The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  As they crossed the Louisiana line, thinking ahead, they purchased five or six ten-gallon gas tanks at an auto supply store, filled them up at a Chevron, and lined them all up neatly in the back of Laforet’s SUV. That was a mistake. “Fumes just overwhelmed him,” Blumenthal recalled. “Even with the windows open everything stunk of gasoline.”

  Situated along the Mississippi, 225 miles upriver from its mouth at the Gulf of Mexico, Baton Rouge was not incapacitated by Katrina and therefore became a natural choice as a staging area for groups intent on rescue and recovery. When the Times duo arrived, it was like entering a ghostland only sodden with rainwater. Clearly a storm had whipped through, for there were lots of small leaves and pine limbs and oak branches littering the empty streets. Puddles had formed in parking lots and over two hundred power lines were down. Nearly two thousand people were still housed in Baton Rouge area shelters. It wasn’t, however, a place without tragedy. Three senior citizens had died while being evacuated from a nursing home, and a tree had fallen on a man in nearby Livingston Parish, killing him.2 Jeremy Alford, a local twenty-seven-year-old stringer, joined forces with Blumenthal and Laforet at the Baton Rouge Sheraton. A huge, beefy-necked man, Alford had never worked with either of them before. Constantly working the cell phone, which offered only intermittent service, Blumenthal found out that the Texas Task Force, a volunteer team of emergency workers, firemen, medics, and road removal specialists had linked up with FEMA and was going to rendezvous in Baton Rouge in four or five hours. Because all roads into New Orleans were closed, this would be the Times’s most realistic ticket into the bowl from the west—riding FEMA’s coattails.

  But waiting hours seemed like a lifetime, so they abandoned Blumenthal’s car at the hotel and clambered into Laforet’s SUV. Their destination was the northern shore of Lake Pontchartrain, particularly the towns of Madisonville, Ponchatoula, Hammond, and Slidell. There they would capture stories of Katrina’s vengeance, in both words and images—typical posthurricane fare. Realizing that the state police weren’t going to cotton to reporters cruising down closed roads, Laforet pulled out a yellow light strip, a long rectangular emergency flasher with suction cups that went inside the windshield, and plugged it into the cigarette lighter.

  “If you ever find yourself in a situation like this again,” Laforet told Alford, “make sure you have one of these lights. It gets you right through roadblocks.” Racing up to eighty miles an hour, they made it to the north shore around two Monday afternoon; Hammond looked like hell. Blumenthal interviewed one family seemingly straight out of Deliverance, living on the porch of their ripped-up house, trying to cook a huge chicken on a charcoal grill. Because of the moisture it would just broil. “It was really kind of pathetic,” Blumenthal recalled. “They were drinking beers. It was still raining, or raining again, so we took a lot of devastation pictures and tried to make our way to Slidell. But Slidell was completely cut off from every angle. We couldn’t get all the way there. We had no idea how bad things were in New Orleans. We were listening to the radio station. There was no cell phone reception, or if there was, it was spotty.”3

  At one point the New York Times team became ambulance chasers, but even the ambulance couldn’t find a clear path to Slidell. Huge oaks had fallen in the middle of the road, making it impossible to get around. A few locals were outside, yanking chain-saw cords, determined to cut through obstacles to the traffic flow. National Guard troops were also out and about in Tangipahoa Parish, which suffered mainly wind damage. Whatever flooding Hammond experienced was minor, affecting only low-lying areas. This was clearly not a bull’s-eye locale. Dutifully, Blumenthal poked around truck stops, timber yards, and dairy farms. Southeastern Louisiana University looked generally unscathed. Little did the Times’s team realize that Hammond was about to double in size, and the Wal-Mart distribution center in nearby Robert would soon be the number one store in America. With New Orleans 80 percent underwater, the Hammond area was coveted high ground.

