The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  With that, the New York Times reporter and photographer handed over five gallons of fuel they had purchased near Lake Charles. “We felt like a million dollars when we left those guys,” Blumenthal said. “Because without us they would have been stranded forever.”

  Over the pay phone, Blumenthal dictated a description of what they had encountered to his assignment editor in New York. He was contributing to a monster Times overview story along with Joseph B. Treaster, who was at New Orleans’s EOC on the ninth floor of City Hall. But there remained the dilemma of getting Laforet’s photographs filed. They needed electricity. It was 4 P.M. Central Time. They would have to race to Baton Rouge at breakneck speed to get wireless Internet service. “That’s where the light strip came in handy,” Blumenthal said. “It made us look like an emergency vehicle.” And they had another ploy up their resourceful sleeves: Blumenthal was wearing a dark blue Ralph Lauren polo shirt, which just happened to be very similar to the FEMA ones. Blumenthal recalled, “As a bonus, I had a red hat that I had gotten in Colorado that had a cross on it from the Colorado Rescue, so it looked somehow that I was officially involved in the Katrina mess. Authorities had set up roadblocks on I-10 and we got right through them. We drove like crazy…. We logged the story from the Sheraton in Baton Rouge.”

  Laforet’s emblematic aerial photo of a Ninth Ward woman, floodwaters beneath her, being pulled out of the sludge by an orange Coast Guard helicopter, dangling in a basket, not only appeared on the front page of Wednesday’s Times; it was one of the most memorable photographs of 2005.

  So ended FEMA’s first attempt at relief along the Gulf Coast: lost and confused, it ended up at a Sam’s Club, which didn’t need help, miles and miles from those thousands who did. And while the Times team didn’t make it into the bowl, they published the haunting photographs that spoke to the pathos of the post-Katrina moment.

  II

  While Jim Strickland was in Shreveport, Baton Rouge, and Metairie, searching for an auto route into New Orleans, Marty Bahamonde was the only FEMA employee in the Crescent City. After arriving on Saturday, the indefatigable forty-one-year-old weathered Katrina at City Hall, keeping a watchful eye on about 13,000 people in the Superdome (around 12,000 evacuees, more than 400 National Guard personnel, and an assortment of facility managers and medical personnel). Bahamonde, the public affairs officer in FEMA’s New England regional bureau, had worked at the agency for twelve years, often as an advance man on the scene of an expected natural disaster. Bahamonde considered that his primary assignment under such circumstances was “providing accurate and important information to FEMA’s front office and Under Secretary Michael Brown.”9 As for natural disasters team leader Jimmy Strickland, Bahamonde had never heard of him.

  Born in North Dakota and raised in Illinois, Bahamonde had majored in radio and television at Southern Illinois University. After college he held TV sports anchor gigs in Illinois, Texas, and Guam. It was in Guam, in fact, on August 28, 1992, that he covered the deadly typhoon Omar, which savaged the island, an American territory at the forlorn southern end of the Mariana Islands chain. According to the New York Times, it destroyed about 2,000 homes and seriously damaged 2,300 others.10 “Typhoons were regular events in Guam,” Bahamonde recalled. “That August we were hit by seven of them. But Omar was the worst. The people needed help and FEMA had arrived to give it. It had a profound effect on me. You might call it an epiphany. I knew there was more to life than reading sports scores. I had to do something that had a direct, positive influence on people’s lives. I really believed in what FEMA was doing in Guam and I wanted to be a part of their team effort.”11 Just like that, Bahamonde quit television and joined FEMA. He was in the trenches on the relief efforts either before or following practically every natural disaster to hit the United States between 1992 and 2005. A partial list includes the Midwest floods of 1993 (Missouri), the Northridge earthquake of 1994 (Pasadena, California), Hurricane Floyd in 1999 (North Carolina), Hurricane Isabel in 2003 (Virginia), and the 2001 Red River flood (North Dakota), among many others. He worked in Florida during the devastating 2004 hurricane season. “Nothing,” Bahamonde recalled, “compared to Katrina.”

