The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  Instead, they were displaced and making the best of it. “It is quite surreal!” Monique said. “My grandmother and Xavier have never seen a golf course except on TV. We watch the old white men as entertainment at the fourteenth hole.”103 They were among the lucky ones.

  The story of Armantine Verdin makes it a little bit easier to understand the frustration of David Moore, a retired teacher from Akron, Ohio, who took the initiative in mid-September to go to Texas shelters for Katrina refugees and offer good housing up north. He couldn’t understand at first why no one took him up on his offer. The fact that Akron had a reputation for slightly colder weather than New Orleans may have been a factor. But as Moore found out, the pull of home was even stronger than that. By the time he arrived, the people still at shelters didn’t have anything left, except the tie to home. The strong, the smart, and the motivated were long gone by mid-September. They knew how to take care of themselves even when, as Monique Verdin said of her grandmother’s situation, the “world is upside down.” Those who were left in the shelters two weeks after the storm did not know how to survive except in the confines of their home turf. “I cried every night when I went back to the hotel,” Moore said of his visit to Houston. “The people that wanted to get out, they got out. These were the hard core.”104

  AMERICANS GAVE well over $1 billion in the first two months after Katrina to help people whose lives were torn apart by the storm and its aftermath. The Chronicle of Philanthropy listed the top dozen recipients of generosity (as of early November):

  American Red Cross Chapter Headquarters

  $1,300,000,000

  Salvation Army USA

  $275,000,000

  Bush-Clinton Fund for Katrina Relief

  $100,000,000

  Catholic Charities

  $84,000,000

  Habitat for Humanity

  $53,600,000

  United Way

  $36,000,000

  Samaritan’s Purse

  $33,000,000

  United Jewish Charities

  $23,600,000

  America’s Second Harvest

  $22,700,000

  Baton Rouge Area Foundation

  $20,600,000

  Southern Baptist Convention Disaster Relief

  $20,100,000

  Humane Society of the United States

  $18,000,000105

  The Bush-Clinton Fund for Katrina Relief had been initiated on Thursday, September 1, in a press event in the Oval Office at the White House.106 The President’s father, George H. W. Bush, the forty-first president, and Bill Clinton, the forty-second, headed the fund-raising project, just as they had a similar, private-sector effort in the aftermath of the tsunami in Southeast Asia less than a year before. The partnership of the former political opponents had come as a welcome surprise when President Bush appointed them as humanitarian ambassadors in the tsunami disaster. In the wake of Katrina, the concept was slightly shopworn, in terms of its shock value, but the two presidents were still an effective team when it came to bringing in money. Only one day after the launch of the fund, Bill Clinton received a telephone call from Lee Scott, chairman of Wal-Mart, headquartered in Clinton’s native Arkansas, pledging a whopping $17 million.107 The fund was slow in dispersing the funds, waiting until early December to make its first contribution. It made a $40 million grant to help colleges rebuild after the storm; the rest of the money went to hurricane relief projects established by the respective governors, and to faith-based charities that were working on the ground in helping those affected rebuild their lives.108

  The Red Cross, by far the recipient of the most money, was also the target of the most criticism. In case of a national disaster, the Red Cross is not a mere private institution, but a recognized part of the federal response. It is supposed to open and operate shelters, depending on FEMA for supplies. After Hurricane Katrina, the Red Cross did not have enough shelters, by a wide margin, or ready means by which to expand its efforts. In the absence of Red Cross shelters, local governments and private groups opened various spaces for storm refugees, but the Red Cross did not know how many of these there were. The organization had been caught utterly off guard. It dispensed money to people who patently hadn’t been affected by the storm and remained oblivious to many who were.109 FEMA made a poor partner in the post-Katrina effort, continually losing critical paperwork or simply denying requests with no explanation. Even while receiving positive answers from FEMA management, the Red Cross was stymied by what it called the federal agency’s “mushy middle.”110 The Katrina response was twenty times larger than any previous American Red Cross effort, encompassing 220,000 volunteers, yet it was an effort that could have been much better. “Katrina,” concluded the House Select Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Katrina, “was too much for the Red Cross.”111 That would be understandable, except that millions of Americans entrusted the group with their contributions, in hopes of materially helping the victims.