  As they rode down a back road, Alford tapped Laforet on the shoulder and pointed to a weary old man pushing a wheelbarrow full of his belongings, a little boy, no more than five or six, at his side, trying to help. “Hey Vince, you gotta get that shot,” Alford said. “That’s your Pulitzer.” The laconic response from Laforet was, “Yeah, I’ve already got two of those.”4

  It was hard for Blumenthal, Laforet, and Alford to focus on Hammond while rumors abounded that levees had breached and New Orleans was underwater. The fact that Tangipahoa Parish had a 100 percent power outage was hardly front-page news in New York. Just when their frustration peaked, they received a cell phone message from the press secretary for team leader Jim Strickland, FEMA’s emergency director for Katrina. Because FEMA didn’t have enough money, it relied on emergency management teams from around the country to be first responders. Strickland, a Virginian, was one of America’s twenty team leaders, who rotated every four months. He was in charge of all FEMA task forces coming into Louisiana, not just those from Texas. “Change of plans!” the FEMA message said. “We’re going into N.O. tonight. Be at the EOC in next forty-five minutes.” Bingo. Here was their optimal chance for a free lift into the bowl.

  There was, however, a problem. There was no way to make the run from Hammond to Baton Rouge—forty-five miles—in less than an hour, even in ordinary times. But they had to try. The flashing lights were turned on and off as they sped west. “I thought if we missed the Strickland task force,” Blumenthal said, “we’d miss our chance to go in with them. We dropped everything and rushed over there to the Emergency Operations Center, and as it turned out, they didn’t leave for hours.”

  Blumenthal and Laforet arrived at the EOC, hooked up with Jim Strickland, and arranged to be part of the FEMA convoy. Alford would stay behind to report from the EOC for the Times. Located on Independence Boulevard, this EOC was mission control for the National Guard, the Red Cross, Homeland Security, and Louisiana state officials. Although the atmosphere was frenzied, there was a sense of doom in the air Monday. On the big room’s wall, a map highlighted all the parishes without power (ironically, by lighting them up). Looking at the map you couldn’t help but conjure up Randy Newman’s piano ballad “Louisiana 1927” with its sad refrain “Louisiana, Louisiana / They’re tryin’ to wash us away.” Meanwhile, Governor Blanco and other state officials were there intermittently making sure, among other things, that all the regional nuclear facilities had survived without leakage (they had).

  At 9 P.M. Jim Strickland announced that they were headed to the Baton Rouge firefighting training camp, where the Texas Task Force (among others) was waiting for them. “It sounded good but the official FEMA convoy couldn’t find the fire camp,” recalled New York Times reporter Ralph Blumenthal. “We were in our SUV lined up in the EOC parking lot as part of the convoy. We just joined this line of vehicles. We went in one direction and then the whole thing stopped and turned around. Somebody shouted, ‘Doesn’t anybody know where the fire station is?’ It was all very disorganized. But eventually they found it, just a few miles away from the EOC where we started from.”

  Once at the training field, Strickland ordered everybody to gather for a frank briefing. Volunteer task forces from Tennessee and Missouri were also waiting there. This was the FEMA rendezvous spot. Around the training lot were huge tractor-trailers with relief supplies—tents, kitchen stoves, food, chemical suits, first-aid kits. A lanky, mournful-looking man in his early fifties, Strickland was a rather unfortunate choice to lead the FEMA brigade into the New Orleans bowl. A retired fire chief from Fairfax, Virginia, he was a civilian clearly incapable of running a large-scale operation. Constantly putting his fingers through his gray hair, he gave the impression that he was already exhausted, before “the game” had even begun. There was an old-school decency about him, however, and a can-do attitude that counted for something. No doubt he had been an expemplary fireman. He didn’t mean to seem hapless; it’s just that the magnitude of Katrina caught him by surprise. �
��We’re going to go in tonight,” he said to the various task force contingents. “We’ll travel in convoy and go stay at the Convention Center.”5 The Texas Task Force was going to stay behind and get some sleep. It would follow on Tuesday to relieve the Missouri and Tennessee contingents.

  At 10:30 P.M. the convoy finally left the fire training camp and got on I-10, heading east toward New Orleans. Sitting in the backseat of Strickland’s command vehicle was Ralph Blumenthal. Full-time FEMA employee Dave Webb was driving. Following behind was Laforet in the rented SUV, with a FEMA photographer in the passenger seat. “There were no restrictions placed on me,” Blumenthal recalled. “They let me listen in on everything. It was not off the record or anything like that. Everybody was focused on getting into New Orleans and no one was thinking about holding anything back. It was all very open.”

