The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  3:00 P.M. (approximate) Evacuations of two local hospitals are suspended due to attacks from sniper fire.

  8:00 P.M. Mayor Nagin calls in to the radio program of Garland Robinette and complains vociferously about the federal response. In comments crackling with slang and obscenities, the mayor blasts federal authorities, including the President. The interview ends with both Robinette and Nagin unable to talk, for all the raw emotion they feel, along with everyone else in Greater New Orleans.

  9:00 P.M. Governor Blanco says that Speaker Hastert’s comments on the rebuilding of New Orleans amounted to an effort to “kick us when we’re down. I demand an immediate apology.”

  10:00 P.M. In Washington, the Senate convenes a special session to vote on a $10.5 billion emergency relief bill for the disaster zone. It is called H.R. 3645, the “Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act to Meet Immediate Needs Arising from the Consequences of Hurricane Katrina, 2005.” The bill passes.

  11:00 P.M. Officials in Houston deem that the Astrodome is filled to a workable capacity after 11,375 people have been admitted. They close the doors and begin sending new arrivals from Louisiana to other shelters in Texas.

  FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 2

  As of Friday morning, Louis Armstrong International Airport has been set up as a medical center and is ready to receive patients from area hospitals and others needing help.

  The number of National Guard troops in the disaster zone has risen to 19,500; 6,500 are in New Orleans.

  The Louisiana SPCA is working to save the thousands of pets left behind in Greater New Orleans.

  2:00 A.M. The last staff members are evacuated from Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans. Forty-five bodies remain behind.

  4:35 A.M. Those still in New Orleans are jarred by several loud explosions at a chemical warehouse.

  4:55 A.M. Alan Gould, a man who has been living inside the Convention Center for three days, tells CNN that with no food, water, or help from the outside, people are suffering and many are dying. He calls the situation “genocide.” Told that thousands of troops are expected over the next few days, Gould tells CNN, “Okay, so we got to sit by and watch four or five more elderly sick people die or some—another baby die, or whatever, while they’re making up their mind to come in?”

  6:20 A.M. The head of Emergency Operations for New Orleans, former Marine officer Terry Ebbert, expresses the bottled-up frustration of people all over the country: “This is a national disgrace. FEMA has been here three days, yet there is no command and control. We can send massive amounts of aid to tsunami victims, but we can’t bail out the city of New Orleans.”

  9:00 A.M. (approximate) A well-coordinated force of 1,000 National Guard troops storms the Convention Center to take control. It is an enormous building and a time-consuming task. The troops have 200,000 meals with them.

  10:30 A.M. Army Chinook helicopters evacuate the last people from Tulane University Hospital.

  10:35 A.M. In Mobile at the start of a tour of the Gulf Coast, President Bush praises Brown: “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” He seems utterly out of touch with FEMA’s ineffectual response to the disaster.

  12:00 noon Convoys of army trucks arrive in New Orleans, with supplies, food, and water. Lieutenant General Russel Honore is in command. In Washington, the House of Representatives passes the $10.5 billion relief bill approved by the Senate the night before.

  12:30 P.M. In Biloxi, Bush says, “I am satisfied with the response. I am not satisfied with all the results.”

  1:00 P.M. Evacuation of the Superdome continues at a slow pace; those at the Convention Center continue to wait for buses.

  2:07 P.M. The United Nations announces plans to send aid to the Gulf Coast. Individual nations from Venezuela to Canada to Germany have already started sending personnel and matériel to the disaster zone.

  2:30 P.M. President Bush visits the 17th Street Canal levee in New Orleans and has his picture taken in front of the effort to patch the breach. Huge machinery is being used to lower building materials into the gap.

  3:00 P.M. (approximate) With the Astrodome deemed full, having accepted more than 11,000 evacuees, the city of Houston opens the Reliant Center, which will accept another 11,000 people from the hurricane zone.

  4:00 P.M. President Bush meets with Governor Blanco, Mayor Nagin, and others aboard Air Force One. Nagin almost loses control as he demands that Bush and Blanco work out a chain of command for the deployment of military personnel.

  The hospitals in New Orleans are finally evacuated.

  5:01 P.M. President Bush makes a five-minute speech at Louis Armstrong International Airport promising that New Orleans will be rebuilt. Some people consider his flippancy on the occasion inappropriate. Referring to New Orleans, he said, “I believe the town where I used to come from Houston, Texas, to enjoy myself—occasionally too much—will be that very same town, that it will be a better place to come to.”

