The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  Eventually, Robinette, the most beloved TV anchor in New Orleans’s history, got out of the media business, tired of being “Ted Baxter” as he put it, referring to the airheaded anchor on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. He went to work for the enemy—Freeport-McMoran—for twelve years, finding ways the company could improve its environmental record. Environmentalists shouted “Judas,” believing Robinette had betrayed the green movement. Ornery as always, and tired of having bosses, he quit in 1998 and formed his own crisis management/communications company, Planet Communications. “Done, done, done,” Robinette recalled of being an on-air reporter. “Never did I want to get back into that racket. TV was humiliating. I went into the studio to read words, had a lot of hair, so I kept the job.”

  Everything was on the upswing for Robinette in the summer of 2005. He was married to Nancy, his fourth wife, and they had an eight-year-old daughter. His elegant portraits—including ones he painted of Pope John Paul II and Pete Fountain—were selling for top dollar nationally, and the only media people he chose to watch or listen to were Don Imus and Jon Stewart. “The rest,” he said, “just didn’t interest me.” However, he got a call from his friend David Tyree, who had a popular talk-radio show on WWL with bad news: Tyree was suffering from prostate cancer and wanted Garland to fill in while he went through chemotherapy. “We had a confidential understanding that I’d do it temporarily,” Robinette recalled. “But the second he was able to return, it was back to painting for me.”

  So it was that on Sunday, August 28, Robinette headed to work at 1450 Poydras Street, a high-rise that housed the WWL studio. The station had been broadcasting on a clear channel since 1922, so it was certain to have a lot of listeners for Katrina updates. He stopped at CC’s coffee shop on the corner of Magazine Street and Jefferson Avenue. Standing in front of CC’s, he got goose bumps. Robinette recalled, “It was Vietnam all over again. I looked up. There were no green parrots in the palm trees. I looked down the street, not a stray cat.” Right before combat in Vietnam all the animals instinctively disappeared, particularly the birds—the jungle just became quiet. Although he was a veteran of numerous hurricanes, this was the first time the pre-storm silence unnerved him. He headed back home and took every drawing of his wife and daughter off the walls. “I’d already evacuated my family to Natchez,” Robinette said. “Now I raced to the station—I had to be on the air in a few minutes—bringing a handful of my art inside with me.”

  As he settled in front of the microphone that evening, Garland Robinette didn’t mince words. He told his audience about the vanishing parrots, and about his experience when the birds stopped chirping in Vietnam. Then, in uncharacteristic fashion for a professed libertarian, he blurted out, “You’re going to think I’m stone-cold crazy. But the birds are gone. I know the powers that be say not to panic. I’m telling you, panic, worry, run. The birds are gone. Get out of town! Now! Don’t stay! Leave! Save yourself while you can. Go…go…go!”15

  III

  As the national and local media focused on the impending hurricane, twenty-one-year-old Cody Nicholas was in a 125-foot utility boat that had been operating out of Port Fourchon, Louisiana. He had just evacuated the last rig workers from Apache oil platforms 205 and 206 in the South Tem block area of the Gulf of Mexico. Most of the oil companies had already evacuated workers. Chevron Texaco had pulled out 2,100 employees on Saturday while Royal Dutch Shell did the same for 1,000 of their own. Nicholas was doing the final roundup on Sunday for his company. The Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, which held the distinction of being the biggest oil-import facility in America, had halted the off-loading of vessels in preparation for the storm.16 Ferrying back and forth between Fourchon and the platforms had made Nicholas’s stomach turn. The water had been beyond choppy. Eight- to ten-foot waves, watery spires, caused the utility boat to bob up and down like an especially nauseating roller coaster. “We were getting our asses kicked,” Nicholas later recalled. “By the time we brought our last platform workers to safety in Fourchon the winds were too high for them to be helicoptered out. But the oil companies, I believe, had vans and stuff so they could go, barely outracing the storm.”17

