The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  Clark ran to his hotel room, telling his family, “Let’s go! Pick up your stuff—we’re leaving.” Unfortunately, his mother-in-law, Sedonna Green, could barely move, so it took nearly a half hour to get her downstairs to the back parking lot. Eventually, the Clark family—all six of them—made it outside, and to Ivory’s great relief, the boat owner hadn’t paddled away. The raft was soon so weighed down with Clarks and Greens that it almost sunk. But with Clark pushing from behind, and the stranger pulling in front, they waded through the floodwaters, arriving at a ramp that led to I-10. This was the waterline. From this point Clark would have to walk his family to the Superdome, where the medics would be able to tend to Grandma and Auntie. “I told that guy thanks,” Clark recalled, “I was halfway to the Superdome and, most important, out of all of the flooding.”

  However, the Superdome was still a quarter mile away, and neither Grandma nor Auntie was in walking condition. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a woman with two children standing on the sun-scorched interstate with a stolen stock cart from a Winn-Dixie. It was a large cart, with two tiers. He wanted it. With all the charm and desperation he could muster, he approached the sheepish woman, telling her his plight. Two elders might die if he didn’t get them to the Superdome as soon as possible. The woman looked over at the Clark family, where Auntie, as if on cue, was having a coughing attack. Her first answer was no. But Clark insisted, invoking God and Jesus and Stevie Wonder and pointing out that her family could still walk. In Christian terms, his family situation was “meeker” than hers. At most, this woman might lose possessions, not human lives. Her defiance melted. “She started mumbling and unloading her cart and gave it to me,” Clark recalled. “She wished us well…sort of…. We put Grandma and Auntie in the cart, one on each tier, and started ‘walkin’ to New Orleans,’ as Fats Domino used to sing.”

  On any other day, Ivory Clark pushing a cart with two old people lying on it down the middle of I-10 would have attracted no little attention. But not on the Wednesday after Katrina. The entire highway was now a staging area for evacuees, with people screaming at every helicopter, babies crying, and people passing out from heat exhaustion. Water was a rare commodity and people took deep swigs and then passed along the plastic bottle. Every twenty yards, Clark would stop the cart and whack Auntie’s back. She was having wheezing fits and Clark kept glancing at his wife, Donna, afraid that at any minute Auntie might be a goner. You didn’t have to be a doctor to realize that the elderly were “passing” all over the Gulf South. Eventually, the family made it to the Superdome. Clark ran around outside looking for a Red Cross volunteer or a nurse, anyone who could help. He had imagined there would be FEMA booths—like at church fairs—where teams of disaster experts were dispensing medical help, washing out cuts with disinfectant, gurneying the truly needy onto ambulances. How wrong could he have been? At the Dome he might as well have taken a number like at a bakery—one that read “27,363.” It seemed everyone in sight had medical needs, and virtually none of them were receiving any help. The officials whom Clark approached only shouted at him, “The Superdome is closed. Go to the Convention Center.”

  Clark told his family the bad news. But, as always, he put on a sunny mask. “Kiddos,” he said, “we’re going to the Convention Center.” Nobody heard the cursin’ under his breath.

  Down I-10, the Clarks saw mayhem swirling all around them. Eventually, they got to the Tchoupitoulas exit. It was a downward ramp, so Clark stood in front of the cart, his feet acting like brakes, making sure it didn’t become a runaway train. It was impossible to measure how much Clark sweated that muggy afternoon. His T-shirt was drenched, as if he had gone swimming for a day in Lake Pontchartrain. In a sense, he had. His eyes were stinging from the sweat, and every time he spoke, beads would roll into his mouth. It was like drinking salt water. His lips were cracked. He pulled off a piece of dead skin. He thought of the Ray Charles/Gladys Knight song, “Heaven Help Us All,” a cut on a duet CD he had recently purchased at Starbucks. He wanted to fall down on his knees and say a prayer. Instead, he kept pushing onward like a plow mule, saying, “Lord have mercy” and “Keep the faith,” even though, for the most part, he wasn’t a religious man. Jesus had a way of coming to the forefront of his mind only when he was in a jam. “This constituted a jam,” Clark said. “Yes, indeedy.”

