The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  The National Guard has nearly 11,000 Guardsmen on state active duty to assist governors and local officials with security and disaster response efforts. FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers are working around the clock with Louisiana officials to repair the breaches in the levees so we can stop the flooding in New Orleans.

  Our second priority is to sustain lives by ensuring adequate food, water, shelter, and medical supplies for survivors and dedicated citizens—or dislocated citizens. FEMA’s moving supplies and equipment into the hardest hit areas. The Department of Transportation has provided more than 400 trucks to move 1,000 truckloads containing 5.4 million meals ready to eat, or MREs; 13.4 million liters of water; 10,400 tarps; 3.4 million pounds of ice; 144 generators; 20 containers of pre-positioned disaster supplies; 135,000 blankets and 11,000 cots. And we’re just starting. There are more than 78,000 people now in shelters.

  HHS and CDC are working with local officials to identify operating hospital facilities so we can help them, help the nurses and doctors provide necessary medical care. They’re distributing medical supplies, and they’re executing a public health plan to control disease and other health-related issues that might arise.

  Our third priority is executing a comprehensive recovery effort. We are focusing on restoring power and lines of communication that have been knocked out during the storm. We’ll be repairing major roads and bridges and other essential means of transportation as quickly as possible. There’s a lot of work we’re going to have to do. In my flyover, I saw a lot of destruction on major infrastructure. Repairing the infrastructure, of course, is going to be a key priority.

  Department of Energy is approving loans from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to limit disruptions in crude supplies for refineries. A lot of crude production has been shut down because of the storm. I instructed Secretary Bodman to work with refiners, people who need crude oil, to alleviate any shortage through loans. The Environmental Protection Agency has granted a nationwide waiver for fuel blends to make more gasoline and diesel fuel available throughout the country. This will help take some pressure off of gas prices, but our citizens must understand this storm has disrupted the capacity to make gasoline and distribute gasoline. We’re also developing a comprehensive plan to immediately help displaced citizens. This will include housing and education and health care and other essential needs.

  I’ve directed the folks in my Cabinet to work with local folks, local officials, to develop a comprehensive strategy to rebuild the communities affected. And there’s going to be a lot of rebuilding done. I can’t tell you how devastating the sites were. I want to thank the communities and surrounding states that have welcomed their neighbors during an hour of need. A lot of folks left the affected areas and found refuge with a relative or a friend. And I appreciate you doing that. I also want to thank the American Red Cross and the Salvation Army and the Catholic Charities and all other members of the armies of compassion. I think the folks in the affected areas are going to be overwhelmed when they realize how many Americans want to help them.

  At this stage in the recovery efforts, it’s important for those who want to contribute to contribute cash; to contribute cash to a charity of your choice but make sure you designate that gift for hurricane relief. You can call 1-800-HELP-NOW or you can get on the Red Cross Web page, redcross.org. The Red Cross needs our help, and I urge our fellow citizens to contribute. The folks on the Gulf Coast are going to need the help of this country for a long time. This is going to be a difficult road. The challenges that we face on the ground are unprecedented. But there’s no doubt in my mind we’re going to succeed.

  Right now, the days seem awfully dark for those affected. I understand that. But I’m confident that, with time, you’ll get your life back in order. New communities will flourish. The great city of New Orleans will be back on its feet. And America will be a stronger place for it.

  The country stands with you. We’ll do all in our power to help you. May God bless you. Thank you.71

  Where was the passion in President Bush’s speech? Could anybody find a single memorable line? His delivery had all the drama of a reading from the phone book or an IRS form. “George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life yesterday,” commented the New York Times, “especially given the level of national distress and the need for words of consolation and wisdom. In what seems to be a ritual in this administration, the president appeared a day later than he was needed. He then read an address of a quality more appropriate for an Arbor Day celebration: a long laundry list of pounds of ice, generators and blankets delivered to the stricken Gulf Coast. He advised the public that anybody who wanted to help should send cash, grinned, and promised that everything would work out in the end.”72

  As the Times noted, nearly all of the help that the President described was still in the future, many weeks away, a fact that he neglected to mention. Meanwhile the situation was only getting worse with every hour. Because soldiers were not yet on the ground in large numbers, for instance, security was eroding.

