Katrina: After the Flood

by Gary Rivlin

  Brown was the designated face of FEMA’s stunted response to Katrina, but plenty of people deserved blame. First on that list might be a former marine general named Matthew Broderick, who ran Homeland Security’s operations center during Katrina. Broderick’s job was to synthesize the snippets of intelligence the government was receiving and keep Chertoff and top people in the White House up-to-date. Broderick had Bahamonde’s report of a major levee breach Monday morning and his firsthand observations from a Coast Guard helicopter by that evening. At 1:15 p.m. on Monday, the Coast Guard sent out an e-mail reporting on a levee breach that caused at least eight feet of flooding in the Ninth Ward. As Broderick drove to work from his Virginia home on Tuesday morning, radio reports declared New Orleans a flooded city. Yet not until later in the afternoon on Tuesday did he send out a bulletin confirming that most of the city was underwater. Asked to explain the delay, he cited a television report he had glimpsed Monday evening on a TV in the agency’s break room. On the screen, people were being interviewed inside a French Quarter bar. How bad could it be, Broderick thought, if people were drinking and carrying on in the center of town?

  Broderick and his people never seemed to catch up. Their Wednesday intelligence report told of the twelve thousand to fifteen thousand people stranded at the Superdome when the true number was closer to twenty-five thousand. That same report also failed to note that, in an act of desperation, the city had opened its Convention Center as a second refuge of last resort, despite a lack of provisions there. On Wednesday morning, the Louisiana state police were estimating that another twenty-five thousand were inside the Convention Center. Yet not until Thursday did Broderick’s intelligence report even mention it. “Actually, I have not heard a report of thousands of people in the Convention Center who don’t have food and water,” Chertoff said during an appearance Thursday night on NPR, though by that time the cable stations were doing stand-ups in front of the building. Talking to Ted Koppel later that night, Brown estimated that around five thousand people were in the Convention Center. In the first several days after Katrina, the average cable news viewer seemed to know more about the catastrophe than the people running the show from Washington.

  “THIS IS GOING TO get real ugly real fast,” FEMA’s Marty Bahamonde wrote in a text message he sent to his bosses the Sunday night before Katrina even reached New Orleans. They had been expecting fifteen trucks loaded with bottled water but only five arrived. They had also received 320,000 fewer MRE (“meals ready to eat,” which the military uses on the battlefield) than requested. After the Pam exercises, FEMA had promised to pre-stage four hundred buses and eight hundred drivers just outside the storm zone to be ready to cart people out of the city. For days, everyone from Governor Blanco down was yelling for buses, but the answer was always the same: tomorrow. “Even if the FEMA buses had come on Wednesday, George Bush would have looked like a hero,” Kathleen Blanco said. The promised buses wouldn’t start arriving en masse until Friday morning.

  “We need to get people out of here,” Blanco told Brown when the two were in New Orleans on Tuesday morning. “We need buses.” Nagin also stressed the need for buses when he met Brown that same morning. At Bahamonde’s suggestion, the mayor had arrived with a list. “Be as specific as possible to help FEMA do its job,” Bahamonde had coached the mayor and his people. Maybe it’s only an apocryphal story meant to underscore the government’s ineptitude, but one well-traveled report had Brown or one of his people misplacing the mayor’s list after receiving it Tuesday morning.

  “Sir, the situation [in the Superdome] is past critical,” Bahamonde wrote to Brown on Wednesday morning. Yet once grounded in Baton Rouge, Brown seemed focused more on ensuring that he still looked to be in charge than on managing his team. “In this crisis and on TV, you need to look more hard working,” a handler wrote to Brown in an e-mail that eventually would be made public. “ROLL UP THE SLEEVES!” When Brown’s press secretary asked people via e-mail to leave her boss alone for a couple of hours so he could enjoy a proper meal before an appearance on MSNBC, Bahamonde had had enough of the e-mail string he was reading. “Tell her,” Bahamonde pecked out on his BlackBerry, “that I just ate an MRE and crapped in the hallway with 30,000 other close friends so I understand her concern about busy restaurants.”

