As Katrina approached, Councilwoman Jackie Clarkson was in the Hyatt Regency. She was only on the fourth floor, but even there, where Entergy had set up an emergency-response hub, you could hear windows popping out like mad. Clarkson was evacuated from her room down to a 25,000-square-foot ballroom and spent the storm alongside frightened city workers, the press, and a few hundred evacuees. “My deputy and I got a little spot on the floor,” Clarkson recalled. “We were supposed to be in City Hall initially. There were bunks there, but City Hall began swaying at the top, so they moved the mayor and all of us to the Hyatt. First they put us in rooms, but that was too scary. Then they moved us to two different ballrooms.”45
The director of Safety and Loss Prevention at the Hyatt Regency in New Orleans was forty-four-year-old Gralen Banks. According to Banks, the Hyatt became Mayor Nagin’s “command center” as a matter of “convenience.” Entergy had generators, telephones, and computers on the fourth floor. Nagin would use this as his base, while Terry Ebbert, a true hero of Katrina, ran City Hall. Because the Hyatt was an atrium hotel, Banks’s fear of falling glass was acute. He was gripped with fear when “Flying Geese,” a huge aluminum sculpture hanging from the roof, started to sway. “That thing was being moved by the wind,” Banks said. “That meant the wind was moving the roof. Yeah, I had fear.”46
Everybody in the Hyatt Ballroom and the French Market Exhibition Hall lamented that cell phones were down. They were isolated from the world outside. But Clarkson, a professional telephone busybody, discovered that if she stood in the atrium and pointed her phone in a certain direction, she could receive calls. “At one point I was standing out on the balcony and the windows in the atrium began blowing in and you could feel the glass,” Clarkson recalled. “I shouldn’t have been out there, but I couldn’t help myself. Suddenly, my phone started ringing and I was able to say hello out there and it was my daughter in Italy.”
The daughter—Patricia Clarkson, who had been nominated for an Oscar for her role in 2003’s Pieces of April—was in Venice, watching the coverage of Katrina on CNN International. (She was in Venice promoting the movie Good Night, and Good Luck.) Her earlier efforts to get her mom to flee New Orleans had been futile, but she comforted herself with the thought that Mom would at least be at City Hall or the Hyatt—two ultrasafe buildings. So you can imagine her dismay as CNN showed baneful images of the Hyatt’s windows popping out, and beds and desks being sucked into the morning sky. “She wanted me to leave for someplace safe,” Councilwoman Clarkson later laughed. “Where was I to go? She put George Clooney on the phone. He tried to persuade me that the Hyatt wasn’t safe. It was strange. I’m standing on the atrium balcony of the Hyatt, and I’m watching these windows blow in and this fierce wind and rain. And I can feel speckles of glass hitting me while I’m talking to Patty and George Clooney in Venice, of all cities, the city of canals. Then we lost our connection.”
Among the guests staying in the Hyatt were the Black Men of Labor, a social club that was a legendary part of New Orleans’s annual Labor Day Parade. Five members of the club—Fred Johnson Jr., David Sylvester Jr., Todd Higgens, Reynard Thomas, and Roland Doucette—had boarded up their homes, sent their families away, and evacuated to the Hyatt. They were worried about the poor and elderly who hadn’t evacuated New Orleans. Together they decided to be first first responders. While almost everybody else was looking for cover, the Black Men of Labor stared out of the hotel lobby windows, anxious to help storm victims. “Divine inspiration brought them together,” Banks recalled. “These weren’t guys who waited around for FEMA. They didn’t get a quarter. They were native sons of this city. What the Black Men of Labor understood was that it was our friends and family members stuck. Nothin’ could hold them back. They weren’t going to sit around with thumbs up their butts beggin’ for federal help.”47
VII
