The Great Deluge
Page 17
By 9 P.M. on Sunday, a heavy rain was pelting the coasts of Mississippi and southeastern Louisiana.22 Favre’s windshield wipers were of little use—the downpour was blinding. Roads were washed out. Traffic lights swung back and forth like out-of-control pendulums. Favre felt unmoored. An eerie darkness loomed over Beach Boulevard, the main coastal drag in town, as angry clouds moved as quickly as if they were being played at fast-forward speed on a DVD. A green metal street sign suddenly blew in front of Favre’s car—a close call.
Katrina was roaring toward land, with the eye less than 100 miles away. It was still a Category 5 hurricane, with sustained winds of 161 mph, but it was starting to weaken. That was probably inevitable, since it had been raging at maximum intensity for almost twenty-four hours. The larger waves generated when Katrina was at its strongest tended to be cooler than those on which it had built to a fever pitch. Because lower water temperatures contributed less energy to the rotating winds, Katrina was starting to fade slightly as it approached the Chandeleur Islands Area (CIA), the easternmost barrier islands of the Mississippi River Deltaic Plain. Encompassing Chandeleur, Curlew, Grand Gosier, and Breton, along with some flyspeck islets and seagrass meadows to their west, the CIA had shrunk in size in recent years as a result of coastal erosion.23 They failed to serve as effective speed bumps to slow down Katrina’s storm surge.
Favre drove by the Hancock Medical Center and checked inside. Everything seemed to be all right. “I was worried about surge because those islands had shrunk in recent years,” Favre said. “But I wasn’t particularly worried about Hancock Medical Center. They were far from the Gulf. I knew they wouldn’t flood.”24
At 2 A.M., the National Hurricane Center downgraded Katrina to a Category 4 hurricane.25 For those waiting in its path, however, the distinction hardly mattered any longer. By the time a hurricane made landfall and its peculiar characteristics met those of the shoreline, five mere categories no longer described the potential misery index. Katrina packed a brutal punch even before it arrived en force along Louisiana’s porous shore. At 3 A.M., a buoy monitored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered frightening new information. Located fifty miles east of the mouth of the Mississippi River, it reported waves that were forty feet in height—and growing.26
Turbulent water in the Gulf combined with heavy rain to fill Lake Pontchartrain to the very brim. The four wide drainage canals leading from the lake into New Orleans—17th Street, Industrial, Orleans Avenue, and London Avenue—were likewise full and still rising. The Big One—well, actually, the Medium One—had arrived. At 3 A.M., even before Katrina came to shore with its storm surge in tow, water broke through the concrete flood wall separating the 17th Street Canal from the city. The turbulence in the normally placid canal inevitably found the weakest part of the wall and burst through.27 The breach wasn’t large at first, but it grew with the impact of the hurricane. All of the lakefront area—full of restaurants, condominiums, marinas, and homes—was doomed. The specter of massive flooding was upon the city.
Because so much of New Orleans and the adjacent parishes was below sea level, rainwater would not drain off anyway. In New Orleans, the Sewerage and Water Board had twenty-two pumping stations in 2005 to collect and disperse the rain. Most was sent into Lake Pontchartrain, by way of one of two canals, or underground pipes. Some went into the Mississippi River. The stations were manned twenty-four hours a day; most of them had been installed around 1915. While that suggests they might be outdated, this was not the case. “The machinery has a certain antique splendor about it,” wrote Brian Hayes, a specialist in infrastructure, “but the pumps are not museum pieces; they are still among the most powerful in the world.”28
Nearby Jefferson Parish lay as much as five feet below sea level and depended on gravity to collect rainwater at forty-seven stations, containing 130 pumps. The staffing was not continuous at all pump stations, as in New Orleans; instead, pump operators left some houses unguarded, while they remained on standby status. When all the stations in the greater New Orleans area were manned, they had the capacity to pump 16 million gallons of water per minute. “Pump everything down,” Walter Maestri, Jefferson Parish’s emergency management chief, told his pump-station personnel. “Get as much of the water out without sucking in the walls of the canal.”29
