The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  It was on Monday that the governor had learned that all the New Orleans RTA buses were flooded and out of commission. She stepped into the void to procure others. By early Tuesday morning, even before the helicopter rides, she had tasked Leonard Kleinpeter, her special assistant, and Ty Bromell, executive director of the governor’s Office of Rural Development, with becoming bus wranglers. A hunting enthusiast, Bromell, six feet tall with cropped hair, looked like a physical education teacher. That morning he had been jarred awake by a telephone call from Kleinpeter at his Christian Avenue home in Baton Rouge, informing him about the breached levees. “New Orleans needed buses,” he said. “It wasn’t just the Superdome, but the people flooded out in Lakeview, the Lower Ninth, New Orleans East, everywhere.”21

  Bromell started working the telephones. He called just about every school superintendent in northern and western Louisiana, in search of school buses for New Orleans evacuations. Diesel-powered, these standardized yellow buses could hold from forty-five to seventy passengers. He directed all of the volunteered buses to the Tanger Outlet Center in Gonzales, right next to the mall’s Cracker Barrel restaurant, which would become the bus dispatch center. By early afternoon, Bromell had found one hundred buses from places like Shreveport, Monroe, and Natchitoches. The game plan was that once the bus drivers picked up directions at the Tanger Outlet Center, they would drive to New Orleans and bring hundreds of evacuees back to a new Hurricane Katrina shelter created at the Maravich Center on the LSU campus in Baton Rouge. “Our efforts were focused just on school buses,” Bromell recalled, “and without an executive order, we couldn’t force parishes to give us buses.”22

  Governor Blanco was wise to have Bromell search for yellow school buses. But she was making mistakes. Why not issue an executive order, which would have forced parishes to donate their buses to the evacuation effort? Instead of Bromell’s one hundred yellow buses, she would have had thousands at her disposal. The same was true of city buses. For example, there were eighty buses in the fleet of Baton Rouge’s Capital Area Transit System (CATS). Dwight Brasher, the CATS director, recalled, “At tops, I was running twenty buses after Katrina, giving people in shelters access to hospitals. We’d take people with kidney problems or dialysis to hospitals. But we had sixty buses which we weren’t using.” When asked why Governor Blanco didn’t commandeer his buses, all Brasher could say was “Well, I don’t really know.”23

  Again, all Blanco had to do was issue an executive order and all sixty of those CATS buses could have headed to the Superdome or the I-10 and Causeway intersection, where thousands were congregated, many being dropped off there by the Coast Guard and fire departments. “It wasn’t that simple,” Bromell explained in defense of Blanco. “Each bus had to come with a driver and a security guard. The story was bad on TV about the looters. So, many school bus drivers from upstate were afraid to come to New Orleans.”24

  In Louisiana, political feuds are quick to flare up and slow to heal. Blanco was taking the cautious approach, and not using up all her political capital quickly. She didn’t want to start the response effort on a confrontational note. Knowing she’d need even more cooperation as the days wore on, she tried diplomacy first. Governor Blanco, however, did reach out to others for buses. On Tuesday, Blanco put Angele Davis, head of the state’s Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism, to work. Determined, chatty, and goal-oriented, Davis was the kind of state employee who actually enjoyed ribbon cuttings and awards ceremonies. Cynicism was not in her makeup. She was of the Old South school that believed that a smile gets you a thousand miles farther than a scowl. Her job was to find additional tour buses to complement a convoy of five hundred FEMA buses supposedly coming down from Arkansas. Davis worked the phones like a pro. Her first success was with the Travel Industry Association of America, headquartered in Washington, D.C., where she was looking for tour buses—ones that usually took vacationers on Cajun country or Mississippi Delta treks. “They pitched in,” Davis recalled. “There wasn’t any hesitation. I called another guy who owned two buses, woke him in the middle of the night. He said, ‘You’ve got it. Take them; they’re yours.’ Such acts of generosity were repeated time and again.”25

