The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  Holed up at the Grand Palace Hotel, the Ivory Clark clan had survived Katrina, peeking out their window as cars were blown off the top level of a nearby parking garage. Everybody on their floor was listening to WWL as people in Louisiana’s crippled parishes telephoned in their litany of Katrina woes. Food was in short supply after the storm, so Ivory volunteered to go to a Winn-Dixie and “commandeer” water and food. He was trying to help suffering people, and the idea that he was looting never crossed his mind. What he saw on the streets of New Orleans was awful: rising floodwaters everywhere. When he got back to his room, distributing food to the nearly two hundred people in the hotel, his wife told him that a band of thugs had entered the Grand Palace Hotel, demanding jewelry and kicking people out of rooms. With his children now in danger, Ivory decided that come Tuesday morning he would first take his aunt to Charity Hospital, where her asthma could be treated. Then they would head to the Superdome, which he assumed would be a safe haven, with plenty of food and friends.

  “We heard FEMA had five hundred buses at the Superdome,” Clark explained in defense of his planned evacuation of the Grand Palace Hotel. “And I figured they had plenty of medical assistance teams over there to help folks like us out.”89

  * On Monday, August 29, President Bush was in Arizona to participate in a birthday-cake photo-op with Senator John McCain and visited a resort to promote Medicare drug benefits. At 4:30 P.M. (CDT) he flew to California.

  * Governor Blanco hired James Lee Witt as a post-Katrina consultant on September 3, 2005.

  Chapter Eight

  WATER RISING

  Fill my days with circulating rhythm

  Where they spill, I will spill with them

  Dip my bucket in the running stream

  Try to go with it, whatever that means.

  —Robert Hunter, “Circulate the Rhythm”

  I

  A SENSE OF DREAD emanated from Governor Kathleen Blanco early Tuesday morning, as she climbed into a Blackhawk helicopter at the state police helipad in Baton Rouge. The sounds of the hurricane, the detonations of thunder and the unnerving whirr of rattling windows were over. There was only fatigue in the air, and little puddles of water on the runway. A touch of grime coated the helicopter. A deflated attitude could even be seen on the face of the Louisiana National Guard pilot. It was not the time to crack a smile. Not in Louisiana, or at least nowhere south of Alexandria. With Blanco were three suddenly high-profile national figures: FEMA Director Mike Brown and Louisiana’s two U.S. senators, Mary Landrieu and David Vitter. All over America the morning TV shows were whipping up passions about the dispossessed clinging to rooftops, the unhinged looters lurking down empty boulevards, and the jerry-built levees. If only the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had constructed the levees with the same exacting standards it implemented for dams, New Orleans might have escaped the deluge. With the whole world watching, Governor Blanco, along with her guests, was now going to get an aerial view of the Great Deluge for the first time. “By the time, the winds died down enough for all of us to fly on Monday, it was too dark,” Blanco recalled. “We couldn’t safely go up in a helicopter. But we sent the state police out and were in touch with the Coast Guard and National Guard. Tuesday morning was my first time up.”1

  Just two Saturdays before Katrina, Governor Blanco and her husband, Coach, had taken a helicopter ride from Lafayette to Venice and crossed Camanada Bay. “Look, Kathleen, I want to show you something,” Coach had said. “You see those marks in the water? Look down. Those are canals. You don’t understand, since we were down here last, look down to the south and look to the north. If a storm were to come up here, to Grand Isle, there’s nothing to stop it. Look, there’s no wetlands left!”2

  The Blancos circled the area a few times in utter disbelief, stupefied by the extent of the coastal erosion. It was one thing to read about the phenomenon in America’s Wetland: Louisiana’s Vanishing Coast or talk with the director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, but to see so much marshland—marshland once so familiar to locals—just disappear in a year was alarming. Due to coastal erosion, the seawaters of the Gulf of Mexico would soon be slapping up against New Orleans’s hurricane protection levees. Grabbing a BlackBerry from her assistant Sidney Coffee, Governor Blanco fired off an e-mail to Anne Williamson, secretary of the Department of Social Services: “I’m looking where the oil field canals were built and there’s water on both sides. Remind me. I think it would be very important to get the President to come see this, so he can understand for himself what our challenges are.”3

