The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  Communications Difficulties

  Transportation Challenges

  Mobility of STA and AIRSTA

  Many of our crew have lost everything

  Impact to?—Damage to Harvey Lock + Bridges

  Numerous sunk vsls + Barges

  Damage to Mineral + Oil Infrastructure

  Ugly Civil Unrest

  Safety and Health Concerns

  1,000s of Bodies Decomposing

  Good Citizens Are Suffering for Acts of Some

  Unknown # Trapped in Buildings

  C-130 Is Poor!

  12 Survivors on Spencer 9 Are Filipino

  3 Mine Sweepers from Navy?89

  Almost every page of Duckworth’s journal pointed out problems that needed solving. When pressed to explain, however, who or what was to blame for the post-Katrina search, rescue, and recovery quagmire, he balked, saying he wasn’t a “woulda, coulda, shoulda kinda guy.” He particularly refused to criticize anything that President Bush or Governor Blanco did; they were, to his mind, his bosses. He respected both of them. But then, not wanting to dodge the question entirely, he turned to page fourteen of the journal and said one word, “bureaucracy.” He then pointed to something he wrote that Friday which, just weeks after Katrina, remained incomprehensible in its stilted red-tape language. “However, FEMA rep FIAT CA DEP is Requiring Request for Type II Incident MGMT TEAM for Assessment for Establishment of DOD Supported Base Camp.” When asked what this meant, Duckworth shrugged. “That’s the point. The Coast Guard was successful because Captain Paskewich had gotten our assets out of New Orleans before the storm, we situated ourselves in Alexandria, and we threw away the playbook,” he said. “We took all comers and didn’t wait for Type II Incident Management Teams. We winged it. We entered the game and stayed in the game until our job was done.” And then, he added, “Too much bureaucracy can be a big, big problem in a catastrophe.”

  VI

  Like Lieutenant Commander Duckworth, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour—the Yazoo City/Zeiglerville booster—believed that stoic optimism and a can-do spirit was the best way out of the disaster. A proponent of this philosophy was Bay St. Louis Mayor Eddie Favre. Each day after Katrina when on the Gulf Coast a lumber store reopened or a fast-food restaurant started clearing away debris, Mississippians started talking about progress. “We’re just not a whiny people,” Favre said. “But we’re compassionate beyond belief. Even though our town was largely gone, we took care of each other. We didn’t count on the feds. We knew it was up to us and eventually the lights would go on.”90 Everybody believed the lights would shine. That’s the incredible thing about Mississippi Gulf Coast optimism. “When the lights came on, that was a blessing from God,” Eddie Bigelow told the Associated Press. “Every day is a little better. It’s like giant steps, if you saw this place [Gulfport] last Tuesday [after Katrina hit].”91

  The Mississippi Gulf Coast optimism was contagious. If Bruce Springsteen was the Rock ’n’ Roll Laureate of New Jersey and John Mellencamp ruled Indiana, then surely Captain Jimmy Buffett was the voice of the Gulf South. Born on Christmas Day 1946 in Pascagoula, Mississippi, the son of a naval architect, Buffett was raised in Mobile, Alabama. All up and down Highway U.S. 90—which ran from Jacksonville Beach, Florida, to Van Horn, Texas—he had kinfolk living along the sand dunes of Bay St. Louis, Pascagoula, Florida, Pass Christian, Gulf Shores, and even the off-shore islands. A natural-born explorer, Buffett liked nosing around the alternative U.S. 90 roads, like the Old Spanish Trail and South Wayside. “Even as a kid, New Orleans was my focal point,” Buffett said. “I considered home anywhere along that ribbon, where French culture existed.”92

  Buffett’s 1975 hit, “Margaritaville,” and its follow-up, “Cheeseburger in Paradise,” became virtual anthems for the Gulf South tourist industry. Captain Buffett, usually clad in Hawaiian shirts and cutoffs, baseball cap in place, always looked ready for the beachball good times. Defying genre, mixing country and western with calypso, he launched the Parrothead Movement; his sold-out concerts were like Mardi Gras celebrations, where booze flowed freely and outlandish carnival outfits were worn. Before long he opened Margaritaville Cafés in Key West and New Orleans (by 2005 there were seven more); this was followed by a series of New York Times bestselling novels, like Tales from Margaritaville and Where Is Joe Merchant? “Everything was going great and then Katrina came and, man, I just couldn’t think,” Buffett recalled. “When those winds hit, and those levees broke, a helluva lot of culture went out of the northern edge of the Caribbean.”

