The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  Each Cajun Navy boat was packed to the gills with refugees, and Roberts couldn’t accommodate a corpse. “You’re safe,” Roberts said, stroking the grieving mother’s head. “We’re going to try and get you into a safe place. We can’t take your son, but you’re going to be okay.” As the rescue boat pulled away, the mother, reaching out for the receding silhouette of her attic, knew she would never see her child again.

  On one run down Read Boulevard, Roberts saw two African Americans coming out of a Rite Aid with big bags full of merchandise. She had seen looters on her TV back in Lake Charles and now they were in front of her very eyes. Her blood boiled. Creeps! Swine! Degenerates! People all around were dying and they wanted things. It made her stomach turn. She later confessed to being extremely “judgmental,” convinced that their bags were full of radios, CDs, and cameras—unessential things not needed to survive. “Later that day I saw those same black guys in a fifteen-story high-rise,” she recalled. “They had taken those supplies and were passing them out among these elderly people that had been left behind, people that were desperate for Gatorade, energy bars, and medical supplies and things of that nature. It made me very ashamed. At that moment I realized they were taking care of the people they loved. I put myself in their position: if I had an elderly mother or partner or friend or child that was in trouble, I would stop at nothing—nothing—to help them. How wrong was I to judge all of these people as looters. I never again thought anything negative about anyone just trying to survive Katrina and the whole bloody aftermath.”

  The high-rise Roberts was talking about was Forest Towers East Apartments at 10101 Lake Forest Boulevard located just off Read Boulevard in a cul-de-sac. It was a generic-looking senior-citizen residence, not a nursing home. It had no legal obligation to evacuate their residents. One man waved his empty oxygen bottle out of a window like a railroad lantern, hoping to catch the Cajun Navy’s attention. It worked. Roberts’s boat, followed by two others, pulled up to the front door of Forest Towers. The debris-filled entrance looked like a hand grenade had just gone off. A soaked picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, walkers, artificial plants, plastic furniture, dead animals were just some of the items in the floating morass. “We drove the boats into the dining room. We carried those in wheelchairs downstairs to get them in our boats,” Roberts recalled. “We had to get them to a stairwell where we had to get them through the dark water. In the stairway were mounds of dead rats, frogs, mice—it was disgusting. Then we set up tables so we could lift residents onto the tables and get them into the boats—that’s how deep the water was.”12

  The residents told Roberts and Buisson that on Saturday they had been told by the management of Forest Towers that they would have to fend for themselves. “We’re evacuating,” the infirm were told. “You must call your families. You’re on your own.” According to Roberts’s estimate, about 70 percent of the residents left behind were in wheelchairs, many needing insulin or dialysis treatment. They were helpless. Some of the residents did have family who came and rode out Katrina with them. Their loyalty to kinfolk saved lives. The able-bodied people, ignoring mandatory evacuation orders, tried to be caretakers for all the seniors.

  What truly amazed Roberts, however, was the number of people in the high-rise with pets. Many of the elderly pleaded with her not to leave a beloved pet behind. The police had instructed the Cajun Navy not to rescue animals—in their view, things were difficult enough without snarling dogs and pissing cats on overheated evacuation buses. But by this time, Roberts was fed up with NOPD rules. “I simply refused to tell these people who had been through so much that they couldn’t take the only loved one they had,” she said. “I lifted many a fat cat and put it into the boat.”

  Besides Forest Towers, the Cajun Navy came to the rescue of the Metropolitan Hospice on Read Boulevard. As in so many Louisiana facilities, the weakest and most frail beings had been left to stew among bits of decaying food and putrid water. However, a chaplain, Bible in hand, had refused to abandon them.

