The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  The U.S. Navy would, after a critical delay, make a contribution to the recovery of the post-Katrina Gulf South. On Tuesday, the Navy sent four ships to the region to aid hurricane victims: the amphibious assault ship Iwo Jima, the dock-landing ship Tortuga, the amphibious transport dock Shreveport, and the rescue and salvage ship Grapple, all based at either the Norfolk Naval Station or Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base in Virginia Beach.85 Unfortunately, the trip took two long days so they wouldn’t be on the scene until Thursday or Friday. The 844-foot-long Iwo Jima first stopped in Biloxi to offer hovercraft and supplies for Mississippi, and then made its way to New Orleans. “We’ve got a lot of work to do,” Rear Admiral Reubin Bookert, commander of Amphibious Group II and the Iwo Jima, said when he arrived on September 2. “Totally devastated situation. My first reaction was shock.”86

  XV

  Not all the local heroes were water rescuers. At East Jefferson General Hospital in Metairie, the staff was relieved that they and their 3,000 dependents had safely come through the face of the storm and the subsequent flooding. But looking out the window, they could see that the residents of a nursing home across the street were still in their one-story building. The residents were attended by caretakers, but all of them were trapped by the rising water—and by temperatures that hung in the low nineties. With the water chest-high, the hospital staff made their way across the street to help. “They had one fan,” said a nurse who went with the search party. “They had a dog over there. They had that one fan on the dog.” While that may have surprised the nurse, the deep importance of pets was a common theme during the hurricane. Many of those caught in the storm believed that their pets were no less valuable than their family. For many, a pet was the only family they had, in fact. As the hospital staff prepared to escort the nursing-home residents across the street, where they were promised a bus ride out of the flood zone, one of the elderly residents was too proper to allow her standards to relax, even in the face of disaster. “If I’m going on a bus,” she said, “I have to get my good dress on.” The hospital staff took the time to find a dress in her closet.87

  “As many bad stories as you hear about looting,” noted Coast Guard Lieutenant Chris Huberty, the pilot of a night-flying copter, “there were plenty of people sacrificing for others, regardless of their demographic. I can’t tell you how many times a man would stay behind an extra day or two on the roof and let his wife and kids go first. It broke my heart. We’d go to an apartment building and you’d see that someone was in charge, organizing the survivors. We’d tell him, ‘We can only take five,’ and they’d sort out the worst cases. It happened many times that the guy in charge was the last to leave.”88 The dependence on society was replaced in such cases by instinct: the human instinct to care first for the weaker, the dispossessed. In the worst situations, the strong fend for themselves—they rush for the exits, for the food, for the only vestige of safety. In some subliminal way, that is what happened in the days preceding the storm—the strong (those with cars, money, and good health) rushed for the exit. In what appeared to be a civilized city, the human instinct of caring for the weak was nowhere to be found, least of all at City Hall. In the chaos that followed, however, there were many individual Louisianans who cared more about others than they did about themselves.

  But if someday there is a Great Deluge Museum in New Orleans complete with a Hall of Heroes, there should also be a Hall of Shame depicting the human-created situations that exacerbated the damage of the hurricane. In the first place, the weak and impoverished should not have been left in the threatened areas. Second, once they were rescued, there was no practical place to put them. The general plan followed by the many disparate groups performing rescues was that the sick and ailing were taken to the Superdome. The rest were deposited on any dry land. In no way were these solutions adequate. People with no food or water were hard-pressed in Tuesday’s stifling heat to survive, let alone to walk great distances. The situation at the Superdome was even more hopeless. On Monday, during the storm, the Superdome offered shelter to approximately 9,000 people. By Tuesday, that number had exploded to 24,000. Since that population had a heavy concentration of the elderly and ill, the staff was unable to provide even the most basic care. The toilets were not functional. Food was in scant supply. Medical help was rudimentary.