  On Tuesday night, the first major convoy of yellow buses left the Tanger Outlet Center headed for the Superdome. The mere sight of these rescue vehicles would bring cheers from the people stranded there. According to the governor’s own data that day, nearly 70,000 people were stuck in the flooded sections of greater New Orleans. Major General Bennett Landreneau of the Louisiana National Guard was in charge of the operation. Wearing U.S. Army fatigues, General Landreneau answered tough questions during daily press briefings in Baton Rouge about Louisiana’s slow response. An unanticipated curveball, however, was thrown General Landreneau’s way when his bus convoy neared the Orleans Parish line. At the intersection of I-10 and the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, thousands of stranded evacuees, desperate for help, blocked the road. They were exhausted; with the sun beating down on them and with no water, they were in pathetic shape. “What I did not know that Tuesday night was that people were gathering on the interstate,” Blanco said. “So when the buses went in, they ran into people. The general called me and said, ‘We’ve got a situation developing. Do you still want buses to go on to the Dome? Or should we pick up the people on the Interstate?’”26 Murphy’s Law was still alive and well in Louisiana. “Obviously, they’ve been in the sun, they have no water, they have no food,” Blanco told Landreneau. “The people in the Superdome have a nasty place and are miserable. But they have a roof over their heads and they have water and food. This is like triage. The ones coming off of their rooftops in ninety-eight-degree weather with children and elderly people had to come first. We had to get them out of the sun with food and water.”27 So the buses started picking people up on the highway before they could get to the Dome.

  Exacerbating the situation was the shortage of bus drivers. Bromell and Kleinpeter were finding it easy to find buses but difficult to find drivers. “All day Tuesday, Leonard and Ty had been gathering up buses,” Blanco recalled, “but the images on TV were scaring the bus drivers and they were going, ‘Look, here’s my bus, here’s the keys, it’s full of gas. You just get the drivers.’”28

  It’s now clear that Blanco should have better prepared Louisiana for the Big One, taking more seriously than she did the New Orleans doomsday scenarios like Hurricane Pam. The day after the hurricane wasn’t the time to look for emergency bus drivers. A system should have been in place—like the one in Texas—for fleets of buses to gather at assigned spots near the population centers, ready to go after the storm. It also must be said that Blanco was god-awful on television, discouraged and sad. She needed to appear strong and tough, spitting in the eye of Katrina and reassuring her constituents, as did Mississippi’s defiant Haley Barbour. Press Secretary Denise Bottcher, recognizing this deficiency, instructed her boss later that week to act more Barbouresque. “I’m now a bit concerned that we’re doing too many ‘first lady’ things and not enough John Wayne,” Bottcher e-mailed the governor’s assistant. “Women are easily portrayed as weak, which KBB [Blanco] has had a hard time overcoming.”29

  But Blanco deserves credit for her ability to improvise in the days after Katrina. She barely ate or rested. She did absolutely everything she could to help victims. Mistakes were made, but she also dealt with each crisis that occurred in a thoughtful, rational manner. Not once did she crack under the strain. She didn’t swear. She didn’t denounce Bush, Chertoff, or Brown. “Never would I criticize my president in the middle of a crisis,” she said. “That’s not what I’m about.” When she learned that Kleinpeter and Bromell couldn’t find drivers, she made adjustments. “Who are the school bus drivers?” she later asked. “They’re just little old ladies and old men from in town. They all saw the crime on the screen and they got scared. So we had a couple hundred buses parked at Tanger Outlet Center, full of gas with the keys and no bus drivers. So I grabbed [an officer]
of the National Guard and said, ‘Can you get me 165 bus drivers?’ We had 40 courageous drivers who were willing to go in and drive. I had to get members of the National Guard to drive the school buses to go pick up the ones who needed rescuing. Wednesday evening, [still] no FEMA buses.”30

  Just picking up stranded Louisianans wasn’t enough. The other dilemma was deciding where to take them. Under Governor Blanco’s leadership three shelters were established in Baton Rouge. The predominant one was still the Maravich Center. Nobody would claim that the shelters were run with Swiss efficiency, but given the magnitude of the crisis, the Red Cross and others working the venues earned an A for effort and a C for providing services. “They did fine under the circumstances,” Blanco said. “Nothing’s easy about this. We were creating shelters all during the day, into the night. We were evacuating people continually all through Wednesday and Thursday. Now, I really needed the FEMA buses, and Social Services began to realize that Louisiana was backing up. There was no more room.”31

