VI
At 11:20 A.M., not long after Michael Brown had finished telling the President and others involved in the teleconference that “he was getting good cooperation within the federal government,” the FEMA director received an e-mail from Marty Bahamonde. “Sir,” it began, “I know you know the situation is past critical. Here some [sic] things you might not know. Hotels are kicking people out, thousands gathering in the streets with no food or water. Hundreds still being rescued from homes. The dying patients…are being medivac [sic]. Estimates are many will die within hours. Evacuation in process. Plans developing for dome evacuation but hotel situation adding to problem….”
Bahamonde heard back from the director. “Thanks for the update,” Brown e-mailed back. “Anything specific we need to do or tweak?” Three hours later, Brown’s press secretary issued an e-mail to several FEMA officials, noting that “it is very important that time is allowed for Mr. Brown to eat dinner. Given that Baton Rouge is back to normal [sic], restaurants are getting busy. He needs much more that [sic] 20 or 30 minutes. We now have traffic to encounter to get to and from a location of his choice, followed by wait service from the restaurant staff, eating, etc.”
A colleague forwarded the message to Marty Bahamonde, who composed a response that showed just how hard it could be to remain committed to any effort in which one’s leaders seem indifferent. “Just tell her,” he fired back, “that I just ate an MRE and crapped in the hallway of the Superdome along with 30,000 [sic] other close friends so I understand her concern about busy restaurants. Maybe tonight I will have time to move the pebbles on the parking garage floor so they don’t stab me in the back while I try to sleep, but instead I will hope her wait at Ruth’s [steakhouse] is short. But I know she is stressed so I won’t make a big deal about it and you shouldn’t either.”42
In a February 2006 interview, Brown explained that the debacle at Morial Convention Center—which on Wednesday started filling up as an alternate shelter to the Superdome even though there were no provisions or triage—wasn’t FEMA’s fault. He pointed his finger at City Hall. “The Convention Center, from my perspective, came as a surprise,” Brown said. “The Superdome was supposed to be the primary evacuation center of last resort. I began to receive some e-mails that the hotels were evacuating and telling people to go to the Convention Center. And those poor people, the tourists and others from the hotels, began to show up at the Convention Center and somehow the doors become open [sic]…. So I’m in Baton Rouge trying to figure out if this is true or not because we’re getting conflicting information. Yeah, a shot was fired somewhere. But does a shot fired at someone evolve into widespread civil disturbances? And we had come to the conclusion sometime on Tuesday that it really wasn’t that bad in terms of civil disobedience. But Marty called me at some point and said, ‘The medical teams and all of us feel unsafe and we’re going to evacuate.’ And I said, ‘Well, Marty, you’re on the ground. You know better than I do. You need to make your own decision about what to do and if that’s the case then go ahead and get out of there.’ Then we started hearing stories about other people going into the Convention Center and it’s starting to get worse. So sometime Wednesday we began to realize there really were people showing up at the Convention Center. Who are they? Is this an organized evacuation or is this just an ad hoc thing that’s occurring? Then I found out that there was absolutely no planning, no indication from the mayor, nothing that this was in place…. We weren’t prewarned in Baton Rouge that we were going to have to deal with people in the Convention Center. It was a total surprise to us.”43
No one, however, had a more frustrating day Wednesday than a man named Peter Pantuso, the head of the American Bus Association, a trade group that represented over 950 intercity bus companies, including the giant Greyhound. America’s bus companies were ready to help; Pantuso knew who they were and how to organize them. He wanted to help, too. Instead, he spent the whole day trying to get through to the people at FEMA who were coordinating the search for buses. “We never talked to FEMA or got a call back from them,” said Pantuso.44 Only later did he learn that the agency had contracted all transportation needs in case of disaster to Landstar, a trucking firm that happened to be headed by Jeffrey Crowe, former chairman of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which funneled funds to the Republican party through its political action committee.45 (The contract was originally worth $100 million, though a post-Katrina modification raised it to $400 million.) As a trucking company, Landstar didn’t have much familiarity with bus logistics. After making a few general inquiries on the weekend before the hurricane struck, it dallied, making no immediate preparations. In fact, Landstar didn’t fully address the problem until Tuesday morning and then only by assigning a subcontractor, Carey Limousines, to find buses. “They found us on the Web,” said a vice president at Carey.
After that, two days went by. It need hardly be said that the urgency for quick transportation out of New Orleans during those two days was a matter of life and death to some of the stranded Katrina victims. Late on Wednesday, Pantuso learned from friends on Capitol Hill that Carey Limousines was in charge of finding buses. He immediately called the company, which was headquartered near his own office in Washington, and spoke to the vice president working the problem. She said that she had meant to call Pantuso but didn’t have his telephone number. (It was listed in the local telephone book.) Finally apprised of the needs, Pantuso could start contacting his member companies with specifics. However, the full complement of buses wouldn’t arrive until the weekend—five days late—due to mismanagement on the part of the federal government and its contractors.