In the early morning hours of Monday, August 29, holed up about eight long city blocks away from Clarkson at the Hyatt, was Deputy Chief of Police Warren Riley, his face bitten by anguish. About five inches of water was already flowing down South White Street behind the NOPD headquarters and the storm had just started kicking in. The telephones and radios were still working; in the first twenty-three minutes after wind speeds exceeded 80 mph, there were more than six hundred 911 calls, mostly from New Orleans East, the rest of the Ninth Ward, and Lakeview. His dispatchers were overwhelmed: roofs were blowing off, levees were breaching, storm surges were topping flood walls, sewers were backing up, homes were being destroyed, and people were dying. The NOPD saved the SOS tapes—the most heart-wrenching historic artifact of the entire Katrina saga. Just imagine the agony of being a dispatcher, receiving a 911 call with a woman screaming that her son or daughter was going to die, and all you could do was say, “After the storm.” The NOPD was going to need therapists and psychiatrists when the atmosphere settled—a trainload of them. An impatient Riley paced about like a caged tiger, tormented that he couldn’t do anything to help these poor drowning souls. He especially worried about fellow officers stuck in New Orleans East and Lakeview. “The dispatchers were very upset,” Riley recalled. “We can’t send people out if the wind is above 50 miles an hour.”48
One harrowing 911 call came in from fellow NOPD officer Chris Abbott, trapped in a curse of water. With the 17th Street levee break, his Lakeview house was swamped, Lake Pontchartrain gushing into his living room as if the Hoover Dam had broken in his front yard. As Officer Abbott pleaded for help, NOPD dispatchers huddled around the radio switchboard more embarrassed than scared. “I can’t get out of my attic,” he said. “The water is rising. It was up to my waist. I’m trying to get out. It’s up to my neck.” Police Captain Jimmy Scott, with Riley at his side, tried to talk Officer Abbott out of his ominous predicament. “Listen, I can’t get out,” Abbott said, trying to camouflage the obvious panic in his voice. “I apologize for asking for help.”
Captain Scott tried to calm Abbott. “Chris, do you have your gun?” Scott asked.
“Yeah,” Abbott said.
“How many magazines you got?” Scott asked. To which Abbott replied, “Three…there’s water up to my chin!”
Scott said, “Listen, take your weapon, take your three rounds, and fire a circle into the roof.”
Abbott, every fiber in his body tingling, reported back that his service revolver was wet. All the officers around the radio apprehensively glanced at one another. One despondent officer feigned a kiss and went out of the room. Every second was an eternity to all who listened. Refusing to give up on Abbott, a calm Captain Scott instructed him on how to fire a gun single-action in order to shoot a circle of holes in the roof. The bullets would structurally weaken the roof and then a fist would finish the job. “Punch your way out!” Scott shouted.
“The water’s up to my mouth,” Officer Abbott said. “I really don’t know that I’m going to make it. I really apologize.”
At that moment the radio went dead.
Silence fell over the Rampart Street headquarters. Everyone in the room was motionless. Rain was pelting the glass; the Grim Reaper was at their windowpane. Many of the officers, particularly those who knew Officer Abbott well, were in tears, ashamed that Katrina had rendered them impotent to save him. And they couldn’t believe Officer Abbott had apologized for asking for help.
Since 2001 Officer Abbott had been a folk hero in the NOPD. That May, heading to court to testify in a criminal trial, he eyed a suspicious-looking man named Brandy Jefferson walking down Dumaine Street with what looked like a concealed weapon. When Officer Abbott approached Jefferson—a known felon with “No Mercy” tattooed on his cheek—the hoodlum opened fire. Officer Abbott took three bullets and lay in a pool of blood. Rushed into surgery at Charity Hospital, he had bullets removed from his neck, spine, and chest. It was a miracle that he wasn’t paralyzed for life.49 Before long, the ten-year NOPD veteran had fully recovered and was back at his job.
After Abbott survived that ordeal, it seemed the height
of injustice that he would drown in his own home. A few of the officers closed their eyes in mourning. Other 911 calls came into the command center, but the last words of Chris Abbott—his apology—made the dispatchers and officers feel helpless. Although they wouldn’t admit it, many of the officers had written Abbott off as dead, an early victim of Katrina. “We heard absolutely nothing for a good thirty to forty minutes,” Riley recalled. “Then…we heard from him again. He’s out of breath, saying, ‘I’m on a roof. I need someone to come and get me.’ Everybody wanted to help. It was one of the most dramatic moments for us that there was.”
