The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  V

  Not only was New Orleans flooding but in neighboring Chalmette, in St. Bernard Parish, a “Wall of Water” had completely overwhelmed the community the day before and little had improved since then. Chalmette was the predominantly white, blue-collar counterpart of the Lower Ninth Ward. It was bisected by the Mississippi River–Gulf Outlet (MRGO), the man-made waterway that had brought most of the flooding to St. Bernard Parish. The waterways that once were considered the conduits of Chalmette’s lifeblood—MRGO and the Intracoastal Waterway—ended up being a twin curse, bringing a 30-foot storm surge that almost completely destroyed the town in the span of fifteen minutes.

  One of the great misconceptions about Katrina was that the destruction was Mother Nature at her worst; that’s only partially true. The horrific flooding that occurred in St. Bernard Parish, New Orleans East, and the Lower Ninth Ward was the direct result of the man-made “improvements” to the region’s waterways. As the MRGO and Intracoastal Canal met and formed a V, they became what the Times-Picayune called “a funnel which causes storm surges to rise higher and move faster” as they took aim at St. Bernard Parish. When that same funnel of water continued west and crashed into the Industrial Canal, the jagged breach that resulted doomed much of Orleans Parish. New Orleans City Councilwoman Cynthia Willard-Lewis appropriately deemed MRGO the “highway for tidal surge,” and in the months following Katrina, residents of both New Orleans East and St. Bernard Parish would gather at rallies to chant, “Go, Mr. Go!”41

  Although Captain Chad Clark of the St. Bernard Sheriff’s office had done everything he could to evacuate the town, many Chalmetteans simply refused to budge on the weekend before Katrina hit. Diligently, Captain Clark had stocked the fortresslike St. Bernard Parish courthouse with drinking water, set up roadblocks to keep unauthorized vehicles from coming into the parish, and dispersed his police officers so they wouldn’t all be stuck in one place. He planned for about 130 St. Bernard first responders to hole up at the courthouse with him. Still, he felt there was a conspiracy of nature in the air; his gut told him that something was out of sync. “I chose the courthouse to wait out Katrina because it’s way above sea level,” Clark recalled. “It’s high ground, up a flight of seaman’s steps, eight or ten feet above sea level. The building’s been there forever. It went through Betsy, the whole nine yards. Meanwhile, I put our one hundred and thirty vehicles, our whole fleet, in supposedly safe places.”42

  As Katrina hit, St. Bernard Parish was awash in rainwater. Captain Clark was all elbows on the windowsills, as debris hurtled past his face and a howling roar filled the courthouse. “Holy shit!” he kept saying. The profanities became more intense when he peered out and saw a railroad train moving down the tracks. “I don’t understand, because what moron is going to move a train in these conditions?” he recalled. “Now we’re gonna die. I was certain of it. The damn wind was moving the trains. Trees were snapping, you could see power lines falling over. Water was coming in the courthouse.”43

  The situation only got worse. Clark received a call from a police station nearby, where ten detectives were holding down the fort. “We think the levee has broken!” said the panicked officer at the other end. “We got water coming.” The Industrial Canal had broken and water was literally rushing down the highway. Chalmette was badly hit with both the Industrial Canal break and the MRGO topping. Within a matter of fifteen minutes, the courthouse went from two to ten feet of water. A decision was made—much like how the Bay St. Louis police saved the Waveland force—to go get those ten drowning detectives. Unfortunately, Captain Clark had positioned his high-water vehicles next to Jackson Barracks, on the theory that if it was good enough for the National Guard, it was good enough for St. Bernard Parish. Katrina made a fool out of such logic. “They went underwater in nineteen seconds,” he said. “But we had two boats placed by the courthouse and when the wind got down to about 60 mph, and with water just pouring into the courthouse, we hopped in the little boats. Nobody has ever seen water come up that fast.”44

  The two boats to which Captain Clark referred were, in actuality, Sea-Doos, sit-down watercraft, wave runners that were ideal for reconnaissance but not large enough for more than two people. Conscious of the danger involved in using these small craft, Clark and Officer Pete Tufaro volunteered to set out because neither of them had children. They would survey the damage along the St. Bernard Highway, check up on the officers stranded at the station near the Orleans Parish line, and report back to Sheriff Jack Stephens. “We started up the wave runners and took off,” Captain Clark recalled a couple of months after Katrina. “The water was so high you could touch the red lights. Some of them you had to duck. It was unbelievable how high the water got so fast. As I got a little farther toward New Orleans, we were going over waves that were five or six feet.”