  Scanning the sweep of the Superdome on Tuesday evening, watching the suffering and confusion, one became acutely aware that “the blues” was not all boodlie-bum-bum on Bourbon Street. The real House of Blues wasn’t the franchised club on Decatur Street, but sections 230 and 237 of the Superdome. Musically, blues music reflects the full range of emotions, but it is best known for describing sadder, darker moods. Suffering was the cornerstone of the blues, and misdirection its sidekick. Traditionally, whether it was Trixie Smith moaning about her “aching head” or Blind Willie McTell cursing about a “hot-shot liar,” the blues was about weariness, about the end of the line, the land of broken shoes and a face full of frowns. The crowd in and outside the Superdome was almost entirely African American. It was a reflection of the racial makeup of the city, skewed by the fact that Katrina’s displaced tended to be poor, isolated, and out of touch with mainstream news. To some, the crowd stranded at the Superdome conjured up images of both slavery and slave insurrection. Of course, such over-the-top comments were irresponsible. Reverend Jesse Jackson milked the hollow analogy when he spoke with CNN’s Anderson Cooper later in the week about African Americans congregated on a freeway interpass: “Today I saw 5,000 African Americans on the I-10 causeway desperate, perishing, dehydrated, babies dying,” he said. “It looked like Africans in the hull of a slave ship. It was so ugly and so obvious. Have we missed this catastrophe because of indifference and ineptitude or is it a combination of the both?”89

  Perhaps what Jackson was trying to communicate was that the faces of African Americans in slow, starving despair was not a new visual or historical novelty to black people; it triggered memories of Jim Crow injustice, of Virginia lynchings, Georgia beatings, and Mississippi murders. The screams for help at the Superdome were an echo of slavery’s whip, a tortured plea not to be forsaken yet again. No matter the murder or rape statistics, the resentment in the eyes of those affected was undeniable. The good news was that, watching their plight, most Americans had a simple, merciful thought: Can’t we do more to help? Where are the mercy brigades?

  “These are people who fell through the safety net,” said Sheriff Paul Valtreau of Orleans Parish, surveying the condition of the New Orleans residents he was pledged to serve. “They’re hard-working, tax-paying citizens and they’re being treated like trash.”90 Watching the Superdome scenes on television, Aaron Neville, who had lost his New Orleans East home after the Industrial Canal breach, shook his head in calm disgust. “These were my people,” the singer later explained to Fox’s Neil Cavuto. “Even if I didn’t know them, they were my friends.”91

  Chapter Nine

  CITY WITHOUT ANSWERS

  The air is getting hotter

  There’s a rumbling in the skies

  I’ve been wading through the high muddy water With the heat rising in my eyes

  Every day your memory grows dimmer

  It doesn’t haunt me like it did before

  I’ve been walking through the middle of nowhere Tryin’ to get to heaven before they close the door.

  —Bob Dylan, “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven”

  I

  WHILE THE GULF COAST was sinking ever lower into the grip of the worst natural disaster in modern American history, Michael Chertoff, the man in charge of the federal rescue, was on his way from Washington,D.C., to Atlanta to attend a daylong seminar on the flu at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He didn’t yet think it necessary to visit the Gulf states or even to devote a part of his day to the disaster in those states. Influenza was a prime health issue, to be sure, and the avian strain (or “bird flu”), which threatened to be a worldwide pandemic, was dangerous. The
Bush administration was rightly concerned. But the flood devastation in New Orleans was killing people that very morning, on Chertoff’s watch, and partly because of the lack of immediate federal help. “I remember on Tuesday morning,” Chertoff said later to Tim Russert on Meet the Press, “picking up newspapers and I saw headlines, ‘New Orleans Dodged the Bullet,’ because if you recall the storm moved to the east and then continued on and appeared to pass with considerable damage but nothing worse. It was on Tuesday that the levee—it may have been overnight Monday to Tuesday—that the levee started to break. And it was midday Tuesday that I became aware of the fact that there was no possibility of plugging the gap and that essentially the lake was going to start to drain into the city. I think that second catastrophe really caught everybody by surprise.”1*

  The levee breaches did not catch everybody by surprise. Actually, Katrina had hit New Orleans as a Category 3 hurricane (nearly Category 4), the maximum strength that the 110-mile levee system could supposedly endure. But, as experts had long predicted, the levees were failing left and right, springing leaks that were already growing bigger. Yet the most damning aspect of Chertoff’s remark was that despite all the reports from FEMA personnel—and the availability of descriptions from the Coast Guard rescuers who were even then entering a second day of their own version of Operation Dunkirk in New Orleans—he based his actions on what he read in the newspapers.

