The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  An even more egregious case of forced pet abandonment occurred when Denise Okojo, blind and ill with cancer, was evacuated from her New Orleans East apartment. Although Okojo was in desperate need of chemotherapy and radiation treatment, she didn’t want to leave her Seeing Eye dog, Molly, a Labrador retriever. For six years, Molly had been her companion, making life bearable. “The Coast Guard airlifted me from my roof to Lake Charles Memorial Hospital’s oncology unit,” Okojo recalled. “They said no animals and pulled Molly away from me. I screamed and yelled, but they lifted me into a basket and off I went.”43

  Maloney had set up LSPCA headquarters in the Lamar-Dixon Horse-show facility in Gonzales, a couple of miles from where Tony Zumbado had stashed his Hallmark trailer before Katrina. Her task was daunting. Over seven thousand people had contacted the national SPCA asking for help finding their stranded pets. Molly was just one of the animals she helped find. Within two weeks, the LSPCA saved over 8,500 pets. Even more impressively, Maloney, following Duke Ellington’s maxim of “no boxes,” allowed other animal rights activists to join in the rescue effort. They helped save an additional 7,000 pets. “We had a lot of inexperienced people helping us,” Maloney recalled. “So we had a lot of bites.”

  In Lake Charles, Okojo told a nurse about having had to abandon Molly. Word was sent to Maloney. Determined to reunite Okojo with her companion dog, Maloney and Caroline Page, also of the LSPCA, joined forces with two volunteers from the ASPCA in a daring boat journey. It took the four women six hours in a flatboat to make their way to New Orleans East. All the houses were underwater and addresses were impossible to discern, but they eventually found Okojo’s apartment building. Page took an oar and smashed a first-floor window. She swam in the murky water, calling, “Molly, Molly.” Hearing a throaty bark on the second floor, she made her way upstairs and found the faithful dog alive, but, as Maloney put it, “afraid, hungry and cold.”44 They rushed her to an animal clinic for care. Then they took Molly to Okojo, who was still at the hospital. “We all cried,” Maloney said. “It was so emotional for all of us.”45

  In too many cases, people stayed behind and faced death rather than leave their pets. The many tragedies involving people and their animal companions during Katrina forced officials to recognize that rescues haveto take pets into account. In the immediate aftermath of the storm, United States Senators Rick Santorum (R-PA) and John Ensign (R-NV) asked President Bush to appoint an “animal czar” for the Katrina response. Although the suggestion was declined, the nation was beginning to understand that animals are part of U.S. society and can’t be separated from their human companions in good times gone bad. “You have no idea how many people wouldn’t get on boats or helicopters because their pets couldn’t come,” Maloney recalled. “When you’re old, and alone, your dog or cat is your family. To ask them to leave them behind is cruel and dumb. We need to educate our government accordingly.”

  What frustrated Maloney the most was that when the National Guard (and others) finally came to evacuate humans off of I-10 and the Causeway, they forced people, often at gunpoint, to leave their pets on the side of the road. The LSPCA had found buses, taken them to Jefferson Parish, and pleaded with the authorities to allow the organization to shadow the human rescue buses with ones for animals. The LSPCA would do the corralling of the pets and be responsible for the paperwork. They were told to get lost. “After the storm, Homeland Security came to us and told us they were wrong,” she recalled. “To their credit, they wanted to work with us in the future to create a database of humans and pets so they wouldn’t get separated permanently due to natural disasters.”46

  V

  Ron Forman, CEO of the Audubon Institute, was responsible for the hurricane preparation plan for the New Orleans Zoo, Aquarium, and Species Survival Center on the West Bank. He had a permanent staff in place to tend to the animals both during and after Katrina. “The staff that stayed lived in the grounds in the reptile house, of all places!” Forman recalled. “You wake up and you’re sleeping diagonally and there’s the king cobra looking at you and you’re wondering, ‘Is this the best place to be sleeping after a hurricane?’”47

  Luckily, Forman had Dan Maloney (husband of Laura Maloney at the LSPCA) spearheading his zoo efforts. While their number one concern was to care for the animals themselves, they also wanted to protect the community. “Trees were falling all over the place,” Forman recalled. “If a tree hits the tiger enclosure and a tiger’s running loose on St. Charles Avenue, we’ve got a safety issue. Some of the more dangerous animals truly are of concern. You couldn’t have a community recovering from a hurricane with a lot of animals running around.”48

  Because Forman’s wife, Sally, was Mayor Nagin’s communications director, he stayed at the Hyatt, where the Office of Emergency Preparedness was set up. Two of the Formans’ three kids endured the storm with them at the Hyatt.

