The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  Making matters even more insufferable at Big Charity was the flooded morgue. Over a dozen corpses floated around, with five of them piled up like logs in a beaver’s dam, blocking a stairwell. “Our morgue at Big Charity,” said Don Smithburg, CEO of the LSU hospital system, “is full and it is underwater.”77 Everything was a race against time. The last unevacuated remaining patients were struggling from depravations. The insulin supply was running out. Intravenous fluids were nearly nonexistent. Sickly newborns were in incubators which had become airless suffocation tanks. The National Guard and Acadian Ambulance Service had to rescue these folks fast. There was no time anymore for the luxury of worrying about snipers. But the Coast Guard remained hesitant. “We’ll be doing rooftop extractions as soon as possible,” Coast Guard Lieutenant Commander Jeff Cater told USA Today. “There are some areas where shots were fired. We are avoiding those until we get some assurance our crews can fly in there. As much as we want to help those people, the safety of our people has to be a concern.”78

  Pushing the issue, Dr. Berggren accused the National Guard and Coast Guard of fussy cowardice in the face of an evil piffle. They had an army. Why were they terrified of one lone sniper? To her mind, it was wrong for Guardsmen to halt their mission over a single renegade and floodwaters. Realizing that the situation was going from very bad to worse, Tyler Curiel, her husband, arrived at the ER loading dock in a canoe he borrowed from a surgeon at Tulane. “I’m here to help you,” he told his wife. He also reported that their twelve-year-old son had been choppered out of New Orleans in the care of family friends.79

  For Berggren, it was a moment of great relief. Her boy, Alex, was all right and her husband was at her side. Together they would be able to evacuate the AIDS patients from Nine West. Things were looking up. Beyond that, Curiel had come to Charity with the intelligence that helicopters were evacuating Tulane University Hospital patients from the adjacent Saratoga parking garage roof. “I needed a boat to get to Charity, to check up on my wife,” Curiel recalled. “There was a canoe padlocked to some pipes in the parking deck. An orthopedic surgeon had decided to bring a canoe to Tulane University from home. He also kept life jackets and oars in his office. So I grabbed those. I now had access to a canoe to see my wife. Unfortunately, paddling my way to Charity people in the water shouted obscenities at me, and they splashed in the water after me trying to steal my canoe. It felt horrible not picking them up, but I was on a mission to Charity and I wasn’t going to be hijacked.”

  Not long after Dr. Curiel arrived, two National Guard Humvees arrived at Charity’s ER dock. They were ready to take patients to the Tulane University helipad. The first drop-off went without a hitch. Like a dutiful scoutmaster, Curiel left the parking lot with the guard trucks to evacuate another five or six Charity patients via canoe and bring them to the helipad. All of a sudden, as they arrived back at the Charity ER dock, gunfire rang out. Curiel felt his back tense. National Guardsmen emptied out of the trucks and bolted inside the hospital. Berggren said, “I’d been assigned a sheaf of papers and I’m tallying which patients we’ve gotten out from which ward. I’m standing right there and people are rushing by with gurneys and there’s a feeling of frenetic activity, but it’s also hopeful—we’re finally getting out of here. It’s Thursday morning, we’ve been here since Sunday. All of a sudden, people start screaming, ‘Sniper! Sniper!’ They’re charging in from the dock. I grab my papers and flatten myself up against the wall because I thought I was going to get trampled by the panicked crowd stampeding. They were like buffalo. I felt that the danger to those of us in the hospital was not the flood or even the temporary lack of food and water; it was actually crowd behavior and people with guns.”80

  Berggren rushed back upstairs to the working telephone near Nine West with her husband. They reported the sniper attack to CNN. Their profound SOS was heard around the world. But in the coming days, when it became clear that reports of gunshots and violence in New Orleans were overdrawn, some press questioned whether the sniper story was apocryphal, a creation of histrionic doctors, blurry-eyed nurses, and jittery Guardsmen. “My response to that is anger,” Berggren later stated. “There’s no question we were being shot at, and you have to tell somebody you’re being shot at or you won’t get any help. For reporters to come back to us at Charity and say, ‘Maybe you were messing it up or maybe you were so anxious and overwrought, you just thought someone was shooting at you, and gee, you shouldn’t have done that because it shut down the rescue operation,’ is outrageous.”