  After meeting so many bedraggled refugees at the Superdome, Bahamonde worried about New Orleans’s future. He was surrounded by jittery talk of the Big One, as if the community were a metronome ticking away the seconds until the hurricane made landfall. “I was alarmed by what I saw at the Superdome,” Bahamonde said. “I’ve always tried to stay focused on disaster victims. And I knew at once that if we got a Cat 4 or 5, like was being forecasted, the city of New Orleans had a big problem on their hands. Instead of evacuating people out, the city had packed them in a very unsafe place.”12

  All day Sunday, Marty Bahamonde’s focus had been on the Superdome, and he sent repeated messages about it to FEMA officers in Washington and Denton, Texas, insisting that food, water, and basic medical supplies were already running out—and the hurricane had yet to strike. “Issues developing at the Superdome,” Bahamonde e-mailed David Passey of FEMA. “2,000 already in and more standing in line…. The medical staffat the dome says they will run out of oxygen in about 2 hours and are looking for alternative oxygen.”13 If the supplies and expert personnel didn’t arrive on Sunday night, Bahamonde explained, “it won’t be until Tuesday and by then it could be too late for a few.”14 As the blitz of e-mails flew back and forth to FEMA officers around the country, Bahamonde was assured that supplies were just hours away. In the Superdome, Dr. Kevin Stephens was in charge of medical services. “We’ve got sick babies,” he said in desperation, echoing Bahamonde, “sick old people and everything in between.”15

  Bahamonde and Stephens were right to worry. As Katrina approached, forty to forty-five Superdome refugees were in life-threatening situations. There were also hollow-eyed junkies jonesing in the shadows, hungry for crack or heroin, afraid that their next fix was days away. Prescription medicines were needed for the seriously ill—diabetics in need of insulin, for example, or schizophrenics needing Zyprexa. Babies needed milk. Garbage was piling up in heaps, dirty diapers and empty beer bottles tossed down aisles with abandon. Many people had evacuated to the Superdome expecting food, water, and medicine—the basic provisions. They just barely received the food and water. But what they mainly got was a human tragedy. By Monday afternoon, conditions were awful, with the electrical and pumping systems out of order. The people who had come for refuge had become a community of beggars, crowding the sports arena as the Hebrew cripples did the pool of Bethesda. “I was and am still most haunted by what the Superdome became,” Bahamonde later explained. “It was a shelter of last resort that cascaded into a cesspool of human waste and filth. Hallways and corridors were used as toilets, trash was everywhere, and among it all, children, thousands of them. It was sad, it was inhumane, and it was wrong!”

  Doug Thornton, one of the Superdome managers, stayed on the scene all the while, trying to placate the throngs. He could see the problems, even before they arose. “We can make things very nice for 75,000 people for four hours,” he said. “But we aren’t up to really accommodate 8,000 for four days.”16 Mayor Nagin’s evacuation plan had turned into a debacle. But early Monday morning Thornton believed the Dome, the world’s largest steel-constructed room unobstructed by posts or pillars, would survive. The Superdome had weathered 87,500 Rolling Stones fans in 1981 and 80,000 Catholic schoolchildren anxious to see the pope in 1987. (It would, indeed, survive with about $150 million in repairs.) Three months after Katrina, NBC’s Brian Williams had returned to the Superdome to compare notes. “I guess what I want to remember most is that [frightening] sound,” Thornton told the newsman. “It’s a sound I’ll never forget and my concern for the safety of these people in the building.”17

  Waiting out the storm in Baton Rouge, Judy Benitez, executive director of the Louisiana Foundation Against Sexual Assault, was terrified by images of the Superdome on television. A rape therapy specialist, she knew that the Su
perdome evacuation scenario was setting up conditions for unimpeded assaults or rapes. Ugly male behavioral patterns were predictable. In a situation like the Superdome, feeling trapped and abandoned, without electricity or supplies, powerless men may feel compelled to victimize women even more. “Everything at the Superdome was a worst-case scenario for rape,” Benitez later explained. “There was no authority or supervision of any kind. About 200 New Orleans policemen had fled the city. When you have squalor and filth like in the Superdome, there will be anger and frustration. Some people in the sports arena were criminals, some were mentally ill, others had violent tendencies. So rape becomes a method of gaining power or control, even for a brief period of time.”18 Even under normal circumstances, it’s estimated that only one in every eight rapes is reported, so it was unlikely that accurate numbers would ever be determined. As of December 2005 the National Sexual Violence Resource Center had received forty-two reports of sexual assaults in New Orleans (or host homes) following Katrina.19