  A woman from the neighboring town of Arabi was standing on the balcony of a two-story building on Lebeau Street, screaming for help and holding a baby above the floodwaters. Captain Clark jetted his Sea-Doo over to her. “What are you, nuts?” he shouted. “Put the baby back inside.” But she kept crying, “I need help! I need help!” She was having what Clark called a freak-out. She was convinced her child was going to drown in the deluge. “Put the baby back,” he kept instructing her, demonstrating what to do with his hands. “Put the baby back.” His words cut through her panic, and the mad gleam, the black fear, left her face. Her voice was high-pitched, shrill, crackling with anxiety. “Stay put,” he told her. “we’re gonna be back.” She looked at him desperately. “If you don’t come back,” she said, “we’re gonna die.” Clark tried to make her understand that he was a man of honor, his word was golden. “I can still see her eyes,” he recalled, months after Katrina. “I said, ‘I promise you I’ll be back. I’m going to check on these stranded cops. You’re on the second story, so you’re good for a while.’” She now believed him. “Please come back,” she pleaded, as he increased the throttle.45

  Clark and Tufaro made it to the police station, which was full of water. Clark reassured them that Sheriff Stephens would soon be rescuing them—since the train wasn’t an obstacle—and that they should just chill out for two hours, three maximum. Time was of the essence. Clark and Tufaro made a U-turn and started heading back to the courthouse. A detour, however, was made to rescue the woman and her three-month-old boy. She was relieved to see them back so soon. “Now, how in the hell am I gonna put this baby on a wave runner and bring it to safety?” Clark groused at his buddy. “This is too dangerous!” He loosened his life jacket enough to place the baby firmly against his chest. The mother got on back and wrapped her arms around him, as if on a motorcycle. “Then we hauled ass to the courthouse,” Clark said. “We just cut through the water at record speed.”

  Once her baby was safe and dry, the mother calmed down completely. She also seemed sedated, as if once her maternal worry was gone, she could become almost a child herself. “Why did you stay?” Clark asked. “Why were you so foolish?” She hesitated for a moment. “Well,” she said, “because I’m a dumb ass.” Without chuckling, Clark walked away. “Good answer,” he said. “Very good answer.”46

  VI

  Out of the devastation, the St. Bernard first responders—not just police, but judges, the district attorney, and others—fanned out from the courthouse and went on to evacuate more than 10,000 people between Tuesday and Friday.

  Katrina flattened and dissolved mile after mile of St. Bernard Parish. The families huddled together in the attics and on the balconies of Chalmette, Meraux, and Arabi, watching the floodwater levels rise and creep up on them, were hoping for salvation. Certainly one could read passages of Nevil Shute’s On the Beach or Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five to find language that could be applied to St. Bernard Parish. But the only work of art that honestly mirrored the pulverized landscape was The Ant Farm, a couple miles outside of Amarillo, Texas, where ten Cadillacs were buried (front first) in the turf. Everywhere in the parish, cars were overtu
rned in similar fashion, only they were upturned in six to eight feet of water. “We’re talking about the complete destruction of St. Bernard Parish as we know it,” Parish Council Chair Joey DiFatta said. “Every neighborhood, every street, every home, every building, has water—lots of it.”47

  There have been fine history books written on American disasters, like David McCullough’s The Johnstown Flood and Simon Winchester’s A Crack in the Edge of the World, but nothing compared to the oral history testimonials of Katrina survivors. Many of Louisiana’s worst-hit towns, such as Grand Isle, Delacroix, and Port Sulphur, were virtually submerged under water. They didn’t have as many eyewitness survivors to tell what happened, since Plaquemines Parish and the fishing camps along Barataria Bay in Jefferson Parish had been almost fully evacuated. But Chalmations by the thousands had stayed in St. Bernard Parish, socked with the double whammy of the Industrial Canal breach and MRGO overtopping. They hadn’t expected a “Wall of Water” beating down their doors. Many of them stayed behind to take care of ill or elderly family members who simply could not evacuate. Others didn’t have the financial resources to flee. All had been reassured that the Mississippi River levee would hold out—it did. But the MRGO topped the levee, hence the deluge.