  Then there was the unrecorded charity, from person to person. “I met a fellow from Vermont, a truck driver,” Haley Barbour recalled, speaking of a visit he made to a shelter in Mississippi. “He and sixteen other truck drivers had driven down from Vermont to deliver seventeen trailers of food to Gulfport. I couldn’t believe it…seventeen tractor trailers all the way from Vermont. Then he told me it was his third trip.”112

  Doris M. Jones, age eighty-seven, had lived in New Orleans for thirty years, having worked as an accountant at a hotel. In retirement, she resided in a small apartment complex, enjoying her friends there and the way they took care of one another. The complex weathered the storm in good shape, but one day about a week afterward, the authorities came in and told the residents they had fifteen minutes in which to pack their belongings and leave in the Army trucks awaiting them outside. It was part of the mandatory evacuation proclaimed right after the storm, but put into practice only after the homeless were safely moved out. “The first thing I did was dump my underwear drawer in a bag,” Miss Jones said later. “Then I took all my jewelry and perfumes. I left there in my bedroom slippers, my underwear, and my jacket. It was horrible the way they treated us.” Eventually, she was sent to Camp Edwards, an Army base on Cape Cod, all alone, without any relatives in the world and without even her friends from the complex. And also without the belongings she treasured most. “I loved my clothes,” she said, “all color-coordinated and hanging up nice. Now they’re all gone.” As someone interested in fashion, she mentioned to some of the people at the Army camp that when she thought of Massachusetts, she thought of Filene’s Basement, the bargain source for haute couture in downtown Boston. Word seemed to get out about that.

  A few days later, Filene’s Basement sent a town car to pick Miss Jones up at the base and bring her into the store for a VIP tour. She had the best bargain anyone ever had at the store: anything she wanted, for free. “This is to me a lifetime dream come true,” she said. Employees lined up to greet her. A group at the bottom of the escalator—on the way to women’s wear—cheered her and held a sign reading, “Welcome, Doris.”113 There were a few weeks in September and October 2005 when communities across America could not do enough for Katrina evacuees like Doris Jones. Everyone can imagine what it is to lose all sense of home. The only remedy in those early days was the word on the sign “Welcome.”

  Patrick Wooten, the roofer who had literally beaten back the looters eyeing his Algiers home, ended up at Camp Edwards as well. When he and his family arrived, they were dirty and tired, having been at Louis Armstrong International Airport for several days while awaiting evacuation. At the airport, “we had to sleep on the floor with the dogs and everything,” Wooten said. “The dogs peeing all on the floor, so you know that’s how you made your clothes smell.” After the three-hour flight to Cape Cod, the passengers were met on the tarmac by a line of people: Red Cross volunteers, physicians, ministers, and others from the community. These Cape Codders were so happy to see the evacuees, safe and sound a
t last, that they naturally opened their arms to hug each passenger. Patrick Wooten recalled, “You come out there and getting off the plane, I said, ‘Oh, man, I really don’t want to do this to these people, touch them. I’m stinky.’ And so they’re overlooking that filth, you know what I’m saying, man? ‘Come here and give me a hug.’ I say, ‘Okay, here you go, but I’m stinky.’ They ain’t worried about how stinky I was. They said, ‘Come here.’ I said, ‘Oh, man, this is love.’”