  If Chertoff had “picked up” the New York Times on Tuesday, he would have seen a whole spread dedicated to Hurricane Katrina. The lead article did allude to a sense of relief in New Orleans, but it also stressed that the storm had been no spring sprinkle: “Hurricane Katrina pounded the Gulf Coast with devastating force at daybreak on Monday, sparing New Orleans the catastrophic hit that had been feared but inundating parts of the city and heaping damage on neighboring Mississippi, where it killed dozens, ripped away roofs, and left coastal roads impassable.”2 Chertoff may well have read the Washington Post that morning, too. Under the headline “Amid the Devastation, Some Feel Relief,” the paper led with the fact that New Orleans had long lived in dread of the Big One. It immediately quoted a man named Demetrius Ralph who was walking his dog in the French Quarter. “This wasn’t it,” Ralph said bluntly. The article, however, then went on to describe the many neighborhoods in the eastern part of the city that were flooded up to the rooftops.3 The Post depicted the widespread devastation of the Mississippi coastline, in a second article called “Storm Thrashes Gulf Coast.” It explained that “along the Mississippi coast, the storm pushed water up to the second floor of homes, flooded floating casinos near Biloxi, uprooted hundreds of trees, and flung sailboats across a highway.”4 And if Chertoff had read the Times-Picayune online later on Tuesday (the only way to read it, under the circumstances), he would have seen the “Catastrophic” banner, as well as James O. Byrne and Doug MacCash’s story on the breached Lakeview levees.5

  Secretary Chertoff apparently based his lackadaisical response on one report: that of dogwalker Demetrius Ralph. This wasn’t the Big One, and with that, the only man—except for the President—who had the authority to rise above bureaucratic tangles and enforce an urgent, immediate response to the Katrina disaster boarded a plane on Tuesday headed for Atlanta. The Bush adminstration had found out about the levee break at 7:30 A.M. on Monday. Louisiana Congressman Charlie Melancon got it right when he complained that during the hours after Katrina, Chertoff was behaving like a “complacent, uninformed, detached bureaucrat.”6 Apparently Chertoff—with a war on terror to fight—was unfamiliar with President William McKinley’s wisdom regarding “homeland security,” offered back in 1898 during the Spanish-American War: “I am more afraid of the West Indian Hurricane than I am of the entire Spanish Navy.”7

  After the Russert interview, Democrats piled on, some demanding Chertoff’s resignation. But in a rare sign of bipartisan unity, the GOP right, to its credit, also concluded that Chertoff had failed in his duty. Syndicated columnist Robert Novak, not known for attacking the Bush administration, led the onslaught. Livid at Chertoff’s haughty, above-the-fray attitude displayed on Meet the Press, Novak went for the jugular. “Chertoff’s miserable performance on the air reflected a fiasco at all levels of government,” Novak wrote a week later. “‘There’ll be plenty of time,’ Chertoff told Russert, to ‘do the after-action analysis.’ That bloodless dismissal made the human tragedy and physical mayhem on the Gulf Coast seem like a bureaucratic mistake.”8

  Perhaps better than any other columnist, Novak explained exactly why Brown and Chertoff were so numbly ineffective: they were lawyers trying to “cover President Bush’s behind.”9 Katrina was a gut-wrenching, emotional drama being played out on TVs all over America. Like Ronald Reagan after the Challenger disaster or Bill Clinton after the Oklahoma City bombing, the White House needed to touch the nation’s heartstrings, to add epic oratory to the catastrophic moment as Reagan or Clinton would have done. Instead, George W. Bush gave cold, terse, lawyerlike speeches void of human pathos or deep regret or full of grief. A scene Joseph Conrad described in Heart of Darkness as “passivity, paralysis, immobilization”10 described perfectly the White House’s modus operandi. Bush’s front man was Chertoff, who Novak claimed was the “quintessential lawyer” who had “surrounded himself at Homeland Security with more lawyers.” As Novak knew well, you just can’t do Meet the Press, with Russert as the inquisitor, and get away with legalese and gibberish, particularly while Americans were dying in the Gulf South, reaching out for a federal hand. Chertoff’s performance, as Novak pointed out, deserved an F; it was an unforgivable combination of “political deafness” with “lawyerly evasion.”