  A heavyset boatman from Mississippi, Nicholas sported a thin moustache and a face full of peach fuzz. For the first time in his young life, the Gulf of Mexico had turned madcap and violent on him, heaving with a sob and a sigh. The unmistakable advent of Katrina had left him truly startled. Now that his crew had locked down the oil platforms, they were racing to dodge Katrina themselves, fleeing full throttle up Atchafalaya Bay. These escapologists planned to ride out the storm in the petroleum port of Morgan City, Louisiana, far enough west to be out of harm’s way. To ease the fears, the boat captain allowed Nicholas to play George Strait and Garth Brooks songs on the vessel’s CD player, but the raging wind made the pop music hard to hear. “By the time we hit Morgan City we were getting steady fifteens,” Nicholas claimed, referring to the height of the waves. “We docked, double-tied the old utility boat on every bet, and hoped for the best. We were going to have to sleep on the boat in the water. We knew we’d have to hang on for dear life.”18 By then, Katrina was bulldozing to the Louisiana coast. It was the hour when veteran boatmen rose to the occasion by clinging to shore.

  Another riverman, Jimmy Duckworth, had already taken refuge at home on Old Metairie Road in New Orleans. Some New Orleanians believed that no one knew the byzantine waterways of Louisiana better than Jimmy Duckworth. Because he was going to leave active duty with the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve in a few days, he was going to sit Katrina out. Duckworth’s great-grandfather had started the family business, Jimmy Duckworth Tires, in the late 1920s. Until he was twelve, Jimmy lived a block from the Mississippi in Jefferson Parish. Outside of business, Duckworth men had a primal passion for hunting and fishing in Plaquemines and St. Bernard parishes (and the Mississippi marshes). Their eighteen-foot Glaspar boat was essentially their second home. Gregarious and extremely well-mannered, Jimmy Duckworth befriended shrimpers in Pointe à la Hache, caught redfish in Black Bay, reeled in speckled trout at Triple Pass, and crabbed off the Lake Pontchartrain seawall. He became a wetlands rat, able to pilot a motorboat all over the confusing marshlands of coastal Louisiana with the ease of a latter-day Jean Lafitte.

  When Duckworth entered Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge in 1974, he was already known by the hardworking watermen of the state. “I also belonged to Ship 46, a troop for sea scouts sponsored by St. Charles Presbyterian, and later got my Coast Guard license through a lot of sea time that I had gained working on some of the longer sea scout vessels,” Duckworth recalled. “I then went to work downtown, at the foot of Canal Street, at nights for Streckfus Steamship Company, which owned the excursion boats.”19

  Although Duckworth admired all the various men who plied the mighty Mississippi, he became especially enamored of the Coast Guard—enough to earn a commercial captain’s license in 1977. They were, to his mind, the best watermen of all—and they saved lives. In January 1983 he joined the Coast Guard Reserve and became a search and rescue coxswain. Operating a variety of boats for the Coast Guard was a childhood fantasy come true for Duckworth. He loved exploring the entire Mississippi River–Gulf Outlet (MRGO) and other state waterways. But as the years went by he grew saddened that his favorite childhood fishing holes were disappearing. Take, for example, Lake Athanasio, a gulfside body that was incorporated into the man-made MRGO in the 1960s. As a kid Duckworth had fished the drop-off in the lake. But dredging and the construction of oil pipelines allowed Lake Athanasio to erode. The subsequent intrusion of salt water into the MRGO, and into the wetlands along the entire coast, according to Duckworth, “just plain killed a lot of old oak trees and beautiful marshes.” It pained him to watch his beloved marshes disappear.

  From 1987 to 1990 Duckworth spent weekends around Venice in Plaquemines Parish, leading Coast Guard search and rescue missions. The first town upstream on the Mississippi, Venice was a strange outpost for fishermen and oil-platfor
m rig hands. It was also the gateway community for the Delta National Wildlife Refuge, where a dazzling array of animal species coexisted with oil derricks. What Duckworth liked best about Venice was pulling his Coast Guard boat up to inspect the fresh catch of the local fishermen; on shore, he also enjoyed chatting with geologists, petrochemical engineers, and roughnecks. There was a “last chance” mentality that permeated Venice, reminiscent of the venerable trading posts that used to dot the Wild West.

