The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  All over the United States, home owners were drawn to property near open water. Between 1980 and 2003, in fact, America’s coastal population increased by 28 percent.15 And in keeping with that trend, the scenic Mississippi coast was too tempting to bypass. Given the harsh potential for hurricane damage, however, insurance companies that were writing coverage there couldn’t handle the risk of storms and of subsequent flooding. This probably ought to have sent a message that the coastline was simply too dangerous for permanent development. At some point, risk of natural disaster should be a consideration—and insurance companies are in a good position to determine just where that point lies. Apparently, though, the idea that people can’t live wherever they want seemed restrictive and antithetical to American liberties and, so, starting in 1968, the federal government offered policies for those in high-risk areas. That invited the development boom along the coast. Even then, many residents didn’t think ahead—and didn’t take out flood coverage. Many poorer Hurricane Belt residents simply couldn’t afford any home insurance. They had no choice but to accept the woeful old line: “Nothing, baby, is guaranteed.” At any rate, by Sunday, August 28, it was too late to make long-term provisions. It was practically too late for anything except to quickly pack the car and flee. And if you didn’t happen to have a car, then in most communities, you were in a very bad way.

  As those who were still left along the Alabama-Mississippi-Louisiana coast on Sunday morning woke up, they heard the terrifying news from the NHC: Katrina had grown into a Category 5 storm. Incredibly, Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi had yet to declare a mandatory evacuation. Governor Bob Riley of Alabama, which was farther east of the anticipated storm’s track, was also biding his time. They may have been waiting to see where the storm would track, but they already knew it was coming and that should have spurred them to firmer action. For those stranded in New Orleans with no means of escape, the Superdome, which Mayor Nagin deemed a “shelter of last resort,” opened at 8 A.M. Some nine hundred Louisiana National Guardsmen were on duty there, and no one passed through the doors without a weapons search by the Guard. That slowed the process and within an hour, a long line snaked around the huge stadium, as if the New Orleans Saints were playing the Atlanta Falcons and only one door allowed admittance as kickoff approached. “Only a fool would have waited in such a line,” longtime resident Terry Jenson recalled. “And I was one of them.”16

  As the predominant shelter the city, the Superdome was not enough. Back during Hurricane Georges in 1998, Mayor Marc Morial had also opened a shelter of last resort in New Orleans East on the third floor of the old Dillard’s department store. Morial was worried about the car-less in NOE—of whom there were many. They had an above-sea-level place to go. Making it downtown to the Superdome without transportation, he decided, was unrealistic. But under Nagin, the car-less were left stranded in NOE, as seemingly undisturbed as death. “He screwed up real bad,” Morial later said. “What else can you say?”17

  Reverend Willie Walker was on his way into his church, Noah’s Ark, in Central City early Sunday morning. Every week, on his way into town from his house in suburban Kenner, he picked up a parishioner named Diane Johnson at her home on Tricou (pronounced “Tree-cue”) Street in the Lower Ninth Ward. Johnson was not a well woman, suffering with sickle-cell anemia, a genetic disease that caused the body to be starved for oxygen. She had a husband to take care of and three grown children to monitor, one of whom was in prison. Cognizant that there was no cure for adults with sickle-cell anemia, Johnson accepted the fact that she would not live forever, or anything like it. Reverend Willie’s preaching was the best kind of medicine for her. That and a gnarled ancient oak tree across the street. “My favorite thing to do,” she said, “is sit on my porch and look at that beautiful tree.” In the car with Reverend Walker on the way to Noah’s Ark, Johnson could not engage in her usual gossip about the superettes and washaterias of the Lower Ninth. With Katrina nearing the Louisiana coastline, Reverend Walker, refusing small talk, pleaded with Johnson to evacuate her low-lying home on Tricou Street. “Over and over again,” she recalled, “he kept telling me not to stay. Oh, he wouldn’t stop. He offered to buy me a motel room or he would find me a hospital that would take me in. But I said, ‘No, no, no.’”18

  At 10 A.M., Advisory 23 on Katrina confirmed that “reports from an Air Force Hurricane Hunter aircraft indicate that the maximum sustained winds have increased to near 175 m.p.h…. With higher gusts. Katrina isa potentially catastrophic Category Five hurricane.” Moving at 12 mph, the storm was now 225 miles from reaching shore. That put landfall within twenty-four hours. Most ominous of all was the amount of water that Katrina was predicted to bring along, according to this advisory: “Coastal storm surge flooding of 18 to 22 feet above normal tide levels…locally as high as 28 feet along with large and dangerous battering waves…can be expected near and to the east of where the center makes landfall.”19

  For those who understood anything about meteorology, advisories such as this had calamitous implications. Few people in the general population, however, could visualize 175 mph winds, and fewer still knew what barometric pressure was. Many just assumed that staying indoors—“riding out the storm,” to use the popular metaphor—would be enough to keep them safe. And so, for all of the warnings issued by the NHC, New Orleans still seemed to be lagging in its response to Katrina on Sunday morning. At 10:11 A.M., a warning far stronger than even Advisory 23 was sent to media outlets and government officials. It seemed to slap the sleepy city awake and give it a horrible glimpse of the future. There was very little science in it, only savage imagery like some “white paper” kin of Dante’s Inferno:

  DEVASTATING DAMAGE EXPECTED….

