by Gary Rivlin
Table of Contents
Cover
Dedication
Epigraph
Maps of New Orleans
Author’s Note
Prologue
Chapter One: The Banker
Chapter Two: Air Force One
Chapter Three: Behind Enemy Lines
Chapter Four: A First Burst of Optimism
Chapter Five: The Shadow Government
Chapter Six: Looking the Part
Chapter Seven: Cassandra
Chapter Eight: He Said, She Said
Chapter Nine: Rita
Chapter Ten: Brick by Brick
Chapter Eleven: Blue Sky
Chapter Twelve: Shrink the Footprint
Chapter Thirteen: Isle of Denial
Chapter Fourteen: Look and Leave
Chapter Fifteen: A Smaller, Taller City
Chapter Sixteen: Limbo
Chapter Seventeen: Chocolate City
Chapter Eighteen: The Mardi Gras Way of Life
Chapter Nineteen: Darkness Revealed
Chapter Twenty: Road Home
Chapter Twenty-One: “You'll See Cranes in the Sky”
Chapter Twenty-Two: Eight Feet Across
Chapter Twenty-Three: Fatigue
Chapter Twenty-Four: Vanilla City
Chapter Twenty-Five: Blight
Chapter Twenty-Six: The Sore Winner
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Return to Splendor
Chapter Twenty-Eight: “Get Over It”
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Notes on Sources
Index
Copyright
Katrina: After the Flood
Gary Rivlin
Simon Schuster (2015)
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For Daisy
CONTENTS
Epigraph
Maps of New Orleans
Author’s Note
Prologue: Water Rising
1: The Banker
2: Air Force One
3: Behind Enemy Lines
4: A First Burst of Optimism
5: The Shadow Government
6: Looking the Part
7: Cassandra
8: He Said, She Said
9: Rita
10: Brick by Brick
11: Blue Sky
12: Shrink the Footprint
13: Isle of Denial
14: Look and Leave
15: A Smaller, Taller City
16: Limbo
17: Chocolate City
18: The Mardi Gras Way of Life
19: Darkness Revealed
20: Road Home
21: “You’ll See Cranes in the Sky”
22: Eight Feet Across
23: Fatigue
24: Vanilla City
25: Blight
26: The Sore Winner
27: Return to Splendor
28: “Get Over It”
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Notes on Sources
Index
They say that in New Orleans is to be found a mixture of all the nations. . . . But in the midst of this confusion what race dominates and gives direction to all the rest?
—Alexis de Tocqueville,
1832
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Water still covered much of New Orleans the first time I saw the city after Hurricane Katrina. Armed soldiers were stopping cars at roadblocks set up on the perimeter of the metro area. I had hitched a ride with a Republican state senator anxious to get to her flooded home and her then husband. My press credentials got us through one checkpoint; her legislative ID convinced the National Guard to allow us to pass through another. The highway was empty when, once inside the city limits, we hit an elevated stretch of road offering a panoramic view. This was the flooded city the world was seeing on television, but even there on the highway it still seemed unreal, like a special effect ordered up by Steven Spielberg. Eighty percent of the city lay underwater—more than 110,000 homes and another 20,000 businesses.
A week earlier, I had been sitting in the San Francisco bureau of the New York Times writing about Google, Facebook, and Silicon Valley’s next crop of underage billionaires. My New Orleans was the New Orleans of tourists: Bourbon Street, Mardi Gras, the Jazz & Heritage Festival, po’ boys. I had no connection to anyone living there. But an all-hands mentality prevailed at the Times given a disaster that displaced more than one million people.
My editor asked if I could help out, and a few days later I was picking up car keys at a rental counter at the Baton Rouge Metropolitan Airport, around an hour north and west of New Orleans. My new office was whatever patch of free space I could find at a place my colleagues had already dubbed “the plantation”—a white-columned, antebellum house in Baton Rouge normally rented out for parties that the Times had transformed into a makeshift newsroom and barracks. We’d take turns in New Orleans, sleeping in a trio of rooms the paper had booked at the Sheraton there, which, as one of the few functioning hotels in the center of town, also served as the city’s main meeting place.
Most everyone around me was looking backward in those earliest weeks after Katrina. Teams of scientists were exploring how and why the levees around New Orleans had failed on the morning of Monday, August 29, 2005, when Katrina struck the Louisiana coast. Medical examiners around the region still had no idea what the final death count might be. There were reports of euthanized patients inside a New Orleans hospital. Three dozen elderly patients had supposedly been left to die at a nursing home. Reporters were assigned to each of those topics, but most were focused on the botched rescue, which had played out live on television. Thousands waited helplessly on elevated sections of the interstate, hungry and thirsty and looking skyward for the help that was not coming. It took the government four days to send the buses needed to rescue the twenty-five thousand people stranded inside the Superdome. Another twenty-four hours passed before buses were dispatched to pick up people at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, where another twenty thousand had taken refuge. The most powerful nation on earth had failed its citizens so miserably. Blame needed to be assigned.