  Months after Katrina, Ronny Lovett admitted that he had forgotten the African-American chaplain’s name, but he didn’t forget his deeds. After entering the facility, the Cajun Navy quickly loaded up three boats, their last run of the day. Lovett offered the chaplain a ride, but he refused. There were seven women in their eighties and nineties, simply too ill to be evacuated by boat and left on a street corner to wait for a bus. “So he stayed with those seven white women,” Lovett recalled. “He just wasn’t going to leave them. I think about that chaplain a lot. I just wonder what happened to him and the others at that hospice. He was a man worthy of respect.”13

  As twilight turned into nightfall at the Crystal Palace staging area, Roberts stood in line to take the antibiotics that were being handed out by the NOPD. Surveying the hundreds of refugees, she noticed many had open sores, a whitish-yellow pus oozing out of their skin. “I don’t know if, during the storm, when they were trying to escape the floodwaters, they were gashed,” Roberts recalled. “Also, many of the people were diabetics, desperate for insulin.” Struggling with hyperglycemia, which could cause dehydration and ketoacidosis, many were at risk for gangrene, which could lead to the amputation of toes, feet, or even legs. There were also people with heart and kidney ailments, intestinal ulcers, glaucoma, and other serious medical conditions. “These people needed medical aid fast,” Roberts recalled. “There just wasn’t much I could do to help.”

  At the end of the day, the Cajun Navy loaded its boats onto the trailers, re-formed the caravan, and headed back to dry land downtown. Seemingly docile evacuees, tired of waiting for phantom buses, jumped on the boats, pounded on vehicle windows, and encircled the caravan. Warped by fear, they wanted a lift. A riot nearly broke out. “We somehow made it through the human barricade,” Roberts said. “We got back on I-10 and we exited at the Convention Center. That was a madhouse. They were angry, they wouldn’t move off the freeway exit. They were blocking the exit. They were shouting and the street was very tense. They were hungry, thirsty, mosquito-bitten, and sick. They were exposed to the elements. They were hot. The police managed to get us past that. We lined up on Canal Street.”14

  The Cajun Navy spent the night in their pickups, just three blocks from the tortured Convention Center. They were, as Andy Buisson put it, “sitting ducks, barely armed with nowhere to go.”15 A SWAT team of forty or fifty armed men patrolled the area. Their primary objective was to make sure those congregated around the Convention Center didn’t suddenly turn into a riot army. Meanwhile, Ronny Lovett worried about his Cajun Navy troops. Should they leave or stay? Things were getting hairy. Sara Roberts had fallen ill, with dry heaves and an excruciating headache. She blamed her condition on the antibiotics.

  Suddenly, an NOPD officer appeared alongside Buisson’s truck, asking for help. Apparently, six SWAT officers hadn’t returned from a rescue mission around Esplanade Avenue, between Broad Street and City Park. The police wanted to take the Cajun Navy boats to go look for them. “Ronny was brought into the conversation,” Buisson wrote. “After ten minutes, he noted in frustration that the officer had told him three different stories while trying to engage our help. Tensions were high. Unknown dangers, whether real or imagined, appeared to be all around. Now some of the group was being asked to carry three boatloads of tactical specialists into the dark bowels of ‘New Venice’ to rescue six armed officers, whose fate was unknown. The choice was soon removed when the desperate officer declared Martial Law, commandeering the boats.”

  The NOPD took three Cajun Navy boats and three R & R Construction workers with them, and disappeared for nearly five hours. When members of the Narcotics Division of the NOPD found out about the boat heist, they were livid, furious that fellow officers had infiltrated the Cajun Navy and “stolen” people. Eventually, at 2 A.M., the boats returned. With reports of violence breaking out at the Convention Center, Lovett made a decision to get out of New Orleans. “By 6 A.M. Thursday morning, we arrived home,” Buisson recorded.
“We bathed and crawled into bed thinking we would sleep away the day. I awoke three hours later, rested but restless. I began to think about New Orleans again.”16

  Although the Cajun Navy took Thursday off, they were back in New Orleans East on Saturday, this time with thirty-five boats. They worked all weekend long. It’s estimated that this patchwork outfit rescued close to 4,000 people in the flooded neighborhood.

  II

  On Wednesday morning Reverend Willie Walker tried to make it to Central City from his wind-damaged home in Kenner. His big worry was that Noah’s Ark Missionary Baptist Church was underwater—which it was. He knew from radio reports that South Saratoga Street was swamped, but that didn’t deter him. From his minister’s perspective, grief and concern easily trumped pragmatism in the wake of Katrina. He hatched a plan. He would sneak past police barricades in his Mustang in order to get into New Orleans to rescue those left behind, particularly parishioners from Noah’s Ark. Somehow, by the grace of God, he would find a boat. Off he went. Driving through largely white Metairie, it saddened him that de facto segregation still reigned in Louisiana. He couldn’t help but think about race as he drove past the old office of ex-Klansman David Duke, wind damaged by Katrina. At least the Lord did something right, he chuckled to himself.

