The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  The amoebas had flattened Williams, who was virtually unable to move. He was burning up with fever, experiencing sharp cramps. Just forty-eight hours earlier, the Ritz-Carlton had seemed like a smart place to be. It was a cavalier joke among NBC employees, in fact, that they were weathering Katrina ensconced in the spalike luxury of the Ritz. Only Tony Zumbado really felt the bad vibe. Without air-conditioning, by Tuesday the building felt like a stifling tomb. Armed gangs had broken into the 527-room hotel, brandishing guns and terrorizing guests. Williams, in fact, had seen his first corpse floating down Canal Street from his eighth-floor window earlier that day. Then the fever consumed him. Delirium. He couldn’t eat or drink. Jean Harper, the producer of NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, found her anchor in a very alarming state. “Jefferson Parish [Reserve Sergeant] Matt Pincus [of the sheriff’s office] was in the Ritz and Jean brought him to me,” Williams recalled. “I was about eight or ten steps from the exit door. They were going to lock in or down the Ritz, shut it to keep the gangs out. Nobody was allowed out. No exceptions. It wasn’t the kind of situation where anybody recognized me or anything like that.”66

  Williams asked Pincus to help evacuate him out of the Ritz. A Newark police officer on the scene also intervened on Williams’s behalf. They were both from New Jersey—an automatic bond. A triage center had been set up in the Ritz lobby, and Williams was desperately in need of an IV, but he declined. “I had to refuse,” Williams said. “There were so many ill people in line who needed it more than me. My conscience wouldn’t have felt right if I had tried to pull rank. But I was in pure hell. I had no medicine, nothing.”67

  In order to get picked up by the Louisiana state police, Williams had to wade outside, in two feet of floodwater, barely able to stand. A gang was waiting on the streetcar tracks in front of the Ritz, ready to “smash and grab,” as Williams put it, to take the vehicle. Eventually, a huge Toyota Land Cruiser pulled up, thirty-six inches off the ground, manufactured for the wilds of Africa. It was one of the few commercially made vehicles which just might be able to persevere through such high water. At Williams’s side were Harper and Jack Bennett, an NBC technical manager. A group of Louisiana National Guardsmen pointed guns at the gang, making sure the NBC trio didn’t get their escape vehicle hijacked. “They aimed weapons at the men on the street,” Williams recalled. “Then we were on our own.”68

  That Wednesday evening Williams, Bennett, and Harper slept in a trailer along Canal Street, trying to avoid looters and floodwater. “I couldn’t keep anything down,” Williams said. “That whole night was hazy. I couldn’t get clarity of mind.” The next morning, Thursday, they made it to Metairie. Even though he was consumed with fever, he continued broadcasting the Katrina story. Blanket coverage. When off-air he spent most of the day groaning in the NBC trailer. “Somehow,” Harper recalled, “he marshaled his resources and kept on reporting.” They were toughing it out. “That evening we slept in a Metairie car dealership parking lot,” Williams recalled. “I don’t remember much.”69 He got evacuated out of New Orleans on Friday night after his news broadcast and recuperated at his home in New Jersey. With proper pills, uninterrupted sleep, and plenty of liquid, he was back in Louisiana in a few days. “With the levee breaks,” said Harper, “Brian realized that Katrina was one of the biggest news stories of his life. Even with dysentery he never missed a broadcast. He was an on-the-spot reporter, really, not an anchor in New Orleans. He was at his best.”70

  XII

  Even with three of the nine canals leading south into the city from Lake Pontchartrain pouring water into neighborhoods, a few New Orleans businesses refused to close, like Johnny White’s Sports Bar, located on Bourbon Street. The owner J. D. Landrum had gone to Baton Rouge for provisions, including lots of ice-cold beer. He was determined not to let Katrina upset his sterling record of staying open nonstop (just about) for sixteen years. With the electricity out, votive candles were used for illumination. It felt like a Revolutionary War–era tavern, with a bohemian cast, as customers’ silhouettes flickered on the memorabilia-cluttered walls. Eventually somebody donated a generator, which allowed the ceiling fans to run. The old wooden sign outside hadn’t been knocked off by Katrina, so advertising wasn’t a problem. Huge boxes of Fritos, saltine crackers, and toilet paper were also brought in from out of town. A battery-operated boom box played Johnny Cash and Tom Waits. Quickly, the bar took on the role of a community center, a gathering spot for artists and other denizens of the French Quarter, a NOLA Homeboy crossroads. Generation Z twentysomethings with tattoos and body piercings also congregated there. Shell-shocked senior citizens likewise emerged to socialize while complaining about FEMA, President Bush, and the Red Cross. It felt good to carp, even if it didn’t help the grim reality of post-Katrina New Orleans.

