The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  Called “Saint Sherry” for her nonstop efforts to take care of diabetics and high-blood-pressure patients at the shelter of last resort, Watters made sure Domino got over to the Arena, the basketball facility next door to the Superdome that had been pressed into service as a triage area. After that Fats Domino, like everyone else at the Dome, waited to escape the bowl. On Wednesday, Domino and his wife, Rosemary, along with their large extended family, boarded a bus outside the Superdome bound for Baton Rouge. Once they arrived at the Maravich Center they waited patiently to register just like any other evacuee. Refusing to trade on his celebrity, Fats checked in as Antoine Domino. He was then taken to triage where medics could calm his heart palpitations and monitor his blood pressure. A volunteer named JaMarcus Russell, a student at Louisiana State University (and the quarterback of the LSU Tigers), recognized the rock ’n’ roll legend. His girlfriend was related to him. Russell was thrilled to approach one of his idols, introduced himself, and shook his hand. Seeing that Domino was sick and exhausted, and wanting to help, Russell offered to let the Dominos sleep at his apartment. Eventually over twenty Katrina refugees ended up “crashing” at Russell’s place. Fats, like everybody else, was glued to CNN and the other news channels, trying to monitor events. A bed was found for him, though at one point he chose the floor.

  Because there had been reports that Domino had died, the news that he was alive and well in Baton Rouge was one of the cheerful moments of a gloomy week. “The important thing is that Fats and his family are all right,” Russell told the press. “I’m not sure where they are headed, but I feel better knowing that they’re okay.” Although Fats refused to do interviews, an LSU spokesperson conveyed a heartfelt message: “Tell the people of New Orleans that I’m safe,” Domino said. “I wish I was able to still be there with them, but I hope to see them soon. I want to express my sincere gratitude and appreciation to JaMarcus for opening up and sharing his home with us.”58

  On Friday, September 3, Fats Domino, Rosemary, and some of his kids piled into cars and headed toward Dallas. Once they crossed the border, Fats became part of another official statistic: one of 230,000 Katrina evacuees to arrive in Texas.

  Fats Domino eventually made it to Arlington, where he was housed in an air-conditioned high-rise. Get-well greetings soon came pouring in from all over the world. His blood pressure stabilized and his bouts of sweating ended. All things considered, he was doing well. But he was homesick.

  In the middle of October, after living in Bedford, Texas, Fats returned to the Lower Ninth Ward. Both his Marais Street home and the adjacent office on Caffin Avenue looked like they had been dumped into a washing machine for days. A big satellite dish sat in the front lawn, but the pink and yellow trim on the house hadn’t lost its pastel appeal. And the flowered tiles on his front porch were still in place, muddy but not cracked. As he wandered around the premises looking for salvageable items, a wave of despair threatened to consume him. He shook his head in disbelief at the eight-foot watermark. But he put on a valiant front for the TV crew on hand to document his return. A favorite shirt was found and a handsome bust unearthed. Suddenly Fats cheered up more—a lot more. His world-famous smile beamed on his face. Three of his twenty-one gold records hadn’t washed away or been looted: “Rosemary,” “I’m Walkin’,” and “Blue Monday.” For the first time since Katrina, the Fat Man was a Happy Man.59

  Scattered about Fats Domino’s compound debris was a white Steinway piano missing its legs. As artifacts go, this one was filled with symbolic meaning. It was unclear whether Fats ever wrote any songs on the grand piano. It probably didn’t have any import at all. Also found in the rubble were an electric Wurlitzer piano and another Steinway. But staring at the thick gray dust on those desecrated piano keys, laying decommissioned on the old wooden floor, it was hard not to believe something profound had perished. The Lower Ninth Ward would never be the same. Something new would take its place. The jamboree, however, was over. Salvaging scraps from the past was all that was left to do. In early 2006, the Louisiana State Museum salvaged the legless piano, and someday it would be under glass on display. Schoolchildren would study the artifact as a Katrina learning tool. But it was perfectly reasonable to believe those months after the hurricane that Fats’s piano symbolized just one thing: the day the music in New Orleans died.

