The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  Creppell was dismayed as she tried to understand Mayor Nagin’s thinking. She knew he had participated in the Hurricane Pam simulation in 2004, when hurricane and flooding experts explained to him that if the Big One hit, lakefront houses would take seven feet of water, snakes would appear, and packs of wild dogs would become a menace. Because New Orleans had numerous sewarage treatment plants, the entire city could fill up with fecal matter. They told Nagin it would smell like a combination of putrid fruit and a country outhouse. There was going to be no electricity for weeks, maybe months. There would be no safe water or plumbing. “Maybe Nagin had visualized it to the point that it was all a hallucination, something that couldn’t really happen,” Creppell went on. “Connecting the dots between the enormity of that storm brewing in the Gulf and his very incomplete evacuation plans must have been trying. He was stuck with very incomplete plans, ones he never prioritized to complete. In truth, he never had the money, couldn’t find it, to do a real plan. We’re talking about an inexperienced man. I just think he never had to weather any big crisis before. But sending people to the Superdome with few provisions?…He knew better.”48

  New Orleans’s famous enclosed football stadium—the Superdome—was not designed to be a long-term campground. It was an air-conditioned downtown bubble designed by internationally renowned architect Arthur Davis. Because the NFL season was about to begin, the arena floor was laid with bright-green artificial turf, decorated with the Saints black-and-gold fleur-de-lis. Nagin announced that this city landmark was open to people who would otherwise be stranded in the hurricane. But he added the admonition that the Superdome would most likely be out of power for days, if not weeks, in the aftermath of the storm. He suggested that anyone resorting to the Superdome bring enough food and water for four days. His discouraging words were, as Creppell noted, a confusingly mixed message. Nonetheless, residents arrived in droves to take shelter at the stadium, waiting in the sweltering 93-degree heat to go through weapons screening at the door.

  Many of the evacuees were ill or handicapped, while others had small children—very few were easily capable of a two-hour wait, standing in the late-summer heat.49 “I was going to the Superdome and then I saw the two-mile line,” said Tony Peterson, who lived in the French Quarter. “I figure if I’m going to die, I’m going to die with cold beer and my best buds.”50 Most of the bars in the neighborhood, however, were closed and boarded up. A notable exception was Johnny White’s, which had a sixteen-year-old policy of never closing, staying open round the clock 365 days a year. (Actually, it closed once for all of two hours, fourteen years earlier when the original owner died.) It was, as the San Francisco Chronicle described it, a “gum-stuck-under-the-counter joint.” But it had heart—taps full of heart. “I’m not going anywhere,” bartender Larry Hirst later told the Chronicle. “This is home. They’re going to have to carry me out in a body bag.”51

  The crew at Johnny White’s was not alone. A sign in one French Quarter window read, “Go Home Miss Thing.” Another just said, “Beat It.” There were also religious slogans on plywood, like “God Save Us” and “Left for the Devil’s Storm.” Some residents thought that staying at home with close friends and weathering Katrina would produce a bonding experience. Blues guitar wizard Walter “Wolfman” Washington, who lived near the New Orleans Fairgrounds racetrack in the eastern part of the city, explained his rationale for staying: “I said, it’ll be cool. We’re gonna hang.”52

  This “gonna hang” attitude was shared by the legendary French Quarter performer Chris Owens, the most flamboyant diva ever to sashay down Bourbon Street. In 1967 she had purchased a sturdy building on St. Louis Street, which became her entertainment castle. Dripping with diamonds, and always wearing gorgeous sequined gowns, Owens was New Orleans’s version of a Vegas glamour queen. Tourists flocked from all over the world to hear her sexy versions of “Hot Legs” or “My Heart Belongs to Daddy.” With the help of cosmetic surgery, Owens just never seemed to age. Even though her friend Jefferson Parish Sheriff Harry Lee had demanded that she evacuate, Owens decided to stay. Her escort, Mark Davidson (a combination bodyguard and cook), was staying with her, and, well, it would be romantic in a blacked-out French Quarter, candlelight flickering from balcony windows. In just a few months, in fact, she was going to be the newest inductee into the New Orleans Musical Legends Park, her statue slated to be installed next to those of Fats Domino, Al Hirt, and Pete Fountain. “I’d been through hurricanes before,” she said. “I just wasn’t afraid of it. Coming from West Texas, I was stubborn. St. Louis and Bourbon was my home.”53