  As the Strickland convoy drew closer to New Orleans, you could sense an eeriness in the night. A spell had been cast on the city; there was a feeling of brutal displacement in the air. Because road signs were down, the convoy, which had been split in two, accidentally went separate ways. Such transportation blunders became part of life with FEMA-sponsored emergency volunteers. “The feeling really was one of disorganization,” Blumenthal said. “They didn’t know where they were going. We didn’t have a driver who was familiar with the road and that, frankly, did strike me as off. To be going in an emergency convoy with FEMA and getting lost?”

  As they approached downtown New Orleans, Strickland learned by radio that the areas around the Convention Center were unreachable. This report was untrue. With a GPS they could have glided into the French Quarter practically with their eyes closed. Why didn’t Strickland have a scout who could have pointed out to FEMA that all you had to do was exit Causeway Boulevard to River Road and drive to Tchoupitoulas Street, a direct shot to the Convention Center? The whole area around the Convention Center was bone-dry. The National Guard trucks—those five vehicles not left to drown at Jackson Barracks—were already being driven all over the French Quarter–CBD–Superdome area quite easily, not even debris in their way. The flooding misinformation caused Strickland to alter his New Orleans relief plan. The source? The New Orleans Fire Department had a representative at the EOC in Baton Rouge who radioed Strickland with orders to abandon Mission Convention Center, to “vector” to Sam’s Club in Metairie. It was a fateful, poor decision, an abandonment of the largely African-American population left in New Orleans. “So we headed to a Sam’s Club,” Blumenthal recalled. “The fire department made that decision to change the destination. About midnight, as we rolled into Sam’s Club, which was in Metairie—we had bypassed downtown. We had to change our route to avoid the supposed water around the Convention Center. We got into the Sam’s Club parking lot on Airline Drive okay. FEMA decided on the store because there were bathrooms and water and whatever. But the manager from Sam’s Club was there and said no—there was too much damage inside the discount store. It wasn’t safe. The roof could fall down on them; it was leaking.”

  Sam’s Club was a members-only warehouse association owned by Wal-Mart, and named after its founder, Sam Walton. Launched in 1983 to serve small-business customers, the warehouse sold merchandise in bulk, a debit-card charge at a time. At the time of Katrina there were 581 Sam’s Clubs in America, each averaging about three acres of merchandise. Even if FEMA personnel couldn’t sleep inside Sam’s Club, they could commandeer provisions from the enormous store. The night hadn’t been a complete washout, and as an added bonus there was this consolation: Jefferson Parish was far safer than Orleans Parish. Sheriff Harry Lee was not the kind of law enforcement officer to tolerate looting. Strickland, whose intentions were good, ordered the convoy to make a base camp in the parking lot, even though it was blanketed with broken glass from the windows of the nearby Galleria. A few boxes of snack packs were handed out to the emergency personnel, while Blumenthal and Laforet shared peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that Blumenthal had made back in Houston. Up until now Blumenthal and Laforet had been tolerating FEMA’s fecklessness, figuring it was just getting off to a clumsy start. That was until they learned that FEMA didn’t have a single portable toilet for the hundred men and women in the convoy. “That struck me as beyond the pale,” Blumenthal recalled. “They’re going into an area like that and they don’t have any emergency toilet facilities, so you just had to use the bushes?”

  After sleeping for a few hours in the SUV, Blumenthal and Laforet arose on Tuesday, August 30, to discover that a primitive FEMA command center had been erected in the corner of the parking lot. Briefings were being held and rescue equipment unpacked. Meanwhile, all night long, private boats and Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries vessels had been helping flooded Lakeview and Ninth Ward citizens. And, come sunrise, the “incident situation” teams from Missouri and Tennessee were eager to get going. Emergency help was needed in every direction. “It’s worse than I thought,” Strickland matter-of-factly told his team.6 Reports came in of natural gas breaks, house fires, and breached levees. And the death toll, as conveyed by the Times-Picayune, was probably going to be catastrophic. Sergeant Chris Fischer of the Jefferson Parish sheriff’s office asked a legitimate question: What to do if we come across a floating body? Eyes darted around, unsure of the appropriate answer, the thought of corpses making everyone understandably uneasy. Eventually Major Bobby Woods fielded it: “Let it go. Let’s first go for life.”7