  Dr. Peter DeBlieux confirmed that Charity doctors and other emergency personnel were sitting ducks for a rooftop sniper on Wednesday and Thursday. “What looked like a steady stream of patients getting evacuated got shut down,” the doctor explained. “Snipers were firing at people rescuing folks from the Tulane Hospital. We got to witness people throwing things off the interstate at people in boats…so there were some pretty awful things going on.”81

  By Thursday, the U.S. government started to downplay reports of violence out of New Orleans. The motivation for a response from Homeland Security was obvious: the government was being embarrassed internationally in New Orleans. If the United States couldn’t control New Orleans, could they handle the streets of Baghdad or Kabul? Therefore, there were two ways to get control of the anarchy: send in federal troops and start claiming the sniper reports were largely false. Both responses were put into effect. The record shows that many reported sniper stories were false. The U.S. government was right to quash some of the exaggerations. But there was also no reason to dismiss the claims of Charity and Tulane doctors that somebody took potshots at them while they were on the ER loading dock. They were credible eyewitnesses.

  Late Thursday afternoon, Berggren received an uplifting phone call. Libby Goff, a friend in Texas, managed to dial into Charity on a landline and speak to Berggren directly. Goff sometimes spoke in a hippie slang, using terms like “groovy-doovy,” but she was loyal beyond words. She was overjoyed to hear Berggren’s voice. “What do you need to do, Ruth, to get out of there?” Goff asked. Not wasting time with idle chitchat, Berggren told Goff how worried she was about her patients with tuberculosis; the air from their quarantined rooms was no longer able to circulate through a special decontamination air filter. Staff had already put masks on the faces of those with TB, but tuberculosis could be spreading throughout the hospital. Goff immediately launched into action from her University Park home in Dallas. In quick succession she called her congressman, Pete Sessions, Jack Vaughn, vice president of Vaughn Petroleum, and entrepreneur Ross Perot Jr. From the combined efforts of those three wealthy Texans, Goff was able to secure a helicopter from Tenet Healthcare to pick up Drs. Berggren and Curiel from Charity. The question remaining was how to get choppers to Charity in New Orleans, where the airspace was temporarily shut down because of the sniper reports. A private jet was also procured.

  Eventually, Goff called Berggren back with good news: a jet from Sterling Aviation was going to first send a helicopter to the parking garage roof on Friday afternoon and then have a private plane waiting at Louis Armstrong International Airport that evening. “Thanks for the jet,” Dr. Berggren said, “but you can’t just take me and Tyler. I’ve got eighteen patients and I’m not leaving them!” Goff understood and promised she’d have multiple helicopters and a big private jet, one that could hold up to thirty or forty people. Cheers rippled through Nine West where they heard that transportation and food were on the way. At long last they were getting out of Charity. All they had to do was hold tight one more day. “We had found a plane in Chicago that would get them,” Goff recalled. “Everything was coming together serendipitously. No matter what, I was getting Ruth out of there.”82

  When patients and medical personnel were evacuated from New Orleans hospitals, they were usually taken to Louis Armstrong International Airport, located about fifteen miles from downtown. People with health problems from other points in the city were also dropped at the airport. On Thursday, v
ery few people made it there, and as a field hospital, the place was practically empty. But as evacuations finally accelerated on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, the airport was full of people, each of whom had a different medical need. Patients were laid out on the floor, and even on the baggage carrels. The overcrowding was shocking. “Remember the scene in Atlanta in Gone With the Wind,” said a paramedic named David Spence from Texas City, Texas, “That’s what it was like.”83 Doctors and paramedics from all over the country scurried around in a rush, trying to tend to the ill amid the arduous conditions. Working a twenty-hour shift was the norm. The operation wasn’t as efficient as it might have been, and supplies were limited, until the U.S. Air Force took over the job of deliveries from FEMA. The sanitation was poor, with the signature odor of Katrina—overflowing toilets—in the air.