  VII

  Many Louisianans had long regarded Texas as a tall, dark shadow over their state, dominating business, reaping the benefit of Louisiana’s cornucopia of natural resources, and even pulling many of its brightest minds away. Texas, it has been said, looked at Louisiana as a Third World territory, wide open for exploitation. In the bleak humor of the lower Mississippi, the capital of Louisiana was not Baton Rouge; it was Houston. However, it was Texas that opened its doors and surely its hearts the widest to people made homeless by Katrina. Throughout the day on Wednesday, Governor Blanco had extensive telephone conversations with Governor Rick Perry of Texas, who wanted to join in the official effort to give relief to the evacuees. Blanco’s immediate problem was finding a place to send the 30,000 people in the Superdome and at least twice that many who were stranded in other venues in and around New Orleans.

  Perry was a fifth-generation Texan, a rancher from Abilene who was elected as a Republican state legislator in 1985. In 1999, he was George Bush’s running mate as lieutenant governor, and when Bush left Texas to move into the White House in January 2001, Perry took over the governorship. A tough, fiscal conservative, Governor Perry made his mark in tort reform, legislative vetoes, and an abiding belief in making health care more readily available to children. At the time of Katrina he was a popular governor, albeit one facing a reelection challenge in 2006.

  In responding to the hurricane disaster, Governor Perry reached out to officials in Texas’s biggest cities, finding some support in all of them, but a true ally in Houston’s mayor, Bill White, a Harvard-educated attorney who had spent most of his career as a businessman, running energy and construction companies. White, a Democrat, had been mayor of Houston since January of 2004. He had been raised in San Antonio. His father was a leader in registering Mexican Americans to vote. Fighting to eliminate poll taxes and a staunch advocate of “one man, one vote,” he was elected to the State Senate when Bill was thirteen years old. “We did voter registration drives in the west side of San Antonio,” White said. “That got me started. By 1975, I was a legislative assistant to a U.S. congressman.”60

  White was obsessed with studying energy consumption issues. A true “wonder boy,” when the OPEC embargo of 1973 hit, White, not yet twenty years old, headed to Washington, D.C., to write energy legislation pertaining to fuel efficiency standards and strategic petroleum reserves. Upon graduating from the University of Texas School of Law in 1979, White remained in Texas and opened a public interest law firm in Houston. His reputation soared, and he was admired by Democrats and Republicans alike. Along the way, he became heavily involved in the oil business. Short, bookish, and soft-spoken, with big ears and a Howdy Doody grin, White was the antithesis of a Texas cowboy; everything about him spoke of Georgetown salons and Cambridge think tanks. Married with three children White taught Sunday school at St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in Houston and attended, seemingly, every social event in town.

  What differentiated White from most other politicians of his generation was his nonpartisan nature. Like Perry, White responded to Katrina with pragmatic generosity. Both intended to accommodate the refugees of the storm, but to do so in an organized way that would be accountable financially as well as socially. In opening Reliant Park—a convention, sports, and entertainment complex consisting of the Stadium, Center, Astrodome, and Arena—for the evacuees, Perry and White were undaunted by the fact that the Superdome had deteriorated under a similar weight. A catering company was engaged to serve three hot buffet meals per day. Medical personnel began to set up stations to screen for those who needed hospital treatment. The Red Cross arranged for cots and extra toilet facilities
. Metropolitan buses were put on a schedule to ferry people to shopping malls, parks, and other sites around the city. According to this plan, Reliant Park was projected to be a temporary stop, until more permanent housing became available; if necessary, though, it could handle evacuees for up to ninety days.61 At the same time, Perry made sure that Texas schools prepared to receive children displaced by the storm. “No community is equipped for such an enterprise,” White later recalled. “It’s just a reality we had Americans in need and we were the closest urban area with the capacity.”62

