The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  That Tuesday night, Ray Nagin was trying to exert the power just accorded to Michael Brown. In an evening news conference, he complained that his orders to use available National Guard helicopters to drop sandbags into the breach in the 17th Street Canal had been ignored, thus allowing the breach to widen. He complained that there were too many chiefs calling the shots—and he was probably right.92 There were either too many chiefs or not enough effective ones. Nagin said that his priorities were to rescue people, fix the canals, and evacuate people from the Superdome. “We’re not even dealing with dead bodies,” he said. “They’re just pushing them on the side.”93 Nagin used his mayoral power to declare martial law in New Orleans on Thursday. All residents who were able to were ordered to leave, and that included non-emergency police officers.

  In the evening, having accomplished little and grounded in Baton Rouge, Michael Brown recognized that the magnitude of Katrina had outmatched FEMA. Chertoff was acting imperious and Brown’s overtures to the White House were falling on deaf ears. The agency did manage to bring in eight disaster medical-assistance teams, with thirty-five members each. Beyond that, there was nothing much to boast about, just things like crews going out to inspect oil rigs for spills. Everything else was in the future. Medical personnel were being summoned through the Department of Health and Human Services, and food was being requisitioned through the Agriculture Department.94 Someone at FEMA had been in touch with the U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) of the Defense Department all day, trying to arrange for the use of two helicopters. That might have sounded good, except that the helicopters were needed, according to the request, for flyovers by FEMA officials.95 With a little flexibility, they could have used the Coast Guard helicopters instead. Brown later testified against Chertoff before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that his boss was “irate” because he tried to conduct field inspections.96

  At the same time, NORTHCOM also began setting up a task force to be based at Camp Shelby, near Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Among other things, it would oversee deployment of regular army assets and personnel, if orders were received to that effect. The National Guard presence was at least showing some improvement. As of Tuesday, 7,500 Guardsmen were on the ground along the Gulf Coast.97 That number was clearly inadequate, but NORTHCOM promised that 98,000 troops were available. “We have some unique capabilities such as airlift and amphibious vehicles that FEMA doesn’t have,” said a NORTHCOM spokesman, Michael Kucharek. “I think there’s a realization that the devastation is so widespread that they are going to need more support than they can provide on their own.”98 He was certainly right about that.

  By Tuesday night, Michael Brown was placing urgent, even panicked calls to the White House. “Guys,” he recalled saying, “this is bigger than what we can handle. This is bigger than what FEMA can do. I am asking for help.”

  Brown reflected later, “Maybe I should have screamed twelve hours earlier. But that is hindsight. We were still trying to make things work.”99

  * The U.S. Coast Guard operated as part of the Department of Homeland Security—like FEMA—making Chertoff’s claim that he didn’t know about the levee break until Tuesday even more perplexing.

  Chapter Ten

  THE SMELL OF DEATH

  The moment an undertaking begins to shape up, it becomes ipso facto the butt of a thousand hostile, treacherous, subtle, and untiring intrigues…. Nobody can say different…. A tragic fatality penetrates its very fibers…slowly lacerates its warp, so profoundly that, when you come right down to it, the shrewdest captains, the snootiest conquerors can only hope to escape disaster, to keep from cracking up, by some cock-eyed miracle…. Such is the nature and the burden, the true upshot of the most admirable ventures…. It’s in the cards…. Human genius is out of luck.

  —Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Death on the Installment Plan

  I

  SARA ROBERTS WAS FURIOUS. A partner at Dunn, Roberts, & Company in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and a practicing certified public accountant since 1987, she just couldn’t stand watching New Orleans turn into a Pompeii or an Atlantis as she passively stared at her television set. Her husband, André Buisson, was the ninth of ten children from a New Orleans family. They had, as she put it, “tons” of friends in the city. Word eventually reached her in Lake Charles—the seat of Calcasieu Parish and the urban hub of southwest Louisiana—that Katrina had flattened the homes of two of her brothers-in-law, in Shell Beach, near Chalmette. To add insult to injury, Roberts was a member of the Superdome Commission and couldn’t believe reports that over 20,000 people had congregated there. “The Dome is not built to be a shelter,” she later said. “It’s just not; it’s too open. You have to be able to separate certain groups, for example, the elderly, children, and families. The Dome is not really made for evacuation. We had many, many meetings regarding that. And the one thing we were all, as commissioners, very interested in, was making sure that we made it as safe as we possibly could. That we had appropriate provisions for a couple of days.”1

