The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  Obviously they were unable to get out a Times-Picayune newsstand issue that Tuesday. But, even through all of the commotion, they managed to produce a full paper, posted online in PDF format that night. It was comprehensive coverage. On Wednesday and Thursday there were further electronic versions of the Times-Picayune, breaking numerous stories about looting, flooding, rescues, and the Army Corps of Engineers. And then, on Friday, September 2, after not officially missing a single issue, they had a printed version issued from Houma. “It was a weird-looking paper because their format is different from ours,” Amoss said. “It stayed that way for two weeks.” Amoss had a new set of collectors’ items for his wall.

  IV

  Just like the Times-Picayune caravan, Garland Robinette and his WWL team, who had broadcast during the hurricane from their downtown high-rise, now found themselves in a real dilemma. As of Tuesday morning, water was starting to flood around the Superdome, a couple of blocks away. Robinette didn’t want to give up the microphone. This was one of the few times he felt good about being on the air. There was nothing narcissistic or egotistical about trying to bring families back together or report escape routes out of the bowl. But broadcasting from a closet on the fifth floor of a blasted-out building, shattered glass everywhere, made no sense. “At first I thought a broken pipeline or a manhole cover blew,” Robinette recalled. “But people shouted at me that the water outside our building was rapidly rising. By the time we all fled down the stairwell, water was knee-deep. We had to get to the parking garage fast, real fast.”

  Because most of Robinette’s colleagues had regular cars, they failed to make it through the high floodwaters. Robinette, however, had a hybrid, and his car cruised out of the garage with relative ease. With five WWL employees Robinette headed for the West Bank. He dropped his passengers off in New Iberia and Lafayette, and then headed up to Natchez, Mississippi, where his family was. “When I saw the rising water on Tuesday I knew exactly what it was,” Robinette said. “The very first thing that hit the brain was, I cannot believe you lived long enough to see it. Remember, I had done all of these doomsday documentaries about New Orleans flooding and coastal erosion. Some months I worked on these projects seven days a week nonstop. They were creative endeavors and when I was done I’d go eat and drink and say to myself, Not in our lifetime. Good story. But not in our lifetime.”

  Nothing about the levee breaches really surprised Robinette; he knew the Corps of Engineers had constructed them on the cheap. However, as he drove northward, following the Mississippi, he did marvel that his city was being destroyed by a tortuously slow trickle instead of a booming loud crash of twenty feet of water. Robinette seethed with anger at all the frivolous Louisiana greed-heads who had refused to properly maintain the levees. “We’ve known the storm was in the Gulf for thirty years,” he fumed. “I used to go to government meetings on civil defense on West End Boulevard every year. These FEMA and Corps guys would sit in the back of the room while parish officials explained their obviously inadequate preparations and plans. We’ve all known about this for thirty years and the city, state, and feds did nothing about it. It had been predicted. When I saw those floodwaters on Tuesday it was like for thirty years telling your child, ‘Don’t walk in front of the train.’ And now I had to stand there and watch him walk in front of the train. The levee breaches could have been easily avoided. In 1970 it would have probably cost them a million bucks to change the tide on wetlands. In 1980 it would have cost them ten million to fix the levees. They all knew about it, the crooks. And guess what? In New Orleans we also knew our education system was the pits. We knew we were corrupt. We knew we were going down the crapper but it was okay, because it was just New Orleans. Screw ’em. I get mad at people who say that New Orleans’s ‘do nothing’ attitude is our culture—isn’t it quaint? I’m an honest Cajun and let me tell you that’s just malarkey.”37 The “do nothing” attitude may not have been universal in New Orleans, but for decades it prevailed, both in government and in levee management—and for that, every complacent citizen had some share of the blame.

  Despite the anger Robinette felt after Katrina, he remained helpful on the air. When he resumed broadcasting on Thursday—from Baton Rouge, where Clear Channel helped him broadcast all over the world—he was the voice of reason in Louisiana. He constantly gave sound survival advice to screaming mothers, terrified children, and lost souls. He was emotional but not the least bit over the edge. He seemed to thrive on the Hunter S. Thompson adage “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” When asked how he stayed so professional, Robinette had a one-word answer: Vietnam.