  After Venice, Duckworth’s next assignment was at Station New Canal, the old lighthouse on the New Harbor Canal across from the Southern Yacht Club. Then he was assigned to the Coast Guard base at the Industrial Canal lock along St. Claude Avenue. In 1990, as an ensign, he was reassigned to the Marine Safety Office, located on the seventh floor of the Tidewater Building on Canal Street, working for the captain of the Port of New Orleans. The Coast Guard moved talented mariners like Duckworth around frequently so they would learn the waterway system surrounding Greater New Orleans like the backs of their hands. He knew where the Jefferson Parish canals along Lake Pontchartrain were. He knew how the locks at Empire, Algiers, the Industrial Canal, Harvey, and Port Allen (crucial to the Intracoastal Waterway System, moving east to west) worked. He didn’t study nautical maps in a classroom—he experienced the waters in a boat. Through it all, Duckworth agreed with Mark Twain, who recalled how, when he was an apprentice river pilot in 1857, his teacher explained that even if he recognized every detail of the 1,039 miles of river between New Orleans and St. Louis, he might have to “learn it all again in a different way every twenty-four hours.” This was especially true in Louisiana, with its ever-changing marine topography. Duckworth also embraced something Harnett T. Kane wrote in The Bayous of Louisiana: “It is a place that seems often unable to make up its mind whether it will be earth or water, and so it compromises.”20

  Besides memorizing the water topography of the greater New Orleans area, Duckworth participated in port operations, foreign vessels inspections, marine investigation and inspection, and emergency rescue; and in June 2001, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant commander. He was a crack rifle shot, participating in national Coast Guard competitions. All the time Duckworth was in the Coast Guard Reserve, his real job was running Duckworth Tires and Repairs on Old Metairie Road. Besides raising two daughters and getting divorced along the way, he also found the time to build a fully operable replica of a World War II Higgins boat, the locally produced craft used in the D-Day landing in World War II (the boat went on display in 2000, when the National D-Day Museum opened in New Orleans).

  The terrorist bombings of September 11, 2001, dramatically changed Duckworth’s life. Because 20 percent of all imports and exports in the United States went through the Port of New Orleans, he was called to active duty. His father had to run the tire shop on his own. Duckworth was put in charge of port security, and in the months leading up to Katrina he was chief of port operations. A wide range of new security concerns had arisen since 9/11: if a boat full of explosives rammed into the Mississippi River Bridge in New Orleans, for example, it would block barge traffic for months, probably causing a severe economic recession in America. Duckworth also worried about hurricanes, which meteorologists were predicting would be increasing in menace.

  In the runup to Hurricane Ivan in 2004, Duckworth had come up with a plan placing the Coast Guard’s staging center in Carville. A small contingent of Coast Guard officers and the captain would wait out the storm in this town sixty-seven miles from New Orleans. On the evening Ivan approached, Duckworth’s superior, Captain Frank Paskewich, didn’t like being hunkered down, away from potential trouble spots. What, the captain wondered, if the Industrial Canal levee broke or MRGO overtopped? You would need massive search and rescue operations operating the second the winds died down. In the middle of the night as Ivan was approaching, Paskewich contacted Duckworth over the two-way radio. He wasn’t satisfied with the plan: “If this storm kicks our ass, we’ll be of no help rescuing desperate people. We’ll be stuck here with not enough equipment and manpower. I’m not happy with this command post. Next time we’ve got to set up elsewhere.”

  Just as Governor Blanco fixed contra-flow after Hurricane Ivan, Paskewich intended to fix the Coast Guard’s search and rescue approach before the next hurricane season. Paskewich was a spark plug who knew his job from the ground up. A graduate of the Coast Guard Academy, he was a consummate officer. Under his watchful eye, no aspect of marine safety went unchecked, be it responding to a ruptured pipeline or a damaged rudder, or a ship that had run aground. Hurricane Ivan had just barely missed New Orleans, but the Coast Guard had to learn from the near hit. Paskewich wanted a new command post, one that was bigger and better and would run like clockwork.

