The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  Helicopters continued to fly along the Mississippi River. The entrenched New Orleanians who hadn’t evacuated sighed with relief. The choppers were, if nothing else, a sign of outside civilization. Photographer David Spielman, whose shop was in The Rink just a half-block from Commander’s Palace, reported to his Uptown-Garden District friends that eating landmarks such as Tipitina’s and Clancy’s and Casamento’s had escaped the floodwaters; their culinary future looked bright. Since Katrina struck, the fifty-five-year-old Spielman kept a finely written diary of his solitary experiences wandering around the Uptown–Garden District. “The streets are being cleaned little by little,” Spielman wrote. “National Guard everywhere, pouring into the city faster than the water, the only traffic on the street are the Humvees and military trucks. Checkpoints everywhere, guard camps being set up in Audubon Park, Children’s Hospital, school and fire houses. Helicopters overhead day and night like dragonflies hovering over a pond.”

  A marathon runner, Spielman, didn’t forsake his daily jog even during the worst days of the Great Deluge. In his diary he wrote of runs he made at dawn.

  My runs in the park are strange as it is only the birds, squirrels, and waterfowl there with me. The camped Guard are amused by me running, must be betting this old guy’s nuts to be out doing this, after all this. Life in the Monastery is strange, so quiet, yet the presence of the Sisters is there. Each morning I go into their chapel and say a prayer for them and us. I keep a candle burning for them in front of the altar. I then ring the bell in the hall outside the chapel three times reminding God that they might not be here, but please don’t forget them. Still no sign of the police, their absence is very noticeable. NOPD seems to mean No Police Department. I get checked often at roadblocks, my station wagon, gray and diminishing hair, I think, helps in reassuring the soldiers I’m not a looter. If it weren’t for the Guard this place would be taken apart by looters.12

  But mainly what Spielman saw cropping up all over New Orleans were X ’s on houses. X marked the spot all over New Orleans, and the Gulf South in general, following Katrina. Cans of DayGlo spray paint were handed out by FEMA to second and third responders. The primary goal was to mark in bright red or orange which buildings had been searched and whether bodies were found. The FEMA schematic—published verbatim in the Times-Picayune—was as follows:

  a) A simple slash designates a “hasty search,” while an X marks a more thorough primary or secondary search.

  b) The date is marked at the top of the grid.

  c) The initials of the search squad are painted to the left.

  d) To the right are notations for hazards: gas and water leaks, downed wires, rats or dead animals.13

  Deciphering these spray-painted signs on New Orleans homes was like engaging in an ancient ritual. One thought of Exodus 12:7–13: “They shall take of the blood, and strike [it] on the two side posts and on the upper door post of the houses…. And the blood shall be to you for a token upon the houses where ye [are]: and when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and the plague shall not be upon you to destroy [you].” In a reversal of God’s promise to protect, the symbols staining the door posts or walls of houses often meant death. If you knew how to read the symbols correctly, it told how the flooding unfolded in the bowl. In 1665, London suffered an outbreak of bubonic plague, also known as the Black Death, in which 15 percent of the city’s population perished. In an attempt to control the plague, households that were afflicted were quarantined, a red cross painted on their door next to the phrase “Lord have mercy on us.”

  There was, however, no X on the door of Memorial Medical Center of New Orleans when Tony Zumbado, accompanied by Josh Holm, found the forty-five dead there on September 6. During the first post-Katrina week, medical staff at Memorial Medical Center managed to evacuate seventy patients, largely on Acadian Ambulance helicopters. Then the employees left and the center was empty, really. All the evacuees told horror stories of dank hallways, terrible isolation, and fear of disease.

  For days Zumbado and Holm wanted to get inside Memorial, to check if there were any survivors in the 317-bed Uptown hospital. But they never made it. Every time they came within a quarter-mile of the hospital, they were called on to rescue someone stranded in the Central City Garden District neighborhood. The two NBC freelancers saved dozens of storm victims, pulling them off floating plywood and plastic garbage cans and into their pirogue. On September 6, Zumbado and Holm hardened their resolve and refused to be distracted until Memorial Medical Center loomed in front of them like an ugly Oz. They were both seized with fear, hearing unintelligible sounds coming from the massive hospital, faint noises crying out in the otherwise silent street. Or so they thought. Something was clearly amiss. You could sense it. Sizing up their situation, Zumbado decided it was best to wade around the hospital’s perimeter looking for an easy entrance. If worse came to worst, they would smash a window and crawl inside. “Sure enough, a door was unlocked,” Holm recalled. “We were, at that moment, more fearful of remembering how to get back to the canoe.”14