Officer Abbott was rescued by the NOPD, and even though he lost his bungalow, in a day the indefatigable cop was back on the job, rescuing stranded New Orleanians. “That shows the courage, the calmness, and the desperateness of the entire situation,” Riley later explained. “He couldn’t have been calmer.”50
What Abbott couldn’t communicate over the radio was that along the Orleans–Jefferson Parish line pure anarchy reigned. Lake Pontchartrain was unbelievably rough, with huge waves slapping away at the Bucktown marina, and the storm surge was overtopping jetties. Boats were being lifted in the air and dropped down on top of houses. The wind was otherworldly. A spate of 911 calls had come in before the levees even breached, as the wind pulled off the sides of hundreds of homes. “Windows begin shattering between 9 and 10 A.M.,” wrote Jennifer Broome, describing her hotel in suburban Metairie. “Glass is falling into the lobby…. The wall of my room faces the elevators and it looks like it’s breathing.” She feared for her life. “I run down the hallway, praying that this is not the end,” Broome continued. “I have never been as terrified as I was in that moment. I walk through darkness. With my flashlight, I see people huddled together in hallways, many saying prayers.”51
VIII
Officer Abbott wasn’t the only person ravaged by the 17th Street Canal and London Avenue Canal breaches in Lakeview, the first section of New Orleans to flood when the Lake Pontchartrain storm surge rushed in. He was one of thousands.
The breach in the 17th Street Canal levee opened up in stages. At the London Avenue Canal farther to the east, though, the levee simply burst in two separate explosions powered by nothing more than the water pouring in from the lake and pressing outward against the canal’s inadequate walls. The levee walls along London Avenue were about fifteen feet high, consisting of dirt embankments at the base and concrete sheetpile walls farther up. Katrina pressed the storm surge into the lake on Monday morning, and then left the bulging water behind as it moved farther north. By that time, the swirling winds, no longer pulling the water north from the sea, were positioned to push it back south against the city of New Orleans. The water was forced into the London Avenue Canal at a terrific rate. It soon rose to within three feet of the top of the levee wall.52
More water kept pushing its way into the canal. In a “normal” flood situation, the water would just have kept rising, finding the least resistance from the air above. But the sheer weight of the angry waters, and the force that drove them into the canal, was more than the walls could withstand. For more than an hour, water seeped through the embankments holding the sheetpiles in place. Had the sheetpile walls been secured by deeper pilings, the seepage in the embankments might have been the only problem—a small one at that. But with the earthen embankments compromised, the inadequate pilings that supported the sheetpiles could not remain anchored, and they toppled from the force of the water. At approximately 9:30 A.M., the embankment on the east side of the canal’s southern end crumbled, and the flood wall toppled with it. The Ninth Ward neighborhood near the Mirabeau Bridge was overwhelmed by what amounted to a flash flood. Even so, the London Avenue Canal was not relieved of the water pressure. In madly swirling waters, there is no consistency to the pressure brought to bear on a vessel: in this case, the levees of the canal.
Already weakened, the levee on the west side of the London Avenue Canal, farther north toward the lake, gave way at about 10:30 A.M. Like a river unleashed from its bounds, eight feet of water from the canal poured into the neighborhood near Robert E. Lee Boulevard. It was still gushing from the south end of the canal, too. In both places water would not stop pouring out of the London Avenue Canal for more than a full day. Even though senior citizens John and Annie Kelt of Warrington Drive had life preservers on, they drowned, the crude violence of the London Avenue breach flattening every object they had accumulated since they were married in 1949.53 According to Ceci Connolly and Manuel Roig-Franzia of the Washington Post, between twenty and thirty corpses were eventually found on the streets of Lakeview, a neighborhood where houses sold for $1 million.54