  On Tuesday, conditions at the Dome weren’t improving much; a human rights crisis still was on hand. Out of Roberts’s concern for New Orleans was born the Cajun Navy. The armada originated with a telephone call. On Tuesday, Sam Jones, the governor’s liaison to parochial and municipal governments, had telephoned her, saying FEMA and federal troops were slow in coming. “Let’s call out the volunteers,” Jones said. “We’ve got to get those people out of New Orleans.”2

  Jones wanted Roberts to procure twenty boats in Cajun country, hitch them to pickup trucks, and caravan them eastward to New Orleans to join the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries (LDWF) boatmen. Without hesitation, Roberts said, “I think I can do it.” Her first act was to telephone a client named Ronny Lovett, the owner of R & R Construction, a lumbering, bespectacled entrepreneur with thinning hair. A country boy from Leesburg, Georgia, he had over six hundred employees in his contracting firm, mainly no-nonsense types, who helped build chemical plants. After Lovett agreed, which didn’t take long, he started hunting down employees with boats. “My guys don’t back off of anything,” Lovett said, “and we all take care of each other. So, when Sara called, we all acted.”3 The Cajun Navy started with the donation of his own Bay boat.

  Roberts had iron-straight blond hair and a lighter complexion than most of her fellow Cajun colleagues. In addition to her full-time career, she was busy raising two kids, one in the first grade and one in the third. But she was “stoked” to suddenly be corralling boats for such a worthy cause. Born into Scotch-Irish and Cajun lineage, Roberts’s mother had hailed from Rayne, Louisiana, the second-largest city in Acadia Parish, also known as the “Frog Capital of the World.” Roberts quickly rounded up boats from friends. Meanwhile, the Lovetts started telephoning their employees in tiny Lake Arthur, Louisiana, population 3,007, located in Jefferson Davis Parish, for rescue boats. Ruth continued to score. Virtually every employee she asked said, “Count me in.”

  The Lovetts offered any employee who joined the citizens’ navy triple wages for the time spent in New Orleans (they wound up spending about $200,000 of their own money to fund the Cajun Navy). Roberts also corralled boats from friends. Call it a humanitarian monetary incentive. And with fellow Louisianans in need, and FEMA a missing-in-action joke, this citizens’ navy was rapidly materializing. The three magnets that pulled all the filings together were Lovett, Roberts, and Buisson. It was like an American Civil Defense effort, something akin to the Battle of New Orleans of 1815. “Once we got thirty-five people and eighteen boats on Tuesday morning, we were ready to go,” Roberts recalled. “My husband and I were going to lead the caravan to New Orleans.”4

  Because Lovett had helped the victims of Hurricane Andrew in 1992, he knew what provisions were needed. Each boat had to have spotlights, gas-powered chain saws, picks, axes, life jackets, oars—every tool, in short, that might make a difference in saving a life. “Ronny also made sure that we had a fuel truck that went w
ith us and a tool truck,” Roberts recalled. “We had mechanics and electricians. Most of our crew members were skilled laborers, and we purposely assigned tasks according to skills.”5 Sara, using her own talents as an accountant, tallied and organized the supplies as they were packed onto the vessels. The shallow-water boats on her ledger sheet came in all shapes and sizes, including tunnel hull boats, aluminum-welded boats, a Sea Fox, and homemade johnboats. “I even got us a gooseneck thirty-foot trailer,” Lovett said. “A one-ton truck was brought in full of water. Everybody we encountered was going to get a drink.”6