  When the Clarks finally arrived at the Morial Convention Center, they were shocked. Everywhere they looked, there were piles of rubbish. Most people were afraid to go inside the building. Clark decided that in order to find a generator for Auntie’s respirator, he “had to assert myself,” he said. “You had to look for an opening.”54

  IX

  With no effective barrier, Lake Pontchartrain had been draining into the city for more than two days. The good news on Wednesday afternoon was that the floodwaters stopped rising in New Orleans. The water stabilized and the lake no longer had anywhere to go. They were just two adjoining bodies of water—Pontchartrain being a lake and New Orleans being a huge pond. The bad news was that with the parity between the two, the floodwater could not recede from the pond. The only hope was to re-erect the barriers. To that end, the Army Corps of Engineers and the National Guard started using helicopters to drop fodder into the breaches, starting with the gaping levee of the 17th Street Canal. To block the 200-foot-long, 25-foot-high hole, the military dropped sandbags and concrete highway-lane barriers. These sandbags were not the 50-pounders used to fill sandboxes for kids. They weighed 3,000 pounds each, but even so, it looked as though the helicopters were dropping peas into the gaping breach. Cynics predicted that it would be three years before the holes were all fixed and the water could be pumped out. Engineers said that it would be three weeks, but in New Orleans on that Wednesday, years and weeks, hours and days all seemed to be the same.

  At 1:45 P.M., Air Force One was flying over Louisiana, taking the President from Texas to Washington, D.C. George Bush was onboard, along with Karl Rove, Deputy National Security Advisor J. D. Crouch, other aides, and a gaggle of reporters and photographers. As usual, President Bush remained in the forward compartment of the 747, away from the members of the press and most of the staff. Unlike noisy airplanes, Air Force One was a relatively silent, meditative chamber, in which the President could collect his varied thoughts. The President’s bedroom, bath, and office were in the nose of the plane. A little farther back was a small lounge and then a galley, skirted by a passageway and a row of chairs and sofas along the window. That seating area was usually used by the Secret Service, who killed time playing games on their BlackBerrys or flipping through magazines. Just to the back of the galley area was a conference room that doubled as the dining area. Farther toward the rear of the plane was a work area for presidential aides. Finally, there was a seating area, looking much like the first-class cabin on a commercial jet, for members of the press. President Bush, a private man, remained in his section of the 747, generally avoiding the press, in their section.

  Somewhere over Louisiana, the presidential staff ordered the chief pilot to make a detour over the Gulf Coast, so that Bush could survey the hurricane damage, two full days after Katrina struck. Air Force One slowed as it approached New Orleans from the northwest, descending gently from its cruising altitude of about 37,000 feet to just 2,500 feet. The pilot remained in contact with ground control in the area, to make sure that the jet didn’t intrude on the work of rescue helicopters. President Bush sat in a seat across from the galley, the area normally used by his security detail, and peered out the window. His hands were curled into fists, an unusually grim expression seemed frozen on his face.55 Rove, Crouch, and Press Secretary Scott McClellan hovered nearby, pointing out landmarks. One of the Air Force pilots onboard stopped by to indicate towns, submerged or barely protruding from the floodwater. Bush himself spotted the Superdome first, its roof tattered by the wind. As the plane continued east and reached the Ninth Ward, the President said, “It’s devastating. It’s got to be doubly devastating on the ground.�
��56

  As the presidential plane flew over New Orleans, it dipped lower, to 1,700 feet, and people who had been stranded on rooftops for forty-eight hours easily heard the roar of the engines. The city was so eerily silent, except for the whir of helicopters, that the engines of the President’s 747 filled every corner of the air for miles around. The blue-and-white jet swooped past the Superdome; the President could see the displaced people clustered around the arena. Likewise, those onboard Air Force One could all but see the desperate people who were still waiting on rooftops, trapped on highways, or wading through floodwater in search of safety. Those in the luxury jet, surrounded by immaculate furnishings, were assured by an aura of order and security. They were 2,500 feet above and a world apart from the victims below.