  They chose Alexandria—a city along the Red River in central Louisiana—because there was a convention center that was conveniently located next to a few hotels. “The idea was that we could walk to and sleep in the hotel,” Duckworth recalled. “We could work twelve hours off, twelve hours on.” On Thursday, August 25, as Katrina approached the tip of Florida, Coast Guard Sector New Orleans moved its operations to Alexandria. By Friday, August 26, all of the New Orleans Sector Coast Guard functions were established there.

  That Friday, back in New Orleans, Duckworth had grabbed a quick lunch with Paskewich at Coast Guard headquarters. Duckworth assured his captain that the Alexandria incident command post was fully staffed, with good accommodations for about 250 coasties. His hurricane preparation work finished, Duckworth was slated to leave active duty on September 1. He intended to see Katrina out at his family business, in the company of his girlfriend, Shelley Ford, the manager of a pediatrician’s office. “I told the captain, ‘Let the new guys get the experience of doing this.’ I did Ivan and set up Alexandria, and I thought it would be great for the new guys to get some hands-on, not thinking that the levees would actually break.”

  Captain Paskewich agreed. Over the years he had developed a great fondness for Duckworth. So as Paskewich drove to Alexandria, Duckworth returned to his Old Metairie tire shop to board up the windows of his apartment, which was packed with World War II history books. He was a great fan of Stephen Ambrose’s Citizen Soldier, a true believer in the fact that everyday Americans won World War II. He long knew it would be the same in a hurricane. And he knew from reading historian Samuel Eliot Morison’s magisterial History of United States Naval Operations in World War II that in December 1944 Admiral William “Bull” Halsey lost 700 men in the Pacific Theater because of a typhoon.

  As Sunday night turned into Monday morning, Duckworth reconsidered his decision to wait the storm out in his cozy wood-paneled apartment. Echoing in his ears were the words of his old friend Jesse St. Amant, who directed emergency operations in Plaquemines Parish. “Do not stay in New Orleans for a Cat 4 or 5 direct hit,” St. Amant had told him over the years whenever the subject of the Big One came up. The two men had worked together on port security, pollution control, and hurricane response. “I knew from Jesse’s point of view how bad things could potentially become,” Duckworth recalled. “As I watched television and saw the eye wall move toward New Orleans, unswervingly, I thought about what Jesse said. Shelley and I just got in my truck and left.”21

  As Duckworth and Ford left for Baton Rouge at 2 A.M. Monday, Katrina was approaching the mouth of the Mississippi River near Venice. Driving west on the elevated section of I-10, they experienced hurricane-force winds. Pine trees were falling on the road right in front of them, turning I-10 into an obstacle course. Wave tops were breaking over the bridge. “We almost didn’t make it out of town,” Duckworth lamented. “It’s the dumbest thing I ever did in my life, to wait that long to leave town. We were the only people on the highway. It was terrifying.” Eventually, they made it to a friend’s house in Baton Rouge. Duckworth’s story illustrates just how confusing the day had been. With all his knowledge and experience, he made a poor decision. What could be expected of average landlubbers all over
the region?

  IV

  Sunday evenings in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, were usually tranquil times for Mayor Eddie Favre, a cousin of Brett Favre, the Green Bay Packers’ quarterback. Entering his fifth term as mayor, he was a local politician who could do no wrong. Blessed with a breezy, slyly humorous demeanor, Favre loved to socialize. With his discolored moustache always in need of a trim and a predilection for laughing at his own jokes, the roly-poly Favre was the Falstaffian charmer of Bay St. Louis. He ran the beach community with one hand clenched into a fist and the other holding a Budweiser. There were very few Jimmy Buffett songs he didn’t know by heart. Late at night he could often be found at the Casino Magic lounge or the Firedog Saloon, telling stories about catching record-size swordfish or about surviving Camille. On Sunday, August 28, he was a worried man. “Katrina had already come across the tip of Florida and was headed straight at us,” he recalled. “I personally drove around all night, telling everybody to get out of town. I made sure all the backup generators in Bay St. Louis were working, even those at the water wells. I refused to sleep. None of my police officers slept either. We patrolled every street, stayed in the field until the very last moment.”