The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  IV

  While there was no official moment when the Great Deluge ended, when the buses finally emptied the Convention Center on Saturday, the dark veil of Katrina started to lift. “We set up the bus lanes and in just six hours, from 9 A.M. to 3 P.M., we closed the entire area,” McLaughlin recalled in his field diary. “There are some very sad stories late Saturday. I took custody of a fifteen-year-old child, carrying a backpack, with a borderline IQ—he was a nice-looking, gentle black kid, who had been abandoned by his parents at his home and was alone for six days until he was found by an ambulance crew—I personally put him on a bus. What kind of parent abandons a special-needs child? Of everything, this angers me the most.”27

  One father who never lost track of his brood was Ivory Clark. When the buses pulled up on Convention Center Boulevard, Clark seized the moment. While everybody else headed for the first three or four buses, he wheeled Auntie toward the end of the convoy, the rest of his family chasing after him. By this time, Ivory’s body felt broken. Somehow, from the New Orleans Grand Palace Hotel to Charity Hospital to the Superdome to the Convention Center, he had kept his morale up. He had even hummed old Marvin Gaye and James Brown songs to make the young ones laugh. But above all else, he thought about football: just pretended he needed to drive Auntie’s wheelchair into an imaginary end-zone. He had the notion of getting his family on one of the last buses. This way they could board with dignity, no elbows flying. Eventually, he wheeled Auntie straight into a Louisiana National Guard barricade. Breathless, sweating profusely, Clark tried to convey his predicament to the Guardsman standing there as if protecting Buckingham Palace: how his auntie could barely breathe due to chronic asthma, how ninety-two-year-old Sedona Green was dehydrated and crippled with heat exhaustion. “Can’t we get on one of these buses?” Clark asked. “We’ve got to stay together as a family.” The Guardsman glanced over the two elders in the Clark clan, seeing that indeed they clearly needed medical attention. “Well,” he said. “Go get them ready. Come on. You’re going in the sky.”28

  At that moment on Saturday, dozens of helicopters started landing at the I-10 end of the Convention Center, where Clark and his family were gathered. They were directed into helicopter lanes. The National Guard was trying to medevac the sick and the elderly first, but Clark had been adopted by this one Guardsman who promised to get his family out of New Orleans as a single unit. Clark never got his name, but he was their savior. Winking at Clark, patting his son, Gerald, on the back, bringing them water. It was as if this Guardsman, from somewhere in Louisiana, realized that this was the very reason he had joined the National Guard in the first place: to help fine upstanding families like the Clarks. A helicopter ground controller kept shouting out low numbers: “two” or “three” or “five.” That designated how many available spots there were on a chopper. When “eight” was shouted out, Clark’s new Guardsman friend burst out laughing, giving the double thumbs-up, anxious to help them get aboard. None of the eight, including Clark, had ever been on a helicopter before. They were instructed to hunch downward, to cut into the wind being generated by the propeller blades. “We all acted like we were carrying a football,” Clark recalled. “We were determined not to get hit, heads down.” Without any hitches, they all boarded the helicopter. Their Guardsman friend made sure they were all buckled in. The helicopter held around thirty evacuees. Everybody was apprehensive, unsure of where they were going. But anywhere in the United States had to be better than sleeping on oil slicks in Harrah’s garage. Upon liftoff, Clark gazed out in disbelief. It was the first time he saw how badly New Orleans had flooded. Nobody had yet told him whether his home at 8534 Edinburgh Street had flooded. He looked in that direction. His section of Holy-grove was under seven or eight feet of water. For days he had endured, not once shedding a tear. With everybody now safe and the realization that his home was a Katrina casualty, he reached his breaking point. He sobbed. Lake Pontchartrain had literally poured into all the restaurants and homes in Lakeview he knew so well. He spotted horses trapped on a little piece of dry land and people waving at the sky from I-10. “I thought New Orleans had turned to hell,” Clark said. “Every second I felt better about gettin’ the hell out of the cursed place.”29