  8:30 P.M. (approximate) Amtrak trains are being used to take evacuees out of New Orleans.

  9:40 P.M. On the telethon “A Concert for America,” produced by NBC, singer Kanye West goes off-script to complain about the specter of racism in the federal response to the Katrina victims, saying, “You know, it’s been five days [without aid], because most of the people are black…. George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

  11:20 P.M. Governor Blanco receives a fax from Bush Chief of Staff Andrew Card, indicating that she need only sign an attached letter requesting that the federal government assume control of the rescue and recovery in Louisiana, including oversight of National Guard troops.

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 3

  As of Saturday morning, the state of Texas has taken in 220,000 evacuees from Louisiana, not counting those staying with relatives and friends. The number staying in the state’s ninety-seven official shelters is about 120,000, with about 100,000 in hotels.

  Katrina has impacted 90,000 square miles—an area equivalent to the size of Great Britain.

  2:15 A.M. With the evacuation of the Superdome almost complete—2,000 people are left—the National Guard abruptly stops the operation because buses have been ordered to stop going to the stadium. No one at the Superdome knows the reason.

  7:30 A.M. President Bush prepares to announce that the federal government is taking over control of the Louisiana National Guard and other rescue functions. He has signed the $10.5 billion emergency spending bill passed by Congress.

  7:56 A.M. Governor Blanco faxes a letter to Andrew Card at the White House, refusing the federal government’s attempt to assume control.

  8:00 A.M. President Bush changes his announcement to cover only the deployment of 7,000 active-duty troops, which would, he says, arrive in the Gulf Coast over the next three days; the troops are from the 82nd Airborne, the First Cavalry, and the Marines First and Second Expeditionary Forces.

  9:00 A.M. Governor Blanco makes a statement describing a new attitude in New Orleans, now that 13,000 National Guard troops are on the ground there. She predicts that people in the Convention Center will be moved out that day.

  9:30 A.M. Michael Brown announces that 1.9 million meals (army rations) and 6.7 million bottles of water are on hand in the disaster zone.

  12:00 noon Buses arrive at the Convention Center to take people to safety and comfort elsewhere.

  1:45 P.M. Helicopters take the last evacuees off the Interstate 10 overpass in New Orleans.

  3:00 P.M. James Lee Witt, the former director of FEMA, has been hired by Governor Blanco to help the state of Louisiana organize its relief efforts. Michael Brown’s response to the hiring: “That is absolutely the right thing to do. He will make a huge difference.”

  4:00 P.M. The New Orleans Times-Picayune reports that the streets of New Orleans are “getting safer by the minute.”

  5:00 P.M. Loyola University announces that the fall semester has been canceled. Tulane and other colleges in New Orleans have already made the same decision.

  5:47 P.M. The Superdo
me is empty.

  9:50 P.M. Louisiana State Police announces that the Convention Center is empty.

  Notes

  Chapter 1: IGNORING THE INEVITABLE

  1. Interview with Laura Maloney, January 5, 2005.

  2. SPCA National Mission Statement, SPCA Archive, New York, N.Y.

  3. Press releases, July 7 and August 27, 2005, Louisiana SPCA.

  4. Bulletin, “Hurricane Katrina Advisory Number 16,” National Hurricane Center, Miami, Fl., August 27, 2005, 5 A.M.

  5. Joseph B. Treaster, “Hurricane Drenches Florida and Leaves Seven Behind,” New York Times, August 27, 2005.

  6. Interview with Kathy Boulte, October 18, 2005.

  7. Interview with Laura Maloney, December 15, 2005.

  8. Agency Group 05, “NRC Continues to Monitor Nuclear Plants Affected by Hurricane Katrina,” Nuclear Regulatory Commission, August 30, 2005.

  9. “New Orleans Braces for ‘The Big One,’” CNN News (online), August 28, 2005.

  10. “Katrina Evacuation Directives,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, August 27, 2005.