  On Tuesday, August 30, Blanco was back in a helicopter, headed for the Hyatt-Superdome area in New Orleans. It was too late for President Bush to fly over Louisiana’s wetlands—the wetlands were underwater. Peering out the window with Brown, Landrieu, and Vitter, all Blanco could do was sigh, and shake her head and cry. Humble tract houses, strip malls, drive-through banks—suburban structures of all kinds—were inundated with water. Senator Landrieu grew ill when she saw the pervasive damage, calling her trip “a helicopter ride from hell.” She had spent the storm at the Embassy Suites Hotel in Baton Rouge, shuttling to and from the EOC. Landrieu, a mother of two adopted children, and her husband, Frank, had boarded up their family fishing camp in Slidell the Sunday before Katrina hit. Gazing out the helicopter window, she knew it was probably gone. “Still, you want to see it with your own eyes,” she said. “Only then do you truly believe.”4

  The first stop on the helicopter tour was Jefferson Parish, to meet Aaron Broussard and discuss the abandoned pump stations. Governor Blanco had agreed to rendezvous with him on Williams Boulevard in Kenner. “We landed on I-10,” Landrieu recalled. “I was under the impression that we were going straight to the Superdome. But the governor insisted on meeting Broussard in Kenner. When we arrived at city hall, we were told Broussard was on the west bank.”5

  Somehow the communication between Blanco and Broussard (or their staffs) had gotten cross-wired. Philip L. Capitano, the angry, cantankerous mayor of Kenner, did meet with the delegation, demanding National Guardsmen, pallets of water, and debris removal equipment. Capitano fumed that the sheriff was useless and that Louis Armstrong International Airport, a prime economic engine in his city, had actually contributed to the flooding, because it had been constructed on a slope, allowing water to roll down into neighborhoods. “It was obvious to me that they weren’t prepared to handle a storm of this magnitude,” Capitano recalled. “They were in awe of it, totally confused, unsure what direction to go in.”6

  From Michael Brown’s perspective, something wasn’t right in Louisiana. Everything was off kilter. Mayor Capitano, for example, was operating with raw emotion, instead of cool pragmatism. Concerned, Brown caught Landrieu’s attention and called her over for a private word. “Do you think everything is going to be like this?” he asked. “Because if it’s like this everywhere, we’re going to be in a lot of trouble.” The PR-wise senator knew that having the head of FEMA bad-mouth Louisiana wasn’t going to be helpful. She reassured him that Kenner was a sui generis situation, that most mayors did work in tandem with their sheriffs. “I hope so,” Brown said. “I hope so.”

  The delegation climbed back into the Blackhawk. Ten minutes later, they landed on the helicopter pad at the Superdome and headed to a briefing with Mayor Ray Nagin, who was full of stories about how when Katrina hit, the Hyatt windows had shattered and curtains had blown out into the wind. The immediate future of New Orleans was at stake. Everybody was extremely cordial, Nagin more poised and collected than the rumor mill had led Blanco to believe. He seemed in control. The police superintendent, Eddie Compass, however, was in a bad way, trembling, his eyes glazed, mumbling to himself. Based at City Hall with Terry Ebbert, Compass had been working harder than any other NOPD officer since Katrina formed in the Gulf. But he was not working well. For a trained investigator, Compass was off his game, believing too many false stories that were floating around town. Instead of discussing specifics, he would
say things like “All my men have left town” or “Rapes are happening in the hospitals.” He kept whispering to the delegation that “the levees broke”—a fact they already knew. The shocked gleam in his eye told Landrieu, Brown, and Vitter to take his reckless statements with a few grains of salt. “I was working around the clock with no sleep whatsoever,” Compass recalled. “I was on the front line. I was only human. People started saying I was drunk or on drugs. I wasn’t. The only medication I was on was perscription stuff for my glaucoma. And I had recently had a hand operation. I had twenty-some stitches. I was trying to keep it clean but no painkillers.”7