When the 17th Street Canal breached early on Monday morning, the New Orleans pumping stations were operational, and the pump-station mechanics on duty worked heroically to keep up with the frenetic, stark-raving flow. It was only late in the day on Monday, when four breached canals made New Orleans essentially a sill for Lake Pontchartrain, that the alarmed mechanics were told to turn off the great pumps and leave their stations. In Jefferson Parish, however, the flooding resulted from two sources: the hurricane rainwater and the breach of the 17th Street Canal. The system of pumping stations could have remained ahead of the rainwater and alleviated most of the flooding from the canal. Doing so would not have been futile, as it would have been in New Orleans. Unfortunately, the parish had pumping stations, but no mechanics to operate them. “All this panic is going on,” remembered Brian Baudoin, a pump operator, of his colleagues on the Sunday night before the storm. “They wanted to get out. Well, I wanted to get out, too!”30 Jefferson Parish’s president, Aaron Broussard, citing a 1998 “doomsday” plan prepared to meet the contingency of a major hurricane, ordered the mechanics to evacuate on Sunday night—before the storm struck. Even beyond his obligation to follow the doomsday plan, Broussard later claimed that he stood by his decision. “You could easily be sentencing someone to death by staying at their post,” he said. “That is illogical, unreasonable and we will never do that.”31
It was also, however, illogical to evacuate essential personnel to a site 110 miles away. That was the case with the pump operators, who ended up in the town of Mount Hermon, near the Mississippi line. Amid the conditions that prevailed on Monday, it took them hours to return to Jefferson Parish at 7 P.M. and assume their posts. During those nine hours, thousands of homes in Lakeview and Metairie that might have remained dry were destroyed. More than that, some people drowned, when the pumps might have saved them from the deadly flood. In the aftermath of Katrina, the long absence of the pump mechanics would be the most incendiary issue in Jefferson Parish; a serious citizen effort was made to recall President Broussard. He promised that in the future, the mechanics would remain near their pumps, in safe houses constructed to withstand even a Category 5 hurricane. He was in a situation typical of the human response to Katrina: he hadn’t been wrong, but he hadn’t been right either.
When criticized later by Jefferson Parish Councilman-at-Large John Young for “pulling the operators,” an irate Broussard exploded in disgust. “It will be a rainy day in hell…before I tell a pump operator that they will stay in any structure…during a Category 4 or 5 storm,” Broussard said. “You say you’re sensitive to life. I say you’re full of shit.”32
V
Incredibly, Tony Zumbado and Josh Holm were still out after midnight on Monday, driving around New Orleans in the wee morning hours, despite the danger. They knew that when the electricity went out, New Orleans would become a pre-Edison world, with only the benefit of flashlights and battery-operated generators. With Heather Allan as their logistics commander, however, they weren’t worried. Allan was desperately trying to persuade the National Guard to allow Zumbado to park the van at the Superdome, the so-called shelter of last resort. Usually the news media get full cooperation in such matters. After all, the footage Zumbado and others took could influence U.S. Coast Guard, FEMA, and the Red Cross on how best to help out. All Allan was looking to do was embed NBC News at the Superdome, but she received no cooperation. “Yes,” Zumbado recalled. “That was yet another red flag.”33
Zumbado and Holm continued to patrol New Orleans, their van vibrating. Fast-food signs up on high poles spun around like weather vanes, out of control, and then crashed to the pavement. Palm trees shook like pom-
poms, and streetlights popped out of the ground. Large chunks of sheet metal became the local equivalent of ghostly tumbleweed. Eventually, as the winds became unbearable, they returned to the Ritz and started filming rainwater on Canal Street. “It wasn’t that unusual of a storm,” Zumbado recalled. “Hard rain blowing in sheets, but nothing out of the ordinary.”34
But the rain started showering down harder in pins and daggers, a deafening spectacle. Jennifer Broome, a reporter with WOIA, the NBC affiliate in San Antonio, arrived in Louisiana late Sunday night to cover the storm. She and her crew checked in at a hotel in Metairie, just west of New Orleans. A short time later, she watched as Katrina ripped the city apart, the rain piercing. “By 4:30 A.M.,” she later wrote, “the winds are picking up and we’re already standing in a foot of water…. We’re alreadyinto tropical storm force winds, probably around 50 to 60 mph. Power is shut off at some point and the hotel generators turn on. It’s surreal. The streets are starting to turn into rivers and the water keeps coming.”35