  VIII

  Texas stepped up, but the federal response continued to be muddled on Wednesday afternoon. At about 1 P.M., Michael Chertoff hosted a press conference that included five other cabinet members. “We are extremely pleased,” Chertoff said, “with the response that every element of the federal government, all of our federal partners, has made to this terrible tragedy.” He did not explain why there was so little to be seen for it all. He also did not mention the name of FEMA Director Michael Brown once, although he made reference to many other colleagues and seemed to be in a generous frame of mind, when it came to extending praise for whatever it was that he thought had been done by his department.63

  Americans, however, did not share Chertoff’s good humor, and they were decidedly not “extremely pleased.” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was on vacation, shopping at the Salvatore Ferragamo store on Fifth Avenue in New York, when a fellow shopper spotted her and shouted, “How dare you shop for shoes while thousands are dying and homeless?” That evening, Rice attended the Broadway musical Spamalot. Word went through the audience that she was present, and when the lights came up after the show, she was roundly booed.64 The next day, she ended her vacation early and returned to Washington, D.C. At least one administration official had finally gotten the message: Katrina was a crisis that could not be ignored.

  On Wednesday afternoon, Governor Blanco finally issued the executive order that allowed the state to commandeer every school bus in Louisiana. In fact, many people from throughout the country were hankering to help, but most found that it wasn’t that easy. The road of good intentions led only to frustration and madness on the way to New Orleans. In an effort to secure the area, police or Guardsmen were stationed at most of the roads leading into southeastern Louisiana. They had orders to keep potential looters out. They also had to keep home owners from returning and becoming a danger to themselves in the midst of the crisis. That was also understandable. But when rescue crews arrived from municipalities all over the nation, fitted out in uniforms and carrying specialized equipment, it should have been clear that they belonged in a different category. One reason given for turning away rescue crews was that they would need to be fed and housed—and the city had no way to help anyone, not even those coming to help.

  While rescuers were being turned away under the absolute lockdown, reporters and cameramen seemed to have no trouble moving in and out pretty much as they pleased. Even a fake press pass was an invitation into the bowl. People watching the coverage were perplexed to hear from a veritable battalion of reporters freshly arrived in New Orleans that the federal government couldn’t find any way to bring help into the flooded city.

  Assuming that the trouble in absorbing volunteer rescuers was just part of the fog of war—the war on the hurricane damage—it was still hard to explain why FEMA was so irresponsible with the expert help that was proffered. In the most egregious case, a group of more than 100 first responders who came in from all over the country were diverted to Atlanta on Wednesday for training on rules against sexual harassment. With the equivalent of a sinking ship going down in New Orleans, no one would think of sensitivity training as the absolute top priority—no one, apparently, except FEMA and the federal government. In any case, these rescuers, including firemen, experts in search and rescue, Hazmat, and paramedics, were told that their only job would be handing out flyers containing the FEMA toll-free number. They were not to interfere further; no matter what they were asked, they could only respond by repeating the toll-free number. “There are all these guys with all this training and we’re sending them out to hand out a phone number,” said a firefighter from Oregon, who was thinking of the storm’s victims. “They are screaming for help and this day was a waste.”65

  Some people wondered why local firefighters had been on duty nonstop, with time off only for catnaps. Under the leadership of Superintendent Charles Parent, the NOFD demonstrated extraordinary courage putting out huge infernos. “Down there in the Ninth Ward we thought there was a toxic chemical fire,” Terry Ebbert recalled. “The fire department, perhaps risking their own lives, put it out. And then there were all the gas fires flaring up because of the gas lines that were severed, and we were working with folks to get those shut down.”66 Mayor Nagin used one of his television appearances during the day to solicit more help from the nation’s fire departments. The situation was that dire, which was why the firemen sitting through the FEMA seminar in Atlanta were perplexed and angry. The Oregon firefighter was right: people were screaming for help.