  Another native of New Orleans who stayed was fifty-one-year-old Ivory Clark. Short, stocky, and blessed with a hundred-watt Louis Armstrong smile, Clark was a tireless worker in any endeavor, frowning on slackers. He never soured, never lost his good cheer. Although he moonlighted as a chauffeur or gardener, his primary work was cooking. Clark was a superb chef, trained in the old-style, butter-heavy tradition of New Orleans cuisine. Breakfast with Clark was an incredible indulgence of fluffy potato pancakes, fried eggs, pink grapefruit, and boudin sausage. “Cooking starts at home,” he’d say. “If you can’t do it in the home skillet, you can’t do it at all.” He had worked his way up in the restaurant business from a start as a dishwasher, through stints as a prep cook and line cook, before finally becoming recognized as a chef in 1984. A customer needed only to name a Gulf shrimp or crawfish dish, and Clark could whip it up with the flair of a master. His specialties were shrimp étouffée and barbecue shrimp. “You learn your little tricks,” Clark said of cooking. “And if you’re smart, you don’t share them with too many people.”54

  When Katrina set its sights on New Orleans, Clark was working in a restaurant at the Pan-American Life Insurance Building on Poydras Street in the central business district. “So it was hard for me to evacuate,” Clark recalled. “I had work, plus a family who couldn’t leave due to old age.” Family was everything to Ivory Clark. As one of nine children, he had grown up in a household that was close-knit, despite the fact that his father was a truck driver and was often gone for weeks at a time. At a time when every extra dollar was devoted to paying off the mortgage on the house, Clark’s mother brought in her own income working as a butcher. They were good, loving parents, and a work ethic was instilled in their children. Ivory was particularly receptive.

  On Sunday, August 28, as Katrina approached, Clark helped fretful neighbors board up their homes and then picked up his mother-in-law, Sedona Green of New Orleans East. Her house was only a few blocks from Lake Pontchartrain and he feared that she’d be flooded out if the levee topped. At ninety-one, however, and in frail health, Mrs. Green wouldn’t necessarily survive a hot and tedious road trip to East Texas or North Mississippi. At the Clark house, Mrs. Green joined other family members dependent on Ivory Clark: his wife, Donna; two teenage children, Gerald and Jeriel; one aunt; and a niece. On hearing that Katrina had uncoiled into a Category 5 hurricane, Ivory adopted a more drastic plan. “Better a little late than not at all,” he recalled. “I made up my mind that we had to leave our [three-bedroom] house on Edinburgh Street and evacuate to a motel. I got everybody together and all of us crammed into my car.”55 As Donna put it, “Ivory really got us all moving fast.”56

  VII

  At 12 noon (EST) that Sunday, Michael Brown of FEMA convened a videoconference from Washington that included officials in emergency management from Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. Weather experts were online. And so were President Bush from Crawford, Texas, and Secretary Chertoff, from a different location in Washington, D.C. The purpose of the meeting was to verify that all those concerned with leading the recovery effort were briefed with the same hard facts and that they were all on the same page as the Katrina storm neared the Gulf Coast. For that reason, it was extremely significant that Bush and Chertoff were among those participating in the videoconference. Katrina was being taken seriously by everyone in government. In obtaining the participation
of his bosses, Mike Brown had done well.