Katrina was gargantuan in sheer size, 460 miles in diameter, but it was the eye wall that contained the strongest winds and promised the greatest destruction. As of early Monday morning, the storm was headed almost due north, straight toward New Orleans. Just before dawn, however, its track “wobbled,” in the words of one meteorologist. In the words of another, the direction developed a “wrinkle.” In any case, the cataclysmic storm began to curve eastward. Residents of Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, who had thought that they would be on the near periphery, were now in the crosshairs. “I called my kids and told them to hit the road, to get to Florida,” thirty-eight-year-old Waveland, Mississippi, Police Dispatcher Judy Frank recalled. “Dread came over me.”36
The hurricane made landfall at three spots as it skirted the uneven Gulf Coast on its eastward curve. It was deemed a Category 4 storm by NHC at the time, but in December, after reassessing data, NHC downgraded it to a strong Category 3. The first place to feel its fury was just to the south of the hamlet of Buras, Louisiana, which sits near the mouth of the Mississippi in Plaquemines Parish, sixty-three miles southeast of New Orleans. Katrina struck there at 6:10 A.M., slashing the fishing community with winds of 161 mph. As far as is known, no one was left behind in Buras. All 3,348 people from Buras and its sister village, Triumph, had evacuated. By doing so, they saved their lives, for virtually all 1,146 households were flattened like pancakes; livestock and wildlife drowned en masse. The evacuated people of Buras and Triumph hunkered down in North Louisiana or East Texas or West Tennessee, listening to the National Weather Service reports like horse gamblers during the home stretch. What they heard was nothing short of sickening. Chicago Tribune reporter Tim Jones later accurately called the Buras area a “climatological war zone.”37
As the hurricane moved, it was dropping rain at the rate of an inch an hour.38 Fifty-eight-year-old Lee Walker lived in the small town of Poydras, about midway between Buras and New Orleans. At the end of a quiet road called Saro Lane, he had a small white house that suited him perfectly—he was a bachelor with a painful back condition. “My neighbors left a day or two before the hurricane,” he said. “You know, when you got money, you can do that. When you cain’t, you just get left.” When Katrina came to Saro Lane, it brought a flood of water—the storm surge that pushed the seawater right up the Mississippi and over the river’s banks. It came so fast at dawn Monday morning that Walker had only just enough time to gather his three small dogs and race upstairs to the attic.39 For the time being, they were safe, but very much alone, cut off from the rest of the world, as the storm raged outside.
With 911 unresponsive in most Louisiana communities, Garland Robinette of WWL radio found himself in the unlikely position of being an emergency clearinghouse center. Desperate pleas were logged from Gentilly, where a roof blew off, and from the Lower Ninth Ward, where “I need a boat” was a common refrain. A woman called in and screamed, “We have a two-year-old. I think we’re going to drown.” The calls came ringing in from Tremé and Chalmette, Slidell and Metairie—everywhere. “A lot of callers were identifying locations,” Robinette recalled. “We were trying to help, but what could we do? We didn’t have boats. But people called into WWL just to say they were all right, that they were alive. Relatives and friends hear that. So, yes, we were providing a social service.”
“Spooky” is the best word to describe what it was like for Robinette to be broadcasting from the fifth floor of the pinkish building near the Superdome, the high-rise shaking like a plucked tuning fork. The winds were hellacious and then pow! the studio’s large plate-glass window blew outward as Robinette clutched his microphone, his life flashing before him. A jet-engine-like windstream came blasting through the building and almost sucked him out. Everything around him—papers, books, furniture, tapes—went flying into the morning sky. Behind the studio booth window, engineers, call screeners, and a few station stragglers were struggling to recover. Barely missing a beat, the team quickly regrouped in a large closet. Now they were stuck in the building. A group decision was made to keep Robinette broadcasting, shifting his operations to the closet, where the howling wind wouldn’t be heard. “When the window blew in, they gave me a new microphone on a stand with wheels,” he said, “and we moved down the hall into the closet.”