  One Chalmette survivor was fifty-two-year-old Michael Brown (no relation to the FEMA director). Conscientious and dutiful, Brown understood that Katrina was a potential Category 5 storm. As a precaution, he sent his wife and children to Cajun country in western Louisiana for the storm. But his in-laws, both well into their eighties, simply refused to evacuate. They were stubborn and won a battle of wills with Brown. He couldn’t leave them alone in the face of a major hurricane. When the winds hit 150 mph, he made them wear their life jackets—just in case of flooding. “Then my worst fears materialized,” he said. “I looked outside and I saw this black water starting to move across everything. I saw this wall of water hit the back of these homes and it just exploded. All of a sudden, water was everywhere.”

  Like all the Chalmette survivors, it was the roaring cascade that stunned Brown, as though it were something out of the movie The Day After Tomorrow. Quickly, he ushered his in-laws to the tiny second-floor attic; then, with a last burst of strength, he gathered whatever water bottles he could scrape up. (One of the great ironies of flooding was that you couldn’t drink the water. You died of thirst in the general bedlam, surrounded by brackish water with massive seawater intrusion, and loaded with greasy toxins and chemicals.) As six feet of water filled his house, Brown looked out the window and saw his BMW float away. “The water was ferocious,” Brown recalled. “You could see the natural gas bubbling up out of the water everywhere you looked. As far as the eye could see, there was nothing but black water.”48

  To put the Chalmette flooding into perspective, the Mississippi River levees in town were 16 feet high, while the “Wall of Water” was over 30 feet high. No “trickle-trickle,” as WWL’s Garland Robinette explained, it was “boom-boom.” That the water was poisonous made it all the more incredible that Governor Blanco, pulling a Vitter, described it at the Tuesday press conference in Baton Rouge, “I wouldn’t think it would be toxic soup right now. I think it’s just water from the lake, water from the canals. It’s, you know, water.”49

  Everywhere Brown looked after the storm, live animals were floating by, struggling to ground themselves on some rooftop or building, rarely to any avail. For a second, he felt lucky it wasn’t him. Then another crisis hit the Brown clan. A heavy odor of mildew filled the house; he was not sure where it came from. The attic bricks started popping out of the house like baby teeth. Nervously, he moved his in-laws to the second floor. They would all be stuck there for days, as no Coast Guard helicopters or boats came to the rescue. A neighbor noticed that they were stuck in the house and stopped by in his little motorboat with bread, crackers, and water. On Tuesday evening, as the clear sky was full of glowing stars, yet another sinister terror struck the house. “I looked and saw this movement in the water,” Brown recalled. “We had water moccasins on the ground floor. They were everywhere—on throw pillows, everywhere. They bite you and they’re dangerous.” A decision was made then and there. Come daylight, they were leaving the snake-infested house—somehow, some way.50

  VII

  Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu made it to St. Bernard Parish on Tuesday, courtesy of a Wildlife and Fisheries flat-bottom boat. His goal was to track down Parish President Rodriguez and find out details about the “Wall of Water” and an oil spill in the Parish. “Nita Hutter had reached me by cell phone about what had happened to St. Bernard,” Landrieu recalled. “She, Junior Rodriguez, Joey DiFatta, and a bunch of officials were stuck in the St. Bernard courthouse and I was determined to find exactly what they needed. Eventually, I found my way into a boat to Chalmette, where Junior and those guys were heroically saving lives.”51

  With flabby jowls that shook when he made public statements, which was often, Junior Rodriguez was a political legend in Louisiana. Somehow, he was born without a verbal filter and words just tumbled out of his mouth without restraint. Like Huey Long, Rodriguez was a populist, truly believing that every Louisianan deserved a whole chicken in their pot. Now, he wanted Landrieu to find him MREs, Gatorade, medical supplies—all the basics. St. Bernard needed them. “Junior was in his underwear and a T-shirt,” Landrieu recalled. “I said, ‘Junior, I came here. What do you need? Because we can’t communicate with you, we can’t talk to you. What the hell is going on? I want to get everything you need from Baton Rouge.’” Rodriguez handed the lieutenant governor his wish list and then jumped to the primary problem. “We have only one shelter,” he said. “It’s going to be the port. We have 2,000 people that need evacuating from Chalmette. Tomorrow, it will be 5,000 people.”