  On Wednesday evening, Mayor Nagin ordered the majority of New Orleans police officers to stop rescuing people. Looters were considered a higher priority. “They are starting to get closer to the heavily populated areas—hotels, hospitals,” Nagin said, “and we’re going to stop it right now.”73 In the beginning, anyone might have been a looter. Those who needed food or water during the clutches of the disaster had some intrinsic right to take it from a store or office. The spree escalated from there, however, to the point that two very different scenarios were playing out at once in the city. People were seeking relief, still standing on rooftops or struggling with the problems at the shelters. Simultaneously, bands of lawbreakers were running rampant. They took the contents of stores and even automobile dealerships, preyed on hurricane victims, and used guns with abandon, shooting at the sky or threatening other people. The rescue effort might have continued alongside the looting, but when it developed into wanton violence, Nagin ordered the police to turn their entire attention to regaining control. It was a steep challenge. There was nowhere to put those arrested except the temporary jail at the Greyhound bus station. More commonly, the police could do little but put ruffians in line for evacuation.

  The descent into Lord of the Flies anarchy was the third tier of the Katrina disaster. The first tier had been the storm. The second had been the flooding, due to the levee failure. The third tier was the violence that swept away laws, due largely to the absence of federal troops. There was a fourth tier, too, awaiting in the city and it scared everyone, good or bad. Floodwaters stagnated in the steamy hot region, creating a breeding ground for infectious disease that would soon take whatever lives the wind and the flood and the violence hadn’t. Or so it was feared. The dragonflies helped, but the fear of malaria or tetanus or worse persisted.

  As the Cajun Navy and the Louisiana National Guard at the Superdome had found out, at night New Orleans was ruled by “anything goes.” The U.S. government had sent armored vehicles to haul out the money at the Federal Reserve Bank. Likewise, other banks had private security teams safeguard money in the cover of darkness. Slowly, but surely, buses were starting to transport some Superdomers to Baton Rouge, Lafayette, and Houma. The mass exodus to Houston was yet to begin, however.

  That Wednesday at 6:00 P.M., most of the national media were being kicked out of downtown hotels. “Vans were now pulling up to the W Hotel; the entire hotel was under a forced evacuation,” Jeff Goldblatt of Fox recalled. “My bosses told me it was time to leave. All I had was my rental-car, no trailer to sleep in.”74

  Just as he was doing his final report from the W, however, Goldblatt saw a vagabond submerging a plastic jug into an ornamental fountain out front. Ernest Hemingway had written just such a scene on the first page of To Have and to Have Not, only it was a “bum” in Havana with a cup. “I pivot around and I notice this bedraggled, filthy man with mangy grayish black hair in his fifties going on about eighty, dip his jug into the
slimy water and then drink,” Goldblatt recalled. “As he put the jug to his lips I turned around and said something like ‘Sir, what are you doing? You can’t drink that!’ His gesture went right to my spine; it wasn’t just a tingle, my whole back went rigid and I said, ‘Stop, we’ll get you some water.’”

  Broadcasting live, Goldblatt’s audio technician walked over and handed the needy man some water. It was a coalescing moment for the reporter who hadn’t slept in days. He had been hoping to find the libertine side of Katrina, i.e., Johnny White’s bar serving beer or Bourbon Street revelers waving Mardi Gras beads. But suddenly Goldblatt turned deeply pessimistic about New Orleans’s immediate future. When the homeless were drinking contaminated water out of scummy fountains and hotel owners were booting out media, New Orleans had reached the forbidden hour, the moment when you felt like a lemming about to walk without protest over a cliff. Things were going to get worse, not better. The trickle effect had arrived. All that was left was panicked improvisation. “Getting out of town was insane,” Goldblatt said. “But you’ve got to know when it’s time to go.”