  When pressed to elaborate on how his Swift boat days there were related to Katrina he grew quiet, then spoke. “The water didn’t remind me of Vietnam,” he said. “The dying did. Knowing people were dying and hearing stories and talking to people who were in the process of dying, who were going to die as soon as we hung up. That reminded me a lot of Vietnam. When the people came out with me from our studio to the flooded cars, they were hysterical or shocked. I felt extremely calm. Vietnam. When the windows were blowing out (and I’m afraid of heights if you put me on a ladder), I wasn’t afraid. I was calm. Vietnam. I think it was thirteen months of combat, and if you lose control, if you get emotional or you get afraid or too brave or just don’t stay calm and think and be relaxed, you’re going to die. So Vietnam was a gigantic plus. It comes back to the fact that I have been to a bad place. I had that bad place to go back to, that helped me remain calm enough to get the job done…. I had seen the birds disappear before.”38

  V

  As of Tuesday morning, the intrepid Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries (LDWF) had been on the scene for a full twenty-four hours, with a force of two hundred rescuers with boats. By Saturday, September 3, they would have rescued more than 10,000 people in southeastern Louisiana—an astonishing number for an outfit usually concerned with issuing hunting licenses, preserving game, protecting habitats, and maintaining fish hatcheries. They truly were first responders and their tireless work immediately became the stuff of Louisiana legend—even if the media didn’t cover their exploits properly. Using a site on the St. Claude Avenue Bridge, LDWF’s people were unique in that they came with everything they needed, including their own food, water, and tents. Nonetheless, their launch site was more akin to a keelboat dock in Muskrat Flats than a city wharf. According to Sam Jones, an aide to Governor Blanco, they had become “fishers of men.”39

  Instead of wandering a fragile strip of beach in Port Fourchon, they were carrying patients out of Lakeview Medical Center. Instead of banding roseate spoonbills at Lake Martin, they were pulling children out of the rubble in the Lower Ninth Ward. And instead of patrolling the Freshwater Bayou in Southwest Louisiana, W&F, as they were called, were now wading in oily, chemical-tinged muck. Even when Katrina was still kicking with 45 mph winds on Monday, and other first responders were waiting to enter the bowl, W&F boats were already on the job. “Governor Kathleen Blanco has given LDWF and all state agencies the green light to do everything necessary to get our jobs done,” LDWF Secretary Dwight Landreneau said. “And we’re doing it.”40

  The overwhelming concern of health officials during the flooding was stopping the spread of disease. Reports of rashes, dizziness, dehydration, headaches, chemical burns, along with hundreds of other maladies were becoming frequent. Luckily, many of the rats in New Orleans drowned, flushed out of the sewers by the nestful. But rats being rats, many more managed to survive. Gnawing on rotted wood and electrical cables, scouring through mounds of debris for water-soaked food, the surviving rats stayed in packs, particularly along the wharf front. Fleas, trying to escape the floodwaters, burrowed in the backs of rats, making the rodents a double health menace. At night, those humans stuck in the bowl heard the hungry rats scampering about, brazenly prowling for food. “And dem bigass rats dat live under da wharf,” Rick Ray, who waited out the storm at New Orleans Pumping Station 7, told John Burnett of National Publ
ic Radio, holding his hands two feet apart, “dey got really bad, dem sumbitches was all over da place. We had to sleep in cars.”41

  An even bigger worry than rats were mosquitoes. Cans of Off! and DEET were passed around rescue boats and shelters like tanning oil at a beach resort. Nobody had much experience with floodwaters, so every mosquito caused a pang of worry about diseases like malaria or St. Louis encephalitis. Tulane University may have boasted the finest school of tropical medicine in the hemisphere, but when you’re standing in stagnant water and see blood on your skin, that doesn’t help much. You think of worst-case scenarios. You ponder flukes. Just because you escaped the Big One didn’t mean that the Little One—the mosquito—wasn’t going to knock you off on the viral back end. In such desperate conditions, every headache became dengue fever, every fever blister seemed to be some new strain of leprosy. Life in the deluge on Tuesday wasn’t just a breeding ground for mosquitoes, it had become a nursery for newborn hypochondriacs, rightly worried that a paper cut equaled tetanus.