  The destruction in the wake of the hurricane was still fresh. In two days, thousands of people had been rescued, but none of the damage to buildings had been repaired. And the water just sat: stubborn, ugly, and dangerous. For those who experienced Katrina’s flooding, the foul smell would linger, and probably stick with them to the grave. The media continually referred to the waters as a “toxic gumbo.” But if you stood on a porch or balcony on Wednesday and tried to inhale and exhale normally, your entire nasal cavity rebelled. The floodwater wasn’t for the fainthearted—or even the brave, for that matter. It was a rotten stench, as bad as that of decomposing flesh.

  Many first responders could take one whiff in a house and tell whether an animal or human had died inside. Some knew the difference between a dog or cat. The poisoned New Orleans floodwater, by contrast, was the death smell, plus dozens of other odors commingled with the overflow from the sewage system. It was as if the saucer that was New Orleans had been turned into a giant petri dish, where some mad chemist had tossed every wretched waste product imaginable into a stirring, stagnant pot. With temperatures in the nineties, this hell broth cooked. One whiff and your eyes burned, your face cringed, and your lungs pulled up their defensive drawbridges, hoping to survive the onslaught by partially shutting down. From Claiborne Avenue came smells—seawater and carbolic acid, rubber tires, dead plants, linen and common house paint, gasoline and dead rats. All you could do was cover your nose and search for a surgical mask. And then, just as your senses were poised to adjust, a slight breeze brought with it the smell of mildewed refrigerators, sour cheeses, and curdled milk. In post-Katrina New Orleans, the evil aroma attacked your sinuses, causing them to swell in minutes.

  Soon, you developed “Katrina cough,” a bronchial hack that left rescue workers feeling dizzy and heavy-headed. Anybody in or near the water naturally worried about the long-term health risks. That’s what it was like in the bowl for everyone: the victims and the first responders; the powerful and the needy; Democrats and Republicans; NOLA Homeboys and the Cajun Navy; the Uptown rich and the Ninth Ward poor. Anyone who was in the region knew what that smell was like, but wondered if anyone else did. Could President Bush really know the smell from a limousine in the sky?

  As Air Force One continued on its thirty-five-minute tour of the hurricane-ravaged coast, the President himself spotted the shocking state of Pass Christian, Mississippi. “It’s totally wiped out,” he said. As he correctly observed, the bridge across St. Louis Bay was gone. All of Harrison County, in fact, was in pieces. Every juke joint and eating house along the coast was gone. “There wasn’t a whole lot of conversation going on,” Press Secretary McClellan said about the mood on Air Force One. “I think it’s very sobering to see from the air. And I think at some points you’re just kind of shaking your head in disbelief to see the destruction that has been done by the hurricane.”57

  President Bush opted not to put the flashlight in his face, saying, “This is your president,” as LBJ had done during Hurricane Betsy. He chose a more fastidious approach. While it was true that President Johnson’s flashlight trip was grandstanding, he had made Betsy survivors feel significant. The President of the United States cared. President Bush, while emotionally distraught, chose the remote approach instead of an on-the-ground inspection. It was a blunder. “The President pointed out this one church that was still standing,” reported McClellan, “but all the homes around it there were completely wiped out. There’s a causeway we saw that was in pieces that the President pointed out.”58

  Around this time Karl Rove made his way to the back of Air Force One and invited photographers to the forward compartment to take shots of Bush surveying the damage. Some reporters tagged along as well. The invitation surprised the members of the media, who were rarely allowed access to the President onboard Air Force One.59 It was obviously intended as a photo op, a depiction of the President as a compassionate man, connecting to the tragic region. It backfired. No one expected the President to go to New Orleans, pick up a bucket, and start bailing water, but detouring over it in a jet was a meaningless gesture at the other end of the spectrum. Howard Fineman of Newsweek described the resulting pictures in terms of “president as tourist, seemingly powerless as he peered down at the chaos.”60 Bush, already two days late in seriously addressing the Katrina situation, was finally entering the recovery foray from an unfortunate springboard of high-altitude disconnect. He should have smelled the death. He should have touched the floodwaters. He should have showed he cared a bit more. White House political advisors admitted later, “It looked like he didn’t know what was going on.”61

  Chapter Eleven

  BLINDNESS

  The Government is fully aware of its responsibilities and hopes that those to whom this message is directed will, as the upright citizens they doubtless are, also assume their responsibilities, bearing in mind that the isolation in which they now find themselves will represent, above any personal considerations, an act of solidarity with the rest of the nation’s community.