Yet even before getting on that plane to Baton Rouge, my instincts had me looking forward to the mess ahead. Eventually, the floodwaters would recede. How would New Orleans go about the complicated task of rebuilding? The majority of the city’s police and fire stations had flooded. So, too, had most of the city’s schools. Flooding had destroyed the city’s electrical system and disabled its sewer and water systems. Even the weight of all that water on the streets proved catastrophic, cracking gas lines and underground pipes and, in some cases, the roadways themselves. Most of the city’s buses had been destroyed along with dozens of its streetcars. Meanwhile, powerful voices in Washington were saying the city shouldn’t be rebuilt—that a low-lying delta was no place for a city (except if there wasn’t a New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi to serve as a port of entry to the thirty-one states and two Canadian provinces that are part of the Mississippi River Valley, they’d have to build a city there given its geographic significance).
The storm meant New Orleans would be without most of its revenues. All those shuttered businesses represented millions in lost sales tax revenues each month. Collecting property taxes, the city’s sec
ond-largest source of revenue, seemed unrealistic in a city 80 percent underwater. Five weeks after the storm, the city laid off nearly half its workforce, including most of its Planning Department. New Orleans had long been one of the country’s poorest and most violent cities. The Orleans Parish schools had been through eight superintendents in seven years, and off and on the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) had been among the country’s most notorious. And racial tensions were never far from the surface in New Orleans. “Our celebratory culture and accepting nature conceals a city with a troubled soul,” Silas Lee, a well-liked black commentator, had written two years before Katrina. For two decades, Lee, a pollster with a PhD in urban policy, had been studying the socioeconomic makeup of the city. During that time, the portion of black New Orleanians earning a high school or college degree had dramatically increased, yet the income gap between black and white had widened. “Behind the mask,” Lee wrote, “resides a divided city.”
My temporary posting became more permanent when, around one month after Katrina, I was assigned to the “storm team” assembled to handle the paper’s coverage of Katrina. My center of gravity shifted from the plantation to the Sheraton in New Orleans, where my neighbors included the president of the City Council and other elected officials who had lost their homes in Katrina. New Orleans then felt more small town than big city—home to maybe twenty thousand people where it wasn’t uncommon to run into the mayor several times a week.
Any journalism endeavor has an element of luck. I wasn’t in Baton Rouge twelve hours when I sat across the desk from Louisiana lieutenant governor Mitch Landrieu, who would play a central role in the story I tell here. That night, I racked up a bar bill of nearly $200 at a restaurant popular among political insiders, collecting names and cell phone numbers—the only digits that would count for months in a city of shuttered businesses and flooded homes. That’s how I was able to reach the personal friend of George W. Bush who served as Karl Rove’s eyes and ears in New Orleans and also Alden McDonald, a savvy, well-connected black banker whom the mayor would invite to shape the rebuilding plan as a member of the Bring New Orleans Back Commission.
“Bring a map of New Orleans” was McDonald’s only precondition when he agreed to meet with me eleven days after Katrina. The talk then was of an equal-opportunity storm that had hit black and white alike, but he was having none of it. Sitting in the makeshift office his people had set up for him in the back of a bank branch in Baton Rouge, he drew a line down the middle of the map. He pointed to the western half of New Orleans. That’s the New Orleans you know, he said: the French Quarter, the Superdome, the Warehouse District, the Garden District, St. Charles Avenue. Then he pointed to the eastern half of the map. That’s where he lived, McDonald said, and also most of his customers. “Where you saw water up to the rooftops?” he said. “That’s where most of the city’s black people lived.”
Prologue
WATER RISING
Overtime pay was never enough. The bosses running the city’s transit agency needed to offer more than money to convince the bus drivers, streetcar operators, mechanics, and others they needed to stay in town through a big storm. So in August 2005, with a hurricane named Katrina bearing down on New Orleans, they did as they had in the past ahead of previous scares: they opened up the agency’s headquarters, a three-story brick fortress on Canal Street on the edge of the city’s central business district. “To get the volunteers we needed, we’d allow them to bring their spouses, their children, grandmothers, grandfathers, girlfriends, nieces, nephews, whoever,” said Bill Deville, then the general manager of the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority.
The A. Philip Randolph Building—what RTA employees called the “Canal Street barn” or simply “the barn”—was hardly the Hilton. People slept on air mattresses and needed to bring their own food. But the barn was also a veritable fort, stocked with military food rations and water and with its own backup generator. Most important, it was in a part of town that everyone knew never flooded. “People really want to be together in a protected facility,” Deville said.