  Hundreds of New Orleans police officers went AWOL in those first few days after the flooding. By midweek, Eddie Compass, the chief of police, announced that his people would no longer help in the rescue efforts because he didn’t believe he had enough of a force to maintain order in dry parts of town. Blanco requested that troops be sent to New Orleans, as did Nagin and Michael Brown. The White House at first indicated that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was unavailable (he was spotted sitting in the owner’s box at a San Diego Padres baseball game Tuesday night). Days of delays followed as lawyers inside the White House argued over lines of authority and paperwork rather than ordering the military to the region and sorting out the legal technicalities later. By Thursday—three days after the levees broke—the police were running out of ammunition, and Chief Compass, a friend of Nagin’s since childhood, breathlessly told the mayor a story about how he was nearly taken hostage inside the Convention Center. “People are shooting at officers there,” Compass said, “but we can’t shoot back because we don’t want to hit innocent people.” The chief “was clearly shaken up,” Nagin concluded, but he didn’t know what to tell his old friend except to suggest that he get some rest. Turning to longtime aide Terry Davis, Nagin said, “This thing looks like it could blow. It’ll take a miracle for us to hold it together.”

  RAY NAGIN HAD FIGURED on riding out the storm on the large leather couch in his office on the second floor of City Hall. But someone woke up the mayor at around midnight the Sunday before Katrina hit. The winds were causing the building to sway, and people were nervous about staying inside the cement structure. So in the middle of the night, the mayor and key staff moved across the street to the Hyatt. That first night Nagin chose to sleep on a cot in a fourth-floor ballroom, where the city had set up an auxiliary command center, rather than in a suite that had been reserved in his name on the twenty-seventh floor. “Raindrops so large they sounded like gunshots as they hit the building,” Nagin wrote in a self-published memoir. Winds that screamed “louder and crazier than a wild banshee,” and a “constant drone like sci-fi possessed Gods chanting ominous incantations.” The night’s most frightening moment came when the windows on the northern face of the hotel blew out, forcing the occupants of hundreds of rooms to flee to safer quarters. Nagin figured he got maybe two hours of sleep that first night.

  On Monday morning, Nagin spoke with the deputy police chief overseeing the city’s 911 system. During one twenty-three-minute period, he told Nagin, the system received six hundred calls. To learn what was going on, the deputy had listened in on a sampling of calls. He told the mayor, “It was people begging and screaming for help. ‘The water’s up to my neck. Please come now.’ ‘My husband has blown off the roof.’ ‘My children are drowning.’ ” All day Nagin learned about more levee breaches, but his meeting that night with FEMA’s Marty Bahamonde underscored for Nagin the tragedy in the making. Water was covering three-quarters of the city. Thousands of people were stranded on rooftops, and thousands more wading through the waters to get to the Superdome, which was already nearing capacity. Alone in his suite that night, Nagin told himself that nothing mattered more in the coming days than his appearing calm.

  Around midday Tuesday, Nagin got his first glimpse from inside a Black Hawk helicopter of the watery Atlantis over which he now presided. The mayor fixated on the Seventeenth Street Canal, where Lake Pontchartrain was pouring through a large gash in the levee wall. To his eye, the city would continue filling with water until they plugged this breach that measured 450 feet. From the air, he saw the restaurant in the middle-class enclave of Lakeview where he and his wife and the youngest of his three children had dined on the Saturday night before the storm. Ten
feet of water now covered it.

  “What do you need, Mr. Mayor?” Bush asked Nagin when the two spoke by phone on Wednesday night. By that point, Nagin and his people had calculated that they needed more than one thousand buses. A small caravan of trucks carting water and food rations would have helped make a terrible experience a little less miserable for thousands of people. The city needed military medevac teams at both the Superdome and the Convention Center. Nagin instead chose to make a single request of the president: plug the Seventeenth Street Canal. His communications director, Sally Forman, jumped on him as soon as he was done talking to the president. Nagin cut her off, snapping, “Let him do this one damn thing, Sally, and then we’ll move to the next set of needs.”