  One New Orleanian still needing help on Wednesday morning was chef extraordinaire Austin Leslie, who had been trapped in his attic for two days. Rescuers would finally arrive that afternoon. At seventy-one, Leslie was the city’s reigning expert on cooking fried chicken. With his muttonchops and trademark white yachting cap, he was well-known in the restaurant world, both in the back, at the fryer, and out front, hobnobbing with guests. “There’s nothing like cooking Creole food in New Orleans,” he said in an interview in 2004. “That’s your toughest audience, your best one.”67 The two days in the attic heat had placed an unbearable strain on Leslie, however. After persevering through an arduous trip to the Morial Convention Center, and eventually to Atlanta, he was unable to shake a fever and died on September 29.68

  IX

  On Wednesday, officials in Texas rushed to prepare the Reliant Park complex and other venues to receive evacuees. At the same time in New Orleans, Colonel Jacques Thibodeaux of the Louisiana National Guard took up his new assignment: organizing the people inside the Superdome for evacuations onto buses. He and his top aides, including McLaughlin, spent the afternoon on the scene, devising a practical plan. They settled on a short walk to Loyola Boulevard, which had remained dry and where the buses could load passengers and pull away for a relatively easy trip out of town. The only problem was, as Colonel Thibodeaux said, “You wanted to have 1,000 buses to put your hands on.”69 And there weren’t any. Blanco had put out the call for Louisiana school buses, and her trio of Ty Bromell, Leonard Kleinpeter, and Angele Davis was corralling them at mile marker 209, but the governor and every person stranded in New Orleans still waited for the Federal Emergency Management Agency to produce hundreds. FEMA, however, barely even knew who was looking for the buses on its behalf. “But eventually FEMA delivered some,” Kleinpeter recalled. “They did start helping to evacuate the Dome.”70

  Meanwhile, at 4 P.M., President Bush convened the hurricane task force at the White House. An hour later, from the Rose Garden, he addressed the nation on live television. An editorial the next day in the New York Times worried, “Nothing about the president’s demeanor yesterday—which seemed casual to the point of carelessness—suggested that he understood the depth of the current crisis.” The President did not seem to be engaged in the subject, glancing at his notes and delivering a speech that smacked of the press release issued by the Department of Homeland Security that same afternoon. The speech ran:

  I’ve just received an update from Secretary Chertoff and other Cabinet Secretaries involved on the latest developments in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. As we flew here today, I also asked the pilot to fly over the Gulf Coast region so I could see firsthand the scope and magnitude of the devastation. The vast majority of New Orleans, Louisiana, is under water. Tens of thousands of homes and businesses are beyond repair.

  A lot of the Mississippi Gulf Coast has been completely destroyed. Mobile
is flooded. We are dealing with one of the worst natural disasters in our nation’s history. And that’s why I’ve called the Cabinet together. The people in the affected regions expect the federal government to work with the state government and local government with an effective response. I have directed Secretary of Homeland Security Mike Chertoff to chair a Cabinet-level task force to coordinate all our assistance from Washington. FEMA Director Mike Brown is in charge of all federal response and recovery efforts in the field. I’ve instructed them to work closely with state and local officials, as well as with the private sector, to ensure that we’re helping—not hindering—recovery efforts.

  This recovery will take a long time. This recovery will take years. Our efforts are now focused on three priorities. Our first priority is to save lives. We’re assisting local officials in New Orleans in evacuating any remaining citizens from the affected area.

  I want to thank the state of Texas, and particularly Harris County and the city of Houston and officials with the Houston Astrodome, for providing shelter to those citizens who found refuge in the Superdome in Louisiana. Buses are on the way to take those people from New Orleans to Houston. FEMA’s deployed more than 50 disaster medical assistance teams from all across the country to help the affected—to help those in the affected areas. FEMA’s deployed more than 25 urban search and rescue teams with more than 1,000 personnel to help save as many lives as possible.

  The United States Coast Guard is conducting search and rescue missions. They’re working alongside local officials, local assets. The Coast Guard has rescued nearly 2,000 people to date. The Department of Defense is deploying major assets to the region. These include the USS Bataan to conduct search and rescue missions, eight Swift water rescue teams, the Iwo Jima Amphibious Readiness Group to help with disaster response equipment, and Hospital Ship USNS Comfort to help provide medical care.