  The Clark family landed at the Armstrong International Airport and were loaded onto a flatbed Jeep. A couple of forms were filled out and then Auntie was rushed to the second-floor triage center. Boxes of Lance snacks were being passed out and there was air-conditioning. She was given respiratory treatment and nitroglycerin pills, was washed and provided with clean clothes. “Boy, oh, boy, when Auntie came out, when they were done with her, she was a new lady,” Clark recalled. “All clean and beautiful. No more wheezin’.”30

  Some airport official, seeing Ivory Clark and family waiting for Auntie to get released, asked Clark if he would mind sweeping up a section of the airport. Clark was a chef, not a janitor, but he leapt at the opportunity to help out. Grabbing a broom, Clark and his son, Gerald, began sweeping up, picking up trash and dumping it into plastic garbage bags. By the time they were done, the place looked spick-and-span. Clark was rewarded with a bag of Zapp’s chips and an ice-cold Coca-Cola, his favorite drink. “I knew everything was okay when I was given that Coke,” Clark said. “I thought ‘Aaahh…civilization.’”31

  The airport official, impressed with the job Clark had done, promised to get his family on a Baton Rouge–bound bus within the hour. She was as good as her word. The only snafu that developed was that wheelchairs weren’t allowed on the bus. So Clark and his son picked up Auntie as if she were a giant log: one held on to her shoulders, the other to her legs. The entire family got on board. “Eventually we got goin’,” Clark said. “All I could do was hug and kiss Donna. I was so happy to be alive, to have my beautiful wife. I wasn’t sure how I got where I was, but I was free from that mess.”32

  Upon arriving at LSU’s Pete Maravich Assembly Center, the Clark family was given first-rate medical attention. Everybody got eye tests, had their blood pressure taken, and were even given appropriate prescriptions. “Nobody in the hurricane did better than those people in Baton Rouge,” Clark said. “They were so kind, treated us real well.”

  On Saturday the Cajun Navy, led by Andy Buisson, returned from Lake Charles to New Orleans. (Sara Roberts was too ill to make this second rescue trip.) Once again they slept around the Convention Center and Harrah’s Casino. Virtually nobody was left in the grand halls. The evacuation had been successful. “During the night, a contingent of mules galloped past, chased by police. A cool front came through providing relief,” Buisson wrote in his diary. “The 42-floor Sheraton lit up briefly, amidst downtown darkness, a sign of hope to those who were awake to see it. Much different on this Sunday morning compared to four days before when the Dome, Convention Center, once overflowing with anxious evacuees, was now occupied only by mounds of stinking debris and garbage next to unopened cases of bottled water. The City was silent but for the passing helicopters that filled the sky. The radio carried stories of snipers and criminals. Some told of bands of thugs roaming the streets reducing law enforcement to defending a single building from the rooftop. We saw none of that, but knew we were not seeing the entire City.”33

  But it was the arrival of the famed U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division—known in history for its heroism during D-Day—that truly quieted the week-long crisis. When the President finally signed deployment orders for the regular military on Saturday morning, the 82nd could finally move, which was exactly what it was trained to do. At any given time one-third of the division’s available troops were ready to leave immediately for assignment anywhere in the world. On Saturday, September 3, the “go order” came at 10:05 A.M. (EST)34 and by 4:00 in the afternoon, Pope Air Force Base, located in North Carolina near the 82nd’s home at Fort Bragg, was a busy place. As the division chaplain later recalled, troops from the 82nd were sorting themselves out near the runways at Pope: some were leaving for Afghanistan and some for Iraq.35 And appr
oximately 3,600 were headed for hard duty closer to home, in Louisiana. By the time the troops climbed onto the transport planes, though, their commander, Major General William Caldwell IV, was already headed for New Orleans to oversee the Great Deluge operation personally.