Fifty-three-year-old Michael Prevost was just one of many residents of Lakeview who found themselves in dire straits. Prevost had been born in the Lower Ninth Ward, but when he was about five, his father worried that the neighborhood was becoming “too black,” and moved the family just over the city line, to Metairie. “I was a white-flight kid,” he recalled. “Back then Metairie was pretty rural, we used to get out our BB guns and pellet guns and then shoot them off into the bayou.” Eventually Prevost took an undergraduate degree at LSU–Baton Rouge and an MA in social work at Tulane. Despite his upbringing, or maybe because of it, he became a champion of civil rights. At the time of Katrina, the six-foot-tall Prevost—who wore his hair parted down the middle, had slightly graying sideburns, and wore scholarly glasses—was in his eleventh year as the head of counseling at the prestigious Isidore Newman School on Jefferson Avenue in New Orleans. Considered the best private school in Louisiana, it boasted among its distinguished alumni former Time magazine editor Walter Isaacson, bestselling author Michael Lewis, and NFL star Peyton Manning. “It’s like belonging to a community,” Prevost said. “It’s not a job.”55
Prevost was in the city during the hurricane Sunday night, but there was nothing high-minded about the reason he stayed. Basically, he didn’t want to be stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Divorced, with a daughter in Virginia, Prevost owned a sturdy ranch house on Paris Avenue just off Robert E. Lee Boulevard, a major city thoroughfare five blocks from the London Avenue Canal. As an adult, he was still an outdoor enthusiast, the kind who subscribes to Louisiana Conservationist. Prevost had a seventeen-foot red Coleman canoe, which he pulled into his living room as Katrina approached. “I never expected to use it, but I did make sure it had paddles and life jackets,” Prevost recalled. “You never know about Lakeview.” Truth be told, Prevost wasn’t even sure if he lived in Lakeview—a blanket term for a whole host of “lake” housing developments.
Lakeview had once been a marshy spillover area from the lake; its main structures were small fishing camps and dockside shacks. In the 1930s, when the edges of Lake Pontchartrain were dredged, the land was raised and a seawall was built. The area then quickly became a magnet for second-generation Irish Americans. As one of the newer neighborhoods in New Orleans, with postwar architecture and wide, logically planned streets, Lakeview lacked the charm of distinctive neighborhoods like the French Quarter and Bywater. But the waterfront neighborhood, 90 percent white, developed an atmosphere and character like that of San Diego, with a residential-beach-area vibe. Its gems were West End and Lakeshore Park, where locals like Prevost could picnic, jog, and sunbathe. Sportsmen docked their boats in the Lakeshore Drive Marina, and when the weather was good, people sailed, fished, or water-skied in the lake. Spirited summer volleyball games played out daily at Coconut Beach, and bustling, no-frills crab shacks like Jaeger’s and seafood joints like Bruning’s dotted the shore. It was a family haven within the city limits, with a decidedly safe and suburban feel. Large manicured lawns in front of two-story homes, well-lit streets with sidewalks, and choices between decent public schools and excellent private ones made it a “safe place” to live, without being too far from Galatoire’s or Commander’s Palace. In the 2000 census, Lakeview was among the more wealthy neighborhoods in the city, with an average household income of $63,984.56
/> When Katrina made landfall, Michael Prevost was holed up in his house with his mixed-breed SPCA dog, Chelsea. He wasn’t concerned as his front lawn filled with water. He thought it was rainwater. Chelsea, however, was petrified, glancing at her owner as if he were insane. Water had started bubbling through the front door. Within what seemed like minutes the water was thigh-deep. It didn’t come in a mad rush; it came in an insistent creep. Chelsea was curled up on the sofa, looking scared when her furniture-of-last-resort started floating. Realizing that the London Avenue Canal must have breached or been overtopped, a methodical Prevost brought an ax and bottled water to his attic. By 1:30 P.M. he had an urgent choice to make: head for the attic or the canoe. “I chose the canoe,” Prevost said. “I filled it up with a quilt, knife, parka, water, and my dog. Purposely I left my gun behind. I just didn’t want to have to use it.”
The trick was getting the canoe out of his house. With the water about five or six feet high inside, he opened the sliding door and pushed his canoe out into the rain-blown afternoon. The winds were still 80 mph. Defying nature, he paddled out to his neighbors’ backyard. They had an awning still up, which provided cover. All the houses in the area were flooded over, with only second stories above the waterline. “It was beautiful in a strange way,” Prevost recalled. “Everything had an odd glow to it. That’s what I was thinking when I saw two black guys screaming for help. They weren’t in acute danger, but one of them was clinging to his roof. When the storm died down a little more slightly, Chelsea and I were going to have to go get them.”57
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