  HURRICANE KATRINA…A MOST POWERFUL HURRICANE WITH UNPRECEDENTED STRENGTH…RIVALING THE INTENSITY OF HURRICANE CAMILLE OF 1969. MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS…PERHAPS LONGER. AT LEAST ONE HALF OF WELL-CONSTRUCTED HOMES WILL HAVE ROOF AND WALL FAILURE. ALL GABLED ROOFS WILL FAIL…LEAVING THOSE HOMES SEVERELY DAMAGED OR DESTROYED.

  THE MAJORITY OF INDUSTRIAL BUILDINGS WILL BECOME NON FUNCTIONAL. PARTIAL TO COMPLETE WALL AND ROOF FAILURE IS EXPECTED. ALL WOOD FRAMED LOW RISING APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL BE DESTROYED. CONCRETE BLOCK LOW RISE APARTMENTS WILL SUSTAIN MAJOR DAMAGE…INCLUDING SOME WALL AND ROOF FAILURE.

  HIGH RISE OFFICE AND APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL SWAY DANGEROUSLY…A FEW TO THE POINT OF TOTAL COLLAPSE. ALL WINDOWS WILL BLOW OUT.

  AIRBORNE DEBRIS WILL BE WIDESPREAD…AND MAY INCLUDE HEAVY ITEMS SUCH AS HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCES AND EVEN LIGHT VEHICLES. SPORT UTILITY VEHICLES AND LIGHT TRUCKS WILL BE MOVED. THE BLOWN DEBRIS WILL CREATE ADDITIONAL DESTRUCTION. PERSONS…PETS…AND LIVE-STOCK EXPOSED TO THE WINDS WILL FACE CERTAIN DEATH IF STRUCK.

  POWER OUTAGES WILL LAST FOR WEEKS…AS MOST POWER POLES WILL BE DOWN AND TRANSFORMERS DESTROYED. WATER SHORTAGES WILL MAKE HUMAN SUFFERING INCREDIBLE BY MODERN STANDARDS.

  THE VAST MAJORITY OF NATIVE TREES WILL BE SNAPPED OR UPROOTED. ONLY THE HEARTIEST WILL REMAIN STANDING…BUT BE TOTALLY DEFOLIATED. FEW CROPS WILL REMAIN. LIVESTOCK LEFT EXPOSED TO THE WINDS WILL BE KILLED.

  AN INLAND HURRICANE WIND WARNING IS ISSUED WHEN SUSTAINED WINDS NEAR HURRICANE FORCE…OR FREQUENT GUSTS AT OR ABOVE HURRICANE FORCE…ARE CERTAIN WITHIN THE NEXT 12 TO 24 HOURS.

  ONCE TROPICAL STORM AND HURRICANE FORCE WINDS ONSET…DO NOT VENTURE OUTSIDE!20

  Such alarmist passion just didn’t enter into weather bulletins. At least, it never did before. Katrina was clearly a beast of a different stripe. Brian Williams, the anchor of NBC’s Nightly News, recalled the confusion that the advisory caused at his network. “A weather bulletin arrived on my Blackberry,” he wrote about a week after the storm, referring to the 10:11 advisory, “along with a strong caveat from our New York producers. The wording and contents were so incendiary that our folks were concerned that it wasn’t real…either a bogus dispatch or a rogue piece of text. I filed a live report by phone for Nightly News (after an exchange with
New York about the contents of the bulletin) and very cautiously couched the information. Later, we learned it was real, every word of it.”21

  The advisory had been composed by meteorologist Robert Ricks, a forecaster at the NWS office in Slidell, Louisiana. He was the Paul Revere of Hurricane Katrina. For his wording, he relied on NWS’s collection of clarified phrases for hurricane bulletins, none of which had ever been used before.22 But Ricks, who had grown up in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward, determined that the time was right to break with 135 years of NWS techno-jargon, and create an apocalyptic picture that anyone could understand. “I happened to be on the shift,” Ricks told Williams a couple of weeks later about his foreboding bulletin. “I happened to pull the trigger. It just happened to be me that day…. I would much rather have been wrong in this one. I would much rather be taking the heat for crying wolf.”23 In any case, his sense of urgency succeeded in putting a scare, a very necessary scare, into the hopeful population of the Gulf Coast.