  Right then and there, Goldblatt decided he was going to improvise his way out of town, back to Chicago, where his wife was waiting and Morton’s steakhouse was open. “I hope people didn’t think that the fountain drinker was staged, fabricated to get ratings,” Goldblatt later said. “This guy was the real thing. Although I had seen many distressing signs of depression that Wednesday, that was the icing on the cake. That’s when I knew the entire urban grid was gone. I mean, I heard about dead bodies rotting in the street. I heard that a couple of blocks away at the Convention Center there were bodies. I knew that if I walked over there I would have seen them. But to me the drinking fountain was the moment when the bottom had fallen out.”75

  Chapter Twelve

  THE INTENSE IRRATIONALITY OF A THURSDAY

  To see the sufferation sicken me

  Them suit no fit me

  To win election they trick we

  And they don’t do nuttin’ at all.

  —Damian Marley, “Welcome to Jam-Rock”

  I

  ON THURSDAY MORNING, SEPTEMBER 1, President George W. Bush consented to an interview on Good Morning America to discuss the catastrophic sequence of events in the Gulf South. In his talk with Diane Sawyer, which took place in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, the President was low-key. “I fully understand people wanting things to have happened yesterday,” he said. “I understand the anxiety of people on the ground…. So there is frustration. But I want people to know there’s alot of help coming.”1 At times, he was vague, as when Sawyer asked him to compare the devastation he saw at the sight of the World Trade Center after the terrorist attacks in 2001, and the Gulf Coast after Katrina. He said that New Orleans suffered greater physical damage. It was an unimaginative answer that suggested he hadn’t contemplated or processed the full implication of Katrina. “Nine-eleven was a man-made attack,” he offered, “this was a natural disaster.” The only surprising comment from the President was “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees. They did anticipate a serious storm.” At first, it seemed consistent with his generally tepid remarks that morning. And yet protests cropped up that FEMA had conducted the Hurricane Pam exercise in 2004 and it had indeed predicted a failure in the levee system. The Army Corps of Engineers, worried about potential hurricanes, had also warned of the potential for breaches, making it known that it wanted to enlarge the levees and improve the drainage. These were not small points.

  By “anybody,” the President was presumably referring to people around him in the government; that is, he was saying that no one in the federal government anticipated the breach in the levees. If that was the case, and the extent of the flooding came as a surprise, then it might explain the total confusion that reigned for the first four days. After all, even a superpower can be caught by surprise. President Franklin Roosevelt had been “caught by surprise” when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Harry Truman had been half-asleep at his home in Independence, Missouri, when his Secretary of State Dean Acheson telephoned with the startling news that the North Koreans had crossed the 38th Parallel on June 25, 1950. And presidents being “surprised” had antecedents during past natural disasters; nobody blamed William McKinley for being surprised when a hurricane struck Galveston in 1900 or Theodore Roosevelt when an earthquake destroyed San Francisco. For the time being, the American people, thanks to the Sawyer interview, had some sort of answer to their question: the United States couldn’t respond any more quickly, because the federal government had been caught by surprise.

  However, Terry Ebbert of New Orleans Homeland Security immediately contradicted Bush. “This is a national disgrace. FEMA has been here three days, yet there is no command and control. We can send massive amounts of aid to tsunami victims but we can’t bail out the City of New Orleans?”2