  You might say all of Blanco’s bus wranglers were performing their jobs too well. Her logistical thinking was skewed, but to her credit, she continued improvising well. Clearly, the Tanger Outlet Center in Gonzales was simply too far away from New Orleans to be a huge dispatch center. While it was great being next to a Cracker Barrel restaurant, her team needed to relocate. Ultimately, they moved operations twenty-eight miles east on I-10 to mile marker 209 in La Place, where there was a huge Texaco truck stop. This was the closest place to New Orleans that still had electricity and phone service. “From 209 right into New Orleans, it was a communication dead zone,” Bromell explained. “We were on the edge, so we’d found the best staging area we could.”32

  On Wednesday morning, FEMA telephoned the governor’s office with the news that its phantom buses would be arriving at mile marker 209 that afternoon. Bromell, Kleinpeter, and Davis exhaled. From 10:30 A.M. to 2:30 P.M., they stopped making calls for school and tour buses because FEMA assets, after a long delay, were on the way. The only problem was that, once again, the FEMA buses never arrived. They wouldn’t come until Thursday. Meanwhile, a number of fellow governors were stepping in and offering help. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California sent a team of underwater divers, Bill Richardson of New Mexico sent medics, Mike Huckabee of Arkansas sent Blackhawk medevac helicopters, and George Pataki of New York sent disaster relief specialists. Reaching out to Louisiana became the rule, not the exception. There was a three- to four-hour window, in fact, on Wednesday afternoon, when Blanco felt that she had the post-Katrina beast in a box. Up out of the mire—that was Blanco’s attitude—Louisiana was rising like a dirty phoenix. At least she was trying to turn that corner and embrace hope. And Blanco was going to rise with the tide. “We thought everything was under control,” Davis said. “We were getting the job done, slowly but surely.”33

  Well…not so fast. FEMA had essentially double-crossed Blanco again. There were no buses thundering over the Arkansas line on Tuesday or Wednesday, fully equipped with food, water, and medical supplies. It was a ruse, a lie. “When we realized the FEMA buses weren’t coming, I got back on the phone, realizing we would have to do it all ourselves,” Davis recalled. “Now we started getting help from out of state. I’d take anything. Trains, planes, buses. Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu was just awesome, determined to get everybody out of the Superdome fast. The response I got was so impressive. Texas and Utah were trying to help us in every way imaginable. It just made you feel good about our country.”34

  On Wednesday evening, August 31, feeling duped by FEMA, Governor Blanco issued Executive Order 31. Bromell and Kleinpeter didn’t have to politely ask for yellow school buses anymore—providing buses to help rescue Katrina’s victims was now mandatory. Louisianans, with the help of the Coast Guard and their own National Guard, were going to have to save themselves. “Our own people saved thousands of our own people,” Leonard Kleinpeter later wrote, angry at the way his state was portrayed by both the Bush administration and the national media. “This is our chance to show the world who Louisiana people are. The ‘verbal carpetbaggers’ need to be answered. Our own talk-show hosts are lying about each of us. We stood up for each other and saved our friends’ lives.”35

  III

  On that Tuesday morning, as Blanco, Brown, Landrieu, and Vitter were touring the New Orleans area, the Times-Picayune office, located only a quarter mile from the Superdome, was in crisis. The staff had awoken to find water at their doorstep, rising. Calmly, the editor, Jim Amoss, had the whole team convene in his office. Outside they were surrounded by three feet of water—a manageable amount. But with the 17th Street Canal levee breach growing bigger by the minute, it wasn’t too far-fetched to imagine fat porpoises in the parking lot before long. Everyone agreed it was time to evacuate. “We had to make our move quickly,” Amoss recalled, “before it became impossible and we were trapped in this building and couldn’t report, couldn’t function. The publisher at that moment stuck his head in my door and he had reached the same conclusion. So we started running through the building, shouting to everybody to head for the loading dock, rousing everybody. Just getting out was all we thought about. Just getting to the interstate, which was visibly dry.”36

