The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  With Katrina rumbling its way north in the Gulf of Mexico, taking aim at the Mississippi-Louisiana coast, NBC News producers called Zumbado on August 28, wanting him to take his cameras to New Orleans and film both the storm’s fury and its aftermath. The water in the Gulf of Mexico had risen above 85 degrees, a perfect incubator for hurricanes to flourish. “Of course I said yes,” Zumbado recalled. “My soundman was to be Josh Holm. He was only twenty-one years old and this was his first hurricane.” Well over six feet tall, Holm—an incurable fan of the Florida Panthers hockey team and of country singer Alan Jackson—was a native of Minnesota who had been drawn to Florida’s warm weather. He originally worked in an automobile business, but switched into sound work through his friendship with Zumbado. “Tony kept his motor coach in the storage facility where I worked,” Holm later recalled from his home in Pembroke Pines, Florida. “We became friends. His line of work was daring, but I knew he’d never put me in unreasonable danger.”2 Together they drove across the Florida Panhandle in a fully equipped, forty-foot-long white Hallmark motor coach—which slept six and had a kitchen, den, and bathroom—with a Ford Econoline 350 van hitched on the back. What surprised Zumbado, as he drove west on I-10, was that he didn’t see any relief trucks heading into New Orleans. It was the first red flag signaling that something was terribly wrong. Nor were there power-and-light company vehicles on the road. “I kept saying to Josh, ‘Wow, I wonder where they’re at. Maybe they’re up north. Maybe they’re in Georgia and they’re going to come down into New Orleans.’ The point is, after twenty-eight years of doing this, I was stunned not to see the support teams I was expecting to see. It made me nervous.”

  Once they got to Louisiana, Zumbado and Holm headed for Gonzales, fifty-seven miles northwest of New Orleans, where they stashed their motor coach in a Pontiac lot on high ground, void of nearby trees. It would stay hidden there in reserve, just in case the city flooded and they needed a dry, mobile place to live. They then drove the van to New Orleans. “That’s when another red flag appeared,” Zumbado recalled. “There were no police officers visually on duty in New Orleans when we arrived, no law enforcement trying to tell you not to come into the city or trying to check your IDs. It was weird.”3

  The lightning rod of NBC’s New Orleans effort was fifty-two-year-old Heather Allan, based at the Los Angeles bureau. Born in South Africa and educated at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, Allan had spent most of her twenty-five years at NBC in war zones, disaster areas, genocide villages, and violent cities. Allan was NBC’s troubleshooter, or as she put it, “queen of the shitholes.” When Beirut was being bombed to smithereens, and 241 U.S. servicemen died in a 1983 terrorist attack, she was on the scene. When the Marcos dynasty was overthrown in the Philippines, and Corazon Aquino ushered in a new democratic era, Allan was there. Whether it was setting up a bureau in Kuwait during Desert Storm, bringing camera crews to Rwanda to film the piles of human skulls, or witnessing California’s execution of Tookie Williams, Allan was, as Humphrey Bogart might say, “one tough broad.” She had covered Ethiopia’s famine, Somalia’s civil war, and a toxic gas crisis in Cameroon. “When they have a big breaking story, I step in,” Allan explained. “It’s not always bleak, though. I’ve set up bureaus for the Olympics in Sydney, Salt Lake City, and Athens.”

  Make no mistake about it, Allan was a force of nature who didn’t suffer fools gladly, but tolerated all good people. Her medium-length blond hair and rosy complexion belied her extraordinary sense of authority. Allan’s casual manner (she often wore shorts and sandals while mothering her NBC family) was misleading. Recognizing early on that New Orleans was likely to be the epicenter of Katrina, Allan put together a hurricane team of freelancers and company technicians. As Zumbado and Holm drove from Florida, a number of her favorite reporters—Brian Williams, Carl Cantania, and Martin Savage—were on their way to Louisiana from Washington, D.C., and New York. She had booked a dozen rooms for her people at the Ritz-Carlton on Canal Street starting Saturday. Everything was off-kilter in New Orleans, however—including the hotel clocks, which were running behind time. Call it bad karma or impending doom, but the feel wasn’t right; there was a beast already in New Orleans before the first raindrop fell. “We spent all of Sunday at the Superdome,” Allan recalled. “It was truly bizarre. Nobody knew what was going on. We were ordered not to park our satellite trucks in the back ramp of the Superdome because it would flood, because our blue mobile was too heavy. But I saw huge National Guard trucks go up the ramp. Nobody was in charge of anything. It was all just a disorganized mess.”4

