The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  Using the Wal-Mart on Tchoupitoulas Avenue as the NOPD supply depot, Warren Riley blamed FEMA for the debacle at hand. At a time when the police department desperately needed support he tried to talk with FEMA officials but met only a bureaucratic blow off, a shrugging don’t-bother-me attitude. “The first three or four days [after Katrina] FEMA couldn’t answer any questions,” Riley said. “They would listen but never commit to anything and then when they did, it’s telling you what they can’t do. That’s certainly not the time to hear what can’t be done. I said, ‘Listen, just be quiet. Tell me just one thing you can do for this city. One thing!’ And they just got quiet. They’re on television giving us no guidance, no direction, they’re not telling us anything, they’re not supplying us with anything. Why are they here? And that was the most frustrating part of the entire storm for me. I guess it goes back to when I was a kid. I liked Westerns. I liked military movies. I liked police stories. So you believe in the government. I truly believed that the military helicopters would be here, would be flying in. I believed that we would see trucks coming in. It just wasn’t happening.”

  Although Riley hated to admit it, he believed racism was playing a part in the federal government’s slow response. He knew President Bush cared about black people, he just didn’t think he cared enough. “I can assure you that if some storm hit Kennebunkport, Maine,” Riley said, “it would have been a different story.” That suspicion or ones like it occurred to many millions of Americans. In the meantime, Riley and the few hundred officers on whom he could rely had to keep working against all odds in New Orleans.

  Some 890 officers lost their homes and 400 had themselves been trapped by the flooding. Riley could tick off the harrowing flood story of virtually every officer. Troilin Laos was stranded for days on her roof in Hollygrove with no food or water. Sergeant Michael Levassier had stayed in New Orleans East to take care of his wife, who was recovering from breast cancer surgery; a seven-year-old daughter; and his mother with Alzheimer’s disease. “The roof just came off my house,” he told Riley. “I saw a body just float by my house.” Nevertheless, once the Coast Guard rescued the family, Levassier voluntarily reported for duty to save others stuck in the deluge.24

  Also marooned in New Orleans East was Officer Kathy Carter. “The water’s coming up, she lives in a town house, she’s on the second floor, and she’s saying ‘Oh my God, snakes are coming up! Water moccasins! The snakes!’” Riley recalled. “We said, ‘Cathy, do you have your gun? And she said, ‘Downstairs.’ Now I don’t think the snakes were trying to get her, I think they were trying to get away like everybody else. But still, we had police officers that were on roofs for three or four days and the worst feeling in the world is for us not to be able to help, not even our own, because of the flood location they were in.”25

  For others on the force, the storm, the sense of loss, and the sheer shock of the sights, sounds, and smells was truly unbearable. Officer Paul Accardo killed himself on Saturday, September 3. Late that night, Accardo, whose St. Bernard Parish home was wiped out in the storm, drove aimlessly to Luling, a nearby town, and parked his patrol car in the deserted parking lot of a boarded-up restaurant. After writing a note with the police department contact information, he shot himself.26 Lawrence Celestine also used his police gun, shooting himself in front of a fellow police officer, a relative of his, on Friday.27 “Their deaths just broke my heart,” Eddie Compass recalled. “A lot of my bad press moments, when I cried, or seemed broken was because I just couldn’t handle their deaths.”28 Riley was also extremely close to both men. “They were like family, brothers of the shield. I got a phone call at about 6:30 that morning that Paul had committed suicide,” Riley recalled. “I talked to Paul Accardo at about 1:30 that morning because we’d had a report of gunfire near the Convention Center. I was at City Hall, at the Emergency Center. I went into a room where we had some cots set up, where Paul was sleeping, and I went in there to get my radio. Paul Accardo was sitting on the side of the cot. He had just awakened and I said, ‘Hey, man, I’m going out. There’s been some shooting. It never stops.’” A downcast Accardo, engulfed in sadness, said, “Yeah, Chief, it never stops.” That was the last time Riley talked with Accardo.29