  Timing was crucial at this juncture. Shortly after 10 A.M., a dozen delivery trucks pulled up and all the Times-Picayune employees started piling in, in place of the newspaper bundles that the drivers had expected. Photographs of the escape show these delivery trucks lumbering down the service road, coughing up diesel, with floodwater almost over the headlights. A dubious Amoss, worried that the twelve-truck caravan might only make it for a block or so, watched the electronic dashboard message flash: “Water in fuel. Water in fuel.” The likelihood of the trucks’ conking out, or an even greater calamity, was very real. He was nearly faint with dread. He knew there weren’t just Times-Picayune reporters, but family members who had weathered Katrina with them, including an eighty-seven-year-old man, a three-month-old baby, and children of various ages. “The thought that we might stall in the middle of this deluge,” he said, “and have no option but to drag these people into the water, had me on edge.”

  The plan was to get across the Mississippi River Bridge to Algiers, where the Times-Picayune’s West Bank bureau was reportedly dry, although without power. Somehow they made it off the flooded service road and then purposefully went the wrong way up the Howard Avenue exit ramp, made a U-turn off the interstate, and escaped the bowl. “I still remember our truck made it onto the dry road, and everybody inside cheered and everybody behind it thought, All right, we can make it,” Amoss recalled. “Once on the West Bank we all pulled over and said, ‘Okay, now how are we going to make a paper tonight?’”

  That was a good question. After a rushed meeting, a varied group of reporters and editors, including the editorial-page editor, music critic, and sports editor, volunteered to return to the dry area of Uptown. They had to get the news out. A paper could be printed somewhere else, but reporters had to be in New Orleans. They couldn’t abandon their readers in a time of peril. Unfortunately, the West Bank Bureau was small, without a printing press. With Amoss’s approval, a group of daring volunteers took one of the delivery trucks and recrossed the Mississippi River Bridge, deciding they could all sleep at the home of one of the editors, a house that fortunately hadn’t flooded. While heading back into New Orleans, the Picayune contingent stumbled upon the Wal-Mart being looted. Meanwhile, Amoss led the rest of the caravan on Highway 90 to Houma, where the New York Times Company owned a small paper called the Courier. One of Amoss’s staffers was an alumnus of the Houma Courier and she had contacted it in advance to say that they were coming. The most populated town in Terrebonne Parish, Houma sat 57 miles southwest of New Orleans. This small city of 32,000 was heavily Cajun and filled with shrimpers and fishermen.

  When Amoss’s staff, packed into delivery trucks like sardines, the doors partially open for air, pulled up to the Courier building, they were greeted with warmhea
rted Cajun embraces. It was as if they were saying, “Please, just take over our offices. Whatever you need, computers, meeting rooms.” After the delicate health of a few caravan members was addressed, Amoss acted fast, planting his production people and designers there to use the Courier presses to produce the Times-Picayune. “But we needed a real newsroom, in a bigger city, to make the newspaper,” Amoss recalled. “So we left a core group there and the rest of us drove along Bayou Lafourche to Baton Rouge, still not knowing exactly where to go.”

  One possibility was calling up the Times-Picayune’s rival, the Baton RougeAdvocate, to ask for help, but then it occurred to Amoss that he was on the Board of Visitors at the Manship School of Mass Communication at LSU. He could ask Dean Jack Hamilton if they could commandeer the journalism building. The dean readily agreed to provide space for 140 Times-Picayune employees.

  For the first time in two days, Amoss felt relief. At 8 P.M. the caravan pulled up to the journalism school in utter darkness, with scarcely a streetlight for guidance. Hamilton and a few faculty members stood in front, waiting for them. “He just turned the whole place over to our use,” Amoss recalled. “The students hadn’t arrived yet for the school year and there were these wonderful, state-of-the-art computers. We instantly made ourselves at home. Hamilton had even fixed up a room for us with dozens of cots for us to sleep on that night. That was the beginning of our inventing our Baton Rouge future. We stayed for two weeks.”