  Realizing he would need provisions for the stranded, Walker made a U-turn and headed north to Dorseyville, a hamlet in the petrochemical area known as Cancer Alley. You could almost smell the carcinogen called vinyl chloride. Liver cancer was widespread in the area, particularly in the African-American and Hispanic communities. He stopped at his cousin Deedee’s trailer home on the outskirts of town, which still had power. On the television, he caught his first look at the sad, abysmal situation at the Superdome. It spurred him to accelerate his rescue mission. Rushing to a Wal-Mart in nearby Donaldsville, he began to purchase as much food and water as possible. The air-conditioning felt good, but he was worried that he was moving too slowly. After buying a shopping cart full of basic provisions, he sheepishly asked the store manager to donate the goods, showing his church business card. “She gave me thirty more gallons of water for free, saying they considered it a worthwhile church donation,” Walker recalled. “They also gave me turkey, some cookie packages, anything that would give some energy, like Cheese Nips and Red Bull.”17

  As Walker took the old River Road route past Ochsner Hospital, he stumbled upon fifteen or twenty NOPD officers operating a checkpoint with a few out-of-state policemen. He wondered why there were so many police in such an out-of-the-way locale. He quickly answered his own question: the perimeter was just the place to “work” if you didn’t really want to, a refuge from the chaotic demands of the rest of the city. This group of NOPD simply shied away from duty, transforming the city’s limits into one big Dunkin’ Donuts coffee break.

  Reverend Walker wanted to offer up his services to the Jefferson Parish Response and Rescue Team, which was in charge of the rescue boats based at Causeway and Airline. “Who’s in charge?” Walker asked a checkpoint guard. A few men pointed to a sergeant. Each officer had on a bulletproof vest and was carrying three or four guns. “I thought to myself, this was search and rescue?” Walker recalled. “It was like a bear hunt.” The sergeant rushed at him and sized him up, making sure he wasn’t drunk or an Al Qaeda operative or a member of a Memphis gang looking to seize turf. Under such scrutiny, Walker felt like a peyote smuggler from Juárez—frustrated cops could make even a righteous man quiver. Nonetheless, Walker passed the profiling drill. It paid to look clean-cut and offer up an Uncle Tom smile. But in spite of that, the sergeant flat out rejected the reverend’s offer to help; the fact that Walker’s church was named Noah’s Ark didn’t impress.

  Refusing to leave the launch site, Walker approached a group of officers from Monroe, Louisiana, who agreed to take him along. He brought all the Wal-Mart provisions down to the dock and filled a flat-bottom boat with them. “Grim, grim, grim,” Walker said about his first boat rescue. “You’d see bodies hanging on fences, on railroad tracks. The smell of death was everywhere. Everywhere. The wind blew and if there was a body two miles away, you could still smell it.”

  Reverend Walker bonded with the Monroe Police Department. There were six of them in a boat and together they saved dozens of people. But the scene back at the staging area, at the highway overpass, was dolorous. The old-fashioned priorities of rescue—women, children, handicapped people, and the elderly—was in play. Helicopters were landing on the overpass, whisking away the critically ill and infants at regular intervals. After one drop-off, Walker walked to the top of the overpass, hoping to get a view of the city. “I could see to my right Xavier University submerged,” he said. “Tulane Avenue was submerged in water.”18

  All told, Walker would go on more than one hundred boat rescues that week, helping folks down rickety staircases and collapsed porches and fire escapes. Some houses were gutted, nothing left but joists and studs. Sometimes out of courtesy Walker would go up to a partially flooded house and knock. He knew nobody would answer but it was still the civilized thing to do. And it wasn’t just the levees that had breached: the water had lifted asphalt parking lots and dumped piles of gravel into the middle of streets, making some roads impassable for flat-bottom boats. For the next ten days Walker, usually wearing a flotation vest, never complained about the privations of his mission. He figured, What better way to show your love of God than to help the destitute? Just being in a rescue boat, ready to pull in the forgotten and forsaken, was ennobling.