  Smart, kind, and hardworking, Accardo was more of a desk cop than a brawler. Celestine, on the other hand, was one of the NOPD’s toughest street cops, a fearless go-getter, physically fit, arms bulging, never willing to back down. “After thirty-one years on the job, I never thought I’d have to go and put a police officer in a body bag,” said Captain Bob Bardy, Celestine’s supervisor. Bardy said he didn’t want his officers—“the kids” as he calls them—to see the much-admired Celestine brought so low.30 “He could run people down in chases and things like that,” Riley recalled. “I was sitting at Harrah’s and got a phone call that he committed suicide and that was in about the same twenty-four hours as Paul. Celestine was first, then Accardo. It was a shock. We didn’t know why. There were all sorts of rumors as to why he did it. Nobody knows why [Lawrence] pulled the trigger.”31

  Given the NOPD’s disintegration you would think Riley would have welcomed the additional help of the National Guard. Not so. Louisiana and Oklahoma Guardsmen wanted nothing to do with the NOPD. They viewed them as part of the problem, not the solution. Riley recalled trying to evacuate about six hundred stranded people from I-10 on Friday at around one in the morning. About fifty military trucks had arrived at the Convention Center. Riley, wanting a piece of the action, pulled up to a Guardsman. “We’re NOPD,” Riley said. “We’re glad you’re here. We’ve got six to seven hundred people on the interstate; they’ve had no water all day. We need ten to twelve of your trucks.” The Guardsman told Riley, “I need to clear that through my general.” About twenty minutes later the Guardsman reappears. “The general won’t talk to me and the guy comes back with a little smirk on his face and says, ‘You know we just drove in a long way. We can’t help you.’” A flabbergasted Riley said, “What do you mean? We’ve got seven hundred people up on the interstate. It’s one-thirty in the morning. They’re soaking wet from being in the water all day.” The Guardsman held his ground. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said, “I can’t help you.” Riley exploded in disgust. “I don’t believe this,” he said. “I need to talk to the general.” The Guardsman fired back with some attitude of his own. “The general,” he said, “has already spoken.”32

  What Riley didn’t understand was that to be seen standing next to an NOPD officer had become anathema. Like Brown in Baton Rouge, there was an informal three-foot rule for the National Guard. At all costs don’t get into a loser picture with an NOPD officer. Reports of desertion, suicides, and stolen Cadillacs were overwhelming the newswires. To his credit, however, Riley, one of the heroes of Katrina, decided he’d find another way to bring the I-10 folks to the Convention Center area. He flagged down a guy with a scraggly beard who had a big truck. “Sir,” Riley said, “we’re going to have to commandeer your truck.” The guy asked, “For what?” Riley and his fellow officers explained that seven hundred people were on I-10. “You don’t have to commandeer my truck,” he said. “I’ll help.” They shook hands. “This guy followed us there, loaded up his truck, probably made seven or eight runs until six in the morning,” Riley recalled. “And not only that. The guy came back every day and helped. Never asked for a penny. Came, stayed with us. That’s a hero to me, not the military. And that’s when I say: Is America what it says it is if the military refuses to help its people?”33

  Because the NOPD was in such continued disarray, the security onus of New Orleans continued to fall on the Louisiana National Guard. They were, for the most part, clustered around the Superdome. On Thursday, Lieutenant Colonel Bernard McLaughlin was still at the Superdome. On Friday, he was ordered to secure the Convention Center in a military action. His diary offered a record of the tumultuous situation in the bowl of New Orleans on the third and fourth days after Katrina:

  We continue the bus evacuation, we g
et reports of the events in the city (looting and bad guys shooting at us and the police and rescue workers), the Dome is still surrounded by water, and there are roving groups of troublemakers on the highway overpasses. Bodies are being found in the water. We are getting pretty worn out but are heartened [when] troops arrive from Arkansas, Nevada, and California. More reports of looting in the city, the Wal-Mart is looted of all firearms and ammo, and teams are looking for those looters. Lots of private help is on-scene now, doctors, paramedics, out of town police and sheriff units…. Lots of private helos and lots of private boats as massivesearch and rescue ops are underway.