  A seventy-eight-year-old man named Roy Britz was also taken to Armstrong airport. On Thursday morning, a bus came to his nursing home, which was without electricity or plumbing, but safe enough. On the way to the airport, the driver had to take evasive action when someone fired a gun at the bus. Sitting in a chair in the middle of a terminal, Britz told anyone who would listen that all he wanted was a cold drink. He could hardly swallow the lukewarm water he’d been handed. It would certainly help combat the dehydration that was a problem throughout the “wards” at the airport. But no one gave Britz a cold drink. He had been through a lot that day and seen a lot of the response to Katrina. “It’s been nothing but stupidity,” he said, “and hell.”84

  VIII

  While President Bush was talking on Good Morning America, fifty-five-year-old Larry Dixon was still trapped in his Upper Ninth Ward two-story house. He had planned to evacuate for Katrina. He had even dutifully sent his wife to Houston in advance on the Sunday before the storm, but he had stayed to help his Mazant Street neighbors board up and tie down. Exhausted, he had dozed off in a La-Z-Boy chair during those key hours late Sunday night, when escaping the bowl was still a possibility. He woke up to find the Upper Ninth flooding, debris flying everywhere. Like tens of thousands of others, he used the freight-train analogy to describe the loud noise causing his parlor to rattle nonstop. The water rose to four feet in his living room in half an hour. “I was supposed to leave,” he said. “Now I was thinking, I’ve got to survive.”85

  Calmly, without even the slightest tremor, Dixon grabbed bottled water, fruit, and his portable TV and climbed into his attic. A little water wasn’t going to unnerve an ex-Army man like him. Now he was going to become an attic survivor, with plenty of stories to gas off about at the nearby We-Got-It Café over breakfast. Without question, Dixon was an Upper Ninth man, whose countenance and body language reminded one of a middle-aged James Baldwin. He spoke with a steady, unflappable conviction that his life mattered, that he was important. As a boy, his hero was Sidney Poitier, whose character in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? he tried to emulate in both wardrobe and demeanor. Hats, for example, were important to Dixon; his favorite was a light brown fedora he’d purchased at Meyer the Hatter shop on St. Charles Avenue: it was a Dobbs with a black band and a short red feather sticking up. “My mother wears hats,” he said, “and so do I. And so did Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier.”86

  Dixon wasn’t a rich man, but he made a good living. His family owned Dixon’s Central, a snack food company headquartered in Carthage, Mississippi. They manufactured bags of Pork Skins and B-B-Q Flavored Pork Skins, delicious with ketchup or hot sauce and an alternative to potato chips. Dixon made sure every mom-and-pop store in the Upper Ninth stocked their cured chips, void of carbohydrates. And, due to his salesmanship, every Winn Dixie in the Greater New Orleans area was carrying his family’s two-ounce bags right next to big-shot snacks like Fritos and Lay’s. “I had boxes and boxes of my pork skins on the first floor when the water came in,” Dixon recalled. “Unfortunately, they all washed away.”

  Photographic Insert 2

  Cars carrying residents left downtown New Orleans ahead of Hurricane Katrina on Sunday, August 28, 2005. Hundreds of thousands of residents were ordered to flee on Sunday as the hurricane strengthened into a rare, potential Category 5 storm and barreled toward the vulnerable below-sea-level city. MICHAEL AINSWORTH/DALLAS MORNING NEWS/CORBIS

  Satellite imagery showed Hurricane Katrina over the Gulf Coast making landfall as a Category 3 storm at 1:15 P.M. (EST) on Monday, August 29. NOAA VIA GETTY IMAGES

  A mother and son rested amid the chaos of the Superdome, where thousands of New Orleans citizens sought refuge from Hurricane Katrina’s wrath. MARIO TAMA/GETTY IMAGES

  Survivors took food and supplies from a drugstore in New Orleans on Tuesday, August 30, as the city was cut off from the outside world, submerged by rising floodwaters, and troubled by anarchy in the streets. JAMES NIELSEN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

  The vast flooding of New Orleans was shown in this aerial view taken by New York Times photographer Vincent Laforet on Tuesday, August 30, a day after Katrina passed through the region. VINCENT LAFORET/AP