  What they understood at Johnny White’s, however, what most Americans had yet to accept, was that New Orleans was no longer a city. It was a smattering of islands, rising out of the 80 percent of the city’s land that was submerged. Anywhere from 50,000 to 70,000 people were left in the city, two-thirds were in dire trouble on Tuesday—on the verge of drowning, or trapped on rooftops or in attics. The 17th Street Canal was running into Mid-City, and a 500-foot section of its concrete wall had already crumbled. Another twenty blocks to the east, the London Avenue Canal was pouring water into the Ninth Ward, which was already flooded from the overflow from St. Bernard Parish. That eastern suburb was almost entirely underwater, both from the storm surge pushing over the walls of two hurricane levees, and from the later breach in the Industrial Canal, which ran south from the lake to the Mississippi River.

  In sum, the city lay in ruins, its sorrow palpable. Tuesday was a day when individuals recognized with a jolt that they were entirely on their own. New Orleans didn’t make sense anymore. Protection from danger was gone. Water was undrinkable. Emergency care was nonexistent. Seniors were trembling all alone, left behind by careless family members on the absurd assumption that they’d be okay. Many of them died in terrified solitude—no white-suited nurse with a clipboard holding their trembling hands, no nun telling them God was near. Just a mad rush of sewage water, filling up their lungs, snuffing them out with cruel vengeance. The oxygen tanks emptied and, after that, in some cases there wasn’t even a soul around to witness their last breath. One can only pray that they were in a coma or unconscious at the grim time of reckoning. “Last night when I went to bed, I didn’t have no water in front of my door,” one New Orleans senior, Albertine Arseneau, told National Public Radio on Tuesday. “This morning when I woke up, my house has water in it. I’ll have to spend the night on the second floor if I stay the night. I don’t know how to swim.”71

  Josephine Johnson, a neighbor of Arseneau, didn’t have even that much of a chance. She lost her life when the water rose through the house she shared with her son, brother, and other family members. As fifteen feet of water swept into the living room, the rest made a run up the stairs to the attic. Josephine, well into her eighties, couldn’t make a run toward anything. She drowned in the house and the family, crouched in the attic, knew it. After flagging down a passing LDWF boat, they escaped the house and were dropped, along with many others, at the rusty St. Claude Avenue Bridge, still jutting out of the floodwaters. Josephine’s eighty-seven-year-old brother walked up the incline with a walker. For the moment, the family was safe. It was then that the moment tore open for them. Josephine’s son broke down, overcome with grief. “My mamma drowned,” he wailed, “my mamma drowned!” He couldn’t seem to stop, and no one on the bridge—all knowing what he had been through—expected him to.

  Not far away on the bridge, Daniel Weber was also crying uncontrollably. He and his wife had been trapped by the water in their home. They escaped. But they weren’t out of danger. “My hands were all cut up from breaking through the window,” the fifty-two-year-old man said, through his sobs, “and I was standing on the fence. I said, ‘I’ll get on the roof and pull you up.’ And then we just went under.
”72 Weber’s wife didn’t surface. After floating in the dirty water for hours, he was rescued. He was dropped on the bridge, where he huddled with hundreds of others, newly homeless or widowed, like him. “I’m not going to make it,” Weber mumbled. “I know I’m not.”