  When Zumbado arrived at the Ritz, he assumed that he and Holm would be practically the only guests. In Florida, when a hurricane was on the way, the first thing local officials usually did was evacuate all of the tourists—that obvious gesture, after all, took only a smidgen of common sense. “When we got to the Ritz, it was packed with people and, oh boy, did another red flag pop up,” Zumbado recalled. “Normally, all these hotels are closed because obviously, everyone shuts down their businesses; they board up and they get out of town. Usually, the only way NBC can get us a safe haven is if we beg a manager to let us in, and then only after we agree, or we sign a legal document saying, that we’re responsible for our own being.” At the Ritz’s registration desk, the manager said, “We don’t know if we have a room for you anymore.” Despite having reservations, Zumbado had been bumped, but that wasn’t what irked him. Incredulous, he shot back: “What do you mean, you don’t have a room? There’s a hurricane coming. Didn’t people evacuate?” To this, the manager replied, “No, a lot of people are coming in here and staying here.” All Zumbado could do was walk away in bewilderment.

  Zumbado was enough of a newsman to realize that there was a big story in the fact that the Ritz—and other hotels in New Orleans—were sold out. Never before in modern American hurricane history, to his knowledge, had a below-sea-level city—or any city—allowed citizens and tourists to stay in the face of a monster hurricane. “So we started videotaping this strange scene of people packing into the Ritz, scattered everywhere on every floor, in the lobby and in the hallways and in the staircases, up and down on every level,” Zumbado recalled of his Sunday, August 28, arrival. “But the manager and police jumped in front of us and said we couldn’t film. It was like they didn’t want people in the outside world to know what was going on.” The Ritz-Carlton, known for serene luxury, no doubt didn’t want NBC News making a record of its descent into chaos.

  Zumbado and Holm went to scout neighborhoods, doing rounds in the van and getting the lay of the land. They realized that the Ninth Ward was vulnerable to flooding from three sources: the Industrial Canal, the Intracoastal Waterway, and the Mississippi River–Gulf Outlet. They visited all the most vulnerable spots along the Industrial Canal levee in the Ninth Ward. Zumbado wondered why New Orleans’s protection system—unlike that of the Netherlands, which had built a first-rate levee-dike system after a huge flood in 1953 and upgraded it continually ever since—seemed to have such shoddy-looking levees. Occasionally they saw a lone ambulance or a solitary bus on the desolate streets, but, as Zumbado put it, “nothing felt organized.” Back at the Ritz, fifteen or twenty police officers were sitting in the lobby—one of them told the NBC freelancers where to stash their van and where they could go for the best chance to avoid flooding, warning them that the Ritz parking garage would probably be underwater. “Then what are you guys doing here?” Zumbado asked the officer. “You won’t be able to rescue people; you’ll be trapped here at the hotel. Why not take off for the periphery of the city, keep your vehicles safe, then come back in after the storm?” All the officer could say was “Well, this is where they have us staging.”5

  Zumbado noticed a family standing in front of the Ritz with a pirogue—a type of canoe—strapped to the top of their car. Thinking ahead, he arranged to rent the vessel for the duration. “We felt good,” Holm recalled. “If we got stuck anywhere, at least we had a boat.”6

&
nbsp; Although Governor Blanco later was to be criticized for leaving Louisiana unprepared for Hurricane Katrina, she had authorized the adjutant general of the Louisiana National Guard, General Bennett Landreneau, to mobilize 2,000 soldiers and airmen. Eventually that number reached 4,000, and, in hindsight, Governor Blanco should have called for the maximum number from the outset. Her Department of Social Services had properly identified shelters and Red Cross facilities in Baton Rouge, Alexandria, Monroe, and other areas. It wasn’t her fault that the Red Cross refused to go into New Orleans.7 Even Marsha Evans, head of the Red Cross during Katrina, blamed City Hall and FEMA for the posthurricane debacle. “Louisiana had a plan,” Evans said. “It’s New Orleans and FEMA that really didn’t have much of one.”8

