The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  On the way out of Bay St. Louis, Iverson and Belchner stopped by the Fire Dog to pick up a few files and tell the manager, Nick Breazeale, he needed to evacuate. A stubborn, recalcitrant Gulf Coaster, Breazeale was, in some warped way, looking forward to the hurricane. High winds offered a change of pace. He was something of a beloved character around the bay, a native New Orleanian who had spent four years in the Navy during the 1960s. Short and stocky with blond hair turned gray, he was as much a fixture at the bar as the statues of Dalmatian dogs. For fifteen years he had owned Nick’s Catfish House, a popular seafood eatery on Route 90, and had developed a local reputation as a good cook. Refusing to evacuate the coast for Katrina, Breazeale had decided to hole up on a bed in the Fire Dog’s back business office. Whether the storm was a Category 2 or 5 didn’t interest him in the least. He believed in the structural integrity of the concrete building, which had survived not only Hurricane Camille, but gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, who frequented the joint whenever he was in the area, drinking Chivas Regal and using the alias “Ray.” In addition, the Fire Dog was situated twenty-five feet above sea level. That seemed high enough for Breazeale, who prided himself in knowing the Gulf of Mexico like the back of his hand.30

  Just as Breazeale was settling in, however, happy to both witness Katrina and get some rest, Iverson came barging into the bar. “Nick,” he shouted, pointing his finger only inches from Breazeale’s face. “Get out of Bay St. Louis! Now! You’re gonna die in this one!” Nick merely scoffed. Clearly his Minnesotan boss was overreacting, a panicky “snowbird” unaccustomed to Mississippi’s coastal ways. With a burst of macho pride, Nick said, “I’m staying right here.” As Iverson walked out the front door around 8 P.M. preparing to drive all night to Florida (he ended up in Columbus, Georgia), his parting words were: “Nick, this one’s gonna kill you, I’m telling ya.” Robert Ricks’s terrifying NWS warning was being read on the radio as Iverson drove out of town. He knew evacuation was the right thing.

  Like Laura Maloney of the LSPCA, many Mississippians truly worried about evacuating the dogs and cats of the Gulf Coast as Katrina approached. One of them was veterinarian Dr. Charlie West. He was an amiable man, thirty-eight years old, with darting eyes and a pronounced jaw. West had grown up in Waveland in the midst of a five-acre menagerie of goats, ducks, geese, horses, dogs, and cats. His parents were, quite simply, animal lovers. “I learned to get along with animals,” he said, “better than people.” In the Deep South, animal rights often weren’t given much credence. Groups like PETA or the SPCA were laughed at in most conservative Gulf Coast communities, their employees viewed as New Orleans lefties. Although he himself was a conservative, that was not the case with Dr. West. An advocate of spay-neuter programs in Hancock County, he worked closely with the Friends of the Animals shelter and the Humane Society. But his primary business concern was running Pethaven Veterinary Hospital in Bay St. Louis. “We were located a couple of miles from the coast,” West recalled, “but I still put my kennels high off the ground, fearful of flooding if another Camille ever came around.”31

  On the weekend before Katrina, Dr. West evacuated most of the animals from his clinic. Meanwhile, he had rented three rooms at the Ramada Inn in Diamondhead, on the north side of I-10, for his wife, two kids, and their cats, Big Orange Kitty and Lucy. He also had his Jack Russell terrier with him. A few of his other pets, however, including a bloodhound (Flash), a springer spaniel (Brandy), and a gray tabby (Puss), were left in the clinic. They weren’t alone. A basset hound (Marty) whose owner was in Utah and a little black kitten West had adopted August 27, the Saturday before Katrina, were also left in the clinic. In addition, one of his employees boarded her two dogs at Pethaven, believing it the safest place for them.