  A reporter from the Times-Picayune described the scene at the drawbridge, a collection of highly traumatized people: “As they emerged from rescue boats, at times wobbling and speaking incoherently, many of the rescued seem stunned they had not died. Jonell Johnson of Marais Street said she had been trapped on her roof ‘with a handicapped man with one damn leg.’ Gerald Wimberly wept as he recounted his unsuccessful effort to help a young girl, whom rescuers ultimately saved. Dupree said he had seen a young man he knew drown. ‘I just couldn’t get to him,’ he said, ‘I had to tell his people.’”73

  XIII

  The sky on Tuesday was dotted with helicopters, including sixteen from the Coast Guard, another sixteen from the Louisiana National Guard’s I-244th Aviation Battalion and 812th Med-Evac wings; five from the Navy’s warship Bataan, five from the Wisconsin National Guard, and three from the Georgia National Guard. All together, National Guard units had thirty-two helicopters operating along the Gulf Coast starting late Monday.74 The number steadily increased. The region’s primary private ambulance service, Acadian Ambulance, also had its fleet of helicopter and ground ambulances continually at work. All of the rescue teams were staffed by people who didn’t wait for orders from on high. Their mandate was from the people in need, of whom there were many.

  The Coast Guard continued to gallantly rise to the dire occasion. While the section headquartered in Alexandria rescued people in boats and baskets, they welcomed the help from Coast Guard outfits all over America. “We have air crews that have been brought in from Cape Cod to Miami, west to North Bend, Oregon,” said Coast Guard Captain Pete Simons. “In the New Orleans area alone, we have twenty-two aircraft, helicopters that have been conducting rescue operations.”75 One of the people taken from the roof of a flooded home was himself a helicopter pilot with a National Guard unit. He was no sooner dry than, putting thoughts of his own loss behind him, he took a shift rescuing others. Of the rescue process, Captain Simons explained, “It looks more precarious really than it is. The first step is generally that we lower a rescue swimmer down to brief individuals on what’s going to happen. And then they lower the rescue basket down again and one by one retrieve them from the rooftops or wherever they might happen to be.”76 Viewed on TVs all over the country, however, it looked very precarious indeed and left searing images of Louisianans needing military-style rescues.

  The efforts of the NOLA Homeboys, Mama D and the Soul Patrol, the Coast Guard, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, and the various out-of-towners who had arrived to help rescue New Orleanians resembled the heroic evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk, France, in 1940. In the same way and with the same homespun navy, tens of thousands of victims of Katrina were rescued, one, two, or a half dozen at a time. As of Tuesday, the Coast Guard reported that it had saved 1,200 people.77 “Nobody in the press knew,” Jimmy Duckworth recalled, “but the name of our effort was Operation Dunkirk.”78

  Not all of the helicopters buzzing around New Orleans on Tuesday were emergency aircraft, however. Corporations had hired copters to help save documents from their buildings or to evacuate their employees. The broadcast media used helicopters to shoot the footage that showed Americans that the situation in New Orleans was not under control. By midday on Tuesday, the truth about New Orleans was revealed as CNN viewers saw a middle-aged woman climb from a rooftop into a basket that was then winched into a helicopter hovering a hundred feet in the air. All around, the streets were rivers and the houses barely protruded from them, but the drama was contained in the sight of a civilian so vulnerable that the only means of escape was through that terrifying trip in a basket. Virtually all those rescued praised the Coast Guard for showing tenderness under duress. In his blog, Raphael Obermann told of how his airman gave him “a big hug” for surviving.79

  Because the first responders on the water weren’t being filmed live, the Coast Guard helicopters received the most instantaneous acclaim. The most dramatic early film footage and photography came from the sky. “We photograph the rescues from 700 feet up,” New York Times staff photographer Vince Laforet wrote in his blog later that week after getting to do aerial photos. “We can’t hover so we make constant loops—hovering is too dangerous in a single engine chopper. It’s dangerous, period. This isn’t time to take extra risks anyway. I’m shooting with a 500 mm and a 28-300 zoom mostly. The door to the helicopter is removed. The rescues are amazing. These ‘frogmen’ that lower themselves out of the choppers from a hundred feet or less are incredibly brave and lucky. It looks likes a well-rehearsed ballet. People are so tired, dehydrated, hungry and/or scared that you don’t see much emotion on their faces as they are being brought up into the chopper. Many of these people have never flown before. Some of these neighborhoods were so poor that they had few phones, power or TV—and they never even knew Katrina was coming. I was mad at people who stayed behind at first—didn’t they realize others would have to risk their lives to save them? Now I realize, many were too frail, too poor, or didn’t know what the hell was on its way. Some were mothers who had handicapped children they couldn’t get out—an impossible situation. All of this is crazy.”80