  One measure Governor Blanco took—above all others, one that proved exceedingly wise—was ordering the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries (LDWF) to pre-position more than 200 vessels at regional locations outside the coastal parishes (and Orleans Parish). As Katrina approached, LDWF agents from Shreveport, Monroe, Ferriday, and Alexandria congregated at Woodworth, a town just south of Alexandria. If widespread flooding occurred, Governor Blanco wanted to make sure LDWF agents and boats were poised for search and rescue missions. “I greatly appreciate the authority granted by Governor Blanco,” Dwight Landreneau, secretary of LDWF, later wrote in Louisiana Conservationist, “to assign all LDWF assets to the critical search and rescue mission.”9 As LDWF Lieutenant Colonel Keith LaCaze later noted, the governor told his organization that if flooding occurred, their mission was to “get people out of the water.”10

  Some New Orleans Police Department officers, like forty-nine-year-old Tim Bayard of Vice and Narcotics, roamed the streets until the very last second on Sunday. He was operating out of the 1700 Moss Street building. In a frenzy of last-minute improvisation, Commander Bayard, who had grown up in the Ninth Ward, tried to place police cars out of harm’s way. He was fuming mad because Police Chief Eddie Compass, whom he couldn’t locate, didn’t understand that New Orleans was going to flood—it was guaranteed. Bayard was a longtime NOPD veteran who, when he joined the force in 1976, was too young to even purchase a gun; his father, a fireman, had to buy it for him. “I lived through Betsy, so I knew where it was going to flood,” Bayard recalled. “My dad was on the fire department for Betsy. So I remembered going with my dad and my brother and cutting relatives’ roofs and everything else. So what was going to change now? Nothing’s changed in the city.” The entire NOPD had only five emergency boats, two of which Bayard said didn’t work. “We kept the boats right across the street from HQ, in the shed,” Bayard said. “Captain [Robert] Norton was trying to get them up and seaworthy. But it was futile.”

  Realizing that most New Orleans streets would flood, Bayard moved Narcotics to the Maison du Puy Hotel and Vice to the Marriott. He divided them up in case one division became immobilized in floodwater. All evening, however, he was cursing Mayor Nagin for keeping all the Regional Transit Authority rescue buses inside the bowl. “What Nagin did killed me,” he said. “On Chickasaw Street, where we kept some of our cars, we knew it would flood. Our cars were by the bus barn for the RTA. Next to the Desire projects. That’s the Ninth Ward. The school buses were three blocks away from there, on Metropolitan Street. If you read the hurricane evacuation plan, those RTA buses should have been taking people to the evacuation center, to the Superdome, sixty hours prior to the storm’s arrival and the school buses should have been used. Then, as the storm approached, they could have evacuated people out of town and been on high ground.”11

  II

  If you looked around downtown New Orleans Sunday you would have seen media trucks and reporters from everywhere. Fox News had sent its first tier of reporters—Shepherd Smith, Geraldo Rivera, and Jeff Goldblatt—to cover Katrina. At thirty-six, Goldblatt was a broadcasting veteran, having started his career right after graduating from Colgate University in 1991. He had been an itinerant reporter, holding jobs in Myrtle Beach, Wilmington (North Carolina), Richmond, Washington, D.C., New York, and Miami before being hired by Fox in 1999. Handsome, with wavy sandy brown hair and a noticeable scar on his cheek, he was based in Chicago. His wife was seven months’ pregnant with their second child. Fox News was notorious for operating on a shoestring, making sure its reporters were resourceful, not extravagant. On this assignment Goldblatt’s first frustration was getting nothing better than a cheap rental car at the airport, because, as he put it, “there were lines out the wazoo.”

  Eventually, he got a worn-out SUV and headed straight for Jackson Square in the French Quarter to report on how ridiculous it was that people were partying on Bourbon Street with Katrina on the way. Earlier in the summer, when he had covered Dennis, Floridians treated the oncoming hurricane with respect. The French Quarter revelers he encountered, by contrast, seemed to be thumbing their noses at the sky. Not that hurricanes couldn’t be comical. Back in September 2003, in fact, Goldblatt became a one-day national joke when his pants almost fell down while he was covering Hurricane Isabel in Virginia Beach; comedians Jay Leno and Jimmy Kimmel played the clip on their late-night shows. In New Orleans, Goldblatt saw scores of people milling about as if waiting for a throned Rex to appear waving from a gaudy Mardi Gras float. “It was all eerie and strange,” Goldblatt recalled. “All these people were staying in New Orleans. On Sunday I went to the Superdome and it was filling up. That was incredible to me. During Ivan, with a few thousand people in there, it was my understanding that they ripped the seats out afterward, that there was theft in the Superdome. But they were back at it again.”12