  Along with a couple of Audubon employees with tranquilizer guns, animal nets, and other high-powered weapons, just in case an animal got loose, Forman arrived at the zoo expecting the worst. Debris was everywhere; enormous branches and even uprooted oaks littered the once lovely grounds. As he approached the elephant exhibition, he saw his huge, gray mammal friends, Panya and Jean. They trumpeted him, as if to say, “We’ve been waiting for you guys. Get over here.” At that point, Forman knew the zoo had survived. Out of 1,400 animals, he lost only 2 otters and 2 birds.

  The Aquarium of the Americas was an entirely different story. After the 17th Street Canal breached, Forman told his aquarium employees to leave New Orleans ASAP. He wasn’t going to be responsible for the loss of human life. On Tuesday evening, he found himself standing in the aquarium with water starting to enter the building and only about three hours of fuel left in the generators. Once the generators stopped, the fish and marine animals would die. “I started walking through the water down Canal Street to the Marriott,” Forman recalled. “At the Pelham Hotel, I knew the general manager, so I asked him, ‘Where are you getting diesel fuel for your generators? Because to keep the animals alive, I need diesel fuel.’”49

  The answer to the question was Patrick Quinn Jr., part owner of over twenty hotels in the city. Quinn took it upon himself to hunt down diesel fuel to keep hotels and hospital generators running. On Tuesday, he had Steve Carville, brother of Democratic strategist James Carville, send a flatbed truck loaded with ten-gallon drums of diesel. That was a start. By Wednesday, Quinn’s son, Frank, had one-upped Carville, procuring a huge diesel dump truck with high-pressure hoses. It was filling up the generators at Bell South and Tulane University hospitals. It then came to the aquarium. “This fuel truck shows up with weapons on it,” Ron Forman recalled. “It was like the Marines were coming to save the fish. Eventually we found out where the four thousand gallons of diesel fuel went. We were in business.”

  With that goal accomplished Forman went looking for NOPD officers who could protect the aquarium from looting. Forman told the highest-ranking officer he could find, “I have a building with a generator that’s worth a hundred million dollars. I’ve got food. I need police.” That gave the officer an idea. “Well,” he said, “we lost our communication center in the French Quarter. Can we move the communication center in?” A relieved Forman was happy to oblige.50

  Within an hour, truckloads of NOPD police equipment started rolling into the aquarium. Most of the officers hadn’t taken a bath or shower in days. Forman broke into his souvenir store and started handing out T-shirts and tank tops. “They cleaned up and got dressed,” Forman recalled. “One officer in particular, Don Kinney, really cared deeply about the sea otters and penguins. He started being their protector, feeding them and watching out for them. I don’t know what I would have done without him.”

  Officer Kinney was a nineteen-year veteran of the NOPD. A sweet-natured street cop, he was average in every way except one: he brought his pet Moroccan cockatoo, Yogi, with him wherever he went. Yogi wasn’t so much a mascot as he was an appendage. “Yogi
had his own room, with a television on all the time,” Kinney recalled. “He isn’t much of a talker, although he’d say, ‘I love you’ or ‘How are you?’ But Yogi is the friendliest bird you ever met. He constantly wants me to rub his chest, to pay him a lot of attention, and I do.”51

  With Yogi on his shoulder, Officer Kinney holed up at the aquarium on Thursday, charging up police radio batteries in assembly-line fashion. He would also monitor radio text. Then, at a designated hour, he’d walk boxes of batteries across the street to Harrah’s Casino, where they were handed out to fellow cops. Along with Officers Clayton Dunnaway and Tommy Green, he was keeping NOPD communications open. “But we were having problems with the aquarium generators,” Kinney recalled. “The filters weren’t right. We were getting 900 rpms instead of 1,800 rpms. We weren’t keeping the fish and birds and animals cool enough. They were dying.”52