  I find a bucket, quickly take a washcloth bath, wash out my uniform, and put it on wet (it dries in about forty minutes in the heat).34

  III

  The most devastating rumor of all in New Orleans, the one that caused the most distress among the displaced people at the Superdome, was that the buses were coming. Just around the bend. They were always just an hour away, day after day. The lies were widespread: FEMA had sent a fleet down from Vicksburg; the U.S. Army had them rolling down I-20 from Fort Knox; they were already at Jackson Barracks and would arrive momentarily. There were rumors that children would be taken from their mothers and put on separate evacuation vehicles. In truth, the Blanco buses had been slowly moving people out in a haphazard way. FEMA-contracted buses were also starting to arrive. Throngs of displaced people were jockeying for position in the disorganized bus lines outside the Superdome. Tempers flared. Shoving and yelling were the norm. “It wouldn’t be until Thursday that we started to get everybody out in a logical way,” Terry Ebbert recalled. “By then, Houston had opened its shelters.”35

  The city of Houston, under the leadership of Mayor Bill White, had stepped up in a matter of days with the perfect place to receive the newly homeless of New Orleans. Reliant Park had 45,000 cots, hot food, medical units, and plumbing that worked. Those factors met the immediate requirements of the displaced storm victims. Houston was also prepared with trauma counselors ready to meet long-term needs. Lists of available housing were prepared, schools made room for an influx of students, and employment bureaus prepared to place willing job seekers. “I had read both John McPhee’s The Control of Nature and John Barry’s Rising Tide,” White recalled. “I was familiar with the issues surrounding the levees. As soon as I heard they had broken, then I knew that our lives would change for many, many months. No community is equipped to absorb 200,000, maybe 300,000 people. But it was a reality that Houston had Americans in need and so we made it happen. It wasn’t just our shelters that performed, our churches, businesses, and hotels all worked together to help as many people as possible.”36

  More than any other city in America, Houston exuded the can-do, let’s-figure-out-how-to-make-it-happen attitude. Although the Astrodome had been built in 1962, and the presence of NASA had made Houston seem like a space-age city, it was really the economic woes in the industrial Midwest (or Rust Belt) during the 1970s that allowed Houston to prosper. With people migrating southward from Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and other Midwestern cities, Harris County’s population doubled to two million people. The challenge facing Houston was how to build an infrastructure that could grow into a larger metropolis. A wildly pro-business posture was taken by both Democrats and Republicans. Houston soon became the energy/petrochemical capital of the world. The port of Houston supplanted the port of New Orleans as the commerce vortex of the Gulf South. Coinciding with the growth of both the port and the oil industry was the Texas medical industry. A golden age of aggressive research and modern medical care was launched in Houston, at facilities including Texas Children’s Hospital, Memorial Hermann Hospital, and Methodist Hospital. “We developed a big civic spirit,” White said. “We didn’t hesitate or wrap ourselves in red tape. We learned from the mistakes made up north.”37

  By Wednesday, Houston was all set and waiting for its chance to help. But there were more glitches. Finding buses was hard enough in the midst of the Gulf South disaster; engaging qualified drivers was just as tough. One brave wildcat bus driver, however, became an unexpected hero. On Wednesday morning, Jabar Gibson, a twenty-year-old African American from the West Bank, heard that a bus barn in Algiers Point contained Orleans Parish school buses. Algiers Point never flooded, so the buses were dry—although the barn was a pen for vehicles awaiting service. Gibson didn’t know that; he just found the keys to bus 0235 and drove it to the Fischer Housing Project in Algiers, where he invited panicked residents to clamber onboard. Although Gibson didn’t really know how to drive a school bus, he managed to control the commandeered vehicle on a twelve-hour trip to Houston, shifting gears only when absolutely necessary. Texas police had been warned that a “renegade bus” was on the way, and they were on the lookout, but Gibson pulled up safely at the Astrodome just before midnight on Wednesday; his was the first bus to arrive from New Orleans. The fact that a high-school dropout could find a workable bus when none of the city’s officials could became the stuff of legend in the unreal world of Katrina. “Back in New Orleans,” Times-Picayune reporter Josh Peter later wrote, “the first FEMA bus would not pick up evacuees at the Superdome until later [Wednesday]—those at the Convention Center would wait two more days—but Gibson, even with Texas law enforcement out to stop him, had safely evacuated a busload of New Orleanians to Houston.”38

