The Great Deluge
Page 24
Unable to get to the 17th Street Canal, MacCash and Byrne started backtracking to the Times-Picayune building, feeling like war correspondents with a wild-eyed tale to tell. From a media perspective, they in fact discovered the Lakeview flooding. The return trip was arduous. Biking toward downtown, they waded in three feet of water at the Old Metairie trestle. Luckily, MacCash had a headlight on his bike, so they could see a few yards ahead. They chained their bikes on the first floor and then trudged up the marble Times-Picayune stairs. “You can imagine how ripped up we were,” MacCash said. “Splendidly dirty. Eaten up by red ants. James had lost his house but wasn’t complaining. He just didn’t mourn stuff. I would have cried a good bit more. Actually a lot more. Actually come to think of it, he didn’t cry, but I would have.”14
Bubbling over with information about the Great Deluge, they found Amoss in an editorial meeting. The glean in their manic eyes said, “Hold the presses, boys.” They had been out and about for six hours in 35 mph winds. By mingling with dozens of refugees on the Marconi Bridge, they learned that there were multiple levee breaches and tsunamilike flooding. “Forget everything you’re planning,” Byrne said. “This is news. This is the real catastrophe just beginning. The city is going to be inundated.”15 Amoss told them to write up the front-page story ASAP. “In order to write,” Byrne said, “I need to have clean socks.” A jangled MacCash, sitting down at a typewriter, suddenly got a pang of writer’s block. He took a break. Soon, however, they coproduced the lead story for August 30, “Catastrophic: Storm Surge Swamps Ninth Ward, St. Bernard; Lakeview Levee Breach Threatens to Inundate City.” (A month later, Amoss made sure a blown-up version of “Catastrophic” hung on the wall outside his office, a souvenir twice as big as the vintage States-Item ones he so admired.)
A taciturn Mark Schleifstein, the Times-Picayune reporter who had cowritten the alarming 2003 doomsday series about New Orleans, was at the editorial meeting when MacCash and Byrne burst in. Schleifstein also lived in Lakeview, and his home was destroyed as well. Science-minded and reticent, a longtime true believer that coastal erosion along the Gulf of Mexico would someday turn New Orleans into Atlantis, Schleifstein had suddenly become a hurricane prophet. For about two years he had endured being the Cassandra of the newsroom. Colleagues had called him Mr. Big One every time it rained. Obviously, circumstances had now changed. “Quite suddenly he had enhanced credibility,” Amoss recalled. “We treated him with a bit of reverence.” All Schleifstein could say, armed with alarming telephone reports from the breach-beleaguered Army Corps of Engineers, was a matter-of-fact “The bowl is being filled.”16
III
Indeed it was. As the Times-Picayune reported, at 2 A.M. Monday, August 29, the National Hurricane Center had confirmed that Katrina, within hours of reaching the Louisiana coast, turned east.17 Moving quickly on its new northeastern track, it swept past New Orleans. In hooking to the east, Katrina swept almost due north over the southeastern tip of Louisiana, hauling its storm surge along. That near miss, seemingly fortunate for Greater New Orleans, only saved the city from some of the strongest winds. The storm remained in a perfect position to cause enormous water damage. In the first place, with winds moving in a counterclockwise direction, the water picked up from the Gulf was directed to the west, toward New Orleans. Second, the hurricane was moving over two Louisiana parishes—Plaquemines and St. Bernard—rife with waterways, both natural and man-made, that provided a deadly conduit for those waters. Between 6 and 7 A.M., Katrina had moved over the coastline, bringing with it a massive storm surge of a depth of 18 to 25 feet.18 It overtopped the earthen levees along the Mississippi River in many places, like Chalmette and Mereaux, below New Orleans.