  Buffett was actually in Key West the week before Katrina had hit Florida. August was the month he liked to scuba dive. “It was so damn hot,” Buffett recalled. “The usually cool water felt like bathwater. There was nothing scientific about it. But I remember thinking, and saying to people, ‘The next storm in the Gulf of Mexico is goin’ to be a bad one. Real bad.’ I’d dived for decades in August and the water was never that warm.”93

  When Katrina made landfall in Buras, Louisiana, Buffett was playing in Indianapolis. But whenever he wasn’t singing and strumming, he was glued to the television. Not only did he have relatives to worry about, but he owned houses on Mobile Bay. Then there was his restaurant on Decatur Street in New Orleans. “I didn’t think I had a role as a first responder,” he said, “but I got down there as quickly as possible.”

  Immediately, Buffett offered all his New Orleans employees an advance in salary of four weeks, hotel lodging, and jobs at his other Margaritaville restaurants.94 Hurricanes had always been a motif at Buffett’s Caribbean-themed eateries, where lightning, thunder, and a spinning hurricane cloud were used as side effects during the musical revues.95 His new post-Katrina gambit was “Blue Dog Relief ”; all of his restaurants would promote levee 5 protection of New Orleans by selling George Rodriguez Blue Dog prints with the slogan “To Stay Alive You Need Levee 5.”96

  As an entertainer beloved in the Gulf South he didn’t want to denounce President Bush for the slow federal response. That was not his style.

  Shortly after the Indianapolis gigs, Buffett made his way to Mobile Bay. Reports of the New Orleans levee breaks were dominating the news, but Buffett considered Mississippi the ground zero of Katrina. Standing in Pascagoula, Mississippi, seeing rubble, made him feel angry—real angry. But who was he mad at? Buffett was profoundly moved by a Times-Picayune op-ed called “Open Letter to the President”:

  Dear Mr. President:

  We heard you loud and clear Friday when you visited our devastated city and the Gulf Coast and said, “What is not working, we’re going to make it right.” Please forgive us if we wait to see proof of your promise before believing you. But we have good reason for our skepticism.

  Bienville built New Orleans where he built it for one main reason: It’s accessible. The city between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain was easy to reach in 1718. How much easier it is to access in 2005 now that there are interstates and bridges, airports and helipads, cruise ships, barges, buses and diesel-powered trucks.

  Despite the city’s multiple points of entry, our nation’s bureaucrats spent days after last week’s hurricane wringing their hands, lamenting the fact that they could neither rescue the city’s stranded victims nor bring them food, water and medical supplies.

  Meanwhile there were journalists, including some who work for the Times-Picayune, going in and out of the city via the Crescent City Connection. On Thursday morning, that crew saw a caravan of 13 Wal-Mart tractor trailers headed into town to bring food, water and supplies to a dying city. Television reporters were doing live reports from downtown New Orleans streets. Harry Connick Jr. brought in some aid Thursday, and his efforts were the focus of a Today show story Friday morning.

  Yet, the people trained to protect our nation, the people whose job it is to quickly bring in aid were absent. Those who should have been deploying troops were singing a sad song about how our city was impossible to reach.

  We’re angry, Mr. President,
and we’ll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry. Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been were not. That’s to the government’s shame.

  Mayor Ray Nagin did the right thing Sunday when he allowed those with no other alternative to seek shelter from the storm inside the Louisiana Superdome. We still don’t know what the death toll is, but one thing is certain: Had the Superdome not been opened, the city’s death toll would have been higher. The toll may even have been exponentially higher.

  It was clear to us by late morning Monday that many people inside the Superdome would not be returning home. It should have been clear to our government, Mr. President. So why weren’t they evacuated out of the city immediately? We learned seven years ago, when Hurricane Georges threatened, that the Dome isn’t suitable as a long-term shelter. So what did state and national officials think would happen to tens of thousands of people trapped inside with no air conditioning, overflowing toilets and dwindling amounts of food, water and other essentials?

  State Rep. Karen Carter was right Friday when she said the city didn’t have but two urgent needs: “Buses! And gas!” Every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be fired, Director Michael Brown especially. In a nationally televised interview Thursday night, he said his agency hadn’t known until that day that thousands of storm victims were stranded at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. He gave another nationally televised interview the next morning and said, “We’ve provided food to the people at the Convention Center so that they’ve gotten at least one, if not two meals, every single day.”