  It was Harris County Judge Robert Eckels, the county’s chief executive, who was on hand at the Astrodome greeting Gibson when he arrived. At the request of Jack Colley, the Texas governor’s Emergency Management director, Judge Eckels had gotten Reliant Park ready for the Louisiana evacuees. “We don’t need 2,000 beds like we thought,” Colley had telephoned him. “We have 23,750 and we’re going to evacuate the Superdome and transfer them to the Astrodome. Can you do it?” The idea of saying no never crossed Judge Eckels’s mind. A Texas Republican, the judge, whose father had been a Harris County commissioner, was best known for promoting a high-speed light-rail system between Houston, Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio. Although Harris County had a reputation for cowboys, as everything branded Texas did, in truth, Harris County was only 50 percent Anglo. “We have a huge Hispanic population, a large African-American population, and the largest Asian population in this part of the country,” Judge Eckels said. “We have more consulates than Los Angeles. The port anchors a lot of that. What we have focused on, more than diversity, is the commonality, the things that bring us together. We understand that there’s more that unites us than divides us as a community.”39

  When Gibson pulled up to the Astrodome, Judge Eckels welcomed him to Harris County. It was an odd moment, the first of many buses the judge would greet.

  “Gibson just jumped in the bus and drove,” Eckels said. “He just grabbed a bus and drove here, picked up people on the highway and drove them to Houston. That was the first bus. We had other people showing up. He got off the bus and people saw him and asked, ‘Where’s the driver? We need to park this.’ And he was like, ‘What do you mean? I drove it.’”

  Judge Eckels claimed that in the end none of the Superdome evacuees were problematic. In fact, he thought the reports out of New Orleans were exaggerated. The African-American poor he encountered at Reliant Park were bedraggled and scared. There wasn’t even a scent of violence about them. “All day we were getting ugly reports from the Superdome,” Judge Eckels said. “Governor Blanco called me and said, ‘There are criminal-type people; there have been a lot of problems in the Superdome. You need to be ready for it.’ What we found was just the opposite. The people that got here were tired, they were in poor physical condition. They had been without food or water for several days, picked off the roofs of their houses or from a bridge. They had a long bus ride, some of them twelve hours or longer coming from New Orleans. But they were nice, courteous, no problem at all really. We made sure 2,700 doctors came to see them from medical centers all over the country.”40

  IV

  Jabar Gibson drove only the first of many Lou
isiana buses to come. By noon on Thursday, two hundred buses had left the Superdome for Houston. Many of these late evacuees had nothing but the clothes on their backs, but they were the lucky ones, to be leaving in the first wave. Regrettably the police and military continued to enforce their no-pets policy. Mary Foster of the Associated Press wrote about one little boy at the Superdome who was about to board a bus with his fluffy white dog, Snowball. The National Guard stripped him of the dog at gunpoint. “Pets were not allowed on the bus, and when a police officer confiscated a little boy’s dog, the child cried till he vomited,” Foster wrote. “‘Snowball, Snowball,’ he cried. The policeman told a reporter he didn’t know what would happen to the dog.”41 The little boy was forced to board the bus and Snowball was left behind at the Superdome. “When we heard about it, a few of our volunteers went looking for Snowball,” recalled Laura Maloney of the Louisiana SPCA. “We even heard he was in the Superdome, but it was the wrong dog. We never found Snowball.”42