever experienced. “We had no idea,” admitted Michael Kelly, lead scientist of Miss Piggy, “how devastating it was going to be.”4

  Moreover, with a barometric pressure reading of 915 mb, Katrina was one of the most powerful storms ever recorded in U.S. history. It had joined the ranks of the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 in the Florida Keys (winds nearly 200 mph, pressure 892 mb), 1969’s Hurricane Camille in Mississippi (winds nearly 190 mph, pressure 909 mb), and 1992’s Hurricane Andrew in Dade County, Florida (winds at 165 mph, 922 mb). Since hurricane records were first kept in 1851, those three were the only Category 5 hurricanes known to have hit the United States.5 A number of Category 4 hurricanes had almost reached 5 status: New Orleans (1915), Florida Keys (1919), Miami–Pensacola, Florida (1926), Lake Okeechobee(1928), Donna (1960), and Carla (1961).6 Ernest Hemingway noted the ravages of the Labor Day 1935 storm firsthand and wrote, “Indian Key absolutely swept clean, not a blade of grass, and over the high center of it were scattered live conchs that came in with the sea, craw fish, and dead morays. The whole bottom of the sea blew up over it.”7

  A nonmeteorological indicator of the magnitude of a hurricane was the death toll. The U.S. historical winner in this grisly contest was the Great Galveston Hurricane of September 8–9, 1900. It was a Category 4 hurricane, with 140 mph winds, 9 inches of rain, and a 16-foot storm surge. Galveston, then Texas’s largest city, was decimated even though the Gulf community had constructed a 17-foot-high flood wall. Somewhere between 8,000 and 12,000 people died in the Storm, as it became known. Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, rushed to the Gulf South to nurse the maimed. Stories abounded about burials at sea and mass cremations in the Great Galveston Hurricane, which originated near the Cape Verde Islands off Africa. Nobody knew who or what to blame. The impact of the hurricane was gruesome, as has been related in such fine narratives as Erik Larson’s Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History (1999) and Isaac Cline’s Storms, Floods and Sunshine (1945). As late as 2005, deadly stories of the Storm were still told in communities around Galveston Bay. Fifteen nuns and one hundred children at the Catholic Orphanage Asylum, for example, had all drowned. At St. Mary’s Infirmary, ninety-two patients perished when the entire building crumbled like a house of cards. The death and devastation in Galveston, in fact, was so extensive that Texans largely abandoned the Gulf South maritime hub, moving to higher ground in the then small city of Houston located fifty-one miles from the sea.

  No one knows precisely how a storm graduates from a tropical depression (a localized decrease in the barometric pressure) to a tropical storm (an unleashing of the energy drawn toward the depression) and then on to an outright hurricane. A hurricane is a unique phenomenon in nature, a veritable machine for drawing energy out of warm tropical waters and forcing it into the atmosphere, by way of circling winds. The warmer the ocean waters, the more powerful the hurricane can become, leading many observers to conclude that the rash of major hurricanes seen in the Caribbean in the decade after 1995 must have had some relation to global warming. As Herman Melville had perceptively written in Moby-Dick, “warmest climes nurse the cruelest fangs.”8 The temperature in the world’s oceans did indeed increase by a full degree F in the 1990s, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The evidence suggests that this increase is due to global warming—the process by which man-made pollutants diminish the upper atmosphere’s ability to filter sunlight. At the time of Katrina, according to Time magazine, the water in the Gulf of Mexico was actually 5 degrees F higher than usual, which triggered high levels of rainfall and in effect made the Gulf into “a veritable hurricane refueling station.”9 Many scientists at the time of Katrina were unconvinced that global warming had anything to do with the increased frequency and ferocity of hurricanes. But global warming—if the theory was true—would undoubtedly make bad hurricanes worse.