  Although the New Orleans Tourist Board liked to minimize the statistic, Louisiana was a per capita leader in West Nile virus, with 177 citizens infected in 2005 alone. Mosquitoes were the carriers of West Nile, which caused an inflammation of the brain. If you were bitten in the Katrina floodwaters by a West Nile mosquito, within days you could expect swollen lymph glands, high fever, and local paralysis. The World Health Organization had little to recommend as a precaution. “To keep from being bitten by infected mosquitoes, health officials recommend staying inside around dusk and dawn, when the insects swarm,” John Pope of the Times-Picayune wrote, “covering arms and legs, getting rid of standing water, and using repellent with DEET.”42

  Unbeknownst to most of the first responders was the fact that New Orleans had an ally in its fight against mosquito-borne disease. Salt Lake City has a monument to the seagulls, which in 1848 swooped down from the sky to devour a swarm of locusts, thereby saving Utah crops. They were known affectionately as the “Mormon Air Force.” Someday New Orleans should likewise honor the dragonfly. With their large multifaceted eyes, two pairs of strong transparent wings, and outstretched bodies, dragonflies frighten most people. On Tuesday dragonflies blanketed New Orleans, hovering just inches above the smelly floodwater, eating every mosquito in sight.

  Epidemiologists considered dragonflies—called in backwoods areas “the Devil’s darning needles”—an insatiable predator, one usually found in ponds and bayous. Contrary to the popular misperception, they don’t bite or sting humans; in fact, they are as harmless as ladybugs. Female dragonflies lay their eggs (nymphs) in water or on floating plants. After Katrina their eggs were deposited in the floodwater. Then aquatic larvae hatched. From then on, they started devouring mosquitoes, dive-bombing them with aerial acrobatics that made the Coast Guard helicopters look clumsy by comparison. With a nearly 360-degree field of vision, dragonflies can both stay stationary and soar to speeds of 60 mph (they are the fastest insects in the world).

  Sometimes when a corpse was found floating around the streets of New Orleans, washed up against a chain-link fence or concrete wall, dragonflies hovered around the victim. Never did the dragonflies touch the flesh, hunting instead for maggots and fleas and mosquitoes, drawn to protect Katrina’s victims just as they did its survivors.

  VI

  Because the water was being described as “toxic gumbo,” in the annoying cliché du jour, the NOPD avoided the dragonfly zone. The officers seemed angry with those citizens who had stayed behind. Not many of the displaced were dangerous or high on drugs, they were only confused. A few were parolees, craving dowel-like instruments with which to smoke the resin in their crack pipes. The majority were only thirsty, maybe a little restless. But by that Tuesday, they had become objects of derision to the police. Many members of the NOPD, including black officers, were fixated on the fact that the “fire ants,” as they called the stranded, had blown their chance to evacuate—in fact, they had been ordered to leave and had simply refused. All of a sudden, now, after defying common sense, they wanted help. Well…tough. That was the bitter NOPD attitude. They had no obligation to play Shaft or Zorro.

  Many of the NOPD officers had lost their own homes in the flood. They were put out. Jeff Goldblatt of Fox News even saw police officers on Poydras Street pushing shopping carts filled with the only belongings they owned. You had to feel sorry for them. “On Tuesday morning, around one o’clock, we were getting ready to turn in for the night, getting my gear, just kind of cleaning up,” Goldblatt recalled. “All of a sudden I see a line, a single-file line of about a dozen or so lights, flashlights kind of searching for something, coming down Poydras toward the Convention Center—toward us. I’m like, ‘What the hell is that?’ All of a sudden as it got closer I saw men and women in the blue uniform, New Orleans police, some of them holding the hands of little kids, all of them with supermarket carts with their worldly possessions, going into the W Hotel. In return for I guess some tacit guarding, some tacit security, they had a room and a place to stay. It was pretty sad.”43

  Not all of the NOPD officers were shirking their duty or copping cocky attitudes. For fourteen straight days Captain Tim Bayard and some of his troops joined the NOLA Homeboys efforts. Furious at officials who were failing to properly organize rescues, Bayard simply joined the homegrown effort. He launched boats from places in virtually every district. He put his good citizenship ahead of the red tape that may have bound his badge. Whether he was using a hammer to knock off roof vents, sticking his face in a hole to smell for death, borrowing a boat, or climbing wobbly apartment stairs to a stranded child, Bayard was never idle and he shirked nothing. “We were launching boats off I-10, off up ramps and down rescue ramps,” he said. “We launched them off of bridges. We couldn’t get to Claiborne—there was too much water—so we launched off of the St. Claude Bridge.”