  —José Saramago, Blindness

  I

  ONLY A SURREAL ALLEGORIST, like Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago, could describe Katrinaworld, a denuded black hole of double-talking gibberish where the bureaucrats hid behind the white marble walls of statistical procedure and partisan politics. Starting on Wednesday, August 31, Americans were awash in Katrina statistics: Category 3 or 4; 20,000 or 25,000 at the Superdome; 40,000 troops needed; 120,000 people without their own transportation; 38 percent of New Orleans living in poverty; a chilling 2,430 children separated from their families;1 1,700 people still trapped in New Orleans hospitals; 40,000 National Guard needed in the disaster zone; 1,150 Red Cross shelters opened in twenty-seven states; more than 100 tons of sandbags already dropped by the Coast Guard to repair the levees; 90,000 square miles of the Gulf Coast declared official disaster areas. Hope evaporates when a person feels like a number.2

  What Saramago wrote in his novel Blindness—“blind people need no names”—was the attitude that the authorities took on Wednesday. New Orleans, in particular, was in body-count mode. Perhaps 1,000 or 3,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 dead. The politicians spoke of the dead with greater certainty than they spoke of the living. But they didn’t really know anything about either. You called 911 and heard an operatic beep. Baton Rouge was a civilization away. Washington, D.C.—to use cell-phone lingo—was out of range. Not even a sputtering little Toyota was on Esplanade Avenue. You want soldiers? The soldiers were holed up in the Superdome. You want light? Strike a match. The thirty-five St. Charles line streetcars were silent—no more clackety-clack. The Napoleon House bar was boarded up. Decent coffee or brandy wasn’t being served. Water was scarce and the music was stilled. No braying of trumpets around Jackson Square.

  On Wednesday, Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke announced that his boss, Secretary Michael Chertoff, had declared Katrina an “incident of national significance.” That designation, an understatement, granted the department the right to provide “operational and/or resource coordination for federal support to on-scene incident command structures.”3 In other words, Homeland Security was supposed to expedite relief by serving as a central command post. According to the National
Response Plan, however, the designation stopped short of allowing the federal government to assume overall management of the affected areas. That was left to those “on-scene incident command structures,” or in plain English, local governments. The Bush White House was determined to attain full federal control, though, of troops. While speaking to reporters Wednesday, Knocke pointedly observed that while “state and local officials have not formally declared that they can no longer manage the disaster on their own, that is the case.”4 Therein lay a point of contention that would dog and delay the effort to deliver help to Louisiana. “Dying,” Saramago wrote, “has always been a matter of time.”5

  Every time the Bush administration and the State of Louisiana hesitated, lawyered-up, and read the fine print on Homeland Security procedure, an American died prematurely. One of the biggest lessons of Katrina was that in times of disaster, bad bureaucracy plus presidential hesitation equals corpses. Meanwhile, Governor Kathleen Blanco believed that she could manage the rescue and relief effort and needed only resources from the federal government. From the point of view of the governor and most local officials, the federal response had already been monumentally mismanaged, with the military getting a late start and FEMA in a daze. As former New Orleans mayor Marc Morial said, FEMA needed to be “completely rebuilt” to keep with “the needs of twenty-first-century disaster response.”6 From the other side, though, to send the cavalry instantaneously to Louisiana under the aegis of “local officials” was to risk making heroes out of political enemies. Politics aside, the White House and Homeland Security were reluctant to hand over extraordinary assets to Louisiana officials whom they regarded as ill prepared and inexperienced. “Blanco reminded me of an aunt I have whom I love to pieces,” FEMA Director Michael Brown said. “But I would never trust this aunt to run a state or be a mayor. She was just a wonderful human being. I just see Blanco as this really nice woman who is just way beyond her level of ability.”7