VII
On Wednesday morning Tony Zumbado and Josh Holm woke up early in their Hallmark motor coach, which was parked on Canal Street. The night before Zumbado, a good cook, helped prepare sandwiches for about fifty crew members. Now at the crack of dawn, they cleaned up the mess. Quickly they ate a bowl of Total and put out boxes of breakfast bars for their just-rising colleagues. They plotted their day. They were joined by Denny Miller, an NBC engineer. All around them outside were people wandering about, dazed and exhausted, sloshing through the gurgle of water coming up out of the gutters. A curfew had been issued for the hours between 6 P.M. and 6 A.M., but it wasn’t really enforced. “We were just starting to walk to our van when out of nowhere this African-American guy named Dwayne Jones just popped in front of us,” Zumbado recalled. “He was dripping in sweat and his eyes were wide. He looked like he was strung out, if you can imagine that, and I say this with all due respect. I’m not stereotyping, but that’s the image that I saw in him.”46
Startled, Zumbado worried briefly that Jones might be aiming a weapon. “I need to talk to somebody,” Jones said. “You need to talk to me. I need to speak to somebody. There’s people dying in the Convention Center. No media’s been over there. They told us to go over to Canal and find somebody.” As Jones rambled on in this fashion, many people might have written Jones off as a bum detached from reality. Miller, in fact, got between Zumbado and Jones, fearful that some act of violence was about to occur.
Zumbado, however, could take care of himself and he waved Miller away. “Look,” Zumbado said to Jones, “do you want some coffee? Do you want something to eat?”
“No, no, man,” Jones said. “I don’t want nothin’ to eat. I don’t want anything. I want you to come with me.”
A streetwise Zumbado believed that Jones was telling the truth. “Let’s go,” Zumbado said. “Show me.”47
The Morial Convention Center was only four blocks away, but Zumbado drove. They had a lot of camera gear, too much weight to trudge around like pack mules. He told Miller to let Heather Allan know he went to investigate something and would be right back. Part of Zumbado’s rationale for driving Jones was in fact to get him away from the NBC trailers. It was a safety measure. Stories of floating corpses, gang fights, and hijacked supply trucks were all over the wires. “It was chaotic and it was unsafe and everybody was sta
rting to want our provisions. The human tide would, sooner or later, turn against us, so when Dwayne and I left, I told those watching to please go back to your motor houses and eat your breakfast,” Zumbado said. “The previous night people had come up to our camp asking for a cup of coffee, bottled water, a Band-Aid, you name it. And we were like, ‘Oh my God, this is no good. We’re catering to the cops, to everybody.’ But we just couldn’t say no to anyone. It was just horrible.”
So Zumbado headed down Convention Boulevard with Holm and Jones, parking a block from the center. A group of people was behind the Convention Center, standing on the Mississippi River levee, hoping to hijack a blunt-nosed barge or tourist side-wheeler. Others were fanning themselves in the early-morning heat. “What a scene,” Zumbado recalled. “People sleeping in the street. People lying in the gutter. Dead people. People chanting, ‘Help. Help. Help.’ Kids crying. Dogs running around. Trash all over the place. It smelled atrocious. There were maybe thirty seniors, special-needs individuals, on the side of the sidewalk in wheelchairs. They had empty canisters of air, plastic tubes still hooked up to their noses. They hadn’t gotten out of their wheelchairs for days, sitting in their shit, basically.” Zumbado raised his trusty PD-150 Sony handheld camera. “We’re goin’ to get the footage,” he told Holm. “Stay behind me.”48
The stench inside the Convention Center was so awful that Zumbado threw up his breakfast. Pale, sweating, nauseated by the horrific scene, Zumbado made his way through the throng of people, many of whom insistently pulled on his shoulders, asking, “Why won’t you help us?” or “Where’s the government?” or “Look at my mother, can’t you see she needs insulin?” or “Why are kids dying and people getting raped?”
How did the situation deteriorate this badly? Zumbado wondered. “Everybody was yelling and telling me stuff,” he recalled. “And Dwayne was taking me to where the dead bodies were on the side of the building. Eventually they were moved into the deep freezer, where dead chickens and cattle rumps were kept frozen before cooking. And he showed me where a person was dying on the sidewalk. Where a lady had died in a wheelchair, where another man was dead in a lawn chair over there and was just left in the sun. All this horrific stuff. I’m videotaping this stuff and I’m totally, totally overwhelmed.”
Not only had Zumbado lost his stomach, he was losing his head. His body took on a funny odor. He just pushed forward and filmed the bad dream. The bathrooms were overflowing with feces. Bloodstained stairs and muddy wet, clothes tossed everywhere. Flies were buzzing around babies. Dogs ate dirty diapers. Dead cats were kicked into piles of debris. It was barbaric, medieval. Staggering about were a few drug fiends, looking for heroin to snort or jab. “I mean everything vile and deranged imaginable was going on,” Zumbado said. “It was like a bad Woodstock.”