  The second half of Novak’s column called for the immediate beheading of FEMA’s Michael Brown—“heads must roll,” as Novak put it. “I didn’t call for any resignations,” Novak later backpedaled in an interview. “I got into a lot of trouble years ago when I suggested a Federal Reserve official resign. But I will say that Bush, Brown, and Chertoff all looked terrible.”11 In his column, Novak brought to light Representative Mark Foley’s complaint that his community, West Palm Beach, Florida, had airplanes ready to evacuate stranded Gulf Coast residents on Tuesday, August 30, but FEMA refused the offer. Examples of FEMA’s flat-out rejection of help were unfortunately common. It was a form of proactive dereliction that was downright baffling to most observers. When the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee held hearings on January 30, 2006, it was revealed that FEMA even neglected a “red-high” priority plea on Sunday, August 28, for 300 rubber boats from Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries. A FEMA executive in Denton, Texas, simply scrawled at the top of the document, “Request denied.” As Lieutenant Colonel Keith LaCaze of Wildlife and Fisheries said, “We could have used them to tow additional evacuees, and in lower water the rescuers could have used them to load people who were sick and handicapped.”12

  At the same time, the U.S. Department of the Interior offered FEMA 300 dump trucks and vans, 300 boats, 11 aircraft, and 400 law enforcement officers to help in the search and rescue effort. FEMA turned it all down. This flat-out rejection of Interior Department assets was brought to light in late January 2006, in a cache of documents released by the Senate Homeland Security Committee—over 800,000 pages of e-mails, memos, strategy plans, and intradepartmental correspondence. Among other things, the Senate documents revealed that FEMA didn’t take up an offer of help from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to save people stranded in Orleans, St. Bernard, and St. Tammany parishes. “Here we have another federal department offering skilled personnel and the exact kinds of assets that were so desperately needed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and there was no response we can discern from FEMA,” Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine), who chaired the committee, said. “That is incredible to me.”

  At the FEMA Emergency Center in Washington, D.C., seventy people who reported to Michael Chertoff were supposedly working to obtain food, water, buses, and other critical supplies for New Orleans.
13 Although Michael Brown had made repeated assurances that all such supplies had been pre-positioned in states surrounding the vulnerable Gulf Coast area, the documentary evidence suggests otherwise. These Washington-based FEMA workers frantically hunted around the country for supplies, as if running a Jerry Lewis telethon, knowing that, at best, it would be two days before anything reached the devastated regions. And they were constantly getting trapped in bureaucratic red tape, which a little preparation and a lot of leadership would have cut through. The department was unquestionably in a tizzy. “Katrina pushed our capabilities and resources to the limit,” Homeland Security spokesperson Russ Knocke said, “and then some.”14

  The problem was worse, however, than simply pushing “resources to the limit.” Once looting started in New Orleans, Homeland Security pulled the plug on helping Katrina’s victims. Like the Red Cross, FEMA was not about to put its employees in harm’s way.

  Senator Joe Lieberman was particularly furious over a FEMA e-mail message pertaining to the cancellation of relief and rescue efforts just three days after Katrina hit the Gulf South. FEMA’s reason for throwing in the towel was security. “All assets,” the e-mail read, “have ceased operation until National Guard can assist TFs [task forces] with security.” Lieberman criticized FEMA for having “left early,” noting the stark contrast with such outfits as the Coast Guard, Wildlife and Fisheries, National Guard contingents from dozens of states, and faith-based organizations. They all had security concerns, but kept helping fellow Americans in need. “This is shocking,” Lieberman said, “and without explanation.”15 And the trend continued.

  II

  As of Tuesday, August 30, 2005, President Bush had four days left of his five-week vacation, most of which he had spent at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. Tuesday, however, wasn’t much of a day off. In fact, the whole vacation had been a little trying for the President. Just down the road from the ranch, hundreds of antiwar protesters had been making noise all month, capped with Joan Baez singing “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” and “Song of Peace” on August 21, 2005.16 It was almost enough to make a dry conservative reach for a bottle. The agitation was led by Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq; she wanted a meeting with Bush, though she had already had one with the President and other parents of the fallen on June 10,2004. Bush held firm to his position that he had thought “long and hard” about Sheehan’s antiwar feelings and had nothing new to say to her.17 But liberals in the media, by and large, embraced Sheehan, whom they dubbed the “peace mom,” and they were turning her into the number-one celebrity of the anti-war movement, a latter-day version of the Vietnam war’s outspoken Dr. Benjamin Spock or Reverend William Sloane Coffin. “I don’t want him,” she said, referring to the President, “to use my son’s name to justify any more killing.”18