  Somehow, as Cajun folk watched New Orleans flood on TV—while FEMA abandoned the stranded and then treated them as if they were human driftwood—the old ghosts of the past stirred in the hearts of southwestern Louisianans. Many of these Cajuns worked in the oil and gas exploration business but their hearts had never left their pirogues cutting through the bayous at dusk. Many had never been to the city of New Orleans. As the Cajun Navy rendezvoused at the Wal-Mart parking lot in Jennings, these Ragin’ Cajuns were ready to earn their overtime. “The gathering looked like the beginning of a weekend duck hunt or fishing trip among a band of brothers,” Andy Buisson recalled. “On this trip, though, the beer stayed at home as did the guns…well, most of them. Thank goodness not all of them.”7

  He and his wife, Sara Roberts, a Blanco supporter, dressed in blue jeans, T-shirt, and baseball hat, made sure all the pickup trucks pulling boats were fully fueled and ready to roll. Together they made quite a sight. Andy was six feet three inches tall with plenty of bulk. By contrast, Sara was five feet one inch in her stocking feet, barely registering in at 115 pounds. He drove the lead vehicle, a white Chevrolet pickup, while she handled communications on her cell phone. “We were in a huge caravan,” Roberts recalled. “And people on I-10 would just pull over and let us pass. They’d see our boats and give us a thumbs-up. They knew where we were going. They cheered what we were doing.”8

  For Buisson, a smudge of oil on his face, this ruddy afternoon was bittersweet. A Lake Charles lawyer, he was the scion of Confederate royalty, a proud descendant of General P. G. T. Beauregard’s sister.9 However, it didn’t escape Buisson, a student of history, that Beauregard, the “hero of Fort Sumter,” might have deemed the idea of a citizen flotilla to New Orleans to rescue African Americans from floodwaters ludicrous. But Dixie had changed. A litigation lawyer who mainly represented small businesses and local government, Buisson championed equal rights. To think in racial terms at such a dire moment as the Great Deluge was not in his makeup. Reflective, detail-oriented, and observant, Buisson ended up keeping a diary of their frenetic experiences that week. Sam Jones, from the governor’s office, had instructed them to proceed to the LDWF staging area at Causeway Boulevard and I-10 in Metairie.

  “When we all arrived at Causeway, there were literally hundreds of boats in a line,” Roberts recalled. “There was quite a bit of confusion. Wildlife and Fisheries was trying to get some order to this because all of these people just showed up in boats.”10 The caravan was then directed to the Sam’s Club on Airline Drive, where Roberts was handed two cans of Day-Glo paint and instructed to mark each house searched with an alphanumeric code. However, because there was an overabundance of rescue boats at that site, LDWF told the Cajun Navy to line up on Canal Street, alongside Harrah’s Casino, and wait there for an assignment. The Cajun Navy’s original plan was to deploy boats along the Industrial Canal for rescues in the Lower Ninth. But a group of NOPD officers, concerned that New Orleans East was being neglected, persuaded this citizen flotilla to head out to Chef Menteur Highway in New Orleans East the next morning.

  At dawn on Wednesday with a police escort, the Cajun Navy tried to head east on I-10. However, they were stymied by the flooding and the crowds. They were going to deploy in a residential neighborhood, where most of the NOE houses were originally built after World War II to absorb G.I. Bill families. The convoy trip, particularly the scene on I-10, overwhelmed Roberts. “I’ve never seen so many people,” she said. “They were all on the elevated portion of the interstate and many were sitting in the sun in wheelchairs waiting for buses. They were all obviously sunburned, obviously dehydrated, very listless. At that point I text-messaged Sam Jones, Leonard Kleinpeter, and Ty Bromell, all three of them, to get these people off the interstate. It was horrific. I’ve never seen anything like it. You talk about the Dome being a disaster? The real disaster, in my opinion, were the people left on that interstate. It was horrible. People literally crying for water. Begging us for water.”