  XIV

  As Jimmy Duckworth told the story, two of his petty officers came back to Alexandria exhausted. They truly needed some R & R. They had black circles under their eyes when Duckworth sat them down for a debriefing. “They hadn’t bathed in days and they were just grungy and dead-ass beat,” Duckworth said. “They sat down and told me that at the start of their watch they had shots fired at them in near proximity. They continued on with their mission. They wound up evacuating some people, including a nurse, from a hospital. The nurse had been severely beaten and told our crew that she had been gang-raped. The crew took them to safety and then, later on their watch, wound up doing a second-floor entry into a flooded building. Upon entering, they realized it was either an old folks’ home or a type of hospital. Every room they went into, there were dead people.”81

  According to Duckworth, his two petty officers suddenly heard a noise and their hearts jumped, scared out of their wits. “They found an old black gentleman who had a cross on his neck and he said that he was religious,” Duckworth recalled. “There were two other old people in the room who were foaming at the mouth and gasping and they were dying. And the crew said, ‘Do you want us to call a helicopter? Get these people out of here?’ The old man said, ‘They’re too far gone; they’ll never make it.’ A moment of silence ensued and one of the petty officers asked, ‘Would you like to be evacuated?’ and he replied, ‘Come back tomorrow. I’ll stay with them until they’re gone.’”82

  Sixty-year-old Mary Fortune lived on Frenchman Wharf on Down-mann Road in New Orleans East. A disabled mother of four, she decided to stay home during Katrina, not wanting to be inconvenienced by a ride out of town. At her side was her feisty twenty-one-year-old daughter, Brandi Idris, who was seven months pregnant. Watching the bumper-to-bumper traffic on the WDSU news, Idris had reasoned that she was in greater risk of having a miscarriage via a fender bender than through the impact of Katrina itself. Anyway, somebody had to stay and take care of Mama. But when the Industrial Canal levee was breached on Monday, she knew they’d made a terrible mistake. “Water started racing into our apartment,” Idris said. “Mama and I went to the second floor of our apartment complex. All around us there were bricks toppling out of buildings and pipes busting and roofs kicking off. I thought we were all gone dead for sure. I cried for my baby that I’d never see.”

  Mary Fortune and Brandi Idris spent Monday night stranded on a balcony without food or water. On Tuesday morning, however, they heard Coast Guard choppers in the air. As luck would have it, the Guard had just been at a rooftop in New Orleans East, rescu
ing a teenager in a wheelchair who had known of Mary and Brandi’s plight. Coast Guard rescuers got the message to their headquarters in Alexandria and Lieutenant Commander Duckworth directed a helicopter to make the rescue. “They dropped a basket down for Mama and me to climb in,” Idris recalled. “I was scared silly. I thought we were going to fall in the water. Because of the blades, water blew in our face.”

  Words can’t describe how grateful they were to the Coast Guard, which then took them to Louis Armstrong International Airport. From there they were driven to an evacuee staging area in Metairie. Their only complaint was that they were given nothing more in the way of sustenance than a warm bottle of water and no food. Eventually, they were taken on a bus to a shelter in Houma. “We got treated well in Houma,” Idris said. “They brought doctors and nurses to see me quickly. And they told me my baby was going to be okay. And guess what? She was born in Alabama on Halloween. And she came out fine. I named her Savannah.”83

  What perplexed many Americans was the absence of a U.S. Navy presence in New Orleans. Shouldn’t they have been the first responders? Why didn’t Navy ships just come up the Mississippi, dock near the French Quarter, and start rescuing folks like the Coast Guard? These were fair questions. However, the Navy had precious few resources to spare. Just like the National Guard, the Navy had a lot of people and ships in the Middle East. Second, the looting had changed the mood and tenor of New Orleans. Secretary of the Navy Gordon England had concerns about bringing warships into an urban riot, where the police force had disintegrated and Coast Guard helicopters were being shot at. “We can’t blame the Navy for being cautious,” Jimmy Duckworth recalled. “We had numerous reports of rounds being fired in close proximity. If their ships had come into the Port of New Orleans, without proper security, there is no telling what would happen.”84