At 5 A.M., the Times-Picayune reported, even before the punishing storm was at its strongest, the human situation took an ominous turn. The power failed in the Superdome. The blackout was met with a sigh from those who were awake to notice it. Babies whimpered. A loud commotion ensued. Backup generators clicked on and off, but the end result was largely unrelieved darkness. Lighters flickered, and flashlight beams bounced aimlessly around the Dome. You could barely see the ghostly outlines of the scoreboards. More than ten thousand people were trapped in a haunted hall, fertile ground for the malevolent to flourish. The air-conditioning was off for good. General Ralph Lupin of the National Guard was in charge of security; he had about 450 troops stationed in the Superdome (the number varies, with some sources going as high as 550). Although the media later focused on the disgruntled, many inside were grateful just to have a dry, relatively safe place to sleep. “[If ] they hadn’t opened up and let us in here, there’ve been a lot of people floating down river tomorrow,” sixty-four-year-old Merrill Rice said. “If it’s as bad as they say, I know my old house won’t stand it.”19
Brian Williams of NBC had stayed in the Superdome until the wee morning hours. For security reasons, he eventually left for a room in the Ritz Carlton on Canal Street. He was sickened by the deplorable conditions in the Superdome, particularly the fact that nobody offered these evacuees any information. They were indeed being kept in the dark, herded into a white spaceshiplike corral, given food and water, denied the basics of personal hygiene, no generators for air conditioners. Colonel Terry Ebbert, Homeland Security Director for New Orleans, commenting to CNN about the Superdome before Katrina hit, minced no words: “It’s going to be very unpleasant. We’re not in here to feed people. We’re in here to see that when Tuesday morning comes they’re alive.”
The Superdome symbolized New Orleans as a big-league city, the site of a 1987 visit from Pope John Paul II, the 1988 Republican National Convention, six Super Bowl games, and two NCAA Final Four basketball tournaments. Most famously, every January, the Sugar Bowl, an All-American gridiron tradition, was played there. Courtesy of Katrina, the Superdome’s image changed overnight; USA Today, for instance, deemed it “the epicenter of human misery.”20 While Williams was still at the Superdome, a man dived off an upper deck, committing suicide. The artificial-turf playing field was getting soaked because of the hole in the roof; in fact, a large puddle had formed at the fifty-yard line. Concession stands and luxury suites were trashed. Grown men were defecating in front of little children. But, for the most part, the Louisiana National Guard did a good job of keeping the situation safe from crime. And most of the “shelter of last resort” citizens in the Dome were—at this juncture—pretty well behaved. “People for the most part were taking care of their own,” newsman Brian Williams recalled. “But it was stifling hot inside. Some people were glad there was a hole in the roof because the rain cooled them off. Rumors of gangs were everywhere. Nothing was going very well. Nothing at all. The humidity was unbearable.”21
Humidity was a benign term for the water vapor in the air that made it hard to breathe. Nobody liked its side effects: frizzy hair, sticky shirts, and plugged sinuses. But humidity was in actuality a greenhouse gas, and senior citizens with respiratory problems couldn’t take it. Their lungs contracted and they gasped for air. Hyperventilation was very common. No doctor would recommend that any elderly person spend even one minute in an airless enclosed stadium during a Louisiana summer. In all, four people perished from “natural causes” in the Dome. There was the man who committed suicide and another who overdosed on drugs. Although six deaths were bad, in truth, it could have been much worse. According to Louisiana National Guard Colonel Thomas Beron, at one point he received a doctor’s report that almost two hundred people had perished in the Dome. “Don’t get me wrong, bad things happened, but I didn’t see any killing and raping and cutting of throats or anything…. Ninety-nine percent of the people in the Dome were very well-behaved.”22
As the eye of the hurricane progressed to within about 70 miles south-southeast of the city, the Times-Picayune reported that rain fell at the rate of over an inch an hour.23 There was no rhythm to it, just chaotic lashing. Water, pulled by the surge or pouring down as rain, filled Lake Pontchartrain. It was as though the lake were b
eing forced to hold the contents of the entire sky, as well as that of the Gulf of Mexico. According to the Times-Picayune, the water level rose by seventeen feet in about five hours. As the murky water churned in the wind, it pushed up against the earthen levees that protected the north sector of New Orleans. Constructed of packed clay and dirt, carefully laid beneath boulders set in a “rip-rap” pattern, earthen levees were typically ten times as wide at the base as they were at the top. The lakeside levees, about eighteen feet tall, were half as wide as a football field. Storm-maddened waves swept over them occasionally, but only a few gallons at a time. Overall, the berms bordering New Orleans held firm against the worst that Katrina could deliver, protecting the homes and businesses lying just a few yards away on the other side of the swirling water. “The old earthen levees along Lake Pontchartrain,” James Byrne recalled. “They took the very best Katrina could offer and withstood the test. They simply fared better than more modern man-made contraptions.”24
