The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  Not only did Katrina blow out the twenty-foot-high metal doors on several Mardi Gras World warehouses, or “dens” as Kern called them, it created a wind tunnel that screamed through the krewe floats. Among other things, the Mummy lost its bandages, the Werewolf lost half its face, Dracula lost his black cape, and the Devil had his due, having his plaster flames wiped out. Although the damage could have been worse, it was bad enough to put the idea of the 150th Mardi Gras in doubt. That is, for a week or so. Caught inside the warehouse, Katrina’s winds turned the floats into so much trash, like the residue of yesterday’s parade. About six feet of water filled part of Mardi Gras World, but this hardly tapered Kern’s morale. “Heck,” he said, “we might leave the water mark around one or two just for publicity.”35

  Nevertheless, watching CNN from Houston, Kern had real worries. Windows blowing out of the hotels in the French Quarter and the central business district filled him with dread. Before Katrina hit there were 36,000 rooms in New Orleans for Mardi Gras tourists to enjoy. After the storm there were only 25,000. Not too bad, all things considered, but it translated into lost revenue for New Orleans—and Mardi Gras World. Kern employed about one hundred people, most of whom had evacuated. Right up until the weekend before Katrina, they all were hurriedly trying to construct the krewe of Alla—a monster-mash-themed float. Kiss the progress made on that project good-bye. Kern, however, left behind two armed guards, tasked with protecting the property. According to Kern, they earned double-time. Still, they were helpless against Katrina’s winds.

  Kern later took float losses with a sense of irony, humor, and chin-up spirit. He still had his eighteen-foot Hercules at a Tokyo fast-food restaurant and a fifteen-foot Elvis in a Paris bar. No matter what, Kern insisted in November 2005 that Mardi Gras 2006 would proceed, so keep the trombones dry and the bead boxes above water. He had approximately 400 floats to showcase to the world. All the masked riders were ready. The krewes of Rex, Zulu, Endymion, Proteus, Muses, Shangri-La, and Pygmalion were trying on their costumes by winter. “Mothballing is not allowed,” Kern said. “We took losses of floats, about fifty of them in Gretna, and our Rex den on South Claiborne Avenue is full of muck, but so what? You don’t stop Mardi Gras. Nothing stops Mardi Gras. The parades must go on.”

  Besides the storm-related damage, Kern had faced the problem of looters. He had hired two security guards to protect Mardi Gras World on August 29—they did. “I gave these guys permission to shoot,” Kern recalled. “I told them if we let looters mess with Mardi Gras World, then there won’t be Mardi Gras.” Sure enough, as he guessed, a few guys tried raiding his souvenir shop, stealing snacks and vandalizing property. One of the looters fired at Kern’s guard, Lynn Pitre. And Pitre fired back. “I think my guy got the looter,” Kern later said. “He heard a scream which echoed around the large hall. But the looters escaped the same way they came in.”

  Some media types were scornful of Kern, Mr. Mardi Gras, having guards fire at intruders. He, however, had no remorse. “They called us vigilantes,” he later complained. “Forget it. If you come on my property, you’re going to get shot.”36

  V

  By midday Monday Jeff Goldblatt of Fox News was out and about. Unfortunately his rented SUV was locked inside the W Hotel parking lot—the gate, like everything else electrical in New Orleans, was out of commission. He only had one option: he stuck his thumb out on Poydras Street hoping he could bribe somebody into giving him a devastation tour. Suddenly, a pickup slammed on the brakes and told Goldblatt and his cameraman, Robert Lee, to hop in. The driver was Kevin “Fish” Williams, a jack-of-all-trades with longish curly hair and left-wing politics. Sometimes he barbecued for the NOPD to make a little cash and other times he dabbled in real estate. “We jumped into the back of his truck,” Goldblatt remembered. “This freak was drunker than a skunk, but we were just happy to have a ride. He was our tour guide. He took us up Martin Luther King Boulevard. That’s where we realized there was more damage. We saw all the shotgun shacks, they had just fallen apart, and we heard reports about bodies floating around.”

