The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  At dawn Tuesday NOLA Homeboys were operating all around Lakeview, rescuing people off of roofs. Prevost joined the action, leaving Chelsea on the apartment balcony. He had two simple missions: “Paddle around and save people, and survive.” Although he later hated admitting it, there was something soothing about paddling around the flooded streets, all modern communications systems down, and picking shrunken oranges off trees for sustenance. He was like a pirate craving lemons and limes. He was an urban Thoreau who thought saving dogs was nearly as important as saving people. His greatest failure, to his mind, was his inability to lure to safety a scared dog that was stuck in some tree branches. “It wouldn’t trust me,” Prevost lamented. “It kept snarling at me and I was in no position to get bit. I had no first aid and was in the water. So, sadly, I had to leave it behind.” Prevost had another bad experience. A friend had sent a text message about saving his two dogs left behind in a house. Prevost paddled to the appropriate address, only to find that they had drowned.

  At dusk on Tuesday, Prevost thought about canoeing right into the Superdome. But he heard that dogs were banned there. He didn’t want to go back to Lakeview, because looting was becoming a huge problem. At one point, Prevost spied two looters, each with a pack on both front and back. “I tried to stay out of their view,” Prevost said. “They were almost drowning with the weight of their booty packs trying to cross Robert E. Lee Boulevard. I could hear one of them cursing at the other, saying, ‘I told you to get rid of that big pack,’” Prevost said. “I knew they couldn’t cross Robert E. Lee—they would have to swim, the water was eight feet deep.”

  To understand fully what NOLA Homeboys like Knight, Mama D, and Prevost accomplished, it helped to appreciate how dangerous New Orleans was when they were in the water. At dusk on Tuesday evening, Jimmy Deleray, walking in his Riverbend neighborhood, witnessed felonies being committed not far from his house. Riverbend businesses were looted that week. Deleray saw Jet Skis being stolen from the Aqua Marine Inc. at the corner of Oak and Monroe. “The looters had pickup trucks,” he explained. “They would tie a chain to the door and pull. Suddenly, they raided the shops like a pack of rats. At this point I knew I had to protect the neighborhood.”55

  Boldly, Deleray decided to confront a group of looters stealing drugs from the Castellon Pharmacy. Packing the .22 rifle his father had given him as a boy, Deleray pointed the gun at a looter in his late fifties from the window of his Ford pickup. The guy dropped the drugs. Deleray drove his Ford up on the curb and started running over the plastic pharmaceutical bottles. “I established that they weren’t in control of the neighborhood,” Deleray recalled. “They threatened to come back with AKs. Screw them. Other neighbors joined me in controlling our neighborhood. We started boarding up places wherever we could. Then, as we patrolled around, we saw them looting. They’d stolen a forklift and rammed it into the front door. Now they were running out like rats with arms full of makeup and stuff. I yelled at them to stop. They completely ignored me. I then fired twice into the ground. That did the trick. They ran. It was sad—grandmothers were encouraging their grandchildren to loot. What kind of people would do this? What did they think? They acted like it was a shopping spree for free.”56

  And so the widespread looting continued. Houses were burglarized, clothing stores were trashed, and cash registers were stolen. It was the brazen nonchalance of the thievery that infuriated Deleray most. He reported that at one bar, somebody had defecated on a tabletop in “some kind of bizarre animallike toilet dominance trip.” It was the big dump, and it was becoming commonplace. The looters had come from a poor neighborhood between Oak and Claiborne known as Hollygrove, back by an old waterworks compound. “I started filming them,” Deleray recalled. “Once it got around that I wasn’t going to shoot them, they ignored me. One guy said, ‘Hey, man, don’t be filming me, I’s got to get stuff. You understand?’” All a ticked-off Deleray could shout back was a defiant “No, I don’t.”57