  IV

  Only moments before the NWS Advisory 23 was released on Sunday morning, Mayor C. Ray Nagin broke with a long tradition. At 10 A.M., he issued orders for the first mandatory evacuation in the history of the city of New Orleans. “I wish I had better news,” he said, “but we’re facing the storm most of us have feared. This is very serious. This is going to be an unprecedented event…. I want to emphasize, the first choice of everycitizen should be to leave the city.” The mayor advised those who couldn’t find a way out of New Orleans to make their way to the Superdome. Regional Transit Authority (RTA) buses would be picking people up at twelve locations, he said, to take them to the shelter. He asked citizens to check on their relatives and neighbors, in advance of the crisis. “This is an opportunity,” he said, “for us to come together in a way we’ve never done before.”32 Governor Kathleen Blanco and other state government officials were also at the press conference. Blanco even relayed a message from President Bush, expressing his concern about the storm and his hope that the mandatory evacuation order would be heeded. While she didn’t mention it at the news conference, she had also “told President Bush we would need all the help we could get.”33

  As Katrina grew in fury, the sixty-two-year-old Governor Blanco looked ashen-faced, even though she had applied circles of rouge to her cheeks. A native of Coteau in the state’s Cajun country, Blanco was not a typical Louisiana politician. Plump and schoolmarmish, with a sad hangdog cast to her face, Blanco became known equally for her bedrock decency and fairly charmless courtesy. She was also shrewd. Whatever Blanco was, however, she was a far cry from the populist swagger of roguish former governors such as Huey P. Long and Edwin Edwards. She always dressed impeccably, often with a double strand of pearls draped around her neck and a Louisiana state seal pin on her lapel. A teacher in her younger days, she had quit the education profession to raise six children. After working as a door-to-door canvasser in a 1983 political campaign, she decided to run for the state legislature and won. She later served two terms as lieutenant governor, becoming known for her successful effort to increase Louisiana’s tourist trade. On the campaign trail she was tireless. Her fast-talking, jovial husband, Raymond, was her political guru; he was known throughout Louisiana as “Coach,” because he used to be head of the football team at the University of Louisiana–Lafayette. His mere presence in the governor’s mansion, constructed by Huey Long during the Great Depression, added an air of old-time politics to everything his wife did. He was a good ole boy who got business done with a nod and a wink. Both were gun enthusiasts. They liked boating in swamps. She was the queen bee and Raymond was her kingfish. With Kathleen Blanco, each appearance was less a matter of working the crowd than of pausing with each individual for an extra-long couple of seconds, always making eye contact. As it turned out, she needed every one of those voters when she decided to run for governor in 2003.

  Running against Piyush “Bobby” Jindal, a personable man of South Asian descent, Blanco counted on her own Cajun districts in the south and west of the state. Jindal, a former health policy advisor to the Bush administration, figured to run strong in his native Baton Rouge and in suburban precincts all over the state. The city that would swing the election was New Orleans, and it was there that Blanco received a rude shock: during the campaign Mayor Nagin, a fellow Democrat, endorsed her opponent, the Republican Bobby Jindal.34 It was the beginning of a political feud between Blanco and Nagin that would have a profound effect on the lack of city-state coordination during Katrina. When asked on March 15, 2006–more than six months after Katrina—whether he even reconsidered the controversial endorsement, Nagin remained unflinching. “No,” he said. “The only thing I regret is he didn’t win.”35

  On election day, to the surprise of the Baton Rouge Advocate, Blanco won New Orleans by a wide margin, and managed a 52–48 percent victory over Jindal, who was gracious in defeat.36 Blanco became Louisiana’s first female governor and, perhaps even more significantly, one of the few Democrats to hold a governorship in the South. “People underestimate her as this nice grandmother figure,” Troy Herbert, a Democratic state assemblyman from Jeanerette, said. “But she can be very tough.”37 Although Blanco was an uninspired speaker, her first year as gover
nor was surprisingly productive. She spearheaded efforts to attract new businesses to Louisiana and attacked widespread political corruption. Nobody could question her integrity: she was a profoundly honest grandmother of seven.38 But nobody ever accused her of being a decisive executive, either. As Katrina neared, tasks such as immediately mobilizing Louisiana’s National Guard in staging areas in Gonzales or Covington seemed to elude her. Unfortunately, it was her deficiencies, not her strengths, that seemed to describe her public persona on Sunday. As the Financial Times later noted, the listless Blanco looked “more like a woman at a funeral than a pillar of support.”39

  By the time Nagin and Blanco announced the “mandatory” evacuation, it was unfortunately not enforceable. Approximately one-fifth of New Orleans’s 460,000 residents were still in the city, and a similar proportion were left in each of the surrounding parishes (approximately 900,000 people lived in these suburbs). Orleans Parish, home to the city of New Orleans, was the last of them to call for a mandatory evacuation. Nobody at City Hall, however, knew what “mandatory” meant. Certainly the New Orleans Police Department wasn’t in a position to arrest all those who disobeyed the directive. As a matter of fact, dozens of officers, ignoring the police oath, had already taken flight, in a serious dereliction of duty. Nor did the city offer much in the way of assistance to those who had no way to evacuate. But, at long last, Mayor Nagin had finally called for a mandatory evacuation, lawsuits be damned.