  The Cajun Navy eventually made its way, via some slick maneuvering, to Chef Menteur Highway. They created a staging area at Crystal Palace, a large reception hall located only about a half-mile from Lafon Nursing Home and the Sugar Bowl Lanes. Nearby was a largely flooded-out branch of the New Orleans Public Library. A man suddenly appeared at the lead pickup truck, screaming for help. His pregnant girlfriend was going into labor. “Our baby is breached. Can you please help us get to the hospital?” he begged. Roberts and Buisson had been instructed by NOPD officers on hand not to leave the caravan, their armada’s mission being to get people out of the water. Roberts tried to make the man understand that they weren’t an ambulance service. “I was devastated,” she recalled. “It was very hard for me to tell him that I would get the [NOPD] captain and try to get some help. But we couldn’t take them out of the area. We couldn’t leave the caravan.

  Meanwhile, a new problem presented itself. As Buisson explained, the Cajun Navy discovered there was a martial atmosphere in the area. “It became obvious that our lightly armed band of hunters and fishermen might have come under-equipped,” he wrote. “Wearing Kevlar vests, out-of-parish deputies brandished short-barrel shotguns, automatic rifles, and [a] weapon my unsophisticated eye could not identify, and which I would surely not know how to fire. Unlike our good-natured volunteers, with the occasional sidearm on their hips, concealed by their t-shirts, these others exhibited their weapons for all to see. Pumped up, they were ready to go hunting. I suddenly felt naked, wishing I had pulled my one shotgun out of the closet, or wherever I had left it after I used it last.”11

  An NOPD officer gave the Cajun Navy the rules of engagement. “If you encounter a dead body, don’t touch it,” the officer instructed. “Leave it alone. That will be handled later. We are here to help people. There have been some reports of rescuers being shot and boats being taken. If it gets too rough in there, we’re getting out. Bring those who will leave, but don’t force them. No pets. Do not travel alone. Go out in pairs. As far as weapons, carry what you need for protection.”

  By 7 A.M. that Wednesday, five or six boats were deployed down each of four highly populated roads off Chef Menteur Highway: Read Boulevard, Ridgefield Drive, Crowder Boulevard, and Bullard Avenue. “My husband and I worked the same area,” Roberts said. “When we first put the boats in, the first thing I noticed were the police officers, because there was no one evacuating right there where we had launched the boats. It didn’t take me long to figure out that these officers were so incredibly damaged. They were looking for their own relatives. They worked with us, side by side, pulling people out of the water, but they were most interested in trying to find out where their own family members were. Another one of our boats took a police department member with us. He wanted us to find his father. They ended up going to his house and they found his father dead.”

  No matter where Sara Roberts looked that day, there was somebody who needed attention; the number of sick and elderly just floored her. The first person Roberts rescued was a middle-aged woman with her husband and mother. She never forgot how the bedraggled woman kept waving a picture in front of her, moaning, “I’ve lost my best friend, see? My sister.” While being ferried back to the Crystal Palace on Chef Menteur, the evacuee clutched the color photograph. “I think the floodwaters got her,” the woman groaned. “I’ve lost my best friend.” She was hysterical. When Roberts dropped her off, she tried to convey to the woman
that she needed to take care of herself. Just because she was on dry land didn’t mean her evacuation journey was over. There would be long, hot hours waiting for buses. Then it would be weeks or months at a shelter. But Roberts knew she didn’t need to hear about all that for now. What she needed now was comfort and reassurance. “You’re safe,” Roberts said firmly. “We’re going to get you some attention. You’re going to be okay.”

  Later that afternoon, as Roberts was helping another group out of a rescue boat she did a double take. She was grabbing the arm of the “sister”—the woman in the photograph! “You’re the sister!” she exclaimed. “Guess what? I know where your sister is. I’ll bring you together.” It was the high point of a grueling day. “It was the sweetest get-together imaginable,” Roberts said. “They each thought they had lost their sister.”

  The crying, screaming, praying, dragging, and alternating between hope and despair continued. On another rescue, as Roberts helped a woman out of her flat-bottom boat, she accidentally got some foul-tasting water in her mouth. She thought of the bacteria now in her body. Meanwhile, the woman being rescued pleaded, “Please, don’t let them leave my boy!” A concerned Roberts asked, “Ma’am, where is your son?” The response was chilling. “He died in the attic,” the woman sobbed. “He had cancer and he died while we were in the attic. It was so, so hot. He couldn’t breathe. I just can’t leave his body. He’s the only thing I have left.”