  IX

  Michael Prevost, the heroic Newman High School administrator, had decided it was time to leave the Lakeview area on Friday. President Bush had visited the 17th Street Canal, new rescue boats were arriving en masse, and he was plumb exhausted. It was time to stop canoeing. On the previous day, Thursday, he had gotten through to his fourteen-year-old daughter, Maddine, in Virginia. “Daddy, where are you?” she asked. “In New Orleans, honey,” he answered. Her commonsense response was, “Why?” Prevost decided she was right—enough was enough. The next day, he packed his canoe, paddled past the London Avenue Canal and through Lakeview, checking on a few friends’ houses on the way. With Chelsea, his dog, still his loyal companion, he eventually made it to Metairie, getting off at the I-10/610 split. Two ambulances were there and they brought Prevost and his dog to the Causeway/I-10 split. He was appalled at the sea of humanity congregating at the crossroads. “Just like Mogadishu or something,” he said. “It was chaos. When they dropped us off I knew why I had been reluctant to go to the Superdome.”114

  A Louisiana state trooper immediately confronted Prevost. “You can’t take your dog on the bus,” the trooper said. “You see that mass of people, that’s the line and no dogs.” An SPCA rescue truck was nearby, so he took Chelsea over to them. He would have to part with his dog. They said good-bye, in a brokenhearted way, but Prevost assumed they would be reconnected soon. Few buses ever showed up. People were screaming in the oppressive heat. Garbage and flies were everywhere. Prevost decided he would start walking down Causeway Boulevard. Anything was better than hanging out with this angry crowd. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a new Ford Explorer. He walked over and started talking to the driver, who was a roofer. He was heading to Ochsner Hospital in New Orleans to help fix their Katrina damage. As the truck window went down he could feel the air conditioner blast out at him. “I said to him I could use a ride, anywhere out of here,” Prevost recalled. “I told him to just drop me off on Airline Highway. He looked at me and said, ‘You’re all right aren’t you? You don’t have a gun?’ He was very apprehensive. Earlier in the week his roofing crew had been looted and roughed up by a mob. ‘Look, I’ll take you to Ochsner, I have to do a little business there and then I’ll take you to Baton Rouge.’”

  To Prevost this was miraculous. While heading West on I-10 later that afternoon the roofer asked Prevost where he wanted to be dropped off in Baton Rouge. Prevost gave him his sister’s address. The roofer put the address into his GPS direction finder and drove right to the location. When they arrived, Prevost’s sister, worried that he had died, was pulling plywood off the windows. A homecoming was under way. In a single afternoon Prevost had gone from paddling in New Orleans floodwaters to having a Greek supper in an air-conditioned house with his sister’s family in Baton Rouge. “It’s not a happy ending though,” Prevost said, near tears. “I was never able to find Chelsea. Nobody at the SPCA knew what happened to her. I hired pet detectives, the whole bit, but no luck. They’ve just got to change that law about no pets on buses. It’s caused a lot of grief.”115

  Dr. Ruth Berggren, the AIDS specialist at Big Charity, had arranged for the evacuation of her Nine West unit, but not before letting the national media know what had happened to New Orleans’s hospitals after the hurricane. For example, when the shots of snipers were heard in the area around the hospital, its neighbor Tulane Hospital, and the Saratoga parking garage (its roof had already served as a helipad during the evacuation of Tulane), Berggren let CNN and the other major news outlets know. Berggren’s old friend Libby Goff, now living in Texas, had arranged for a private jet to bring up to forty people from Charity back to Dallas.

  Meanwhile, Berggren’s story and Goff’s lobbying persuaded CNN’s editorial director, Richard Griffiths, to send his chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, to the scene. “A lot of these doctors came in because of the hurricane,” Gupta told CNN viewers on Friday, September2. “They knew they might be needed. They’ve been here since Saturday. They plan on staying until every patient has been taken out…. They’ve been very, very diligent about taking care of these patients, which is remarkable. I think a lot of lives that otherwise would have been lost have been saved by these doctors, who have not slept in several days, have very little food and water themselves, and are operating under the most remote conditions really possible.”116

  After Gupta’s helicopter deposited him at Big Charity, it was clear the sick patients there were desperate to be evacuated. CNN could hardly just do its on-scene report and decamp, leaving everybody stranded. “We couldn’t ethically just fly out our crew,” Griffiths said. “So I started guilting companies in the South to send in their helicopters.” Suddenly CNN was chartering a helicopter to make repeated Big Charity evacuations and finding another seven to do the same.