With Jones continuing to point out the vilest attractions, and Holm following to capture the shrieks, they recorded the hellish scene. “See, I told you I was going to bring somebody,” Jones kept telling people. “See.” That line only infuriated some of the people. “Well, he ain’t got no goods and he ain’t got anything,” one woman charged, with a group nodding in agreement. Jones defended Zumbado. “Well, yeah,” he said, “but he’s the media and he’s going to bring us help.” With an angry wave, the woman dismissed the notion. “He ain’t goin’ to do shit for us,” she said. “He’s like all the rest.” This time Zumbado spoke directly at her, forgoing interpreter Jones. “Ma’am,” he said. “I promise you, if you let me videotape this and you let me get out of here with this, I’ll bring you help.”
Worried his presence might spark a riot, Zumbado did a last round of shooting and then drove back to the NBC compound to find the dysentery-consumed Brian Williams and overtired Heather Allan. “Look,” he told them, “you gotta look at this tape.” Both were flabbergasted, cringing at what they saw and heard, and disgusted that City Hall had let the situation get this wildly out of control. “Williams wanted to run it all, but knew we couldn’t,” Zumbado said. “He knew the guys in New York running a family network wouldn’t let him do that.” They all quickly agreed to show some of Zumbado’s footage and play some of Holm’s sound bites. But Williams and Allan wanted Zumbado to go immediately on MSNBC and, as an eyewitness, report the degradation to the world. “So I went on and talked about it,” he recalled. “Williams and Allan were able to get some of the worst scenes on the air without making families watching vomit like I did.”49 Wearing a blue NBC ball cap and green work shirt, Zumbado told about the Convention Center with articulate passion. In cable TV terms he was “on fire.” Reporting that there were no C-rations or water bottles, Zumbado insisted that the victims “needed help yesterday.”50
NBC News, who had already broken the story of the Superdome roof holes and the first wave of looting, had now had another exclusive. Hanging around the network trailers that morning was New Orleans native Harry Connick Jr., the singer. No sooner had Zumbado finished talking than Connick, whose father had been district attorney for twenty-nine years, pleaded to be taken to the Convention Center. “Connick had been sleeping in his car,” Holm recalled. “When he caught the live segment he said something like ‘This is my town and I have to go see my people.’”51
Allan okayed the idea of a filmed Connick tour of the Convention Center. Weary and depressed, Connick was miked and, with Zumbado and Jones as guides, headed back there. “We basically did the whole thing again,” Zumbado said. “Connick just wanted to witness that it was that bad. They thought he was a FEMA official when they saw me walking with him. They’re saying, ‘Oh, look, he did bring somebody.’ And he’s like, ‘No, no, no,’ and then somebody yells, ‘Hell, no, that’s Harry Connick. He ain’t no official.’”
Trying to be the voice of reason, Connick stood up on a chair and launched into a flat speech. The air was heavy with the smell of vomit and cigarette smoke and urine. “I’m here to witness what you’re going through,” Connick began. “I’m going to get help. I’m going to talk to somebody. I will help you. You’re my people. I come from here. I just could not pass the moment to see how bad this was.”
The speech did not go over well. “Man, you can see,” somebody shouted. “Get the hell out of here: go get us help.” According to Zumbado, Connick, overcome by a sudden dizziness, “just couldn’t take it” inside the Convention Center. “I’ve had enough,” he told Zumbado, glancing for the exit. “This isn’t good.” On the way out the door, a man died at Connick’s feet, the victim of a massive stroke. “Look!” Zumbado shouted, videotaping the man. “Look!” A panic-stricken Connick couldn’t look at the fate of “his people” when they were dying like dogs. “Let’s get out of here!” Connick said. “Now!”
Zumbado and Holm kept returning to the Convention Center that day. People were still congregating, without permission—or any protection from one another. Weapons abounded and crime was unchecked. Almost as large a number huddled outside, afraid to go in the building, a formless, irresolute mob. As Zumbado and Holm soon found out, stories of the so-called Death Freezer had made the rounds. They themselves filmed around five corpses. Muffled screams could be heard from one end of the center to the other. Ninety-three-year-old Allie Harris was one of the anguished. She had been evacuated from the New Orleans East home she had shared with her husband, Booker. During the evacuation ride in a hot panel truck, Booker died. In the New Orleans created by Katrina, the driver simply unloaded the old man’s body, propped the corpse in a folding chair, and left. Someone covered the remains with a yellow blanket. On Wednesday Allie sat in front of the Convention Center, once a focal point for millions of visitors, guarding her husband’s body. She sat next to the corpse and slowly ate crackers, “seemingly unaware of all the tragedy unfolding around her.”52 Losing her husband was hard enough, but she wasn’t going to allow him to be dragged away and tossed into some meat locker. She wasn’t going to let her beloved husband’s body become debris—as the saying goes, “over her dead body.”
VIII
The Great Deluge Page 49