  V

  At 11:30 A.M. on Sunday, Reverend Willie was in the pulpit at Noah’s Ark, Diane Johnson hanging on to his every word. There was a tinge of bitterness in his voice as he delivered his sermon. He was not bitter that only about twenty-five or thirty people attended the service. On the contrary, he was angry that anyone at all was left to attend church in New Orleans that morning. He thought about Job 37:9 (“Out of the south cometh the whirlwind”). Immediately after the service, he renewed his campaign to move his parishioners and their neighbors to safety. A handful were able to get car rides out of town. For the rest, Reverend Willie started looking for buses. What he soon learned angered him to no end. The plan to bus the needy to safety was essentially a ruse. “My goal was to get folks in the city and school buses that I thought were ferrying everybody out of town,” Walker recalled. “But don’t get me started, dude. When I got down to Magnolia, there were no buses in sight. Where are the RTA and school buses? I kept asking. Why are they telling folks the Superdome was a shelter of last resort, instead of shipping them out of town? The answer I got from City Hall folks was that Nagin had bigger things to worry about. Dude, what could be bigger than people?”40 There were buses to at least take the poor to the Superdome.

  When his sermon ended and the parishoners left, Reverend Willie Walker, with Diane Johnson riding her Pronto at his side, froze on the sidewalk. The sparrows that nested near Noah’s Ark Missionary Baptist Church were chattering and hopping about erratically, sensing the approaching atmospheric convulsion. They were fear-crazed harbingers of doom. They fluttered on the mausoleums in Lafayette Cemetery #2, making a panicky racket. An empty feeling swept over Reverend Willie. He wanted to head home to Kenner, where his wife and children were anxiously waiting. First, however, he took Diane Johnson back to Tricou Street, giving her all of the water and food that he had purchased that morning at Winn-Dixie. It was a strange good-bye. He told her that he would pray for her throughout the storm. His conscience, however, nagged at him, making him wish he had done more. At home, he worked the telephones, trying to find out why buses were deemed inoperable and how Mayor Nagin could be so cavalier about it. He received the same answer on all fronts, essentially “get lost.”

  As Katrina approached, the RTA had approximately 360 buses available. As bloggers on nola.com have since noted, each could hold up to sixty people. Therefore, RTA’s buses could have ferried almost 22,000 people out of New Orleans on each trip. And that does not even count school buses and contracted private buses, which also might have been pulled into evacuation service. The RTA buses were supposed to pick up poor and elderly residents at a dozen checkpoints in order to bring them to safety. But the service was first erratic and by midafternoon practically nonexistent—a horrific oversight on the part of City Hall. “Though more than 100,000 residents had no way to get out of the city on their own, New Orleans had no real evacuation plan,” Evan Thomas of Newsweek concluded, “save to tell people to go to the Superdome and wait for buses.”41 Mayor Nagin, in a ridiculous counter to Thomas’s charge, conjured up the lamest retort imaginable. “Get people to higher ground and have the feds and the state airlift supplies to them,” Nagin told the Wall Street Journal, “that was the plan, man.”42

  Why not bus people out of the bowl? Where did the breakdown occur? Some people blamed the bus drivers, saying that they abandoned their jobs, choosing instead to evacuate their own families. The truth was more complicated, pointing to the need for leadership in any crisis. Out of ten full-time bus operators interviewed for this book—an admittedly unscientific sampling—eight insisted that they would have stayed and evacuated the poor and elderly if City Hall had given the order forcefully. Most of New Orleans’s bus drivers felt little allegiance to RTA because, under Nagin’s regime, no work agreement was in force, and as a result, bus drivers received low wages. “We worked almost half a year without a contract and then Katrina came,” operator Oliver Armstrong recalled. “One reason Nagin was afraid to put us to work that Saturday or Sunday is that he never had us under contract. He could have gotten FEMA on the line and said ‘Let’s pay them and let’s evacuate as many people as we can.’”43