  Despite the promises from FEMA officials in response to Bahamonde’s e-mails, no supplies and no medical team arrived on Sunday night. Instead, mass confusion reigned in the Superdome. Families huddled together, hoping not to be harassed. A number of women were raped and a couple of men were stabbed. Bathroom stalls became drug dens. With gun-toting punks claiming certain sections as turf and with the roof panels peeling off the famed arena, three police officers quit on the spot. History will remember the Superdome debacle—caused by the dearth of evacuation buses—as “Nagin’s Folly,” mayoral incompetence of the first order. “I feel like I am living in the middle of a horror movie,” FEMA’s Public Affairs Division director, Natalie Rule, wrote in an e-mail message to Marty Bahamonde, just before she left her Washington office and went home for the night.20

  Sunday night Bahamonde had settled onto a cot at the EOC in City Hall. There was a feeling of gloom in the air, and the rattling of the shuttered windows added to the tension. Bahamonde had spent much of the day setting up a helicopter ride with the Coast Guard over the post-Katrina devastation. What baffled him that night was that Mayor Nagin had chosen not to be with his emergency assistance team in City Hall, opting instead for the comforts of the Hyatt. “It was very tense,” Bahamonde said. “I didn’t go to sleep until 1 A.M. There was no light, just that constant rattling. It got really bad at 7 A.M.” When Katrina was at its zenith, Bahamonde got a telephone call from FEMA headquarters in Washington, saying that Brian Williams had shown a photograph on NBC of a leak in the Superdome roof. His bosses wanted Bahamonde to investigate whether the leak was actually there. “You couldn’t see out of the windows so I went downstairs,” Bahamonde recalled. “I went out to the parking garage and looked at the Superdome. It looked structurally sound but you could see foam or whatever blowing off. And I could certainly see that the windows of the Hyatt had blown out. I reported back to headquarters an affirmative response.”21

  With the mayor at the Hyatt, Colonel Terry Ebbert of municipal Homeland Security was running EOC, directing panicked first responders on what to do. Sporting black hair and a perpetual grin, an American flag pin usually on his lapel, Ebbert was a twice-wounded Vietnam vet. After Vietnam, he became a security officer for the Pacific Fleet, responsible for policing all naval base and vessel security in California, Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines, and Japan. As the Homeland Security representative of New Orleans, he turned native, adopting localisms and cheering on the Saints. In Nagin’s absence, someone had to become essentially the proxy mayor, answering questions like how the Superdome could get toilet paper or why in fact the mayor was AWOL from City Hall. To his credit, Ebbert handled the minutiae the best he could. The ugly truth was that New Orleans under Nagin had no serious plan to manage a catastrophe. New York developed one after 9/11, and in Bahamonde’s hometown of Boston, they constantly had emergency drills and training sessions, but very few other American cities took disaster response seriously. New Orleans wasn’t alone. Disaster planning was an inconvenience. Ebbert, unsure what the next steps were with the hole in the Superdome’s roof, out-of-commission buses, and breached levees, pulled Bahamonde aside. “Hey, Marty,” he said. “You’ve done this before. What do we do now?” It was a little late to be asking this question. But without Ebbert everything in New Orleans would have collapsed; he was almost a one-man Command Center, an unsung hero.

  At 5 P.M., Bahamonde got into a Coast Guard helicopter and, as planned, surveyed the Greater New Orleans area. Forget Guam after Omar or North Dakota after the Red River flood of 2001—Bahamonde had never seen, or imagined he would ever see, such widespread devastation. “We had the worst-case scenario,” he said. “I had never seen anything like it. The sheer magnitude of it all. I hardly saw anyplace not flooded, except around the Superdome and French Quarter. People were on rooftops and balconies waving for help.” Staring blankly in the white glare at the breached levees, a demoralized Bahamonde understood that a deluge had occurred. At this juncture only two other Coast Guard helicopters were surveying the damage.