  The Memorial lobby was U-shaped and smelled atrocious, forcing them to blink away tears. Glancing around, they saw oxygen tanks, syringes, and garbage scattered about. Clearly, the lobby had been used as a makeshift triage area in the hours after Katrina. Using their headlamps as a light source, they scanned the wreckage, craning left to right in search of bodies. They heard a faint bell, a muted wind chime coming from somewhere. Unless Memorial was haunted, they weren’t alone. “I thought I was going insane,” Holm recalled. “I kept hearing a jingling bell.”15 As they crept down a corridor, the noise got louder. Suddenly, right in front of them, an orange-and-gray cat appeared, hollow-eyed, its collar tag the source of the mysterious sound. “I said in my head one hundred times, ‘Let’s get out of here,’” Holm recollected. “But I knew that to verbalize it wouldn’t go over well with Tony.”

  Moments later, they came across their first dead patient, an old black man in bed with a grimace on his face, his white hospital gown torn half off, his contorted hands grasping at demons, rigor mortis locking them in place. “That was the first dead person I’ve ever seen the eyes of,” Holm said. “The corpses in the water were facedown. It looked like he died the most painful death he could.”16

  Farther down the corridor, they heard another noise. It grew louder as they approached. Was somebody alive? Had a doctor stayed behind? Zumbado opened the door and they both jumped back. WWL was playing on a transistor radio, which was next to a dead woman soaked in blood. Blood was splattered everywhere, as if somebody had slaughtered a goat. Both Zumbado and Holm almost vomited from the stench, their bodies perspiring as if they had a fever. “From that moment onward we started running into dead bodies that were just lying in the hallways, covered up with sheets,” Zumbado recalled. “And we started videotaping and counting and opening up sheets to see if they were female, if they were elderly, that kind of stuff and we were videotaping that. Then we went to the emergency room, which was flooded, and there was a gentleman left on the emergency room table. There were dogs in there, barking. Yes, there were a couple of dead dogs, a cat. It was horrific. It was horrible and the smell, you know from the poisoned water coming up. We knew that the higher we got, the more bodies we’d probably find. I was overwhelmed with the first floor and the people we videotaped, so we decided to go up to the second floor.”17

  As they approached the stairwell, the sight of a mangy black cat, only half alive, hissing on a chair left to pry the door open, caused their hearts to leap violently. “Two big green eyes glaring from a black cat on a black chair in a black hole of a hospital,” Holm later described the scene. “I wanted out. I just couldn’t handle anymore. But Tony just wouldn’t turn back.”18

  The second-floor hallway was full of dead people covered up, mostly special needs patients. Zumbado kept lifting off the flimsy white sheets and filming the mortified flesh. Many of the hallway dead had a pillow placed under their heads and were still hooked up to ai
r tanks, as if a nurse had been tending to them until the last moment. Whether that last moment had come because the patient died or the caretaker fled was impossible for Zumbado to say. “I tried to videotape whatever ID was left next to the body,” Zumbado recalled. “They had left medical records next to the bodies, so that if someone came in at least they would know who the people were. So, as I videotaped that, as we’re walking down the hallway, I saw a sign on the door of the hospital chapel saying Do Not Enter, and it was written on yellow legal-pad paper.”

  Zumbado and Holm, their headlamps shining in each other’s eyes, knew something horrible was up. Taking a deep breath, Zumbado made sure his PD-150 camera was working, then he headed toward the handwritten sign. Slowly he pushed the door open and was overwhelmed by the heavy, humid smell of decomposition. Dead bodies, nineteen in all, were laid out in the hospital chapel, each of them blanketed with a thin cotton sheet. “The stench just came and slapped me in the face and I turned around and just vomited,” Zumbado recalled. He fell back into the hall. “I just wailed over the second-floor balcony and we were both sick for about five minutes and coughing.” On the altar he had spotted an open Bible, as though somebody had performed last rites. “It seemed to me that somebody had made a last-ditch effort to maybe give them the respect and a memorial, knowing they were going to die.”19