  Around Central City, New Orleans had become a war zone. Lee kept film running, bouncing around in the truck bed with Goldblatt, as Fish headed for the Superdome. Goldblatt slipped Williams forty dollars, gas money, and asked to be taken to Bourbon Street. Although the wind damage was extensive, there was no flooding around the French Quarter. It was getting late in the afternoon. Goldblatt found a spot to set up shop on the corner of Bourbon and Conti, and that’s where he reported in to Bill O’Reilly and Greta van Susteren. He homed in on the Oceana Bar, where gumbo and beer were being served, French Quarter customers convinced the Katrina damage wasn’t too bad. “It was eerie in the Quarter,” he recalled. “All the lights were off. It was dark. People were joking, ‘Hey, I can actually take a leak on Bourbon Street and I’m not going to get arrested or clubbed.’”

  Because Fox News had field lights and water, a group of NOPD officers started hovering around their Bourbon Street base camp. All of the cops were complaining about no communications. “I had a couple officers take me aside and tell me, ‘I’m in the dark out here, so screw it!’” Goldblatt said. “They kept saying, ‘I’m going to get myself a good meal. I’m going to keep myself safe.’ They could have cared less that bodies were floating all over the town.”

  Once the worst of the winds died down, the NBC cameraman Tony Zumbado and his soundman, Josh Holm, were instructed by Heather Allan to head back into the streets of New Orleans; the story had dramatically shifted from gale-force winds to massive flooding. After checking out Governor Nicholls Street Wharf along the Mississippi, they headed to the Morial Convention Center. Not a soul was around. All was as still as an empty church. “I got beat up in the winds of other hurricanes much more than Katrina because in downtown New Orleans the buildings provided protection,” Zumbado recalled. “But the water. Never, ever, had I seen water like that.”37

  The hurricane veteran and the neophyte headed over to the Superdome and found—just as Brian Williams reported—utter chaos. The satellite was down, so they weren’t able to do a live shot. Water was creeping all around the area. Brackish water. Menacing water. Black water. At one point, their van almost started to float. Heavy debris was swirling around the area. The NBC team headed down Canal Street, amazed at the various survival tactics being employed. At one point they saw a sea of shoes floating down a street—clearly, an athletic store had been ransacked. Footballs were bobbing around like tub toys. White tube socks drifted around in the water, rejected by looters in favor of Nike shirts and NFL hats. Suddenly Zumbado and Holm saw about twenty people looting a mom-and-pop store. “We parked the van about a half block away from them,” Zumbado recalled. “I told Josh, ‘Stay in the van and watch me.’ All around I videotaped people coming out of their apartments, down staircases, going directly across the street, looting the place, grabbing whatever they could, and taking it back to their apartments. They were taking everything. I have video of all this.”38

  Zumbado was being cautious with his camera. In Miami looters would have shot him, or at the very least fired their weapons in the air to frighten him away. “But that didn’t happen,” Zumbado recalled. “They just ignored me.” Some seemed to enjoy his video presence, offering up a V sign or a wave. Calmly and with no interference from the looters, Zumbado recorded their privateering. That simple mom-and-pop store was just the opening salvo for the looters. As they patrolled the Tremé neighborhood around the Lafitte Housing Projects, Zumbado filmed pillagers breaking into Publix and other stores. At one shop, people were hauling out about ten or fifteen cases of beer on a hand truck.39