  11. Interview with Benny Rousselle, November 29, 2005.

  12. John Smith Kendall, History of New Orleans (1922).

  13. Ibid.

  14. W. Adolphe Roberts, Lake Pontchartrain (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1946), p. 28.

  15. Ibid., p. 33.

  16. Jim Fraiser, The French Quarter of New Orleans (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), p. 7.

  17. Philomena Hauck, Bienville: Father of Louisiana (Lafayette: University of Southwestern Louisiana Press, 1998).

  18. Fraiser, French Quarter of New Orleans, pp. 7–28.

  19. Interview with Park Moore, November 29, 2005.

  20. America’s Wetland Resource Center, “The Official Numbers,” updated online January 21, 2006.

  21. Elizabeth Kolbert, “Watermark,” The New Yorker, February 27, 2006.

  22. Mike Dunne, America’s Wetland: Louisiana’s Vanishing Coast (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005).

  23. Mark Fischetti, “Drowning New Orleans,” Scientific American, October 2001, pp. 76–85.

  24. John W. Sutherlin to author, October 23, 2005.

  25. Theodore Roosevelt, A Booklover’s Holiday in the Open (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916), pp. 376–77.

  26. Interview with Daryl Malek, November 7, 2005.

  27. C. L. Lockwood and Rhea Gray, Marsh Mission: Capturing the Vanishing Wetlands (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), p. 9.

  28. Sierra Club memo.

  29. Office of Senator Mary Landrieu, press release, May 16, 2005.

  30. Press release, University of New Orleans, January 19, 2000.

  31. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Defending New Orleans, October 2005.

  32. Dunne, America’s Wetland, p. 73.

  33. Interview with King Milling, January 4, 2006.

  34. Roy Blount Jr., “Feet on the Sheet,” Louisiana Cultural Vistas, Fall 2005, p. 72.

  35. Elizabeth Kolbert, “Storm Warnings,” The New Yorker, September 19, 2005, p. 35.

  36. John McPhee, The Control of Nature (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989).

  37. Fischetti, “Drowning New Orleans.”

  38. John McQuaid and Mark Schleifstein, “Washing Away,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, June 2002.

  39. Joel K. Bourne Jr., “Gone with the Water,” National Geographic, October 2004, pp. 88–89.

  40. Eric Berger, “Keeping Its Head Above Water,” Houston Chronicle, December 1, 2001.

  41. Interview with Eric Berger, October 20, 2005.

  42. John M. Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998).

  43. Ken Gewertz, “The Lessons from Katrina,” Harvard University Gazette, December 12, 2005.

  44. “Assessing the Katrina Plan Failure,” BBC News, October 6, 2005. See also Jack Williams, “Hurricane Scale Invented to Communicate Storm Danger,” USA Today, May 17, 2005.

  45. “The Saffir-Simpson Scale,” Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, Miami, Fl., 2005.

  46. David Longshore, Encyclopedia of Hurricanes, Typhoons, and Cyclones (New York: Checkmark Books, 2000), pp. 174–75.

  47. “Anatomy of a Disaster,” U.S. News & World Report, September 26, 2005.

  48. Michael Lewis, “Wading Toward Home,” New York Times Magazine, October 9, 2005.

  49. Innovative Emergency Management, “Southeast Louisiana Catastrophic Hurricane Functional Plan,” September 20, 2004, p. 1.

  50. Ibid., p. 20.

  51. Interview with Clancy Dubos, January 5, 2006.

  52. John McQuaid, “‘Hurricane Pam’ Exercise Offered Glimpse of Katrina Misery,” Boston Globe, September 9, 2005.

  53. “City of New Orleans Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan.”

  54. Audrey Hudson and James G. Lakely, “New Orleans Ignored Its Own Plan,” Washington Times, September 9, 2005.

  55. Press release, “Mayor Nagin Urges Citizens to Prepare for Hurricane Katrina,” City of New Orleans, August 27, 2005.

  56. Patrick Fagan, “Katrina: Correcting Culpability and Fixing Fallacies” (unpublished, report provided to author, November 2, 2005).

  57. Chris Rose, “Hollywood South, Baby!” New Orleans Times-Picayune, August 27, 2005.

  58. Gwen Filosa, “Nagin Says He’ll Oppose Building Moratorium,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, January 22, 2006.

  59. Tim Padgett, “Can New Orleans Do Better?” Time, October 24, 2005 p. 36.

  60. Jeremy Alford and Allen Johnson Jr., “Katrina’s Quiet Gift,” Gambit Weekly, December 27, 2005, p. 12.

  61. Bruce Nolan, “Katrina Takes Aim,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, August 28, 2005, p. 1.

  62. “Suffering and Semantics,” nola.com, September 9, 2005.