  The people from Hollygrove who preyed on the Riverbend shops had long been angry about racism in New Orleans. It often showed up in their music. While Deleray listened to Cajun fiddle and hillbilly jazz at the Maple Leaf Bar, he had no ear for hiphop, not even the work of Lil’ Wayne, who grew up nearby. All Deleray had to do was listen to Lil’ Wayne’s song, “Oh No,” in which he rapped, “Get that look off ya face and recognize you got a crook in tha place.” Or perhaps B.G.’s anthem “From tha 13th to tha 17th,” where he and Lil’ Wayne told the Deleray white-breads of Riverside exactly what was on their minds. Like cheerleaders they spelled out H-OL-L-Y-G-R-O-V-E in the cut, where they warned, “Niggas be tryin’ to creep / So you better watch your back.” Deleray had no tolerance for the kind of inner-city hiphop that Lil’ Wayne and B.G. slammed. The very thought of such violent lyrics made him angry. Songs like “Danny Boy” and “Whiskey in the Jar” were more to his taste. He had never heard such phrases as “bling bling,” “drop it like it’s hot,” “H to the Izzo,” or “Holla Back, Young’n,” and if he had, he would have dismissed them as stupid, infantile, gutter babble. When the lights went out August 29, however, like it or not, Jimmy Deleray was living in a gangsta’s paradise.

  X

  One leading Louisiana politician, a New Orleans native, also became an honorary Homeboy rescuer, a flood-dog, putting his life on the line to help others. Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu had spent Monday night at the Baton Rouge EOC, trying to assess the damage and wondering how he could be most helpful. Deeply worried about towns in St. Bernard Parish, where he heard that a “Wall of Water” had knocked communities right out of the grid of civilization, he was desperate for details. State Representative Nita Hutter of St. Bernard Parish miraculously got through to him on his cell. “She was frantic,” Landrieu recalled. “She was stuck along with Junior Rodriguez, Joey DiFatta, and other St. Bernard officials in the government building. She kept me updated throughout Monday night. I heard that the Ninth Ward in New Orleans had flooded. I decided that there was really no role for me at the EOC, where press conferences were advising the public about what was and what wasn’t. I told my staff early Tuesday morning that we were going to New Orleans and Chalmette.”58

  Landrieu—accompanied by state troopers Troy McConnell and Sheldon Perkins and Lieutenant Jay Diez of Wildlife and Fisheries—headed down I-10 to New Orleans. Coming from the north, they never got as far as the city, or St. Bernard Parish. Arriving in Jefferson Parish, they could see it was a complete mess. With the pump houses still abandoned, a major portion of the parish was flooded. Parish President Aaron Broussard, who was doing a lot of national media and had been commended for his evacuation strategy, was starting to find himself the scourge of Metairie and other eastern towns in the parish for his Lake Pontchartrain pump policies. Taxpayers in these districts had always imagined that they were protected from flooding because of the pumping stations. But, as mentioned earlier, Broussard hadn’t wanted his operators to drown and ordered them to evacuate their posts.

  On the upside, Parish Sheriff Harry Lee had launched a massive boat rescue operation at I-10 and the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway. “We went to the mat,” Lee said. “We put every asset we had into play.”59 With shirtsleeves rolled up and ball cap in place, Landrieu reached the Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries boat launch. He was anxious to get to St. Bernard Parish or the Lower Ninth Ward. “At this site everybody was trying to figure out logistics,” Landrieu recalled. “There were boats, but you can’t put a boat on Lakeview and Clearview and go directly to St. Bernard. It took forever.” Landrieu decided to weave his way east along any roads that weren’t flooded. He drove his car down Causeway, all the way to the Jefferson Highway, then to River Road, near the Rivershack Tavern. From there it was straight into the Audubon Park area of Uptown. This was his neighborhood: he lived on Octavia Street, and his father, the former mayor Moon Landrieu, lived nearby with his mother.

  Everywhere the lieutenant governor looked there were downed trees, utility poles, and teleph
one wires. Magazine Street, around Whole Foods, Scriptura Stationery, and St. Joe’s Bar, was covered with debris, making it nearly impassable with anything less than a Hummer. Landrieu’s instinct told him to cling to the Mississippi levee, which hadn’t breached. To that end, he got on Tchoupitoulas Street and took it all the way down to the French Quarter, around Faubourg Marigny. Then to the partially submerged St. Claude Avenue Bridge, where he joined members of LDWF who were launching boats into the Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish. “When you went into the water in St. Bernard and Lower Ninth, there was always a whole story of a house underwater,” Landrieu recalled. “The only way you could get down the street was to figure out where the big, tall streetlights were, so that you could identify the fact that you were indeed on a street. You were worried about whether or not you were going to hit a fence underneath you or whatever. People were up on roofs, it was one after another. We had W&F agents, who had never been in New Orleans, actually saving folks, and there were people on the ground saving each other. The citizens of the Lower Ninth Ward were saving the Lower Ninth Ward. There was really no federal presence at this point. Just W&F and local heroes.”60