  “What happened was a miscarriage of justice in America,” Griffiths recalled. “And we were impassioned to do something from Atlanta. It was frustrating just watching from our control room. But we had an idea of the big picture. So if we could do our small part at Big Charity, great.”117

  On Friday afternoon Dr. Berggren, like a cattle drover, lined up the staff of Nine West, the ward of AIDS and tuberculosis patients, along the downstairs wall of the hospital. She was a clipboard queen, determined to keep her part of the evacuation orderly. Because CNN had taken on Big Charity as a corporate mission, the world was wondering what would happen to Nine West. “So we’re all standing there in this dark hall and the panic level is rising, everyone’s sweating,” Berggren recalled. “They’re bringing down violent psychiatric patients (whom they had sedated and wrapped with duct tape to the gurney), so they’re coming out like mummies, wild-eyed. The people that are transferring them are shoving these gurneys down the hall real fast. So we’re all flattened up against the wall and there’s people with bullhorns yelling, ‘Move to the left! Move to the right!’ No matter how close you got to the wall. That moment was so unearthly, unlike anything I had ever experienced.”118

  The Texas Wildlife and Fisheries “cowboys” arrived at the emergency-room loading dock with flat-bottom boats. All of the eighteen Nine West patients, fourteen with AIDS and four with tuberculosis, were helped into the boats. Each patient’s medical records had been carefully sealed in a plastic zippered folder and hung via a chain around the neck. “It was essential that whatever shelter they ended up in knew their history,” Berggren said. “Now, at long last, we were all parting.” Some of these Nine West patients were brought to evacuation buses; others, unfortunately, were dropped off at the Superdome. “When I learned they weren’t taken immediately out of town as promised, I was livid,” Berggren said. “But they all eventually made it to a safe place.”

  With all of Big Charity’s patients evacuated, Dr. Breggren was ready to evacuate her Nine West staff, which included nurses, ward clerks, and cleaning specialists. At four in the afternoon, Dr. Berggren and eighteen others, including the twelve-year-old son of one of her nurses, boarded four or five Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries boats. With Berggren’s husband, Dr. Tyler Curiel, as their guide, they headed to the Saratoga parking garage. They felt they were entering the unknown, clambering into glass-bottom boats on a jungle cruise. Like a mother hen, Dr. Berggren took control of the Nine Westers, making sure they evacuated together. “They started screaming with the bullhorns that they wanted five females on the boat and we thought that was really strange,” Dr. Berggren recalled. “We had never heard about any gender separation, so we said ‘Uh-uh.’ The Wildlife and Fisheries res
cuers just couldn’t understand why none of our nurses would step forward. But they eventually let us on the boats as a cohesive unit.” In an article Dr. Berggren wrote for the New England Journal of Medicine, she complained about “rough game wardens,” who were “oblivious to our requests to travel together.”119

  When the boats pulled up to the Saratoga garage, Curiel sprinted to the roof to let the National Guard know the Nine West group had arrived. He met with disappointment on the rooftop: there were no helicopters. They waited anxiously for half an hour while game wardens prowled the rooftop with guns. There were still no copters. They all walked downstairs to Loyola Avenue and eventually found two school buses to take them to the airport.

  Roadblocks prevented the buses from driving down I-10; the police told them that the airport was too full, with more than 45,000 people trying to escape New Orleans. “They kept trying to get us to turn around,” the doctor recalled. “I was still wearing my badge, and every time I had to talk to a police officer, I would just get pushy and shove my ID in their faces.” After talking her way through two such roadblocks, the pair of buses were stopped a third time. “There was this very red-faced, I think maybe drunk policeman, at least he was very sleep-deprived and slurring his words and determined to turn us around,” Dr. Berggren recalled. “He didn’t want to let us go any further.”120