  Caldwell was primed for action. He later admitted that it had been “disheartening” for his division to wait day after day for the call to act.36 The paratroopers in their maroon berets were anxious to go to Louisiana; they’d even rehearsed for it during the week. “They feel very honored they can help other Americans,” Caldwell said.37 As soon as Caldwell arrived in Orleans Parish he met with Lieutenant General Russel Honore, who assigned the 82nd to search-and-rescue activity in greater New Orleans, along with humanitarian missions whenever the need arose, which was often. The 82nd set up headquarters at the Louis Armstrong International Airport, roughing it in the primitive conditions that prevailed there. To the degree that comforts were available, they were reserved for the ill and elderly. The airport had been practically deserted Friday morning, but by Saturday it was inundated with evacuees, medical personnel, and patients. The paratroopers soon found that there was little for them to do in terms of keeping the peace, that the facility had adopted its own weary sense of order. The 82nd was instrumental though in helping to organize the process of evacuation. Moreover, the troops fanned out over greater New Orleans performing house-by-house searches for people in need of help. The first problem was that the city was still largely underwater. The division, arriving with only four boats, soon requisitioned eighty-two more. “We eventually became the 82nd Waterborne Division,” Major General Caldwell commented wryly.38 The 82nd was joined in Louisiana by troops from the First Cavalry Division from Fort Hood, Texas. In addition, Marines from Camp Pendleton near San Diego, and from Camp Lejeune in North Carolina were sent to Mississippi.

  In the city of New Orleans, regular military troops carried automatic rifles, but typically their weapons were not loaded. “We’re just trick-or-treating,” a sergeant with the 82nd explained to Dan Baum of The New Yorker. “If I saw someone going in that store right there, I couldn’t do anything but radio it in.”39 Members of the Army who arrived in New Orleans were not allowed to be on police duty, though they did free up National Guardsmen and law enforcement officers for peacekeeping. The 27,000 National Guardsmen deployed to the region took up that chore with vehemence, and so did the many police sent in from cities all over the region. In fact, one of Lieutenant General Honore’s jobs was to keep the peacekeepers from coming on too strong. In any case, by Saturday, New Orleans had been wrested from the chaos of the preceding week. A kind of calm settled over the streets, not a calm of relaxation or relief, but a weary calm, resigned to the fact that the future was going to be painful but at least it would not be as ugly as the previous week. The Army was on hand to make sure of that much. “Once the 82nd Airborne Division arrived the cockroaches that had caused the problems ran for cover,” a relieved Terry Ebbert said. “They weren’t going to challenge these guys. They instantaneously stabilized the command and control. They had their own radio system operating throughout the city. By nightfall on Saturday New Orleans was very stable. The crisis was over.”40

  V

  On Monday, September 5, the Army Corps of Engineers had finally managed to close the breach in the 17th Street Canal. The other levee repairs had already been completed, and so that evening, after a desperate week, the city’s great pumps started working again.41 Within weeks, the city was drained. The result was not much of an improvement. For miles on end, the buildings were uninhabitable, the life that had once coursed through them all gone. At the time, ABC News and the Washington Post commissioned a poll, asking a sampling of Americans whether New Orleans should be rebuilt in its entirety or limited to the neighborhoods situated above sea level (that is to say, the richer neighborhoods). The result of the poll was close. Forty-nine percent thought it should be rebuilt the way it had been; 43 percent thought the low-lying neighborhoods should be abandoned; 9 percent had no opinion.42 The wealthier neighborhoods flickered back to life first. The people who had been evacuated from the low-income sections were generally ambivalent about returning. “I don’t know if I want to go back,” said Corey Jones, a twenty-five-year-old truck driver with three children. “They lied to us. We got played like fools.”43

  Reverend Bill Shanks, a New Orleans minister, liked his city better in the aftermath. He considered New Orleans to be free of its many sins, as he saw them, and the pride it had taken in them, from witchcraft to free love to open homosexuality and abortion. “God simply, I believe, in His mercy,” said Reverend Shanks, “purged all that stuff out of there.”44 An Internet letter that circulated in the aftermath put it more succinctly. “I always thought New Orleans was a toilet,” the writer asserted. “It finally got flushed.” The idea that Katrina had come as retribution was more common that it should have been. Irresponsibly, adding insult to injury, Mayor Nagin promulgated Reverend Sharks’s vengeful God theory. “Surely God is mad at America,” Nagin said in a public speech on January 16, 2006, to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day. “He sent us hurricane after hurricane and it has destroyed and put stress on this country.” He went even further, pretending he had had an imaginary conversation with Dr. King, who told him that New Orleans should be a “Chocolate City.”45 Suddenly “Ray speak” had turned into rank demagoguery, a mayor luring citizens—at a time when they craved healing the most—into racial politics.