Around the region, the traffic on the highways out of town ahead of Katrina was heaviest on Sunday. The storm wouldn’t hit New Orleans until early on Monday morning. Yet the city’s bus drivers and others needed to work on Sunday, picking up people at evacuation centers around the city and dropping them off at the Superdome. Thus, on Saturday the RTA employees, their families, and their friends started showing up at the barn, dragging with them their suitcases and carrying coolers, and the occasional large silver pot heavy with gumbo. By Sunday night, somewhere around three hundred people were taking refuge there. The group, around 90 percent black, included grandparents and a couple of babies. Only around one-third worked for the RTA. People plugged in hot plates to heat up their food and shared the flasks and bottles they had brought with them. By 10:00 p.m., the winds sounded like a jet engine roaring. By midnight, the pounding rain echoed through the building. Why not a party when there was nothing to do except wait?
MONDAY
Gerald Robichaux, the RTA’s deputy general manager for operations, was up early Monday morning. He saw water in the streets and immediately regretted his decision to leave the agency’s three big dump trucks parked at the Uptown facility a few miles away, along with the big rigs they used to tow disabled buses. These trucks with tires as tall as the average-size man, Robichaux realized, might prove to be their chariots of escape if the water in the streets kept rising. Robichaux ordered a small crew to take the single high-wheeled vehicle they had at the Canal Street barn and pick up the other rigs on Napoleon Avenue. Robichaux also asked Wilfred Eddington to join them. Eddington was a member of the New Orleans Police Department, and part of the RTA’s transit police unit.
The wind was still blowing at around fifty miles per hour when they pulled out of the barn at around 10:00 a.m. Eddington remembered a blue Chevy parked at the Chevron station a block away. The water, maybe curb high, reached the bottom of the Chevy’s hubcaps. The water was halfway up the car’s windows when they returned ninety minutes later.
Back at the barn, the men told Robichaux what they had seen. They had headed west and south of downtown expecting to see at least some flooding in Uptown, which often gets an inch or two of water after a hard rain. But Uptown was dry. Only closer to their building had they hit any real flooding. Needing to see for himself, Robichaux called out the names of a few of his top people and jumped into one of the big trucks. Bill Deville decided to join his number two and almost immediately regretted his decision. The fifty-eight-year-old general manager was taking medicine for a bad heart. He took another pill to manage his high blood pressure. Just getting to the rig meant walking through foul, brackish water up past his knees. Only once it was too late did Deville remember a cut on his leg.
Robichaux was anxious to see the large facility the RTA operated in the eastern part of the city, in New Orleans East. With water starting to leak into the ground floor of the Canal Street barn, that might need to serve as their temporary base for running the city’s transit agency. Once on the interstate, Robichaux realized he had bigger problems than figuring out what day they might restart bus and streetcar service. Water was in every direction, sometimes up to the eaves of one-story homes. The I-10 became impassable after a couple of miles of driving, forcing them to turn back.
At some point on Monday the toilets stopped working—no small concern in a building housing around three hundred people. Landlines weren’t working and cell phone coverage was spotty. They weren’t completely cut off, however. The police scanner was still working, which is how they learned about the levee breaches. Bill Deville called everyone together late Monday afternoon to relay the bad news. He reminded them of the dozens of pumping stations the city operated around town and how effectively these miracle machines soaked up excess water. “It will probably take another day or so for the water to subside,” he said.
TUESDAY
Gerald Robichaux and several
supervisors were up early on Tuesday making rounds. So much water had gotten inside the building overnight that the emergency generator was submerged, rendering it useless. They were low on food and almost out of water. Walking around the building, they could feel the rising panic. Older people were running low on medicines. Mothers needed clean diapers. Robichaux went looking for his boss.
Deville had gone straight to his office after delivering the bad news about the city’s broken levees. He had lain down on the couch, but who could sleep in the stupefying heat and with his cut leg feeling as if it were on fire? In the middle of the night, Deville grabbed a flashlight and headed to his car, parked in the employee parking lot. He turned on the engine, set the air conditioner to high, and fell asleep.
Robichaux rapped on the roof of Deville’s car. Deville’s first feeling was confusion, then shame. It had been dark when he’d closed his eyes, but he was squinting against the brightness. How long had he been asleep? he asked himself groggily. Three hours? Four? “We need to leave,” Robichaux told him. He gave Deville a grim update and then laid out the plan Robichaux and a few others had hatched. We’ll give people a choice, Robichaux said. They were maybe a dozen blocks from an entrance ramp to an elevated portion of the I-10. They could wade or swim to that ramp. They knew from listening to the radio and police scanners that the streets were dry on the other side of the Mississippi River. Those who felt up to it could walk a few miles on the elevated I-10 to the Crescent City Connection, the bridge that took traffic over the Mississippi River to the West Bank. With some luck, they could contact the drivers of the big coaches they had parked in LaPlace, a town halfway between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, and arrange to be picked up at the park ’n’ ride commuter lot the RTA operated on the West Bank. Those who did not feel up to the long walk could remain in the barn while a small scouting party searched for boats to ferry them to safety.