  The meeting, which would last about forty-five minutes, was generally tense in atmosphere, void of frivolity. Early on, Brown introduced Max Mayfield, who appeared from his office at the National Hurricane Center near Miami. Mayfield said, “I don’t have any good news here at all today.”57 Showing a series of four slides, Mayfield compared Katrina to previous killer hurricanes. Occasionally veering into atmosphere descriptions, he didn’t keep to as steady a course in his talk as the hurricane was unfortunately taking on the map, but his predictions were specific. Referring to storm surges as “valleys” in the water, Mayfield said, “You know, there’s a very complex system of levees there in the New Orleans area. Some of the valleys that we see [in computer models of the hurricane’s path]—and I’m sure that all of these areas [pointing to southeastern Louisiana] are already going under water out near the mouth of the Mississippi River. The colors that you see here show inundation over the land areas. One of the valleys here in Lake Pontchartrain, we’ve got on our forecast track, if it maintains its intensity, about twelve and a half feet of storm surge in the lake. The big question is going to be: will that top some of the levees?”58

  The next two speakers were a researcher at the Hydranet Prediction Center and a hydrologist from the National Hurricane Center. After hearing from them, Brown said very quickly, “At this time, I’d like to go to Crawford, Texas. Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to introduce the President of the United States.”

  With that, President Bush, sitting in a small, paneled conference room at his ranch, extended greetings to the group. Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin was the only other one at the table with him. President Bush’s tone was oddly relaxed and genial, coming in the wake of such sobering predictions of inundation. In six short paragraphs, for example, Bush used the word “folks” nine times. Sometimes they were “good” folks, sometimes “local” folks. Once, they were “FEMA” folks. Overall, he apparently wanted to be encouraging, in the vague terms of a pregame pep talk. The most pointed remark Bush made was, “I want to assure the folks at the state level that we are fully prepared to not only help you during the storm, but we will move in whatever resources and assets we have at our disposal after the storm to help you deal with the loss of property.”59

  The President did not ask any questions of the assembled experts or attempt to ascertain the level of preparedness. Indeed, Bush was cued into the videoconference only to extend his verbal pat on the back. He didn’t remain for the whole meeting, having made a commitment to address the nation at 11:30 A.M. (CST).60 Even if he was listening only at the beginning, though, he couldn’t have failed to recognize the magnitude of the impending storm. Later, when observers wondered how he could have been oblivious to the potential for breaching in the levees, his defenders pointed out that Mayfield had only warned that the levees might “top.” He hadn’t said anything about their breaching. As Haley Barbour would later explain on the television show Hardball with Chris Matthews, “Dr. Mayfield said that the levees may be topped. That is, the waves may be high enough that they would go over the top. He didn’t say anything about the levees being breached.”61 It was true that Mayfield hadn’t uttered the word “breached.” But he did speak of inundation, and that ought to have been enough to indicate the deadly nature of the threat.

  Mike Brown, for his part, led the meeting in a businesslike way, expressing his concern about the use of the Superdome as a shelter. “As you may or may not know,” Brown said, “the Superdome is about twelve feet below sea level…and I am also concerned about that roof.” He made an even better point in worrying that no other shelters in or outside New Orleans had been designated for evacuees. “My gut tells me,” Brown concluded, that the coming hurricane “is a bad one and a big one.” His intentions were good, but something was already falling through the cracks. At the end of the meeting, Secretary Chertoff spoke up for the first time to underscore the point that if Brown needed anything from the components of the Department of Homeland Security, he need only speak up. “Secondly,” Chertoff said, “are there any DOD [Department of Defense] assets that might be available? Have we reached out to them, and have we, I guess, made any kind of arrangement in case we need some additional help from them?”

  “We have DOD assets over here at the EOC [Emergency Operations Center],” Brown replied. “They are fulled engaged, and we are having those discussions with them now.” The Department of Defense, however, was anything but fully engaged at that point.