  Following on the heels of the NWS bulletin, Professor Ivor Van Heerden, director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, also went public with a dire warning. The December 26, 2004, Indian Ocean tsunami, which devastated vast areas of South and Southeast Asia, was very much on the minds of most Gulf Coast residents, and Van Heerden seized upon the stark analogy. “This has the potential to be as disastrous as the Asian Tsunami,” Van Heerden advised. “Tens of thousands of people could lose their lives. We could witness total destruction of New Orleans as we know it.”24 Analyzing data with the same computer model used for the Hurricane Pam exercise, the LSU Hurricane Center raised the ugly specter of mass flooding, predicting that the storm surge could reach 16 feet, swelling the Mississippi River–Gulf Outlet and topping levees in Chalmette and New Orleans East. As reported in the Times-Picayune, the computer model also suggested that terrible flooding could occur in the Ninth Ward, Mid-City, and Kenner. The north shore of Lake Pontchartrain—the area below I-12—could also be victimized by storm surges, putting such towns as Slidell, Madisonville, Lacombe, and Mandeville at serious risk.25

  While New Orleans was poised for a direct hit from Katrina, the coast in Mississippi was drawn into the picture more and more as the weekend progressed and the storm was seen to be curving to the northeast.

  The Mississippi Gulf Coast had been settled at the same time as New Orleans. In fact, Biloxi (pronounced “B-luxi” by locals) was the original supply post for Sieur de Bienville and his contemporaries, making it the oldest city in the region. Biloxi was located in Harrison County, which formed the middle of the Mississippi coast. It was near the end of a ten-mile-long peninsula running parallel to the mainland. Both the city and nearby Keesler Air Force Base lay between the Gulf and Biloxi Bay. Not surprisingly, Biloxi, with its salubrious climate, was a busy fishing port throughout the centuries. The sight of shrimpers bringing in their fresh catch was as commonplace as that of cornhusking in Iowa or Nebraska. On the ocean, not far from the spot where the peninsula splits away from the mainland, lay Gulfport, Biloxi’s twin city. Both became major gambling centers after the state legalized dockside casinos in 1990, and before long glitzy Las Vegas–style emporiums were built along the 80-mile coastal region, a string of high-voltage neon lights on a pseudo-Nevada strip called “Casino Row.” The casinos had become the economic engine for Harrison County. Only a few days before Katrina made landfall, in fact, Biloxi was preparing to open a new Hard Rock Café Casino.

  To the east was Jackson County, home to Pascagoula, which had a coastline developed around palm-tree-lined bays replete with fishing fleets, golf courses, amusement parks, boutiques, and restaurants. Redeveloped from the rubble left by Hurricane Camille, the coast was steadily transformed into a tourist and retirement region. On the Fourth of July, Confederate flags were often flown along the beach, amplifying the area’s Dixieland reputation.

  The western section of the Mississippi Coast was occupied by Hancock County, which had its own claim to the picturesque St. Louis Bay. The name of the town on its western shore was inverted: Bay St. Louis. Long used as a retreat for rich families from New Orleans, Bay St. Louis had the look of a cozy New England fishing town, with clapboard houses, a long pier, and vintage storefronts in the streets nearest the bay. During the last third of the twentieth century, Bay St. Louis grew into a suburb of New Orleans, with commuters traveling fifty-one miles to work from fishing camps, tract houses, old-style mansions, and town houses. Only one gambling hall was in Bay St. Louis, Casino Magic; and on any given night, you could see the Neville Brothers, Jerry Lee Lewis, Don Rickles, or other top-tier performers in its theater. Bay St. Louis and other towns in Hancock County had also become home to several major plants associated with the aerospace industry, including the Stennis Space Center, where NASA tested shuttle engines.

  On the eastern shore of St. Louis Bay was the village of Pass Christian. Although connected to Bay St. Louis by a bridge taking State Route 90 across the bay, Pass Christian was a world away, in large part because it was just beyond the range for commuters to New Orleans. As a result, it had retained an upper-class aura, with many substantial houses and a settled atmosphere.