  In some ways, Wednesday was the week’s low point for the mayor and his people. “Absolutely brutal,” Nagin said of the weather that day. “It felt like it was at least one hundred and ten degrees with one hundred percent humidity.” The hotel’s bathrooms had stopped working, so people started using the stairwell when they needed to relieve themselves. Every day Nagin, a former athlete hobbled by a bum knee, and his staff used those same overheated stairwells to reach their rooms on the twenty-seventh floor. “I worked hard not to step in the excrement,” Sally Forman said of her regular treks from their fourth-floor command center to her hotel room down the hall from the mayor’s. Nagin described the experience as “stiflingly putrid.”

  The Superdome next door was becoming a bigger worry. The cavernous indoor stadium had several large holes punched in its roof. The facility was without electricity or working toilets and was critically low on water, food, and medical supplies. It also connected to the Hyatt via a second-floor pedestrian bridge. The National Guard, who were responsible for security there, had been asking for reinforcements, but none were coming. They were vulnerable, Chief Eddie Compass told the mayor and others. From an informant inside the Superdome, the chief claimed, he was hearing that a small cabal was plotting a kind of insurrection. It would start with a diversionary action, the informant said. They would then overwhelm the National Guard, rush the pedestrian bridge, and take over the command center the city had established on the hotel’s fourth floor.

  Compass’s wife was eight months pregnant and staying with him at the Hyatt, along with their three-year-old daughter. The chief didn’t hesitate when he heard a gunshot in the parking lot outside the Superdome on Wednesday afternoon. He burst into the city’s fourth-floor emergency command center and ordered people upstairs for their own safety. “We all ran up twenty-three flights of stairs to the twenty-seventh floor,” said Nagin. Others stayed behind to barricade the second-floor walkway. “Yes, we boarded ourselves into the Hyatt,” said Greg Meffert, a top city official at Nagin’s side that week. “There was this real fear that there was going to be this mass break-in.” That night, lying in a hot hotel room with windows that did not open, Nagin heard gunshots on the street. “I really didn’t think we’d make it through Wednesday night,” he wrote, “without an Armageddon-like war occurring in the total darkness.”

  Thursday brought more of the same. There were no convoys of supplies and no buses, only the occasional coach pulling up in front of the Superdome. Nagin was livid with Bush and even angrier with Blanco. On a hand-cranked radio in his suite, surrounded by staffers, Nagin caught a snippet of a Blanco press conference on the one local station still broadcasting, WWL-AM. Mainly what he heard was a governor boasting about all that the state was doing to help New Orleans. “I’ve had it with all this bullshit,” he told people around him. “I’m calling in to set the record straight.” They had given up trying to get their satellite phones to work, but Greg Meffert, the city’s chief technology officer, figured out a way to make an analog phone work over a computer line. They reached Garland Robinette, the well-regarded talk-show host, in WWL’s studios. On air, Nagin mocked the president for his Air Force One flyover and then lit into both the governor and the president. Maybe it’s Bush’s fault, maybe it’s Blanco’s, Nagin told Robinette, but either way the president needs to get his “ass on a plane” so he can sit down with the governor and figure things out.

  “Get off your asses and do something,” he implored both Blanco and Bush, “and let’s fix the biggest goddamn crisis in the history of this country.”

  NAGIN FINALLY WOKE UP to some good news on Friday morning. Looking out the window, he saw several buses on the interstate, headed toward the Superdome. He also spotted a convoy of military supply trucks. He called out and people came rushing in. That’s when Sally Forman shared the news about her early-morning call. “So buses just happen to start arriving the day the president makes his first visit,” Nagin said.

  Air Force One left Washington at around nine o’clock on Friday morning. The president’s first stop was the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where he held an airport press conference. He was joined by a pair of Republican governors, Bob Riley of Alabama and Mississippi’s Haley Barbour.

  “I want to thank Mike Brown and his staff,” Bob Riley said. “FEMA has absolutely been great.”