  A lot of stranded New Orleanians clutching the rails of the St. Claude Avenue Bridge recognized the lieutenant governor. Just seeing such a high-profile politician working with Wildlife and Fisheries was a morale booster. Stunned by the damage in the Lower Ninth Ward, Landrieu realized that Katrina had wreaked at least ten times more havoc than Betsy. Immediately, he became a rescue ringleader, riding with firemen and police officers, extracting the helpless from flooded buildings. Most folks he saved were grateful beyond words, he recalled. It was sad watching people leave pets. “You’ve got to understand,” Landrieu explained. “You go to one house and you put the victims in a boat, and the boat starts to fill up. You’ve only got so much room and all of a sudden, you’ve got fifteen people in a boat. And that’s all it can take.”61

  What Landrieu gathered, talking to dozens of Lower Ninth Warders, was that they had truly believed that Katrina was going to hit Mississippi or Florida, and that living sixty miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico would protect them anyway. “Some of those people recognized me and we talked,” Landrieu recalled. “And I’d ask them questions:

  “‘You know who I am?’

  “‘Yeah.’

  “‘You heard us tell you to leave?’

  “‘Yeah.’

  “‘Why didn’t you?’

  “‘Well, we didn’t think it was going to hit us. We didn’t think the water was going to come up that fast. We thought we’d be okay. We didn’t think it would be serious.’”62

  Like the NOLA Homeboys and Soul Rebels, Landrieu later had lighthearted stories about some of the stubborn Ninth Warders he encountered. At one home, with floodwaters inundating the first floor, Landrieu saw a middle-aged guy stuck on the roof. “Come on down,” Landrieu shouted up at him from the boat. “I don’t want to go,” the man shouted back. A perplexed Landrieu, cupping his hands around his mouth, asked “Why not?” The response was idiotic, yet somehow very New Orleanian: “Because,” he yelled, “I want to get rescued by a helicopter.” A helicopter? “You’ve got to be kidding me!” Landrieu shouted back. “You better get your ass in this boat and you better get your ass in this boat now!” The disappointed man murmured, “All right, all right, give me a few minutes.”63

  At another house Landrieu anchored his W&F boat in front of a Katrina victim who didn’t want to evacuate because the stagnant water in the shade of his house was too frigid. “I don’t want to come down,” he pleaded. “The water’s too cold in my house.” All Landrieu could do was scoff and shake his head in disbelief. He tried to persuade the man and then gave up. There were other folks who needed saving. There was only so much you could do. “People were just funny,” he said. “Many just didn’t want to be bothered, or didn’t want to leave behind whatever possessions they salvaged from the flood.”64

  After dark on Tuesday, when all LDWF rescues were halted for the day, Landrieu drove back to Baton Rouge to deliver the grim news. “I told the folks at EOC,” Landrieu said, “that it’s worse than we originally thought.” Because of his Catholic training and penchant for Jesuitical thinking, Landrieu asked himself one question on Tuesday evening in Baton Rouge: Where am I most needed? The St. Claude Avenue Bridge had become a well-established rescue center. The LDWF colony (with some NOPD officers and fire department first responders, and a group of NOLA Homeboys) was working out of this staging area in overdrive. And the media had descended on the Lower Ninth Ward because it wasn’t far from the French Quarter. It was ground zero for rescue efforts. A national spotlight was on the area, even though the federal government, with the notable exception of the Coast Guard and a few Louisiana National Guardsmen who escaped the Jackson Barracks flood, was still a no-show. The answer became self-evident to Landrieu: St. Bernard Parish. That’s where he headed first thing Wednesday morning.

  XI

  Right after Katrina had moved northward on Monday evening, Heather Allan of NBC News asked Tony Zumbado and Josh Holm to find a route out of New Orleans with their Ford 350 Econoline van and bring back the Hallmark motor coach, which they’d parked in Gonzales. Her team gladly followed the order. Quite mistakenly, however, they first ventured to the Ninth Ward and encountered massive flooding. They circled back and made it across the Mississippi River Bridge to the West Bank. At an abandoned 7-Eleven store they saw a lone police officer. He was cordial but clearly frightened, acting like an escaped prisoner wondering which way to run, frozen in his own heels. Holm asked if he knew a way to Baton Rouge. “I know a way to get out of here,” the officer said, “but I don’t know how bad the roads are.”