  Desperately, Officer Kinney tried to save the aquarium’s wildlife. He fed the birds thawed mice and threw squid to the penguins. He made sure the alligators got slop and the sea turtles got released before they died. But he had only partial success. More than eight thousand fish died, despite his earnest efforts. “The value is in the millions,” Forman recalled. “We started losing animals one by one. Don and others would dive into tanks and get out these eight-foot sharks and throw them in the Mississippi. The sharks all died. But Kinney did an incredible job and all the penguins lived.”53

  Throughout Thursday and Friday, Forman shuttled between the Audubon Zoo and the Aquarium of the Americas. “I had been giving people rides,” Forman recalled, “but now I stopped. That was the saddest thing. The vast, vast majority of people, pushing grocery carts with their belongings, holding kids, were just good people looking for help. But a gun had been pulled on me so I had to stop.”54

  One evening, Forman drove with a police escort to Audubon Park and couldn’t find a single zoo employee. About twelve people were supposed to be looking after the animals, making sure they were fed, and so the silence was eerie. Then Forman heard a noise coming from the swimming pool outside the zoo. “I went over there and there was a group bath going on,” Forman recalled. “Everybody had gone swimming. They were barbecuing hamburgers. They had ice cream and they were swimming in the swimming pool. It was one of those incredible highs, strange and surreal, when I felt relieved, when I knew, ‘God, everything is going to be all right.’”55

  Philanthropist Julie Packer of the Packer Foundation sent a private plane to airlift the surviving animals from the Aquarium of the Americas to the Monterey Aquarium in California. A specially equipped, climate-controlled truck arrived to evacuate the penguins, seals, and otters. “As the penguins left, they all marched out the door in a straight line,” Forman recalled. “The ordeal was over.”56

  Because Officer Kinney’s own home had been totally destroyed, Forman allowed him to live at the aquarium for two months. Yogi was always right by his side. “Yogi was like a little kid,” Kinney recalled. “Because of the trauma of Katrina he really didn’t like being left for a minute. If I left him out of his cage, he would walk behind me like a human.”57

  Aquatic creatures of all kinds died in Louisiana, not just at the Aquarium of the Americas. The Coast Guard reported finding thousands of smashed fishing vessels in the coastal parishes. Katrina also decimated the enormous state seafood industry. For example, about 80 percent of the crawfish industry was wiped out by the dual hit of Katrina and Rita. Surging salt water annihilated their habitat. At least temporarily, a way of life was destroyed. Rice farmers in Louisiana had long made money by tossing cages in Atchafalaya Bay and pulling crawfish out of the mud. According to the Times-Picayune, about 5,000 mudbug-hunting jobs were lost due to the hurricanes. Most of the state’s twenty crawfish processing plants were unable to reopen due to severe damage. The nation’s major oyster beds lay just east of the Mississippi Delta, but following the churning of the seas, these reefs were dead. Before Katrina there were 2.3 million acres of oyster beds; by early September they were nearly all gone. “In some cases reefs that were there for forty, fifty years,” oyster farmer Pete Vujnoich Jr. said, “are not there anymore.”58

  VI

  On Thursday afternoon, even with the Superdome evacuating, an estimated 40,000 others were still stranded all over the Greater New Orleans area. Major Dalton Cunningham of the Salvation Army worried about the 200 people who had taken refuge at one of his group’s buildings on South Claiborne Avenue in the city. Many of them were sick and all of them were hungry. On Thursday, Cunningham was told that help would probably not arrive for several days. “They said they’re doing it by quadrant and we’ll just have to take a number and get in line,” Cunningham said, and then his thoughts returned to those in his care. “They are there without food. Their lives are threatened. I’m not even sure they’ll be alive when we get there.”59

  At the Morial Convention Center, 20,000 tragedies were circling at once, one for each person inside or outside. Leaving his family encampment across the street in the Harrah’s parking lot, Ivory Clark entered the madhouse of a building on Thursday. He was still looking for electricity, something to power the machine that controlled his aunt’s asthma. He asked the police or National Guard for help. “They had generators,” Clark recalled. “They admitted it to me, but refused to help Auntie.”60

  With a lot of time to kill sitting within view of the Convention Center, Clark’s wife, Donna, scrawled observations and feelings in her journal. Some of her entries capture the hardships of those days, as well as her appreciation of her husband:

  We dozed on and off until mid-morning, awoke by fellow neighbors singing various gospel songs…they praised the Lord and praised the Lord until the troops came over and demand them to lower their voices or they would be arrested.

