The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  One of those who needed saving was Diane Johnson, the sickle-cell anemia sufferer whom Reverend Willie Walker had tried to persuade to evacuate after church services at Noah’s Ark on Sunday. Stuck at Tricou Street, Johnson and her husband, Daryl, thought they could weather Katrina’s brutal force. Never did they expect mountains of floodwater to break into their single-story home. “The water was rising very fast,” Johnson later recalled. “We made our way to the attic. All of our furniture was floating. We had nothin’ to grab on to. We prayed for God to help us, we were in need. And we prayed that Reverend Walker and the members of our church were safe.”58

  Fortunately, Johnson, even in the panic of that violent moment, retrieved her medication from the bathroom cabinet. She was on Folit for her sickle-cell anemia, Coumadin for her bad heart. As the water in the house rose to five feet, and strange water-soaked floating objects started to rattle about in the living room, the family huddled together in the attic, holding hands and saying prayers. They brought a couple of paintings, and boxes of snack food with them. Within a couple of hours all their family heirlooms—except for those in the attic—were scuffled away. Three generations of precious scrapbooks and souvenirs became a ruined jumble. “She lost her motorized chair,” Daryl later lamented. “And her asthma inhalers.”

  With temperatures in the nineties, and the humidity stifling, the Johnsons’ attic felt more like a Hopi sweat lodge than a refuge from fetid water. Afraid they were going to die of heat exhaustion, they occasionally walked down the attic stairs into the toxic sludge, just to get a breath of the comparatively fresher air outside. The entire neighborhood, however, reeked of gasoline and sewage. Dead dogs floated by and all the porches were underwater. The Johnsons were scared, exhausted, beaten down, rotting in a mud hole. Chronically ill, Diane was dehydrated and in need of insulin for diabetes. With the local pharmacy gone with the waters, and hospitals much too far away, she was in dire straits. But a Wildlife and Fisheries boat came Tuesday and saved them. They were dropped off at the St. Claude Avenue Bridge. Diane had trouble walking without her Pronto chair. That machine was her legs, her baby. It broke her heart to leave it behind. “Last thing I did as we got rescued was I blessed myself,” Johnson said. “And I waved good-bye to my favorite oak tree, across the street. It was still standing, praise the Lord. Eventually, we made it to the Superdome. Daryl got me a wheelchair, but I missed my chair…. But they tried to help me atthe Superdome. They really did.”59

  X

  The part of the Ninth Ward northeast of the French Quarter was known as Bywater, named in 1947 by a group of businessmen. World War II had stimulated some growth in New Orleans’s economy, including the naval facility adjacent to the Industrial Canal commonly called the Port of Embarkation. This facility served as a Navy base and was home to the Panama Canal Commission. At night, the best Bywater jazz or funk in New Orleans could be found at Vaughn’s Lounge, home turf of Kermit Ruffins and his Barbecue Swingers. A comical sign behind the bar read “No Whites Allowed” and the walls were lined with photographs of the Mardi Gras Indians who lived in the area. Nearby were B.J.’s and Sugar Park Tavern, which taken together with Vaughn’s were known as the “Bar-muda Triangle.” It was a poor, mostly black neighborhood that maintained a funky, bohemian air. Everybody in New Orleans knew Charmaine Neville, whose father, Charles, was the saxophonist for the Neville Brothers. She was a fixture around the neighborhood and its music lounges. She was a real homegirl, and Time magazine claimed she had the “best pair of lungs in New Orleans.” The forty-nine-year-old Neville sometimes sang with her family’s band but essentially she was a solo artist, singing “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” and “St. James Infirmary Blues” at Snug Harbor or Tipitina’s. She also had the distinction of being a mother of seven. She was living in Bywater when Katrina came bursting into town. Her son Damien, who lived in California, tried to persuade her to evacuate the Big Easy, to no avail. “I didn’t want to leave my dog and cat,” she said. “Plus my neighbor, Railroad Bill, was around to keep an eye on me.”