  One of Nagin’s most controversial appointments had been promoting NOPD Captain Eddie Compass to police superintendent in May 2002. The boyhood friend of the mayor had been a good street cop. It was always fun to be around Eddie—he was a hoot, wearing Mardi Gras beads every February and swapping stories by the watercooler. Raised in a housing project, Compass had worked his way to the top post by charming everyone he met; among his friends were the Neville Brothers and CBS’s Ed Bradley. Early in his law enforcement career, before he was commander of the First Police District (1997–2002), he had provided security for Mayor Sidney Barthelemy (1987–1991).8 A truly wonderful, honest human being, Superintendent Compass unfortunately didn’t know how to run the New Orleans Police Department with an iron fist. He was quirky. Just months before Katrina, for example, he had suggested that the Nation of Islam be tapped for neighborhood watches. Instead of tough, no-nonsense punishment for rogue cops, he launched a “service first” campaign to change the mind-set of corrupt and rude officers. In most U.S. cities, the emergency response time to a 911 call was around five minutes; in New Orleans, it was over double that. On August 20, 2005—just nine days before Katrina—the Times-Picayune reported that the murder rate had risen 7 percent since the previous August. Incredibly, Compass tried to put a smiley face on this news by saying that “the vast majority” of New Orleanians killed were “related through blood or close friends or associates”—as if that were comforting.9

  Like Nagin, Compass enjoyed being a celebrity, smiling for the cameras, getting recognized on the street, and schmoozing with the NOPD cops that he’d befriended during more than twenty-five years on the force. “I didn’t want to do so much media,” he later said of the impression left by his high-profile way of life. “But I was damned if I did or damned if I didn’t. We had to give the impression that we weren’t hiding anything.”10

  Nobody paid Compass much mind that Tuesday morning. Everyone thought he needed a time-out, a break. “We all sat down at a table,” Landrieu said. “There wasn’t any visible animosity between the governor and the mayor. We were all working as a team.”11 Nagin briefed them on the extent of the flooding, telling them there was only one way into and out of the city. Maps were unfurled and it was explained to Brown how FEMA supply trucks and rescue buses could arrive at the Superdome with ease. There were routes open into the city. “Michael Brown had to go, because he was going on to Mississippi and, as I recall, Alabama,” Blanco recalled. “But I thought Ray did a good briefing and that we had our marching orders. Michael Brown had a schedule, so I couldn’t stop that little procession.”12

  Governor Blanco and Senator Landrieu were surprised that the Superdome had received so much damage. Back in the early 1970s, when it was built for $156 million, a great debate went on as to whether the structure was hurricane-proof, whether its foundation designs were sound. To answer such concerns, architect Arthur O. Davis shipped each panel to St. Louis for a wind tunnel test. Every one easily passed muster. A “tension ring” was also installed, twelve feet deep, around the entire circumference of the Dome. “The roof was erected on a series of temporary towers, twenty-six in all, and once the structure was in place, the towers were lowered hydraulically, all at the same time,” Davis wrote in his unpublished memoir, Design for Life. “That was the moment of truth as to whether the building structure would be safe. Since this had never been done, there was quite a bit of controversy about the process and there were even some predictions that the roof would fall straight to the floor like a pancake.”13 Of course, it never did.

  The construction of the Superdome went smoothly in an engineering sense. Only one unexpected problem occurred: pigeons. Before the Superdome roof was to be placed, nobody had thought to chase out the thousands of pigeons that, during building, had made the open-air structure their nest. Nobody knew how to get the pigeons out. Should buses come with cages? Should the city just let the pigeons expire? Find them a new shelter? Poison them? “The story was widely covered in the media and amused citizens all over Louisiana submitted their solutions to the problem,” Davis recalled. “This went on for some weeks, but fortunately this issue was not within our area of responsibility and we proceeded with matters of design and construction, while others shooed pigeons around the Louisiana Superdome.”14