  Goldblatt was also amazed at how young the National Guard soldiers at the Superdome were. Oliver Wendell Holmes once said you know you’re getting old when the cops look like kids—that Sunday Goldblatt felt old. The African-American teenagers trying to enter the Superdome were forced to cough up their personal possessions, the Louisiana National Guard confiscating ice picks, knives, razor blades, guns, and bullets. Gaggles of people were obviously drunk, acting as if the entire evacuation were a tailgate party. The mantra of the moment was “Let me in…let me in.” Eyeing a few women patiently waiting for their turn to enter, Goldblatt went over to talk. To his surprise one of them calmly said, “Look, it’s our own fault that we’re here. I commend the city for at least giving me this opportunity to have a place of refuge.”13

  That night, Goldblatt, his cameraman, Robert Lee, and his soundman, Mark Jeter, holed up at the W Hotel on Poydras Street in the central business district ten blocks from the Superdome. The W was a glass tower, and the Fox News team prudently congregated on the fourth floor. By 3 A.M. on Monday, they could feel the building sway and hear thuds as roofing material was ripped off. At this juncture Goldblatt was relying on his satellite phone to bring images of stormy New Orleans to a national audience; the W’s dish couldn’t transmit under such stiff winds. “We couldn’t go out and give great coverage,” Goldblatt explained. “But all the people who left their Gulf Coast towns, who were now in Georgia or Texas, want to see their hometown on TV. It’s understandable. So we showed what we could of New Orleans. Not until midmorning Monday was it safe to travel about.”14

  The most respected broadcaster in Louisiana as Katrina approached was WWL radio’s Garland Robinette, whose reassuring lilt everybody was listening to as the hurricane approached. Reared near the small Cajun community of Des Allemands, behind a Humble Oil swamp camp, Garland understood rank poverty. Feisty and independent-minded, with large wire-rimmed glasses and a Ronald Reagan smile, Robinette had been kicked out of Nicholls State University for punching the golf coach. He had a temper. He flunked out of the University of Southwest Louisiana. “Then I managed to flunk out at LSU,” he said. “I wasn’t a Rhodes scholar, I was a gravel scholar.” Unable to use college as a fig leaf for avoiding U.S. military service, Robinette was sent to Vietnam, serving as a Swift boat officer in the Navy. Like so many in his generation, Robinette had experiences in the Mekong Delta from 1968 to
1969 that changed his outlook on life. Never again would he fully trust the government. Wounded twice, he received two Purple Hearts. Only you couldn’t get him to talk about the destruction he saw; it was too painful. Mention Vietnam and Garland was apt to get up and walk out of the room.

  Once back stateside, Robinette got a job as a janitor. Every day he also did an agricultural report on a small Louisiana radio station. Not for a Bourbon Street second did he think he had a career in broadcasting. But he enjoyed doing the “Soy Bean Report.” And with his clear, soothing voice, Robinette was bound to be discovered. His break came in 1970, when the news director at WWL-TV, in desperation, offered him an anchor position. “I got my job as a part-time anchor at WWL,” Robinette recalled, “because the main anchor got drunk on the air, and they needed immediate fill-ins. They put me on temporarily.”

  It didn’t take long for Robinette to be discovered again, this time by a New York agent who thought he had national potential. An audition was set up at CBS News in New York, where he was introduced to Walter Cronkite and Barbra Streisand, who was in the building filming a prime-time musical special. But New York didn’t appeal to Robinette—he felt out of his league. His great passions were Louisiana women and portrait painting, and he missed the back bayous, where life passed at a slower pace. So he quit the national news and returned to the CBS affiliate in New Orleans in 1971, where he felt his reporting might just make a difference. For the next fifteen years, he was the most outspoken local advocate of coastal restoration, warning New Orleanians that destroying Louisiana’s fragile ecosystem was a death warrant for their city. He made hard-hitting documentaries for WWL such as New Orleans: The Sinking City and The Dying Louisiana Wetlands. And he hammered away at local companies like Freeport-McMoran for dumping waste products into Louisiana’s waters and exploiting developing nations like Indonesia. He loved to stick it to firms that had oil spills and strip-mining accidents. “Much of my environmental awareness made my documentaries a bit one-sided,” Robinette recalled. “Eventually I learned there was gray. For instance, Greenpeace would arrive at Canal Street hanging plastic signs on fences with copper wiring. They were hypocrites. Corporations weren’t the bad guys per se; we as a society had to change our priorities.”