  Zumbado and Holm decided to risk it. Anyway, they didn’t want to face the wrath of Heather Allan if their mission failed. To their surprise the roads weren’t too bad. There was a couple feet of water on the pavement, but lots of trees and power lines were down. “Around midnight, we just parked the van and slept in the middle of nowhere,” Holm recalled. “There was too much water in the road, plus darkness.” At sunrise they made it to Gonzales, retrieved the motor coach, and headed back to New Orleans; in daylight, the devastation was stunning. When they arrived back on Canal Street, they told Allan the good news that there was a way in and out of the city, so provisions and generators could easily be brought into the bowl. Their producer got ahold of the CEO of General Electric, NBC’s owner, and Shazam generators were flown into Baton Rouge. “We were kicking ass,” Zumbado recalled. “Heather Allan was on the phone saying, ‘We need this’ and ‘We need that’ and ‘We need it now.’ So General Electric sent us everything: motor homes, trucks full of food, rations, all kinds of stuff, prepackaged food. They even sent us a water tank, a gasoline tank, and a diesel tank.” The supplies were for NBC employees, but half of them ended up going to displaced persons they encountered.

  What NBC understood was that the levee breaks had turned Katrina into a long-term story. A decision was made that the company would eventually create a “Camp NBC” next to the headquarters of local affiliate WDSU just off of Lee Circle. Allan, realizing that Zumbado’s skills as a cameraman were needed in the field, pulled him off of logistics. In the rented canoe, and with Holm at his side as soundman, he started videotaping in the Central City neighborhood, filming people stuck in homes, animals left behind, and octogenarians crawling out of windows and on top of roofs “wailing down the street,” as Zumbado put it, for help. He saw people coming out of nowhere, water up to their chests, or even to their chins, jumping on their toes to keep the water out of their mouths. They were carrying personal items in travel bags and pillowcases full of photographs. One group had a floating table with two grandmothers sitting on top of it. Others were using coolers as rafts to float children or other loved ones down the street.

  All the first floors of houses were underwater. The streets were full of everyday items bobbing in the water: tea kettles, wine racks, paint cans, pai
ntings, gasoline cans, shower curtains, bed mattresses, juicers, and so on. “So we were in our little boat and people were yelling, ‘Help us! Help us! Our grandparents are here!’” Zumbado recalled. “We went up to a house, we videotaped, and we helped the elderly into our boat. We were like, ‘Oh my God, now we’re caught up in rescuing.’ And I’m sitting in the boat thinking What am I going to do? I have to videotape or I have to rescue? I was in a dilemma and I told Josh, ‘Let’s get out the camera here on this porch, you stay and film what you can. I’m going to go help rescue these people. We’re going to get the people the hell outta here. But once I get them out, I’m picking you back up and getting out of this neighborhood. I was overwhelmed. There weren’t many Coast Guard and [LDWF] boats at this point. Just me and a couple of locals in boats.”

  During the next hour, Zumbado ferried twelve or fifteen people out of Central City, along heavily flooded Claiborne Avenue, dropping them off on a dry corner of St. Charles Avenue. He then swung back to Canal Street to hand Allan a stack of his videotapes, which were soon running on NBC. Then Zumbado raced along Canal Street to tell the NOPD officers he encountered to join the rescue operations. They merely shrugged and said, “Yeah, there’s people all over the place.” The cameraman was incensed at how lethargic they were. He had heard that hundreds of people had been left behind at Memorial Medical Center on Napoleon Avenue. He enlisted an NBC correspondent and, along with Holm, started canoeing.

  Meanwhile, NBC News anchor Brian Williams, after breaking the Superdome roof story, fell terribly ill from dysentery on Tuesday. He possibly contracted the disease by ingesting water containing bacteria, while doing a Today show appearance. He was standing next to flood water, sipping distilled Kentwood Water, when he noticed a trickle of brown on the side of the plastic bottle. A few drops of the sewage water had accidentally gotten into his mouth. “I was overcome with dysentery late Tuesday,” Williams recalled. “I was fading in and out. Somebody left me on the stairway of the Ritz-Carlton in the dark on a mattress.”65