  Like many who stayed on, Charmaine Neville underestimated what high winds do to one’s nerves. The rain beat at a slant on the windows, eventually popping them out, and then the water came pouring in. All of Bywater had a good four or five feet of water. Gagged by Katrina, she had to get out. Railroad Bill tied a gray rope around her waist and the two of them entered the flood zone, essentially swimming their way to Drew Elementary School on St. Claude Avenue, their wet clothes as heavy as lead. About 500 people had congregated at the school, huddled together in misery and discomfort. “It was hot, funky,” Neville recalled. “People were sick, hungry. There were screaming babies, old people with parched lips, handicapped people in such agony. Never could I have imagined such a scene in America.”

  Neville became proactive. She and Railroad Bill waded back to her house, salvaged some food, and brought it back to the school. She urged others to go out as well and collect food from homes and stores before it spoiled. They would have a feast. A huge makeshift pot of beans was cooked up with every kind of meat you could imagine. They used a broken upside-down desk as the pot. Before long Railroad Bill was cooking up chicken and shrimp on a little grill. Neville felt that they had to feed the refugees, at least for Monday night; she hoped that come daylight FEMA or the Red Cross would arrive at Drew Elementary to take care of their needs. She kept a special eye on a sick baby and a dying old man, wondering if she would have to send them by raft, Huck Finn–style, to the Superdome. That evening a group of the Bywater evacuees with flashlights started walking in the dark, through the chest-deep water, to the Superdome. They would let authorities know that hundreds were stranded at Drew. “It was terribly hot in the school, suffocating, so after making sure everybody was fed, at around 2 A.M., I went on the roof,” Neville recalled. “I was tired and exhausted. It was cooler up there so I just lay down and looked at the sky. I fell asleep.”

  That’s when Charmaine Neville’s life changed forever. A drowsiness came over her. She dozed off in a purplish glow. Suddenly her body must have sensed danger because she jerked awake. Standing over her was a large man brandishing a knife. “I was scared to death,” Neville recalled. “I can’t really describe anything about him but his white teeth in his face. It was too dark and he had the knife at my throat. He threatened to kill me, to slit my throat and toss me into the floodwaters if I didn’t cooperate. So I was violated, raped. I just did what I needed to do to survive.”

  From the broken-bottle rooftop of Drew, where Neville was raped, you got a panoramic view of the blasted Ninth Ward and, that night, you could see the stars. Still, the foamy water was impossible for boats to navigate under such conditions, except for the rubber Zodiac rafts. Stray dogs were now howling like hoarse coyotes in the fullness of the moment. Occasionally a helicopter flew over the floodwater, shining a searchlight downward. The vastness of the flood was hard to fathom; the scale of the ruin and destruction was mindboggling. The situation was a prowler’s delight. In Mississippi the analogy heard over and over again was that of a nuclear bomb. You felt naked and exposed and vulnerable in the barren beach-front towns of Mississippi. But the New Orleans night was suffocating and cruel, as if some sci-fi monster had poured an ocean of black slime down all the streets, gutting architectural gems, transforming the sturdy gilded-age buildings into something akin to a rotting Hollywood movie set, flimsy and ready to topple. A common sight in the Ninth Ward was staircases that led to nowhere, the buildings around them long gone. A few red emergency lights could be seen from atop buildings downtown, but not even a dull lamp radiated in the Bywater. There was no jack-o’-lantern effect (one generator-lit house every block or so). Just darkness. Every few minutes a scream or siren echoed in the night from somewhere around the St. Claude Avenue Bridge. But these were the exceptions. It was the deadly silence, the lack of life, modernity tossed to the wind, that hovered over New Orleans, as the citizens who stayed just flailed about as if trapped in a huge sp
iderweb with nowhere to go. As Jean-Paul Sartre said, “No exit.”

  The rapist fled into the night. Charmaine was left sitting on the roof to cry. All she could think about was getting out of Drew Elementary, wading back to her house, away from the outlaw aggressor, and hiding in the recesses of her closet, away from the world. But then there was reality, such as it was on the day Katrina struck. Being alone on the empty, water-filled streets was terrifying. Traumatized in the darkness, she claimed she saw an alligator thrashing about, pulling an old man into the murky water. She said, in fact, she saw many alligators. It’s a doubtful claim. Traumatized, her mind was playing tricks on her. Evil shadows were lurking all over Bywater. You’d see alligators too if you had been raped on a dark roof, then waded through three feet of sewage-infested water with dogs stuck on roofs and babies wailing. Eventually she made it home. When it was too hot inside her house, she sat on her front porch, crying and dozing intermittently. “The next day when I came to Drew everybody in the school was mad,” Neville recalled. “They had heard what had happened to me. Other women were attacked. They told me. The police are lying when they try to downplay the rapes.”60