  Three basic types of military assistance were available in times of disaster. The first consisted of the National Guard, the part-time army that was organized by the state. During domestic service, each National Guard organization was under the command of its governor. (When a National Guard unit was called to serve overseas, it moved into the control of the federal government.) The second was the Coast Guard, a full-time force that served domestically and was part of the Homeland Security department. The third form of military assistance consisted of America’s standing army, which was part of the Department of Defense. According to the National Response Plan, the DOD had to be asked to engage in domestic relief operations. Typically, the request was expected to come from the Department of Homeland Security, although the President could also direct DOD’s involvement in a disaster. The course described in the National Response Plan called for the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security to declare a particular event an Incident of National Significance. At that point, DOD would assign a Defense Coordinating Officer, who would move troops and matériel to a region as needed.

  On Sunday afternoon, when Michael Brown said that he was in consultation with human “assets” from the DOD, it wasn’t a very impressive fact. Secretary Chertoff surely knew that whoever those assets were, they were in no position to bring in troops or equipment. That would happen only with the designation of a Defense Coordinating Officer by DOD. And that designation wouldn’t occur without the declaration of an Incident of National Significance—by Michael Chertoff. So it was that in a congressional report issued September 19, 2005, on the DOD’s response to Katrina, the authors could only make the damning comment, “It is not yet clear when DHS/ FEMA first requested DOD assistance or what was specifically requested.”62

  At 11:30 A.M. (CST), on August 28, President Bush delivered a short, artless speech from Crawford, mainly concerned with the progress of elections in Iraq. However, he prefaced his remarks with thoughts on the impending storm along the Gulf Coast, garnered from his teleconference, which was still in progress.

  This morning I spoke with FEMA Undersecretary Mike Brown and emergency management teams not only at the federal level but at the state level about the—Hurricane Katrina. I’ve also spoken to Governor Blanco of Louisiana, Governor Barbour of Mississippi, Governor Bush of Florida, and Governor Riley of Alabama. I want to thank all the folks at the federal level and the state level and the local level who have taken this storm seriously. I appreciate the efforts of the governors to prepare their citizenry for this upcoming storm.

  Yesterday, I signed a disaster declaration for the state of Louisiana, and this morning I signed a disaster declaration for the state of Mississippi. These declarations will allow federal agencies to coordinate all disaster relief efforts with state and local officials. We will do everything in our power to help the people in the communities affected by this storm.

  Hurricane Katrina is now designated a category five hurricane. We cannot stress enough the danger this hurricane poses to Gulf Coast communities. I urge all citizens to put their own safety and the safety of their families first by moving to safe ground. Please listen carefully to instructions provided by state and local officials.63

  For anyone along the Gulf Coast who heard the President’s comments, it was practically too late to prepare. People like Wolfman Washington who decided to stay may have been only postponing the misery Katrina would bring. Those who heeded the President’s words and tried to leave New Orleans on Su
nday afternoon were in the midst of their misery. A last-minute evacuation of America’s thirty-fifth-largest city was fraught with problems, with or without the relief of contra-flow. Those on the highways were the modern-day equivalent of the Joads, the Dust Bowlers who escaped Oklahoma in an old touring car during the Great Depression. The Road of Flight made famous in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath was Route 66; its counterpart in advance of Katrina was I-10. Both led to Southern California. Each, in its time of crisis, was paved with equal parts hope and despair.

  Jake Calamusa was one of the evacuees who decided to drive out of the low-lying city on Sunday. He had his eighty-five-year-old mother with him. “It seemed from the very beginning of the week,” he said, explaining why he waited so long, “we were given 100 percent probability that the storm was not coming here at all. And then all of a sudden, we’re faced with the fact that we have this Cat 5 that’s going to hit us head-on.”64 Likewise John Bongard, a seventy-seven-year-old from New Orleans, made a last-minute escape, driving his white Oldsmobile northwest toward Baton Rouge. In his haste, he packed only a pillow, a towel, a few blankets, some documents, and a bottle of iced tea. Long before he arrived, he realized that he had no idea why he’d taken what he did.65 Jake Calamusa hadn’t been as lucky. He couldn’t drive out of the doomed city, even if he wanted to. “We tried to get on the expressway,” he said, “but it was total gridlock.”66 He took his mother to a sturdy old administration building at Tulane University to hunker down for the storm.