  Another oversight involved having no signs clearly marking the sites where evacuation buses would pick people up. By contrast, in Miami Beach, Florida, all bus stops post a huge notice instructing citizens how to get a free ride out of town in case of emergency. Other cities in the hurricane belt did much the same thing. But New Orleans had no such uniform contingency. After Katrina Mayor Nagin often complained that he had no money with which to do anything. How much money would a couple of hundred metal signs have cost?

  Amtrak trains could also have been a tremendous asset in moving people out on Sunday, without adding to the traffic already clogging the highways. Had requests been made with even a little advance notice, trains could have been stacked in New Orleans railyards, and used to transport residents very quickly out of the bowl. Arrangements weren’t made, though. Moreover, when Amtrak officials repeatedly tried to offer seven hundred seats on an unscheduled train being used to move equipment out on Sunday, Mayor Nagin’s office would not accept their telephone calls. “We offered the city the opportunity to take evacuees out of harm’s way,” Amtrak spokesman Cliff Black complained. “The city declined.” As the Washington Post reported, the “ghost train” left New Orleans, headed for high ground in McComb, Mississippi, at 8:30 P.M. Sunday without evacuees, just hundreds of empty seats.44 “They took out five trains from the New Orleans station, leaving empty,” Armstrong, the RTA driver, later lamented. “Why wouldn’t he [Nagin] put people on those trains, on those buses, and get them out of here? Those poor people couldn’t go anywhere, they couldn’t afford to leave. And what about the sick? I mean, you’re stocking them in the Superdome, you know that it’s gonna be bad.”45

  VI

  There were other pre-Katrina problems besides buses. Blanco had been elected in 2003, Nagin in 2002. Two of the key players in protecting New Orleans from the approaching hurricane were neophytes when it came to dealing with the U.S. Coast Guard or the Louisiana National Guard. That needn’t have been a liability, necessarily, but it did mean that the city, without someone experienced in the art of politics, needed a person who would rise to the occasion on the strength of the moment. Sunday did not lend any hope of that. Blanco was going through the motions, but not much more. She did, however, try to look like a politician in charge. Nagin wasn’t even managing that much. Primping for cameras wasn’t the same as having an emergency blueprint for New Or
leans in the desk drawer ready to be implemented when the Big One arrived. Too much planning had been done at the last minute or not at all. Nagin lacked grace under pressure. To the contrary, he got rattled too easily, and preferred winging it to sustained analysis. With Nagin in the mayor’s office and the Big One seemingly on the way, New Orleans was in deep trouble. As former mayor Marc Morial, head of the National Urban League, explained, Nagin didn’t have a real disaster plan “because he was the disaster.”46

  When Nagin made his announcement at ten that morning, offering up the ill-equipped Superdome as a refuge of last resort, former city planning director Collette Creppell moaned. Along with her husband and three kids, she was then in the process of evacuating. She worried that the traffic was going to be unbearable, with yahoos pulling over on the median to chug beer, kibitz, or smoke cigarettes—or all three at once. To some extent, she was right. Cars that ran out of gas gave rubberneckers something to pause for—and that made for bumper-to-bumper traffic for miles on end. The two-hour drive from New Orleans to Baton Rouge was taking five to seven hours. “We were tuned into WWL 87.8, like everybody else, waiting for the mayor’s press conference,” Creppell recalled of that morning’s trek. “Everyone pretty much anticipated that there would be a mandatory evacuation announcement. My husband was driving, the kids in the back, the dog in the way back, a picnic basket and some clothes for two days. We were incredulous that the mayor had waited until the last moment before he announced a mandatory evacuation. The mayor, the city government, knew how many people didn’t have cars—why not get buses shuttling in and out as soon as possible? He hadn’t even finished his first sentence about ‘You need to leave,’ when he added, ‘However, if you can’t leave, we will take care of you.’ What! The city had ignored hurricane planning and the mayor knew that people had to be evacuated out. We will take care of you, if you stay, was a misleading mixed message.”47