  XI

  At 6 P.M. on Monday, George Bush telephoned Kathleen Blanco in Baton Rouge. Shell-shocked, disconcerted, and running on no sleep, the governor was insistent, telling the President that Katrina had devastated much of Louisiana. She was near tears. “We need your help,” she pleaded. “We need everything you’ve got.”61 That was a leading phrase for a notably incurious president to absorb: “everything you’ve got.” The open-endedness of Blanco’s request must have told the President that there was a tremendous leadership problem at the governor’s mansion in Louisiana. Emphatic generalities didn’t tell the President what supplies and services were needed. Governor Blanco should have rattled off specifics like water, nonperishable food, medical teams, buses, boats, and helicopters. Perhaps Blanco’s own vague knowledge about what actual assets the federal government possessed may have prevented her from being specific. Perhaps she was right to be wary of President Bush: behind her back, he was trying to federalize her Louisiana National Guard. “You know, I asked for help, whatever help you can give me,” she later snapped about her inability to be specific. “If somebody asks me for help, and—I’ll say, ‘Okay,’ well, I can do this, this, and this. What do you need?’ But nobody ever told me the kinds of things they could give me!” Eventually, in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Blanco admitted that she should have “screamed louder.”62

  With no detailed request from either Blanco or Brown, Bush didn’t pursue the matter actively enough. Louisiana was a notorious black hole for pork-barrel funds. He wasn’t going to write a blank check. He also wouldn’t be inclined to make up for Blanco’s inexperience; if she was floundering, he didn’t leap to save her reputation. As for “Brownie,” Bush trusted him wholeheartedly. While the President’s hesitation may have been understandable from a bottom-line, CEO perspective, it was a mistake on his part not to take action, even if action would entail letting Blanco take credit for positive results. Great presidents in a time of crisis govern by instinct, bypassing the limitations of novice governors. But given Governor Blanco’s vagueness, President Bush, somewhat understandably, demanded specifics. What he failed to understand was that FEMA should have been providing them.

  President Bush only made a mental note to look into the financial obligation of the federal response. But he was dragging his feet. Certainly he discussed the matter with top White House advisors, like Chief of Staff Andrew Card, Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin, and Counselor Dan Bartlett. FEMA’s Michael Brown told the White House he had everything under control. Why not just trust Brownie? A classic federal-versus-state showdown was occurring, and President Bush, one of the more stubborn American presidents, wasn’t going to take orders from a rookie like Kathleen Blanco. After all, he had been governor of Texas, and he knew that Blanco had allowed Louisiana to be terribly ill-prepared. During his time in the governor’s mansion, Austin had geared up for the Big One hitting Galveston or Corpus Christi; he had made sure Texas had enough food and water to take care of hurricane survivors for months. As a tough, resolute president, Bush didn’t respect Blanco’s uninformed emotionalism. A Bush-versus-Blanco square-off—“a dance,” as Nagin called it—ensued. It was childish and unhelpful. Petty squabbles and deliberate miscommunication needed to be shelved for the good of the people of the Gulf South. FEMA saw the squabbling through a different lens, as Blanco versus Nagin. “My biggest regret,” Brown later said, “is not getting the governor [of Louisiana] and the mayor of New Orleans to sit down and iron out their differences.”63

  As fate would have it, however, Brown was in no position to point fingers that Monday. His foolish e-mail exchange that morning certainly belongs in Bill O’Reilly’s feature “The Most Ridiculous Item of the Day.” Brown, busy doing TV interviews Monday morning in Washington, before leaving for Baton Rouge, received an e-mail compliment from a female FEMA colleague saying, “You look fabulous and I’m not talking about makeup.” Flattered, Brown fired back, “I got it at Nordstrom’s. E-mail [FEMA spokeswoman LeaAnne McBride] and make sure she knows! Are you proud of me? Can I quit now? Can I go home?” This fashion chitchat in the midst of the mayhem was reported by the Times-Picayune under the headline, “FEMA Chief Dawdled, E-mails Show; As N.O. Suffered, He Made Small Talk.”64

  At 7 P.M. Monday, Michael Brown received an urgent telephone call from Marty Bahamonde, his FEMA representative on the scene, who had just toured the New Orleans region in a helicopter to assess the damage. “I explained what I saw,” Bahamonde recalled. “And then provided my analysis of what I believed to be the most critical issues we were facing.” He listed his dominant concerns:

  Ground transportation into the city was virtually nonexistent because of the massive flooding.