  As time passed, even more pointed evidence emerged to refute Bush’s claim of innocent surprise. In January 2006, the Washington Post obtained two documents that proved that the White House had been forewarned. On the Saturday before the hurricane struck, FEMA concluded that Katrina would likely cause as much damage as was described in the Hurricane Pam exercise. On Sunday, at the teleconference, NHC head Max Mayfield warned the President that the levees might be topped. More urgently, the White House Situation Room received a forty-one-page analysis early on Monday morning (at 1:47 A.M., to be exact) from the National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center, a component of the Department of Homeland Security, and it specifically warned of breached levees, in addition to other manifestations of damage from the monster storm.3 With the storm only hours from landfall, the report offered a very small window of opportunity for preparation—but the White House Situation Room was designed to operate under just such tight parameters. Clearly, there was no truth to the President’s assertion that no one knew that the levees might breach. The warnings were part of the record, and part of the process of responsible prediction that keeps the White House informed of probable crises.

  On Thursday, as Bush talked with Sawyer, the nation was confronting a disaster potentially even bigger than that brought on by Hurricane Katrina on Monday. With little progress for the hurricane victims in sight, Americans throughout the fifty states entered into a crisis of faith, uncertain about anything except that the nation they thought they knew was nowhere in sight. Callous, ignorant, inefficient—the words that described the relationship of the United States to its maimed Gulf Coast were usually used to describe Third World countries in the midst of a disaster. From experience, Americans knew their country to be generous, organized, and absolutely unstoppable in the face of disaster. Even the most cynical knew that America could do anything and do it faster and better than any other country—if it wanted. Watching the scenes of New Orleans still enduring want and danger four days after the hurricane was tearing the whole nation apart. There were only two possible ways to understand what was going on besides the “surprise” alibi: (1) the U.S. government couldn’t respond, being woefully weak and confused; (2) it didn’t want to respond, being disinterested in the people and their plight.

  That Katrina unveiled a very different bolt in the American fabric was apparent to anyone who tuned in to Katrina coverage on television. The same comments were heard over and over in conversations across the country. “It doesn’t look like America,” people said. “It looks like a Third World country,” they said. A common question echoed Ebbert’s comment: “How come we could send aid for the tsunami victims on the other side of the Pacific in no time and we can’t get anything to the Gulf Coast?” By Thursday, in fact, Katrina had become one of the half-dozen moments in American television that not only revealed events but actually defined the community of millions responding to it on television. It joined the Army-McCarthy hearings (1954), the Kennedy assassination (1963), the Apollo 11 moon landing (1969), the Watergate hearings (1973–74), and the attacks on September 11, 2001.
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br />   In each case, Americans had been drawn together by the shared response of living together through a searing event, moment by moment, in the intimacy of their living rooms. We were Americans because we lived together through the sense of emptiness after the Kennedy assassination or the betrayal during the Watergate hearings. In the case of Katrina, the shared response was shame. The word was blasted across the headlines of magazines and newspapers. It was at once a confession of culpability and a rejection of the seeming indifference and incompetence that was bringing so much misery to so many Gulf Coast residents. On the day that Americans pondered why the government couldn’t or wouldn’t do more, representatives of the Bush administration gave no comfort. The President came across on Good Morning America as remote, unable to articulate the comforting words to rally the nation in its hour of peril. Former New York Mayor Ed Koch summed up Bush’s dilemma: “I learned that people want you out there,” he said. “They want you to suffer a little with them, they want you to convince them that you will protect them as part of your family, they want you to be an extension of them.”4

  II

  For three days, six-year-old De’Mont-e Love was stuck inside an apartment at 3223 Third Street in New Orleans with his family and some neighbors. From the roof of the redbrick, three-story building, you could see flooded Memorial Medical Center and the torn side of the Superdome roof. All the neighborhood haunts, like the Piggly Wiggly, Chicken-in-a-Box, and the New Mount Era Baptist Church, were inundated with water: so was the shotgun called Smothers’s Grocery, where De’Mont-e bought his Big Shot soda. “We stayed on the second floor and the water was almost to the second floor,” said De’Mont-e’s mother, twenty-six-year-old Catrina Williams. “So we didn’t have to move to the third floor. We thought we’d be all right. But we occasionally checked out the roof.”5