  The entire Mississippi Coast, from Bay St. Louis in the west to Pascagoula in the east, was scored by I-10, constructed about five miles from the beach. The six-lane highway that went from Jacksonville, Florida, to Santa Monica, California, was also a dividing line, separating the old-money sophistication and new economic prosperity of the Gulf Coast from the underdeveloped, rural atmosphere of much of the rest of Mississippi, where cotton, soybeans, and catfish farms still reigned economically supreme. That was where the Bible Belt took over, fanning out to encompass the so-called Deep South. The Gulf Coast, however, felt like an extension of New Orleans (and Louisiana) and, historically, that was how it developed. Most noticeably, the coastline population was heavily Roman Catholic, attending nineteenth-century cathedrals Our Lady of the Gulf Catholic Church in Bay St. Louis and Blessed Virgin Mary Cathedral in Biloxi, both known for their architectural dignity. North of I-10, however, the Catholic influence was scant. And of course, the threat of storms was most dire in the area south of the interstate, along that sandy urban sprawl of strip malls, souvenir shops, and outlet stores. But the recalcitrant settlers of the developing Mississippi Gulf Coast were not the first to ignore nature’s threat. “The ancient Mayans learned by experience to build their cities inland, away from the reaches of hurricanes and their storm surges,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Kerry Emanuel wrote in Divine Winds, “yet despite centuries of hurricane disasters, our society continues to disregard collective experience and invite future tragedy by building more and more structures in surge-prone coastal regions. Short memory is usually cited as the main reason for this irrational behavior; after all, very few of those at risk have experienced a major hurricane.”26

  That Sunday afternoon, many Mississippians could be seen standing quietly on the beach, staring out into the Gulf of Mexico. There were no dolphins at play. The noisy seagulls were all gone. Their annoying aack…aack was not heard and was suddenly missed. The silence from the sky was ominous. These residents would soon join the seagulls in flight to the north, somewhere up around Tupelo or Meridian. The sea was the mysterious natural god in one’s life; you swam in its cooling waters, foraged food out of its abundant reefs, and meditated during its sunrises and sunsets. For children it was a playground, for adults it was a place to get away from the modern rat race. Saltwater breezes, coupled with the surging surf, were often powerful tonics, agents of the lulling and pleasant kind. But pre-Katrina beach lovers who thought a Category 5 hurricane was aiming straight at them weren’t admiring the cloud formations or acrobatic terns or salty air. As survivors of Camille and inheritors of its legacy, they knew, instinctively, that their lives were about to change dramatically. Come dawn, some of their fellow beachfront colonists, those too sick or stubborn to flee, would be dead. All the post-Camille casino building would be wa
shed away. From then on, everything along the Mississippi Gulf Coast would be PK (pre-Katrina) or AK (after-Katrina). The sea had once again lost its mystery and magnetic allure…all that was left was dread of the coming storm. When these residents turned their back on the Gulf of Mexico, they were closing all the previous chapters in their lives for a strange new world. Their comfort zone was about to vanish. Their communities were about to be obliterated. Their self-reliance was about to be tested. “I just came down to see what it’s like before,” thirty-four-year-old Joe Moffett of Gulfport said, “because I know what it’s going to look like after.”27 That’s what he thought.

  III

  One Gulf Coast entrepreneur who decided to evacuate at the last minute was Greg Iverson, owner of the Fire Dog Saloon in Bay St. Louis. A native of Minnesota, the fifty-six-year-old Iverson ran a bar that was open—legally—around the clock. It was created around a firehouse motif, its walls adorned with vintage nozzles, fire hydrants, and weatherproof gear. Dalmatian posters and gimcracks were everywhere. The Fire Dog’s centerpiece was a pair of pool tables. Nearby was a jukebox heavy on 1970s classic rock from groups like the Grateful Dead and The Band. Bleu cheeseburgers and fried pickles were the house specialties. Late at night dealers and croupiers from the nearby Casino Magic would file in, eager for a nightcap after their shift. “We catered a lot to the gambling industry,” Iverson explained. “And tried to be a town hub.”28

  On Saturday evening at six Iverson had decided to close the bar. The weather forecast looked bleak. He told his waitresses and bartenders to board up the saloon and then leave town. He was, after all, in the hospitality (not the mortuary) business. But Iverson didn’t take his own advice. Instead, he went to Henderson Point, an exposed sliver of land jutting into the Gulf, to sleep in his own luxurious condo. In 1969 Hurricane Camille had virtually wiped out the scenic Henderson Point village. Iverson wanted to forget that hard historical fact. “But at five in the morning a friend called. ‘Get up and get out of there,’ he said,” Iverson recalled. “I said ‘What?’ I actually rolled back to sleep! He called me back a half an hour later and said, ‘I’m not kidding, it’s a Category 5.’ So Sue Belchner, my business partner, and I leapt up, turned on the TV, and holy cow! We started loading the car.”29