However, once the lake was riled by Hurricane Katrina, it had other ways of attacking New Orleans. Solid ground was disappearing. Three major drainage canals poked into the central city, which normally sent water flowing through them into Lake Pontchartrain. That water, runoff from rainstorms, was propelled by pumping stations located at the end of each canal. The 17th Street Canal, the largest of the three, was originally bordered by earthen berms, but in the 1930s, the walls were extended—not, however, by raising the height of the dirt embankment. That would have eaten up land, as the base of the berm would have to have been extended as well. Instead, a concrete flood wall was built over and above the berms. Over the years, improvements were made, patches introduced, and the need for repairs noted and sometimes neglected. Incredibly, no one was in charge: no one was fully responsible for overseeing just who was doing what to the levees. Various entities had a hand in the fortunes of the system—and fortunes are all that the levee system meant to a great many of the greedy scoundrels involved through the years. The Orleans Levee District was a state-chartered organization with two hundred employees and a peculiarly independent board of directors. For example, in the months just before Katrina, while a $427,000 repair to a crucial floodgate languished in inexcusable bureaucratic delay, the board went ahead with happier pursuits, building parks, overseeing docks that it had constructed, and investing in on-water gambling, leasing Bally’s Belle of New Orleans casino boat on Lake Pontchartrain in Gentilly.25
In setting itself up as a second city hall, the Orleans Levee District Board seemed to do everything except oversee the levees. At the city level, there was a Sewerage and Water Board, which had charge of the pumping stations, and some parts of the levee system of which they were an integral unit. On the federal level, the Army Corps of Engineers oversaw the Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection Project. The project was a joint federal, state, and local effort, authorized to enlarge and improve flood-protection structures. As fast as Congress could pry money out of the federal budget, the Corps of Engineers built levees and flood walls in New Orleans, but it was also easily distracted. Over the years, Congress habitually diverted funding from flood-protection projects to economically promising ones, notably dredging docksides and improving shipping facilities. “It was not always clear,” concluded a National Science Foundation report on the levee failures, “which agency had responsibilities for what.”26
The result was community confusion regarding the levee protection around New Orleans. The Corps of Engineers asserted that the system could withstand a fast-moving Category 3 hurricane. That was the assurance in place when Beth LeBlanc of Lakeview, a savvy, attractive middle-aged woman, saw water rising in her yard alongside the 17th Street Canal on Bellaire Drive in late November 2004. It soon became a pond, 75 feet long and 10 feet wide. The mystery water was taking over her well-manicured lawn and turning it into Swamp Hollow. An agitated LeBlanc appropriately reported her front-yard flood to the Sewerage and Water Board, which sent several investigators. One of them concluded that the water was coming from the canal. “They sent repair crews out,” LeBlanc said. “They tore up sidewalks and driveways. Things got better, but it never got dry.”27 That ought to have shocked Sewerage and Water Board officials into fast-track action, but instead reports on the seepage disclosed by LeBlanc—and many others concerning the same vicinity—were filed away and forgotten. Out of sight, as the adage goes, out of mind.
Without question, the Sewerage and Water Board was lackadaisical in its response to the Bellaire Drive complaints. Twice—on December 7, 2004, and February 8, 2005—it sent work crews to Bellaire Drive but couldn’t diagnose the problem. The crews just gave up, writing in one report, “Need environmental to find source of problem.” “Environmental” referred to the geological experiments used to determine the root source of the mystery water, but they were never performed. Protocol instructed that the crew should have immediately reported the Bellaire Drive leak—what Times-Picayune reporter Bob Marshall called the “wading pond”—to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The Lakeview residents were terribly ill-served. Obviously, the heavy seepage pointed to an engineering flaw in the 17th Street Canal, one that had to be fixed immediately. “If someone had told us there was lake water on the outside of that levee—or any levee,” Jerry Coletti, a New Orleans operations manager of the Corps, told Bob Marshall, “it would have been a red flag to us, and we would have been out there, without question.”28
Not calling the Corps was just one bungle in what post-Katrina locals call the “Nightmare on Bellaire Drive.” University of California–Berkeley engineering professor Bob Bea, who later spearheaded an investigation into the 17th Street and London Avenue breaches, said that more than a dozen people had reported other leaks, or water-soaked yards or sand boils—all signs of underground leakage. Residents had given Sewerage and Water and the levee boards kicks to the solar plexus, but they were just ignored. “Some of them said they contacted the Sewerage and Water Board, most contacted the levee board, but in all cases, no one even came out to investigate,” a disgusted Bea recalled. “These are all signs that something is wrong…. It means your system is stressed.”29
At 5 A.M. on Monday, as Katrina swept along the Louisiana coast, a man telephoned the Army Corps of Engineers in New Orleans to say that he had heard from a state policeman that the 17th Street Canal had been breached.30 Since the hurricane was still approaching, the Corps couldn’t confirm the report. But in fact, it occurred just yards from the LeBlanc house, a crack in the flood wall.