  Lies don’t get more bald-faced than that, Mr. President. Yet, when you met with Mr. Brown Friday morning, you told him, “You’re doing a heck of a job.”

  That’s unbelievable.

  There were thousands of people at the Convention Center because the riverfront is high ground. The fact that so many people had reached there on foot is proof that rescue vehicles could have gotten there, too.

  We, who are from New Orleans, are no less American than those who live on the Great Plains or along the Atlantic Seaboard. We’re no less important than those from the Pacific Northwest or Appalachia. Our people deserved to be rescued. No expense should have been spared. No excuses should have been voiced. Especially not one as preposterous as the claim that New Orleans couldn’t be reached.

  Mr. President, we sincerely hope you fulfill your promise to make our beloved communities work right once again. When you do, we will be the first to applaud.97

  The newspaper had articulated Buffett’s attitude in a nutshell. The Mississippi country boys like himself would join the New Orleans rising. Bourbon Street was still his touchstone. They hadn’t lost New Orleans, Biloxi, or Mobile, after all. The spit-in-your-face spirit was alive and well. The Gulf South, including New Orleans, was going to rise again. Piano legend Eddie Bo would still be singing “Hook & Sling” and the fried shrimp po’-boys would be better than ever at Trapani’s in Bay St. Louis. The oyster beds would come back; they always did, and the Original Oyster House would be serving half-shells with crackers before you could say “Spanish Fort.” Ever since he went through a Dylan phase in his twenties, Buffett had stayed away from protest anthems. He considered himself a song-and-dance man, not Baudelaire.

  But just seeing his aunt’s Pascagoula home destroyed was hard to take. The simple place had been a depository for precious memories, the station where his boyhood imagination soared. Somehow, all of his sailor’s dreams came back to this house. He had even written a song, titled “The Pascagoula Run,” about his teenage nights at the Stateline bar, along the waterfront where there were “pinball machines and Cajun queens.” The chorus went:

  It’s time to see the world

  It’s time to kiss a girl

  It’s time to cross the wild meridian

  Grab your bag and take a chance

  Time to learn a Cajun dance

  Kid, you’re going to see the morning sun

  On the Pascagoula run98

  So Captain Buffett sat down and did what he did best; compose songs that Gulf Coasters could relate to. He wrote with his drummer friend Matt Betton, who had a gorgeous melody just waiting for Buffett’s salty lyrics—an off-center, post-Katrina coping song titled “Move On.” While Emeril Lagasse was downsizing, and keeping Delmonico closed, Buffett opened his New Orleans Margaritaville Café pronto. So what if he lost money? The show must go on. Next, he signed up to perform at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, claiming he was going to get “his ass on stage dancing” when Fats Domino took to the piano.99

  Somewhere in Buffett’s sea-breezy spirit were the seeds of the New Orleans rebuild. At the time of the 150th Mardi Gras, Buffett was still so popular in the Gulf South that he could have run for governor of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, or Louisiana and won. He wasn’t a first responder or a member of a blue-ribbon commission, but he had the Mike Fink roarer’s attitude, the feisty, fiery, indomitable, clumsy, shrewd joie de vivre of the Gulf South on his guitar fret. Buffet headed to his Key West recording studio in February 2006 and laid down tracks for his new album, Party at the End of the World. He went for a swim on the beach. The water wasn’t hot anymore. The dolphins were back, wiggling like hula hoops. He felt refreshed. Pretty soon the Gulf South would be comin’ on strong. When asked, however, if he would consider running for governor of Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, or Louisiana—all states where he owns homes—he declined. “I probably couldn’t pass the drug test,” he said. “So I’ll just keep singin’ my songs.”100

  VII

  Even as stranded Biloxians were desperate for rescue and relief, some entrepreneurial Gulf Coasters were chanting “rebuild” by Saturday, September 3. But there was an opportunist strain to their voices that did not necessarily put them on the same side as everyone else. Marlin Torguson, a native of northern Minnesota, got his start in the casino racket helping Native American tribes get permits to operate slot machines. In 1990, when the Mississippi legislature approved casino gambling (on water) he headed for the Gulf Coast, purchasing a large tract of land from jazz clarinetist Pete Fountain. Before long he had opened two Casino Magic gambling complexes—one in Bay St. Louis, the other in Biloxi. By 1999 he had made a fortune and could live wherever he wanted. He chose Jacksonville, Florida. “I’m a born chicken,” he confessed with a crooked grin. “That is when it comes to hurricanes.”101