  While most of the Strickland team was anxious to save lives, Laforet was determined to get in a helicopter and survey the damage. His editor, in fact, wanted him to head for high-and-dry Lafayette, where private choppers might soon be allowed airspace. “We had a strong difference of priorities,” Blumenthal recalled. “I wanted him with me, in case I went out on the water and participated in the rescues.” Before their bickering commenced in earnest, the problem solved itself. Like a mirage, a Jefferson Parish helicopter touched down near Sam’s Club. A determined Blumenthal started begging FEMA officials to let Laforet bum a ride; the New York Times needed a photo of the breached levees and flooded districts. It turned out that FEMA was only going to allow their official photographer in the air. The insistent Laforet hadn’t won a Pulitzer Prize for nothing. He absolutely begged the photographer for the helicopter seat. “If I go instead of you, we can pool pictures together and then FEMA can still have them,” he pleaded. “And my pictures, with all due respect, will be better than yours. So could I please, please, please, please have your spot?” His groveling worked.

  Laforet hopped into the chopper and off it went. It didn’t take him long to get chills: he cursed the miserable dividends of Katrina under his breath. Homes reduced to scraps. Homes on fire. Homes on top of homes. Homes no more. He couldn’t believe his eyes. Water was up to the eaves in half of New Orleans’s homes! Lakeview and New Orleans East were islets in Lake Pontchartrain. Out came the Leica. The Coast Guard was pulling women and children off of rooftops in drop baskets; for each one they could get, twenty were left behind. Never, in all of his thirty years, had Laforet seen such overwhelming destruction. “It’s really hell,” he told Photo District News a few days later. “This is by far the most logistically difficult assignment I’ve ever covered and I’ve done some wars…. Nothing comes close to this. I’m not sure the people outside of New Orleans understood just how dire the situation is out here. It’s really a total disaster zone where people are starving to death, dying of dehydration and getting absolutely desperate.”8

  It was only a forty-minute copter ride, but that was long enough. Laforet emerged from the helicopter crestfallen. The breached levees were worse than expected. He had snapped shots of desperate people being pulled off rooftops by the Coast Guard, scenes that seemed straight from the Inferno, people in wheelchairs and baby carriages stuck in floodwaters. Upon landing, he relayed the horror he had seen to Blumenthal. Together the Times team strategized about how to get the news to New York. Cell phones weren’t working, but rumor had it that a few pay phones in Metairi
e, for some odd reason, were still functioning. They pulled into a Shell station on Airline Highway; it had a pay phone where a frazzled refugee was talking away. Blumenthal waited and waited. He waited some more. Then he grew impatient. It was imperative that his editor learn what Laforet had witnessed from the sky. “Look,” Blumenthal said, “could I use the phone?” All the guy said was “Sure,” and hung up. That was oddly easy. It triggered a double-take by Blumenthal. Apparently this defeated man and his buddy were living out of a broken-down old car in the Shell station lot across the street from where Gram Parsons’s ashes were buried, and a few blocks away from the Travel Inn where Reverend Jimmy Swaggart got nailed with a hooker. Besides them, there were four or five cats in the car. They had been living on handout food, like Snickers and Lays potato chips, from people in the area. “It was really pathetic,” Blumenthal recalled. “I realized that now that I got to the phone, I didn’t have any quarters. So the guy says, ‘I’ll help you out. Do you need quarters?’ And he started giving me coins.”

  Blumenthal and Laforet were touched that a guy with all his earthly possessions jammed into a clunker was willing to give the reporter money, no questions asked, even after he had been rude. Thinking he was doing them a favor, Laforet snapped a picture of the two guys. That act started a ruckus. “Wait a minute!” one of them said. “You can’t take our pictures! This is very embarrassing. We’re upstanding citizens and we’re just sort of down on our luck. I refuse to let myself be photographed. I’m going to take your film out of your camera! You can’t do that!” A diplomatic Blumenthal tried to fix the misunderstanding. “Look, I’m sorry to upset you guys,” he said. “If you don’t want your pictures in the paper, we won’t do it. But what’s your problem here? Why are you guys stranded here?” The refugee said they had run out of gas. He was embarrassed by this fact. “We’ll give you gas,” Blumenthal reassured him.