  Most normal people would have fled the nightmare, sprinted back down the stairs, hopped in the pirogue, and paddled back to St. Charles Avenue. But there was nothing normal about Zumbado. After all, he was a hurricane chaser, one with a macho Cuban streak, a veteran videographer with a long history of contained recklessness and amazing diligence. They had ventured this far into the house of ghouls; they had a journalistic obligation to forge onward. After World War II, General Dwight D. Eisenhower had ordered Army Air Corps Motion Picture teams to film the Nazi concentration camps. Emaciated bodies of Jews and Gypsies, and other so-called undesirables had been piled up like cords of wood next to the ovens. Eisenhower didn’t just demand footage of the Holocaust, he forced German villagers to queue up and witness what the Third Reich had done to thousands of innocent people. A prescient Eisenhower knew that if the atrocities weren’t documented, there would be Holocaust deniers, bankrupted charlatans who claimed the extermination of almost six million Jews hadn’t happened.

  Zumbado knew the same would be true of Katrina. He could rush back to Camp NBC, tell Heather Allan and Brian Williams about Memorial Medical Center, but his words wouldn’t do the chapel and its victims justice. They would, of course, believe him. They were his winter soldiers, colleagues he could count on. But over time, when the crisis faded, a Katrina revisionism would settle in. Regency Press would publish a book saying that President Bush hadn’t really been slow to respond, that there hadn’t been any snipers, and that the purity of distilled water had been available at the Convention Center. He could already hear the revisionists, blaming the media for overreacting, claiming the Gretna Bridge Incident and the Cadillac-looting NOPD never happened. So through Katrina, even while saving people, Zumbado used his camera like a weapon, shooting everything in sight. He didn’t care whether the Today show or Hardball thought it was too gruesome to air. He really didn’t care whether they aired his footage at all. He was making a documentary record. And when the Katrina deniers poked their heads out of their holes, NBC would be able to hit them with the footage of the bodies. Let them try to deny the corpses in the deep freezer at the Convention Center. Let them dare to say the dozens of floating corpses he had recorded on film in Central City were illusions. Let them try to claim that the dead in the Memorial chapel weren’t real.

  One reason Zumbado was determined to film everything in Memorial, regardless of its TV value, was that back in April 2000 he was the first cameraman in when the INS agents seized six-year-old Cuban Elián González. “The INS kicked and beat me, grabbed my camera, made me turn it off,” Zumbado recalled. “They later lied that they had roughed me up. And because I had turned my camera off, as ordered, I had no footage of what they did. They later tried to deny their actions. From that moment onward I decided to film everything. No more shutting off. Let the truth be seen.”20

  When Zumbado’s stomach stopped convulsing, when he no longer felt the need for smelling salts, he turned around, as if facing a blaze of gunfire, and pushed his way through the chapel door. He counted each body, out loud, one to nineteen. He zoomed in on the gold cross lording over the macabre, makeshift morgue. In a flashback he remembered a few days before, when he was working side by side with the NOLA Homeboys, rescuing people from the deluge, how he saw a group of nurses yelling, “Help! Come get us!” out of Memorial’s windows. He remembered thinking at least they were safe, on high ground. What hell must they have been going through? Who gave these nineteen their last rites? What verse of the Bible had a doctor or nurse chosen to read? He didn’t know if these bodies would ever be embraced with a good-bye, a prayer, or a song, if anybody would ever bless them before they were buried in the copper-red Louisiana mud. What he did know, however, was that this wasn’t the time to get emotional. He dug deep inside, hanging on to the deep professionalism that he had crafted after decades in the disaster business. “Josh and I are deeply Catholic,” Zumbado recalled. “Wherever we are, no matter where, we go to church on Sunday. So we held hands, bowed our heads, and said a prayer for the dead.”21