  Once back at the Ritz, Zumbado showed the footage to a New Orleans narcotics cop named Mike. Startled, the lieutenant tried to report the mass purloining to his dispatcher, but his walkie-talkie wasn’t functioning. His car was broken. All he had left was instinct and it also seemed to have eluded him. He was a personal wreck. Fraught with indecision, unsure how a cop s
hould act in a deluge, his nerves frayed, he looked around for guidance. “So I said to the officer, ‘Do you want to get in my van? I’ll show you,’” Zumbado said. “He gets in my van and we drive out, and he tries to make contact with some other cops. We eventually met up with them and guess what? None of them had rain gear. Can you believe that? That tells you how ill prepared they were. So they started chasing looters down, walking in two or three feet of fetid water, in regular police uniforms. Then it turned awful. There was a pregnant lady with a shopping cart full of baby supplies: Pampers, powdered milk, oil for the baby. She was pregnant and they chased her down, yelling, ‘Stop, lady, stop.’ And she dumps the basket and bolts. But the police stay after her, and go and arrest her and a few other guys for looting. And she kept crying out, ‘It’s for my baby, I’m just doing it for my baby.’ And she fell to the ground. I’m going, ‘Oh Lord,’ because she’s pregnant, [and] you know what can happen.”

  Zumbado felt guilty for leading the NOPD to the band of looters. In roughshod fashion the police handcuffed her and said they were taking her to jail. What jail? All the prison facilities were flooded. (They didn’t know that fifty-four-year-old state prison director Richard L. Stalder was on his way to New Orleans, about to rescue prisoners and open up a makeshift jail at the Greyhound Bus Terminal. He eventually sent prisoners to thirty-seven safe locations in an amazing rescue operation that deserved high praise.40) About four or five police got into a heated argument about where to incarcerate her. Zumbado hadn’t realized they were so poorly trained to handle a crisis. When in doubt, they turned fascistic. “They were like a Keystone Kops kind of thing,” he recalled. “They were trying to do their jobs, but it was like they had no plan on how to do their jobs. They were clueless. So I left that particular street and went around town videotaping some more looting.”41

  In a city surrounded by water, the police had only a handful of operable boats. Their radio system, cellular communications, and landlines went down simultaneously. They were without satellite phones. Because of flooding they couldn’t even send couriers from one part of the city to another. They had no strong leadership. Their police superintendent, Eddie Compass, at the urging of Terry Ebbert, assumed the role of media spokesperson for the city. But the gregarious Compass was elusive. Rumor spread that he had fled to Texas like other NOPD officers. (He insisted to The New Yorker’s Dan Baum that the rumor was false.42) In Houston local police officers, disgusted by the unprofessional behavior of the NOPD, started photographing the Louisiana police cars, putting the images on their cell phones as a daily chuckle. It became sport in Houston: see how many NOPD cars you could photograph in town today. High-tailing NOPD officers had lost track of rules and regulations; many just drove their patrol cars straight out of the bowl to Texas. A few of those who stayed in New Orleans were “outlaw” cops, not accountable to anybody—desperadoes looking for a quick score like a Panasonic plasma TV or a Sony CD player. Thugs with a silver badge. Pure and simple. Only now, standing in floodwater, their gunpowder wet, their toughness evaporated. They turned yellow. Dozens sank to looting and freebooting—and roughing up the occasional pregnant woman. Most were stranded, just like everybody else left in the flooded parts of the bowl. At least the stranded police, unlike the 15 percent of the force who fled, didn’t face post-Katrina disciplinary problems for fleeing New Orleans.

  As the storm raged, and Zumbado and Holm were filming the flooding on Canal Street, their shoes sucking in mud, and a cabal of NOPD officers unsure what to do, NBC’s Allan slept soundly in her Ritz-Carlton room. When she got up around 7 A.M., she looked outside and saw water creeping down the street. Sensing that the flooding was not going to quit anytime soon, she quickly called a conference. The NBC team decided that once the winds slowed down to 40 or 50 mph, they would move their satellite trucks farther up Canal Street toward the Mississippi, which was the highest point in New Orleans. Allan herself waded in the floodwaters to find the right spot. Late on Monday, the NBC team was working out of a few cars and trailers on the Canal Street median between the U.S. Customs Building and Harrah’s Casino. NBC had broken the stories of both the breach of the Superdome roof and the looting mania. But in the highly competitive world of TV news, it wasn’t enough to cover a story, you had to own it. Allan said, “I just told Tony and the other cameramen, ‘Just go. Shoot what you can—there is a story on every block.’ I didn’t corral Tony or pin him down.”43