  The entire fleet of much-needed New Orleans school buses was flooded and rendered useless due to breached levees in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. PHIL COALE/AP

  A man held himself on his porch in the flooded Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans on Monday, August 29, after Hurricane Katrina slammed Louisiana as a Category 3 storm. MARKO GEORGIEV/GETTY IMAGES

  A family waited on their porch to be rescued while holding on to supplies for their survival in flooded New Orleans on Tuesday, August 30. RICK WILKING/REUTERS/CORBIS

  People on Canal Street made their way to higher ground as water filled the streets on Tuesday, August 30, a day after Hurricane Katrina hit the city. MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES

  A corpse was tied to a tree to prevent it from floating away in the great deluge that engulfed New Orleans. PAUL SANCYA/AP

  A U.S. Coast Guard boat patrolled a neighborhood in New Orleans. The Coast Guard did a flawless job as first responders to the deluge. CHRISTOPHER MORRIS/AP/VII

  Evelyn Turner cried alongside the body of her common-law husband, Xavier Bowie, after he died in New Orleans, on Tuesday, August 30. They decided to ride out the storm because they had no means to evacuate the city. Bowie, who had lung cancer, died when his oxygen supply ran out. ERIC GAY/AP

  President Bush surveyed the damage from the window of Air Force One while flying back to the White House on Wednesday, August 31. CHRISTOPHER MORRIS/AP/VII

  Rhonda Braden walked through the destruction in her childhood neighborhood in Long Beach, Mississippi, on Wednesday, August 31. ROB CARR/AP

  Survivors walked along a beach-front road in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, which was reduced to rubble by Hurricane Katrina. DAVID RAE MORRIS

  Heavy flooding in New Orleans forced families into their attics, and ultimately through their rooftops as they awaited rescue on Tuesday, August 30. VINCENT LAFORET/REUTERS/CORBIS

  An airboat pulled up to Memorial Medical Center while Acadian Ambulance Service medevaced doctors, nurses, and patients from the hospital. Many of the elderly and infirm were left behind to die. BILL HABER/AP

  Survivors of Hurricane Katrina were stranded on the elevated Interstate 10 in downtown New Orleans on Wednesday, August 31, as they sought refuge from the deluge. They waited for days to be evacuated to Baton Rouge, Lafayette, or Houston. One group sought shelter in nearby Gretna, Louisiana, but were turned away at gunpoint. This became known as the Gretna Bridge Incident. RICK WILKING/REUTERS/CORBIS

  Residents in New Orleans, forced to their rooftops to escape the rising floodwaters, were rescued by helicopter on Thursday, September 1. DAVID J. PHILLIP/AP

  Louisiana Lt. Governor Mitch Landrieu aided in the rescue effort in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. Working side by side with Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries, they saved hundreds of people. ARTHUR LAUCK/THE ADVOCATE

  Stranded victims of the hurricane waved umbrellas with distress messages written on them from a second-story New O
rleans balcony behind a flooded cemetery. MARIO TAMA/GETTY IMAGES

  In front of the Convention Center, a bystander views the body of Danny Brumfield, allegedly killed by the New Orleans Police. RON HAVIV/AP/VII

  The body of Ethel Freeman, ninety-one, and that of an unidentified resident of New Orleans remained at the door of the Convention Center on Friday, September 2. The previous Sunday Mrs. Freeman’s son was forced to board a bus and leave his mother’s body behind. He didn’t see her again until he saw her photograph in newspapers and on television as an unidentified casualty of the storm. ROBERT SULLIVAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

  Bottled water was tossed to dehydrated survivors of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans as they waited in long lines to be evacuated from the city. STEPHEN AZZATO

  Thousands of flood victims walked from the Superdome to a staging area outside the Hyatt Regency, where many city officials remained throughout much of the crisis. The angry crowd complained that Mayor Nagin would not come out and address their concerns. BILL HABER/AP

  Twenty-year-old Jabar Gibson commandeered a bus to carry hurricane evacuees to the Houston Astrodome. It was the first to arrive there at around 10 P.M. on Wednesday, August 31. He was greeted by Harris County Judge Robert Eckels whose “can do” attitude made Houston proud. © HOUSTON CHRONICLE