  Because the Wildlife and Fisheries boatmen had heard about the NOPD looting Cadillacs and fleeing New Orleans, good cops like Captain Bayard paid the price. “Wildlife and Fisheries were a pain in the ass,” Bayard said. “They did not coordinate with us. Absolutely nothing. They turned us down on the interstate when we tried to put fuel in our boat. They said, ‘We can’t put fuel in your boat. We need to put gas in our boats first. Then if we got extra fuel, we’ll put it in your boat.’ That’s the kind of treatment we had. Everybody was giving us the cold shoulder. They got boats lined up on the parking lot of Memorial Avenue, waiting for Wildlife and Fisheries, so I grabbed a mayor from Texas. I said, ‘I need your boats. We’ve got to go deploy.’ He said, ‘We don’t work that way in Texas. We are working now in conjunction with the W&F here.’ I went to a captain with the W&F and I introduced myself. ‘We need those boats, brother. We’ve got to put them in the water—we’ve got to go rescue people.’”

  There was something tragic about Bayard’s plea. It was as if he were trying to redeem his departed force by outsaving everybody else.

  “I can’t give you the boats,” the W&F captain replied. “We’ve got other things we’re doing with them.”

  “Jesus” is all Bayard could say, walking away in disgust.

  Later, Captain Bayard would complain that W&F was “locked in” with FEMA and that’s why they were so rude to the NOPD. But nobody did a better job than W&F when it came to first responding—perhaps because it did stay focused on its own mission. For his part, however, Bayard stayed in the murky waters, borrowing boats wherever he could. Months later, Captain Bayard answered questions about Katrina in the clipped fashion of a latter-day Joe Friday—just the facts, folks. Did he see corpses? “Yeah,” he said. “There were bodies all over the place. I think there were a lot of bodies that were never found. We were working with the missing-persons list and we found additional bodies and they’re still finding more bodies.” Did he experience gunfire? “Yeah,” he said. “That ain’t nothin’. That happens every day in the city of New Orleans. We didn’t have long rifles and we were running out of ammo and stu
ff, and really had no boats, but we were still going out there. As far as the gunfire, yeah, it was out there and some of it was directed at law enforcement and some of it was directed at emergency workers. Which goes to show you the mentality of the element you’re dealing with.”

  By Tuesday morning, as Bayard tried to rescue his fellow New Orleanians, lake water was flowing into the city through four breaches in three canals, and the flooding in New Orleans rose to an average level of eight feet. Dead bodies were a common sight in the stagnant water: discolored and bloated, the skin had taken on a marble pattern, with psoriasislike blotches on the arms from sunburn or chemical irritation. The elderly and ill remaining in the neighborhoods were dying for lack of emergency care. Because headquarters on South Broad Street was flooded, the NOPD command was moved to Harrah’s Casino. “But a lot of the group stayed,” Compass recalled. “History shouldn’t forget that.”44

  VII

  Stationed in Alexandria, Lieutenant Commander Jimmy Duckworth of the Coast Guard was receiving telephone calls from people with recreational boats who wanted to help. “The phone was ringing off the hook,” he recalled. “We had one person who was doing nothing but fielding phone calls for private logistical support and I was taking anything that could float.”45

  Duckworth’s proactive “anything that could float” attitude was in contrast to that of Governor Blanco, who wanted the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries to run the water rescue operations. She wanted everything streamlined, even though it was a helter-skelter environment. With looting going on and rumors of chemical spills, she rightfully worried about people’s safety. If every Louisianan with a canoe or washboard came paddling into New Orleans, the situation, she believed, would become unmanageable. “At first, yes, I was worried about too many civilians meaning well but making things more difficult,” she said. “But, I must say, Louisianans with boats rose up and did a great job.”46