  Search and rescue missions were critical as thousands of people stood on roofs or balconies in flooded neighborhoods.

  Supplying commodities would be a challenge as more and more people were headed to the Superdome to escape the floodwaters and food and water supplies were already very short at the Superdome.

  Medical care at the Superdome was critical because the staff there had run out of oxygen for special-needs patients and more and more people needed medical attention.

  Housing an entire city of people would be a major issue as approximately 80 percent of the city was underwater to varying degrees and many areas were completely destroyed.65

  Bahamonde’s telephone call had a sobering affect on Brown. He was jarred, genuinely concerned, almost at a loss for words. For the first time he fully understood that the entire future of New Orleans was at stake. “I was beginning to realize,” Brown recounted, “that things were going to hell in a handbasket.”66 Under the crisis circumstances, and realizing that he was outmatched by Katrina’s devastation, Brown did exactly the right thing. Within the hour, he called his boss, Michael Chertoff, pleading for help. Drowning in his own inabilities and convinced that Governor Blanco was “dysfunctional,” Brown had the good sense to seek guidance from a superior.67 It was the first time he and Chertoff had spoken together all day. Once again, the communications breakdown within FEMA was proving to be extremely detrimental. Dotting i’s and crossing t’s has a seminal place in our highly legalistic society, but not when fellow citizens are in desperate peril. At this juncture, as Dwight Eisenhower used to say, “People come before paper.” In point of fact, the ultimate responsibility for the lackluster federal response to Katrina lay entirely with Chertoff, the secretary of Homeland Security.

  Under rules instituted in January 2005, Homeland Secretary was in charge of all major disasters, whether from international terrorism, Mother Nature, or infrastructure collapse. Until Chertoff designated it “an incident of national significance,” and appointed someone (presumably the FEMA director in the case of hurricanes) as the “principal federal official,” relief would be halting at best. Withou
t that designation, Brown could not legally take charge, giving orders to local and state officials and overseeing deployment of National Guard and other U.S. military personnel. “I am having a horrible time,” Brown admitted to Chertoff in a telephone conversation on Monday. “I can’t get a unified command established.”68

  A stronger personality than Michael Brown might have seized command anyway. But even Brown’s GOP allies knew he was weak-kneed. The question that still haunts the events of Monday, August 29, was not, however, why Michael Brown needed post-Katrina direction and so much instruction from his boss. The important question was why Chertoff was so callous, both to Brown’s specific relief needs and to the apocalyptic needs of the entire Gulf Coast region. Brown tried to maneuver around Chertoff, to appeal directly to President Bush, but it was hard to get through to the White House.

  With his nonplussed countenance, sunken cheeks, oppressive quietude, and closely cropped beard, Chertoff exuded the contained anger of a haggard academic denied tenure. Although only fifty-one, he had accomplished a lot since his childhood in the blue-collar city of Elizabeth, New Jersey. His sterling résumé, in fact, qualified him to be a Supreme Court justice or U.S. Attorney General. His trajectory was classic Eastern Establishment fare: Harvard University; Harvard Law; admittance to the bar in the District of Columbia, New York, and New Jersey. He clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr. By the time Bill Clinton was in the White House, Chertoff had developed a reputation as a first-rate federal appeals judge, a former gutsy prosecutor who didn’t flinch when going after terrorists, mobsters, or political bosses. During any of the big U.S. political moments from 1992 to 2005, Chertoff was somewhere in the mix. He was, for example, both Senate Republican Whitewater Counsel and assistant to Attorney General John Ashcroft before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “My style was always very straightforward and simple,” he told the Washington Post. “Here’s what I know. Here’s what I don’t know. If I’ve made a mistake, I’ll admit it.”