  Professor William Gray, one of the most influential storm trackers in recent times, contends that several factors were responsible for the glut of storms in the last decade. Gray heads the Tropical Meteorology Project at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. While it may seem incongruous for a world-renowned hurricane expert to be hidden away in the Rocky Mountains, Gray, a specialist in the Pacific and Indian oceans, might be smart to live ten thousand feet above sea level and far from any beach. In any case, he had gained widespread attention with the accuracy of the annual forecasts he issued, with the help of his associate Philip Klotzbach and other team members. For 2005, Gray projected that there would be twenty named storms, twice the average. That estimate, which seemed so extravagant before the season began, was ultimately short: there were thirty named storms in 2005. Furthermore, Gray predicted that six major hurricanes would develop in the Atlantic, three times the average (there were indeed six)10 and said that there was a 77 percent chance that one would strike the United States.11

  According to Gray, the profusion of storms was related to cyclical factors, including rainfall rates in Africa and the absence of a warming trend, such as an El Niño prevailing wind, in addition to the unusually warm temperatures of the Atlantic Ocean, and the lower surface pressures. These factors converged, as they had in past centuries, to produce the unusual frequency of storms. “Between 1995 and 2003, we had thirty-two major Atlantic Basin hurricanes and of those thirty-two, only three hit the U.S.,” Gray explained in an interview. “The long-term average is about one in three. So, we were very lucky then. Now, in the last two years, that hasn’t been the case. We’ve tended to have this ridge off the U.S. coast that has driven a lot of these storms westward until they recurved in the longitude of the U.S.”12 This was precisely the path that Katrina was taking, putting it on a collision course with New Orleans.

  Soon after Miss Piggy relayed its eye-wall data, including Katrina’s barometric pressure reading of only 915 mb, another Hurricane Hunter plane broke through to the eye and registered an even lower reading: 902 mb.13 That was the fourth-lowest atmospheric pressure ever recorded in an Atlantic storm. Katrina had the potential to grow into something even more fearsome than 1969’s Camille, which was still the stuff of legend along the Mississippi-Alabama coast. But no one could imagine just what that might mean, in actuality. Katrina was a Category 5 storm at dawn on Sunday, but there were some signs that it would not be able to sustain its force for long. “We cheered each millibar of weakening,” the Hurricane Hunters later posted on their Web site, “but it was with heavy hearts, because we knew it was still going to be very terrible. The day before Katrina struck, our crews were flying over the ‘birdfoot,’ where the Mississippi River extends into the Gulf of Mexico. With the towering anvil clouds of Katrina’s outflow menacing in the background the region looked so vulnerable.”14

  Any hurricane acts like a vacuum as it drives across the ocean, literally pulling water up into its grasp. When the hurricane hits land, all that vacuumed-up water is let loose, in a great wave known as the storm surge. In the case of Katrina, several factors combined to make it a practically perfect water vacuum: it had an irresistibly low-pressure core, it was huge, and it was flowing over the unusually warm water present in the Gulf of Mexico during the last week of August. Playing off the ti
tle of Sebastian Junger’s nonfiction thriller, Katrina was, in popular parlance, another Perfect Storm. Meteorologists all over America, on radio and TV, started using that tag, a euphemism for Big Disaster Soon to Come. Whatever it was, there was no way to stop it.

  II

  Most people along the Gulf basin, especially those who remembered Camille, knew that the U.S. government couldn’t stop a hurricane. They had tried to between 1961 and 1983 by seeding clouds with silver iodide crystals as part of Project Storm Fury. But FEMA could help communities recover from one. And they were aware that some of the worst hurricane damage came from the surge, not the wind. A hurricane packing Katrina’s punch could flood out any edifice within a mile or more of the beachfront. People with the Gulf of Mexico as a front yard lived with one sobering certainty: a hurricane would be kicking on their door someday soon. Very soon. No magical silver iodide crystals, like fairy dust, could scare the brute away. In fact, one reason the Gulf Coast had developed at a slower pace than other coastal areas in America was that it was considered too hurricane-prone to support primary residences. Second homes were another matter. During most of the twentieth century, wealthy and sporting Southerners built cottages along the coast, most on stilts, assuming that if a storm wiped a beach house away, it wouldn’t be a great tragedy (if no one was home at the time, of course).

  In the 1970s—a time when hurricane activity was at a cyclical low—development of permanent homes accelerated. In fact, the Mississippi Gulf Coast (or Redneck Riviera, as it was popularly called) became highly urbanized from one end to the other. “For the Coast, these are the best of times,” wrote Philip D. Hearn in Hurricane Camille: Monster Storm of the Gulf Coast in early 2005. “New U.S. census figures show that nearly 90,000 people, pursuing warm climate, job opportunities, and southern hospitality, moved into Mississippi’s three coastal counties and three adjacent communities immediately north between 1995 and 2000.”