  After the fifteen-minute trip, Bahamonde filed a report. With just enough daylight left, he convinced the Coast Guard to take him up for a second, longer trip. Upon returning to City Hall, he called his boss, FEMA Director Michael Brown, at the Baton Rouge EOC and filled him in for a good ten minutes. “I told him everything I knew and saw,” Bahamonde said. “I felt very good. I let the senior guy at FEMA know just how desperate New Orleans and Slidell were.”22

  For Bahamonde the horror movie continued well into Monday evening. Finally, Mayor Nagin decided to show up at EOC for an 8 P.M. briefing. He was stoic, his downcast eyes fixed on a wall. He didn’t yet understand the flooding situation in Lakeview. About twenty other emergency responders were in the conference room. Astonishingly, the mayor had yet to helicopter over his own city—the only way to get a real assessment of the damage. It was embarrassing. He asked questions like, “What did it look like in the Lower Ninth?” or “What’s exactly a breach?”23

  Times-Picayune reporter Gordon Russell, who had been tossed out of the evening briefing by Nagin’s advisors, was able to grab Bahamonde in the corridor for about five minutes for details about his overflights. “At that point I had only a worm’s-eye view of the City Hall and Superdome area,” Russell said. “Marty had actually seen the extent of the destruction. He actually made a drawing for me of the breached 17th Street Canal. That was the tipping point for me. I now knew that with Lakeview gone, New Orleans was going to flood.”24

  III

  Late on Monday morning, Michael Brown, the director of FEMA, arrived in Baton Rouge. He used the state EOC as his makeshift office. He spoke with Blanco at length. Almost immediately, he briefed President Bush, in a videoconference, on the impact of Katrina. Unfortunately, Brown had not been on the scene in Louisiana long enough to understand the impact. Indeed, with communications hampered in the affected areas, the situation demanded more investigation. At just about the same time, a rare telephone call reached the emergency team in New Orleans. “At approximately 11 A.M.,” recalled Marty Bahamonde, “the worst possible news came into the [Nagin] EOC at the Hyatt in New Orleans. I stood there and listened to the first report of the levee break at the 17th Street Canal. I don’t know who made the report, but they were very specific about the location of the break and the size.”25 That was not the first report of the breach, in actuality, but it was from an authoritative source. At the time, the break was small, just a few feet wide, but the force of the water was bound to change that, if it wasn’t fixed immediately—and with a growing flood surrounding it, engineers from the Army Corps could not even get near enough to make a proper assessment, let alone a plan for immediate repairs. Even as that early report was filtering through the EOC, the breach in the 17th Street Canal was bursting open; the water won, and more of the concrete wall crumbled.

  Tens of thousands of other people had meanwhile joined Michael Brown in descending on Baton Rouge, which had mushroomed overnight into the larges
t city in the state. By late afternoon Monday, Louisiana’s capital was teeming with people emerging from hiding. Katrina was gone. They had escaped its stranglehold. There was reason to celebrate. The college town’s asphalt parking lots were suddenly brimming with SUVs and minivans as frenzied refugees hunted for somewhere to perch. Utility vehicles flashing yellow lights—legitimate ones—crawled up and down Main Street, unsure where to go first in order to help. Gasoline lines were long, and with fuel at over three dollars a gallon, nobody filling up was polite. Yet Baton Rouge had become Luckyville, a place to plug in laptops or cell phone chargers. Electricity, more than hard cash, was the hot currency of the frenetic, taxing moment. The toxic zone was somewhere else, back in the blackout area that President Bush neglected while visiting San Diego, where on Tuesday morning he barely mentioned Katrina in a speech on Iraq.* And for a surreal moment, even though your house may have vanished and your cherished belongings may have been ripped away with one giant sucking sound, you felt like an endurance champion. Your number wasn’t up. Life was still yours to live.

  However, as FEMA and others tried to coordinate the cleanup of the Gulf South, it soon became obvious to those in the capital that the National Guard was not there in full force.

  New York Times stringer Jeremy Alford headed over to the Pete Maravich Assembly Center, where the LSU basketball team played during the season. A triage center had been set up by Monday evening, with old people in need of medical attention packing the arena. A few had Tupperware out, trying to eat a normal meal amid the bedlam. All over Baton Rouge, there were reports of fistfights, gunfire, and auto theft. Nearly all were false, but the evacuees at the Maravich Center had no way of knowing. “You could feel the fear,” Alford said. “Two women, seeing I was a reporter, begged me to help them find their lost children. Just as I was taking notes, two police officers threw me out of the facility.”26