  63. Christy Oglesby, “‘My Momma’s Body Is on the Roof,’” CNN, October 17, 2005, transcript.

  64. Gordon Russell, “Nagin Orders First-Ever Mandatory Evacuation of New Orleans,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, August 28, 2005, p. 1.

  65. Interview with Terry Ebbert, March 8, 2006.

  66. Interview with Tonya Brown, September 30, 2005.

  67. Interview with Jackie Clarkson, November 18, 2005.

  68. Interview with Kathy A. Lawes-Reed, December 8, 2005.

  69. Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind (New York: Warner Books, 1993), p. 842.

  70. “The Lost City,” Newsweek, September 12, 2005, p. 48.

  71. Fraiser, French Quarter, p. 206.

  72. Rich Thomaselli, “N.O.’s 5B Tourism in Tatters,” Advertising Age, September 2, 2005, p. 1.

  73. Anne Rice, “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans,” New York Times, September 4, 2005.

  74. Fact sheet, Port of New Orleans, December 2005.

  75. A. J. Mistretta, “Rebuilding Energy,” Biz New Orleans, June 1, 2004.

  76. U.S. Census Bureau, State and County Quick Facts, 2000.

  77. Ibid.

  78. Michael Grunwald, “The Steady Buildup to a City’s Chaos,” Washington Post, September 11, 2005.

  79. Maureen Dowd, “Sex, Envy, Proximity,” New York Times, October 15, 2005.

  80. Jim Reed’s letter of August 24, 2005, quoted in Jim Reed and Mike Theiss, Hurricane Katrina: Through the Eyes of Storm Chaser (Helena, Mont.: Farcountry Press, 2005), p. 4.

  81. Interview with Dubos.

  82. Interview with Julie Silvers, October 7, 2005.

  83. Keith O’Brien and Bryan Bender, “Chronology of Errors,” Boston Globe, September 11, 2005.

  Chapter 2: SHOUTS AND WHISPERS

  1. Proclamation No. 48 KBB 2005, “State of Emergency—Hurricane Katrina,” State of Louisiana Executive Department.

  2. Kathleen Blanco, letter to George W. Bush, State of Louisiana Executive Department, August 27, 2005.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Quoted in Kerry Emanuel, Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hur
ricanes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 174.

  5. Bob Williams, “Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin Failed Their Constituents,” Wall Street Journal, September 19, 2005.

  6. “Statement on Federal Emergency Assistance for Louisiana,” Office of the Press Secretary, the White House, August 27, 2005.

  7. Press release, “Homeland Security Prepping for Dangerous Hurricane Katrina,” Department of Homeland Security, August 28, 2005.

  8. Interview with Bob Mann, December 21, 2005.

  9. Interview with Cedric Richmond, January 6, 2005.

  10. Kathleen Blanco, “Response to U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Document and Information Request” (submitted December 2, 2005).

  11. Interview with Cedric Richmond, December 11, 2005.

  12. “Exhibits Across South Also Struggling,” Hollywood Reporter, August 30, 2005.

  13. Interview with Nick Mueller, November 28, 2005.

  14. Interview with Marc Morial, September 28, 2005.

  15. Jacques Morial, interview with Jessica Maruri, October 28, 2005.

  16. Interview with Oliver Thomas, January 6, 2005.

  17. Evan Thomas and Arian Campo-Flores, “The Battle to Rebuild,” Newsweek, October 3, 2005.

  18. Michael Eric Dyson, Come Hell or High Water (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2006), p. 8.

  19. Nik Cohn, Triksta: Life and Death and New Orleans Rap (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005). Quotations are from the Web sites of Juvenile and Lil’ Wayne.

  20. Interview with Rafael C. Goyeneche III, December 28, 2005.

  21. Interview with Warren Riley, December 5, 2005.

  22. Ibid.

  23. Ibid.

  24. Office of the Governor of Louisiana, “Response to U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Document and Information Request Dated October 7, 2005, and to the House of Representatives Select Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina,” December 2, 2005.

  25. Clancy Dubos, “First Responders: New Orleanians of the Year,” Gambit Weekly, January 3, 2006.

  26. Ruth Berggren, “Unexpected Necessities—Inside Charity Hospital,” The New England Journal of Medicine 353, October 13, 2005.