As Robinette told his listeners, the hurricane was drenching New Orleans and wind damage would be extensive, but it was sidestepping the city, aiming its worst winds at the coast farther east. Thus was born the cliché that echoed through parts of the city Monday morning, “It could have been worse.” At Brennan’s, the revered restaurant on Royal Street in the French Quarter, the relief was palpable. “I hate to say it,” said Jimmy Brennan, the part owner, “but it turned into a hurricane party. We had a great time.”40 The wind blew out a wall on the fourth floor of Antoine’s, another landmark, but overall the intransigents in the French Quarter looked on Katrina that morning as more exciting than unnerving. Burlesque diva Chris Owens, for example, was surviving the hurricane just fine, drinking her new “Chris Owens” bottled water and cooking up chili over a sterno can. “I kept looking out around the French Quarter,” Owens recalled. “Everything looked fairly all right. I was still worried, though, that Sheriff Harry Lee would be furious I hadn’t left.”41
VI
At the Superdome, where close to 10,000 people had taken shelter in the 69,703-seat steel-framework stadium, the situation was harrowing for those sitting in the stands or lying in the corridors. Families tried to carve out their own turf where troublemakers would leave them alone. After the hurricane had clawed at the building with 100-mph winds for more than an hour, a section of the roof, made of a combination of foam and rubber sheeting, gave way. If only the cheapskate state of Louisiana had spent the $14 million for a metal roof repair instead of a subpar $4 million foam-rubber renovation, the Superdome wouldn’t have been compromised. Nineteen stories above the playing field, two holes burst open in the bubble and let the rain shower down. A few people got out their umbrellas. Others feared they were going to be crushed. The modern structure had been built to withstand winds of 200 mph, or so the press releases boasted when it opened in 1975. That was before the New Orleans skyline closed in around it with skyscrapers that intensified the winds, turning them into effective drills for boring. When the storm poked through the roof, many people inside panicked, assuming that the whole cap would peel off the building by the time the wind was through. “I was okay until that roof fell off,” NBC producer Heather Allan told a reporter. “I was terrified then…. Otherwise it hasn’t been too bad. People are so nice and the people staying here have been really cooperative. But the washrooms are terrible.”42
Allan distinctly remembered the moment when the Superdome became an observatory for Katrina. She was standing on the floor, along with Brian Williams and cameraman Dwaine Scott. They had been doing a running series of interviews, basic “evacuee plight” segments, when rain started blowing inside. Holding a satellite telephone, Scott
captured the terrifying hole. It was the first of many news breaks for NBC and for Williams as an outstanding anchorman during Katrina. “My first concern was that the huge lights would come crashing down,” Allan recalled. “But the people were impressive. Three times the National Guard moved them as units, and there was no pushing or shoving. Considering we could all have been squished, you had to admire the collective calm.”
For the time being, the Superdome was adequate for those sitting in the stands, trying to read or sleep or gossip. The Louisiana National Guard kept everyone under strict control, while the Superdome’s regular managers passed the long hours in the office suites. Secretly they worried that the roof would cave down on the evacuees, killing thousands. Those who stayed in the Superdome overnight still had no real idea what was going on outside, except that rain was falling through the two holes in the roof. And the wind never let up, with its overcharged howl. “I could’ve stayed at home and watched my roof blow off,” forty-three-year-old refugee Harold Johnson said. “Instead, I came down here and watched the Superdome roof blow off. It’s no big deal; getting wet is not like dying.”43
At City Hall, Councilman Oliver Thomas kept checking in at the Emergency Operations Center on the ninth floor, and then walked down to his fourth-floor office. Something about Katrina made him want to be alone. He was full of trepidation. With the winds at a feverish pitch, he kept wondering if the shotgun houses in the “fighting” Ninth Ward were already coming apart. (They were.) The screeching noise was unbearable, and he had flashbacks to that beast Betsy, recalling how, as a child, he had been petrified by the very same hurricane uproar. He lay down on his office sofa. The windows were jangling, shaking like tambourines, about to pop out of their frames. “I heard the glass shattering out on Poydras from the Hyatt, where the mayor was,” Thomas recalled. “And the car windows just burst out in the street. Each popped windshield sounded like a little bomb. It was deafening. It was frightening. The lights in City Hall had gone out. All darkness. I kept being drawn to the window. I feared that the windows would break out. But it was calling me. It was like ‘Come see the devastation.’ And you could feel it. It felt like the end of the world.”44