  Watching the storm on TV from Florida, Torguson grew excited. Katrina could be seen as an opportunity. Sure, the cleanup would cost billions. But the Biloxi strip could now be rebuilt properly. He was ecstatic a month later when Governor Barbour declared that Mississippi casinos could be land-based. That was a windfall for casino investors. And, as luck would have it, Torguson had the blueprints and financing for a $500 million megacasino complex called Bacaran Bay—a name he picked out of thin air. The complex would have 740 hotel rooms and condos nestled along a little waterway near the Gulf. But it wouldn’t be on the water. Those days were over, thanks to Katrina. There would be a huge convention center, forty bowling lanes, two wedding chapels, and a stadium-style music venue, where country and western legends could perform. “We’re also going to have a major blues club and a dog hotel with groomers,” Torguson enthused shortly after Katrina. “The Mississippi Gulf Coast is going to be better than before. You understand? Land-based, real buildings not on water. The dead and debris and mops will be gone before you know and we’ll be back.”

  That’s how salesmen dreamers like Torguson saw the Katrina disaster, even though hundreds of corpses had yet to be identified and frightened people still screamed for water and medical care at the Superdome. The winning ticket was to polish your shoes and make a real estate deal. The important thing now was political contacts. Did you give money to Haley Barbour’s 2003 campaign for governor? Had you made sure never to double-cross former Louisiana Senator Trent Lott? Could you get a subcontract deal out of Halliburton? Did you know Steve W
ynn? Would you be willing to have a bank account in the Cayman Islands? For decades, the Longshoreman’s Union had made it cost-prohibitive to hire union workers. Now, freed from such constraints, and with big labor in disarray, cheap Mexican labor could pour into Mississippi and Louisiana and build Gallerias and Astrodomes and Six Flags. Big Texas and Las Vegas money was on its way—unstoppable. Uncork the champagne bottles. “You’ve gotta understand,” Torguson enthused. “The Biloxi Airport brought in 850,000 passengers a year. The new one—which will be finished mid-2006—will turnstile 2.2 million a year. See what I mean? Biloxi is going to have twenty to twenty-five new casinos in the next five years.”102 The old Gulf Coast was gone, swept away by the hurricane and the human tornadoes that came afterward.

  VIII

  As the first week of the Katrina disaster came to an end, attention was focused on those who were still left in the blighted cities and towns of the Gulf South. But an astonishing 1.7 million of the people who had once lived in those neighborhoods were already gone, scattered throughout the United States. Many had moved in with friends or relatives, believing that the storm would be a temporary interlude, and that they could return home in a matter of days. By the end of the week, it was clear that, for most people, other arrangements would have to be made. Fortunately, communities all over America were eager to help evacuees, in any way possible.

  Armantine Verdin and her son, Xavier, who were stranded on a shrimp boat in St. Bernard Parish for two days, finally walked along a levee to a ferry, which dropped them on the West Bank of the Mississippi, where a National Guard truck scooped them up and dropped them off under a bridge in New Orleans, where a crowd was awaiting evacuation. Eventually, a bus took them to the Reliant Arena in Houston. All the while, Monique Michelle Verdin, Armantine’s granddaughter, was frantically making telephone calls to find them. She described what happened next. “After four days of floating, being herded, walking, riding, and waiting, my ninety-year-old grandmother and seventy-two-year-old mentally handicapped uncle, now alone to fend for themselves, were loaded onto a bus and dropped off at the Astrodome in Houston.” She went to fetch them there, and a friend who lived near Baton Rouge offered them a place to stay in a trailer home, near a golf course. Armantine was told she could not return to her home in Chalmette in upper St. Bernard Parish until the following summer. “From what I understand,” Monique said, “upper St. Bernard is a toxic waste site. Thousands of barrels of oil have spilled in the middle of suburbia. My grandmother desperately wants to go home. But home to what? And when? My grandmother needs a place to live where she can continue to plant her favored butter beans in the earth, breathe clean air, listen to the birds, and catch rainwater in a cistern. Simple survival.”