  The question of whether the political response to Katrina was implicitly racist was debated from the first days. That the local government was ill-prepared and the federal government uncaring was obvious during that critical first week. Many of the problems and attitudes at every level predated Hurricane Katrina by years. The difference was that right after the storm, city and state leaders were doing their best with whatever they had. Leaders at the federal level, on the other hand, meaning Secretary Chertoff and President Bush, shirked the Gulf Coast until pressured to act, days late. And so it follows that local mistakes were committed before anyone knew the racial makeup of the victims. The lag at the federal level started after it was obvious who was affected the most. The fact that the federal response could have been better, starting at the moment the hurricane struck, begs the questions: Under what circumstances could it have been better? If the victims were white? If they were rich? If they had not been members of a voting bloc that the Republican Party had a motive to disperse? All of those factors offered explanations to receptive minds. The one that rings truest, though, is that cronyism riddled FEMA and its contractors in the Bush administration, making incompetence and not racism the key to the response. As Lieutenant Commander Duckworth noted, the bureaucracy “was to blame.”

  President George W. Bush was ultimately responsible for the ineffective response from August 29 to September 2. If Michael Chertoff was haughty and aloof, then Bush should have changed all that with a phone call on Monday night. He should have lit a fire—a bonfire—under him and made sure that Homeland Security didn’t do another blasted thing until the homeland and all who lived in it were secure once again. The President could have moved mountains but was sadly aloof himself, as the storm and its spinoffs passed before him. His approval rating sank to the lowest level of his presidency up to that time; a Zogby international poll had it at 41 percent on September 8. Politically, he was wounded, and not merely from his own poor performance. At the end of the first week after Katrina, Bush tried in every way possible to pressure Governor Blanco into ceding control of troops in her state, along with, effectively, responsibility for the course of the response. It was the sort of political fight that Bush was used to winning, but Blanco, for her part, stood up to the President. As a practical matter, few had done that before. Bush, operating with a majority in both houses of Congress and what he seemed to regard as a mandate stemming from the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, had been able to ignore opposition at most other critical junctures of his presidency
. Blanco gambled everything in refusing to give the President the chance to take charge; she no doubt felt that, due to the work of her office, the momentum of the disaster response was about to change as the first weekend after Katrina arrived. It was a battle largely hidden from the public, but in winning a battle royale with the President, Blanco changed the second term of George Bush, leaving him open to other attempts to curtail the sweeping power he assumed for himself. In the span of one week in late summer 2005, the United States was changed, and not just on the battered coastline along the Gulf of Mexico. The country could always bounce back from a natural disaster, and the hurricane was a natural disaster. But the Great Deluge was a disaster that the country brought on itself.

  VI

  After about six days of nonstop rescues, Reverend Willie Walker finally made his way to Noah’s Ark Church. Water had virtually washed away his files and library. Nothing much was left of the interior. The pews had been churned into kindling, as if run through with a buzz saw. The Bibles, some of them rare, were all mush. The carpet was soaked and smelled like microwaved cottage cheese. His organ had no top and his electric keyboard was a tangle of meaningless wires. Somehow Walker salvaged his podium and his specially made sign, which read: “PEACE for the Weary / LOVE and ENCOURAGEMENT for the Hurt / SPIRITUAL GROWTH in CHRIST for the Lost / SHELTER for the Needy / During the Time of Storms, We Will Stand Strong.”46 His church was nonexistent, except in his heart. His sign would go on the altar of his new church someday: a reminder of the Great Deluge.