  Their prayer, however, was brief. They couldn’t breathe. Zumbado had been half-holding his breath while filming and praying and he was starting to turn ashen gray. He kept remembering Eisenhower and Buchenwald. Quickly, he ripped off the sheets to film the faces of the dead. He’d heard that Jefferson Parish had sent a refrigerated truck to New Orleans to bring the corpses out of the city to a FEMA camp in St. Gabriel, Louisiana. These were the lucky bodies about to be toe-tagged. He wanted to make sure that the families of the Memorial patients had closure, that their loved ones didn’t become unidentifiable corpses in a FEMA morgue. His lungs and eyes, however, just couldn’t take it anymore. After filming five or six faces, he bolted out the chapel door, coughing and hacking uncontrollably. He had done his best. “Let’s get out of here,” he told Holm. “Come on!” With their headlamps in place, they practically slid down the stairs past the black cat and quickened their pace as they hopscotched over the first-floor corpses. Eventually they burst out of the metal doors into the sunlight. Soaked with sweat, muttering expletives over and over again, they found their canoe. “Are you okay?” Zumbado asked, clasping Holm on the back of the neck. “Yeah,” a shaken Holm said. “Yeah. I’ll be okay. Just give me a minute.”

  That evening Zumbado’s footage was the lead story on NBC and MSNBC. The Memorial chapel and St. Rita’s Nursing Home became the symbols of Katrina deaths. There was no X spray-painted on the block-long Memorial hospital, no hieroglyphics written in the bottom right-hand corner. Just forty-five corpses and accusations that some of the dead may have been euthanized by Memorial Medical Center doctors and nurses. That issue would have to be decided by the courts. “All I knew,” Zumbado said, “was that days later, I went back by Memorial and the smell of death was in the air outside. The stench was so powerful that it made its way out of the hospital, just cut through the fortresslike walls.”22

  III

  Five days after Zumbado and Holm had reported on Memorial Medical Center the corpses were still there. They just continued to rot. Nobody, in fact, knew who was responsible for their removal. The State of Louisiana, without proper officials to assign to the task, turned to FEMA to help. “Among the many failures in government planning revealed by Hurricane Katrina, one was particularly striking: No one, it seems, figured out ahead of time who was going to pick up the dead,” Renae Merle and Griff Witte of the Washington Post explained in mid-October 2005. “When the storm swept through the Gulf of Mexico six weeks ago and left hundreds of bodies to decompose in homes and streets, Louisiana officials looked to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for help in removing them. But since c
ities and localities had historically recovered bodies from mass casualties, FEMA says, it had made no arrangements.”23

  People from all over the world were aghast at how the dead were simply left to decompose. It became the warped journalistic cause célèbre. Every editor wanted a corpse picture. More than a week after Katrina, FEMA hired Houston-based Kenyon International Services Inc., body removal specialists, to collect the deceased. It didn’t take Kenyon long to learn that FEMA was in the midst of a bureaucratic breakdown. Every time Kenyon sent a mobile morgue to Louisiana, FEMA tried to slow down their body-recovery procedures. It was almost as if FEMA wanted to leave corpses in the street. Governor Blanco, siding with Kenyon, lambasted FEMA. “While recovery of bodies is a FEMA responsibility,” she said “no one has been able to break through the bureaucracy to get this important job done.”24

  For a city known for festive jazz funerals, the image of corpses on sidewalks was a blow to the very soul of New Orleans. Although on the Saturday after Katrina a guitarist in the French Quarter was singing “Mr. Bojangles” and “Rocky Raccoon” in Jackson Square, most of the music was gone from the city. But slowly the jazz funerals would come back. It was just a matter of time. The long-defunct Onward Brass Band would play again.

  Fittingly, it was the late Austin Leslie, whose fried chicken, as Kim Stevenson wrote in the New York Times, “was considered the gold standard even by the South’s most persnickety chefs,”25 who received the first honors when the jazz funeral resumed. Leslie died several weeks after Katrina, as a result of the stress. Like Diane Johnson, Leslie had spent two days stuck in an attic waiting to be rescued. He was eventually evacuated to Atlanta, hoping to get back to the deep-fryer as soon as possible. But in late September he died, burning up with fever. He wasn’t considered one of the Katrina dead, but the storm surely hastened his demise. On October 9, just after 2 P.M., according to the Times, on the corner of North Broad and St. Bernard, a jazz funeral was held for Leslie, beginning at Pampy’s Creole Kitchen. Gralen B. Banks, a member of the Black Man and Labor and a Hyatt building supervisor, said of the jazz funeral: “This is the first opportunity we had to show the whole spirit of New Orleans. And we’re not going to pass it up for love or money.”26