  “I want to join with Bob,” Barbour said. “The federal government is great—FEMA and all of your people who are on the ground.” When it was his turn to speak, the president used those compliments to give a public pat on the back to his beleaguered FEMA director: “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job!”

  Maggie Grant had asked Sally Forman to have Nagin at the airport about an hour before Bush’s scheduled arrival at around 1:00 p.m. For security purposes, the government flies two Air Force Ones, one as a conveyance for the president and his entourage, the other as a decoy. They would have Nagin wait in the second Air Force One, Grant had said, until the president’s arrival, which gave Forman an idea. It had been days since any of them had bathed. “Forgive me for asking, but is there any way the mayor could take a shower while he waits?” Forman asked. The president’s trip was in part to make a friend in Ray Nagin. Grant seemed pleased to provide so easy a deliverable. “Absolutely!” Forman remembers her enthusing. Nagin would be able to use a bathroom on the decoy plane.

  The chief flight attendant was named Reggie, whom Nagin described as a “brother from New York.” “I’m not sure who you are,” Nagin remembers Reggie telling him as he ushered the mayor to the president’s private quarters, “but it’s very rare that someone other than the president uses this part of the plane.” Nagin figured he was in the shower barely ten minutes when Reggie knocked on the door to warn him of the president’s imminent arrival. Rather than finish up, Nagin soaped a second time and then a third for what he described as a “triple-lather shower.” He took his time shaving and waxing his head for the coming photo ops. “We had waited for the president for several days,” he said, so “he could at least wait a few minutes for me.” For his meeting with the president, Nagin wore a pair of dress slacks and a clean white T-shirt stamped with the word DESIRE.

  Kathleen Blanco was sitting at a table in the belly of the president’s plane when Nagin arrived. So, too, were Senators Mary Landrieu and David Vitter and several congressmen, including Bobby Jindal, the thirty-four-year-old Republican whom Blanco had defeated for governor, and Bill Jefferson, a black Democrat who represented New Orleans East. Michael Chertoff and Michael Brown were also there.

  The president entered after Nagin, who was struck by the president’s “swagger”—a “cowboy-type walk with slight bow legs.” Bush took a seat at the head of the table and lunch was served. The elected officials took turns sharing their frustrations with FEMA. Nagin, sitting to the president’s immediate left, went last. Some around the table felt as if they were watching a man unglued. By several accounts, his eyes grew wider the longer he spoke, and he began to tremble. Senator David Vitter remembered Nagin angrily slamming down his hand and barking at Bush and Blanco. Blanco thought the mayor was on the verge of a breakdown. “My adrenaline was flowing, and my pulse was a bit elevated,” Nagin said.

  After their meeting, Bush and Blanco met in private. There
in the Oval Office in the sky, the president pressed her to sign a document that would allow him to federalize the National Guard troops, which otherwise fall under a governor’s jurisdiction. The governor, whose staff opposed the idea, asked the president for twenty-four hours to consider the proposal. She knew that even without her signature, the president had the authority to take over the National Guard. (Bush’s father had done so after the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles in 1992.) Bush also had the power to send military forces to an area that Blanco had declared to be in a state of emergency even before Katrina made landfall. But Blanco’s staff feared that by making a big show of the governor handing control to the president, Bush and his people could later cast her as not up to the task of command—a woman paralyzed by fear.

  Senator Mary Landrieu, a Democrat, cornered Nagin while Bush and Blanco met. You’re being played, she warned the mayor. Landrieu thought she was stating the obvious: the president’s people were hoping to use Nagin to help discredit Blanco and distract attention from their own failures in the days after Katrina. Nagin saw Air Force One as bringing to their disaster the worst of Washington politics. “She was going on and on about us not smiling if we stood beside the president,” according to Nagin. “I remember telling her, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’ ” In an air-conditioned mobile unit parked on the tarmac nearby, Blanco’s staffers were delivering a similar warning to their counterparts from New Orleans: don’t allow yourselves to be used by the Bush administration.