  The usual rituals, sleep, food, washing off with bottle water, trying not to smell if possible.

  Word kept coming the buses were coming. [No one] really got excited, simply because we had heard this same story before, over and over.

  Auntie was breathless. The humidity and the smoke from the smokers didn’t help much. I got a couple of our neighbors in the garage to include my aunt in prayer, while others fanned her and sung hymns.

  My husband was truly a blessing to us all he never complained he did what a man was supposed to do. He protected us, stuck with us through it all and never once utter a negative word, always willing and doing a real man’s duties as a husband, father, grandson-in-law, nephew-in-law, uncle. I truly thank God for him and may God continue to bless him in all ways.61

  VII

  While the Clarks and others at the Convention Center waited to be evacuated, a glimmer of hope appeared on Thursday in the form of Lieutenant General Russel Honore, who was the commander of the Department of Defense’s Joint Task Force Katrina. He was able to announce in a briefing at the Pentagon that 7,400 troops would be in Louisiana by Thursday night, with an additional 6,000 in Mississippi. The buildup in Greater New Orleans was to be largely through the deployment of 1,400 National Guard soldiers trained in security, including the 300 from the Arkansas National Guard. Honore explained that troops would continue to arrive from the National Guard and the regular army until the total reached about 30,000. He gave the impression of a man not overwhelmed by the magnitude of the job at hand. For the time being, however, he was just another official spouting promises. In terms of improving the lot of hurricane victims, 7,400 soldiers on the ground were having little effect. Honore later acknowledged the master strategy that was the enemy in the situation. He told the Times-Picayune that “if he had been attacking the Gulf Coast, he would have used the same tactics as the deadly storm. Honore said Katrina’s wrath amounted to a ‘classic military maneuver,’ using overwhelming power and the element of surprise to cripple communications and block transportation routes. And the storm covered its flanks by breaching levees and destroying railroads.”62

  As Honore arrived in New Orleans, pathologist Dr. Greg Henderson wandered aro
und the Convention Center trying to help out wherever he could. He told people to sit in the shade and to drink from the few IV bags available because no needles were around. Walking around with a stethoscope and not much more, he was more priest than doctor. Calling the Convention Center “where hell opened its mouth,” Henderson told Anderson Cooper of CNN that he saw approximately fifty dead bodies in hell’s jaws, a number that was conflated. But nobody questions, however, that the streets of New Orleans were awash in bodies.63

  Later in the day, General Honore flew to New Orleans and immediately began directing the soldiers—and anyone else who came into view. Honore had grown up on a scrubby farm in Lakeland, Louisiana, and had a role model in a relative, Charles Honore, who rose to the rank of major general in the U.S. Army. According to a cousin, the Honores were typical Cajun: “a little bit of French, a little bit of Indian, a little bit of Creole, a little bit of black, a little bit of white—just like a gumbo.”64 When Katrina hit, Russel Honore was serving as commander of the First Army at Fort McPherson in Georgia.

  The moment he stepped off his Blackhawk chopper, he made his presence felt. “Put those damn weapons down,” he snapped at soldiers he saw on a military vehicle, looking as though they were riding into open warfare. He admonished National Guard troops that they were not in Iraq, and that they needn’t point weapons at people until provoked. He had the kind of cool strength for which New Orleans had been longing for days. Although Honore could not be everywhere at once, and in fact did little to change the overall situation on Thursday, his arrival in a city so sorely neglected was at least something. Barbara Starr, the Pentagon reporter for CNN, told Wolf Blitzer (on Friday) of traveling with Honore: “Up to 1,000 National Guard troops came into town earlier today. Those people in the Convention Center, thousands of them, are in absolutely dire straits and this has been General Honore’s stated priority for the day, is [sic] to get that food convoy in with food, water, medical supplies and begin to medevac out those who are too sick or injured perhaps to stay. What I can tell you is, as we have traveled with the military today, General Honore has ordered, at the top of his lungs, every troop that he comes across to point their weapons down. He has repeatedly gone up to vehicles, gone up to National Guard troops standing sentry, even gone up to New Orleans PD and said, ‘Please put your weapon point down. This is not Iraq.’ Those are his words. He wants the profile here to very much be one of a humanitarian relief operation.”