  Thirty years later, the pigeons were long gone; the Superdome was now filled with human beings. The dilemma of how to empty the Superdome had become the foremost concern of Governor Blanco. You couldn’t shoo them away or just ignore them. You couldn’t evacuate them with RTA buses that were underwater. At all costs, though, buses were needed pronto. Nothing would start to heal in New Orleans unless buses were found for the Superdome and sandbags were dropped into the breached levees. As the Blackhawk left the Superdome, Governor Blanco was hopeful but still disturbed. Her people—Louisianans—were trapped. “I’d already started finding buses from all over the state to evacuate these people,” Blanco said. “With FEMA’s help we were going to prevail.”15

  Folk-rocker Lucinda Williams, a fine lyricist, wrote a song called “Joy,” which appeared on her 1998 album Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. In an anguished, snarling chant, a determined Williams declared, “I’m going to Slidell and look for my joy.” Unfortunately, as Governor Blanco’s Blackhawk flew over that waterfront city of 26,845, no joy could be found. All of the fishing camps were submerged. So much lumber was floating around that it looked like Paul Bunyan Days in northern Minnesota. Senator Landrieu elbowed the governor and asked if they could fly over her homestead, just a mile away. “Sure,” Blanco said, directing the pilot to follow the devastation up the lake a little more. “There was nothing left of our little place,” Landrieu recalled. “Nor our neighbors. A way of life was wasted away. I pointed down and said, ‘Governor, that’s where it was.’”16

  Upon returning to Baton Rouge, the three politicians went their separate ways. They were scheduled to reconvene at a press conference at 3:00 P.M. All of them were concerned with the situation at the Superdome. Television commentators were saying ad nauseam that they couldn’t believe the arena, in its current state, was “part of America.” Governor Blanco was equally shocked. Deep down, she blamed Mayor Nagin for the debacle and wondered why he wouldn’t meet with the Superdome evacuees. What was he afraid of? What kind of man was he? When she saw her husband at the EOC, she spoke about all the poor stranded people she had seen outside the Dome. “I need to find out what the tempo is,” she said, “and what’s really going on.”17

  With Coach at her side, and no media in tow, Blanco headed right back into the bowl via helicopter. She wasn’t going to be like Nagin, indifferent toward and scared of Louisiana’s most vulnerable citizens. She directed the National Guard pilot back to the Superdome. Within half an hour, there she was, standing in the largely African-American throng, trying to offer words of hope. She was confronting the forgotten. “Now there were a lot of upset people,” Blanco said. “I vividly remember this lady who was very upset because in the rescue efforts she had been [dropped off at] the Dome. She was one who had been evacuated after the storm to the Dome and she was just fretting and fretting because the children in her family had left in a different helicopter and she didn’t know where they were. She and her family had been separated and she was scared. She didn’t know if they had been rescued or if they had perished.”

  Everybody, it seemed,
wanted to touch (or shove) Governor Blanco, to tell her their Katrina story. Never once did she worry about her own safety. “The crowd rushed her and she immediately knew the misery,” Coach Blanco recalled. “Believe me, she knew the misery. They were desperate, they had just run out of water.”18 A visibly frustrated man held a baby in front of her. “You know we don’t have water here,” he said, staring the governor in the face. “My baby needs to be bathed. My baby’s going to get sick.” She did not view these people as ruffians; she said they were simply “scared” and “traumatized.”19

  II

  Given the tense, hurly-burly atmosphere, Governor Blanco knew that time was of the essence. As she continued her tour, she made an effort to inventory the problems. More MREs, bottled water, medics, etc., were needed. But what the people at the Superdome really needed were buses—fleets of buses to drive the evacuees out of the anarchy. She was concerned that the Orleans Parish water system had gone down, as had the sewage system. The lack of electricity she had expected, but not the other two factors. “The water was coming into the city all day Tuesday, and it was building up, so that was the fright,” she said. “The water continued to rise up and people were still being rescued. I asked them if there was food and water in the Dome. I had been told by the Guard that there was and the people told me that yes, there was. It was irritating to have to stand there in those long lines to receive their food.”20 It was a struggle to maintain a supply line, but officials were managing, just barely. Blanco promised to help with that, but the main concern was buses.