  Rodriguez wanted a ferry that could transport St. Bernard residents to dry land at Algiers, to be bused from there to appropriate shelters. Already, Rodriguez knew of sixty deaths in his parish. He didn’t want any more on his watch. Unique among politicians in the first post-Katrina days, most of whom stood hat in hand, Rodriguez was a fireball of defiance. If Landrieu really wanted to help St. Bernard, Rodriguez intimated, he should have brought in explosives. If Rodriguez’s constituents had to suffer much longer, he had a radical plan to dynamite a hole in the levee and drain the scum water out of his streets. “Junior kept saying, ‘Should I blow the levee?’” Landrieu recalled. “‘I just might have to do that.’” Such blasphemous, blunt talk startled Landrieu, largely because he knew Junior meant what he said. Rodriguez’s threat had yielded a positive consequence: the National Guard got supplies and ferryboats to the Chalmette slip. “We never got explosives, though,” Landrieu said. “But we got him just about everything else!”

  Landrieu walked around the Chalmette slip, hugging refugees and talking to them. Scribbling down notes, Landrieu made sure a very sick, elderly woman was immediately medevaced out of St. Bernard to a hospital. (Her daughter later wrote Landrieu a long letter of gratitude.) For the first time they realized that they mattered, that perhaps the trauma would end soon. Collectively, they were saying prayers, like Charley Patton’s song “High Water Everywhere,” about the 1927 Great Mississippi Flood, when folks chanted, “Lord, the whole round, man, is overflowed.”52

  With an understanding of the situation in Chalmette, Landrieu shifted his attention to New Orleans. He wanted to find out directly from Mayor Nagin why the Regional Transit Authority (RTA) buses and the yellow school buses were out of commission. Why wasn’t Nagin getting people out of the Superdome? Not finding the mayor at City Hall, Landrieu waded, as he said, “in the water, into the Superdome a number of different times, walked over and tried to find the mayor.” Eventually, he located Sally Forman, the mayor’s communications director, at the Hyatt. She was glad to see the lieutenant governor.

  “I’m looking for [Chief Administrative Officer of New Orleans] Brenda Hatfield,” she said to Landrieu. “We must find her. She is in Baton Rouge, somewhere.”


  “If I see her,” Landrieu said, “I’ll tell her—”

  Forman interrupted him. “Because we’re looking for the RTA bus keys,” she said. “Well, we don’t know if she has them, but she’ll know where they are.”

  As bad as things were in St. Bernard, Landrieu realized, it was worse in New Orleans. At least Junior Rodriguez was commandeering ferries and contemplating dynamite; it was, rightly or wrongly, a plan of action. Nagin was in hiding, looking for the RTA keys. This very fact meant that Mayor Nagin had been tricking the American public, saying he couldn’t have used the buses to evacuate folks because he couldn’t find drivers. In truth, he didn’t even know where the keys were. He was willing to scapegoat hundreds of bus drivers to save, in his vernacular, his political ass. “So I went up to the top of the Hyatt and saw the mayor,” Landrieu recalled. “He was sitting in a room, trying to pick up information from the TV and radio.” It was a sad scene: twenty-seven stories below the mayor, flood-ravaged people were congregating at the Superdome, looking for food and water. Nagin’s aloofness was chilling. “Mr. Mayor, is there anything you need?” Landrieu asked. “I just met with Junior Rodriguez. I’m about to go see Aaron Broussard. I’m trying to collect information.” All Nagin would say, staring straight ahead, as if in a trance, was “We’re looking for a command and control structure.”