  At one point on Thursday a Coast Guard helicopter hovered over the boat he was in, its rotor blades almost causing the vessel to tip over, the stagnant water blowing into the faces of those on board. It was blinding, but the pilot had a good reason for hovering so low. He was pointing to an apartment complex behind the roughed-up Carrollton Shopping Center. Walker gave the helicopter pilot an okay sign, and the boat headed for the apartments. It looked like a cheerless harmonica, pocked by gaping holes—the doors kicked out. “We knew something was terribly wrong as we approached the apartments,” he said. “Katrina was bad, but it didn’t blast open every second-story door of an apartment complex.”

  The traumatized people Walker and his company encountered there were looking around for fragments to save from rubble. Many were in shock, silent, refusing to move, still feeling the brunt of the storm in their heads. The evening before, a coterie of thugs had raided the apartment complex, stealing from the storm-weary everything they had: TVs, jewelry, kitchen utensils, and CDs. They took things for a simple reason: they could. Oddly, the building did have phone service and desperate residents were able to send an SOS to which the Coast Guard responded after a long wait. “The sun was out,” twenty-eight-year-old Nicole Kelly recalled from the Cajundome shelter in Lafayette after escaping the ravaged apartments. “But the water started coming right up the street and it kept rising. Then we heard Governor Blanco saying on the radio that they couldn’t stop the water and everybody should just get out. So we started calling 911, but we couldn’t get any help.”19

  By Thursday night, Walker was weary. He felt good about saving dozens of people from New Orleans floodwaters over the previous two days. But he still hadn’t made it to Noah’s Ark. He just couldn’t walk away with people suffering from dementia or psychotic illness. He took special care of the meek, making sure they found rides to Ochsner Hospital or Algiers Naval Base. He tried to be stoical. But he was furious. Where were FEMA and the Red Cross? Why wasn’t the U.S. Navy on the scene with airboats? Why had the levees broken? All he saw were NOLA Homeboys with recreational boats and waders, pulling people out of the bilge while officials loitered around the staging area. Incredibly, two policemen in the area had told Walker not to worry about saving the rather pathetic people left in New Orleans; in their opinion the real crisis in the city was automobile theft in high-rise parking garages. Throughout his rescue effort, authorities kept asking to see Walker’s ID, implying that he had no right playing “Bigs
hot Cavalry.” The pecking order of the law, originally designed to serve those in need, was topsy-turvy. Ex-cons were now lifeguards while NOPD were naysaying birds on a wire. Sometimes Walker heard the police come right out and say that those left behind were nothing but “fire ants” or “dumb niggers.” This blatantly racist attitude was even held by some black cops who looked on the stranded black folks with self-loathing. In 1981, Jean-Michel Basquiat painted Irony of a Negro Policeman, depicting an African American torn between his heritage and his job. This, in many ways, was the dilemma some NOPD officers faced. They were torn as to whether to run away or help out or ignore rescues altogether and smoke cigarettes at checkpoints out of harm’s way.

  Not all the flooded areas reeked with dangerously polluted water; on many streets, it wasn’t toxic at all, just Lake Pontchartrain overflowing. Nevertheless, many police officers were unwilling to risk contracting hepatitis, salmonella, or other diseases, just because the city had not bothered to equip the NOPD with Hazmat protection. For whatever reason—old tensions or storm-induced confusion—the police were often part of the problem after Katrina, not the solution. Many stranded African Americans found that every time they met a police officer in the days following the hurricane, a gun was either drawn or touched or insinuated. It was part of the white-knuckled reality of a city in which laws had washed away—for citizens and police officers alike. To get anything done, Reverend Walker had to be smart, even using wardrobe trickery to his advantage. “My jeans and sport shirt weren’t working well,” he recalled. “I had no special permit to be in the flood zone. One night I met a buddy of mine, Mike Powell, who slipped me a Red Cross T-shirt. So the next morning, on my way to the [South] Carrollton [Avenue] boat launch, I slipped it on. If the Red Cross couldn’t make it to New Orleans, I’d take it upon myself to use their good name to keep pulling people out. And guess what? It worked. But having the shirt didn’t mean much when you were wading in debris.”20