  Eventually, NBC would show the world Zumbado’s images of people emerging from shattered houses and wading through heaps of damaged goods and worthless debris. And then there was the looting. Certainly it was sad to see families walking through broken storefront windows, emerging with blenders and hair dryers. There was something wrenching about sitting comfortably in a living room watching such thievery. Commentators kept asking: Is this America? Analogies were made to Third World countries. Anderson Cooper of CNN eloquently captured the sense of outrage just a few days after Katrina, saying, “The truth is people aren’t frustrated here. People are dying here. Walking through the rubble, it feels like Sri Lanka, Sarajevo, somewhere else, not here, not home, not America.”44 From Cooper’s vantage point, however, many of the poor were “commandeering” provisions—not looting—for their families to stay alive.

  Because virtually all the looters Zumbado and others captured on film were African American, the anarchistic New Orleans street scenes made the issue of race impossible to ignore. It was impossible not to notice that the vast majority of those stranded in New Orleans were poor blacks. (Whites did loot the Wal-Mart Super Center on Tchoupitoulas.) As CNN’s Wolf Blitzer awkwardly quipped: “You simply get chills every time you see those poor individuals…so many of these people, almost all of them that we see, are so poor, and they’re so black.”45 Predictably, blogs filled up with harsh assessments misinterpreting Blitzer. Aside from racist responses, there were ill-advised religious ones. Some Christian fundamentalists went so far as to claim God created the New Orleans deluge to rid the world of riffraff and sexual deviants. One of them quoted Hosea 8:7: “For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.” Mayor Ray Nagin later himself claimed that Katrina slammed New Orleans because “God is mad at America.”46

  Zumbado showed Allan the looting footage late Monday afternoon; she had never seen such widespread looting before in all of her globe-trotting. She was concerned. “The vast majority were just poor people,” she later recalled with a rueful reproach in her voice. “Don’t get me started. Nobody…nobody would help all these people desperate for water and food.” Her real ire, in the looming hours, would be directed at the NOPD. Virtually all of them were “cocky, arrogant, and cruel,” she said. “Virtually none showed an act of human kindness.” During the twenty-five years she had been traveling in the world’s hot spots, she had seen such things as a police officer beating women in Dakar and a man executed in Tangier, but never had she witnessed hundreds of police so callous in the face of human suffering, refusing to shift gears and place a priority on compassion and rescue work. The NOPD’s mode was singular: self-preservation. “I saw a ninety-eight-year-old man paralyzed in a wheelchair ask for help and they just scoffed at him,” she fumed. “They kicked three little huddled women with nowhere to go out of the Marriott because that was where the NOPD was sleeping…just tossed them on the street. We took them under our wing at NBC. They wouldn’t even answer questions of people who asked which way the Superdome or Convention Center was. They basically mocked all the homeless. I have never, ever, seen such a cold, I-don’t-give-a-shit attitude from cops in my life.”47

  Boiled down, Allan’s central complaint echoed that of the sheriff in Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men: “A crooked peace officer is just a damned abomination,” McCarthy wrote. “That’s all you can say about it. He’s ten times worse than the criminal.”48

  Photographic Insert 1

  Mayor C. Ray Nagin spent most of the first few days of Katrina holed up in the Hyatt Regency.
On Thursday, September 1, he emerged to speak on WWL radio, urging federal officials to save New Orleans. KEVORK DJANSEZIAN/AP

  FEMA Director Michael Brown (left) listened as Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced on September 9 that Brown was being relieved of his on-site command of Hurricane Katrina relief efforts. ROB CARR/AP

  Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco bore the brunt of the criticism from the Bush administration and the press for her purported lack of preparedness and inadequate response to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina. In truth, it was her around-the-clock efforts that finally brought buses to evacuate New Orleanians. SHAWN THEW/EPA/SIPA

  Marty Bahamonde, regional director for External Affairs for FEMA, attempted to relay to federal officials firsthand information about the desperate conditions inside the Louisiana Superdome at the height of the crisis in New Orleans. BRENDAN SMIALOWKSI/EPA/SIPA