The London Avenue Canal, which runs south from the lake, in between the 17th Street Canal to the west and the Industrial Canal to the east, also burst in two spots late on Monday morning.31 By noon, Lake Pontchartrain was pouring into city streets through three breaches. Lakeview, as MacCash and Byrne reported, had become, along with New Orleans East and the Lower Ninth Ward, ground zero. “These three levee failures were likely caused by failures in the foundation soils underlying the levees,” Raymond B. Seed, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California–Berkeley, told a congressional hearing in November 2005.32 The earth that was supposed to be holding the walls in place was too soft to offer the proper resistance. And the piles used to anchor the walls were too short to be effective braces under stress. To simplify the complicated expert testimony, the levees were poorly built, with too much poured concrete and not enough engineering integrity. The shoddy Army Corps engineering crippled the Greater New Orleans flood-control system. In addition, all of the water that leaked through or “topped” the levees further weakened the supporting earth. The walls, incapable of holding back the inordinate weight of the flood-level waters, toppled.
But the deluge began far less dramatically than that: in both the 17th Street Canal and London Avenue Canal, something in the wall shifted and water began to trickle through. The greatest violence to be perpetrated on New Orleans started with a noise no louder than that of a gurgling fountain.
IV
> Across the Mississippi River from the French Quarter, a famous old business called Mardi Gras World had been whipped by the Katrina winds. Situated two long blocks from the Crescent City Connection bridge on the West Bank, Mardi Gras World was a local institution. Most of the festive and world-renowned fiberglass Mardi Gras double-deck floats were stored in the campus of warehouses situated along the river in Algiers Point. (The deepest part of the entire Mississippi, in fact, was between the French Quarter and Algiers Point at 196 feet deep.) Started in 1947, Mardi Gras World made and preserved most of the blinking floats used in the annual February parades, which brought around $1 billion annually into New Orleans’s economy. It became a popular tourist attraction in the 1980s, complete with a souvenir shop and snack bar. In 2004, 150,000 people toured the facility to photograph the oversized storybook characters that bobbed and weaved and waved past adoring revelers during Mardi Gras.
The owner, seventy-nine-year-old Blaine Kern, was known locally as Mr. Mardi Gras, a poker-playing, gregarious entertainment wizard who often wore a seersucker suit during business hours. Drenched in jewelry and Grecian Formula, like Jerry Lee Lewis (a native of Ferriday, Louisiana), he used to paint murals for a living but, due to his fun-loving floats, had become a multimillionaire. Back in 1959 Kern’s skills as a float sculptor were coveted by Walt Disney, who admired the eighteen-foot-tall gorilla Kern had created and arranged for the fake ape to make a guest appearance on Walt Disney Presents. In the coming years Disney often commissioned fiberglass creatures from New Orleans’s float master.33 To Kern they were his papier-mâché babies. When Katrina came, Kern, who ran the business with his son, Barry, was working especially hard preparing for the 2006 Mardi Gras, which would be the 150th anniversary of the pre-Lent bacchanal. In advance of the hurricane, his work crews, following his instructions, hammered plywood over the windows of the gift shop and tied down the floats so that they wouldn’t drift in case of West Bank flooding. “Then I headed to Houston with my daughter and nine grandkids,” Kern recalled. “I had been at the Algiers location for over fifty years and I believed we would survive Katrina.”34