Katrina: After the Flood

by Gary Rivlin

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  NOTES ON SOURCES

  I conducted hundreds of interviews in the making of this book. I sat through more meetings than I care to count. Yet any work of nonfiction almost by definition builds on the work of others. Woven through this book are quotes, data points, and other jewels mined from a long list of books, documentaries, magazine and newspaper articles, radio reports, and Web-based pieces. I mention many by name in the body of the book but also felt protective of the narrative flow. Below is a more thorough rendering of all those works that enriched the tale I set out to tell.

  Many books helped in the shaping of this narrative, starting with the first I read post-Katrina, New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape. John King, the San Francisco Chronicle’s urban design critic, a friend and a former colleague, made sure I read this masterpiece by Peirce Lewis. That and the next book on my reading list, John M. Barry’s splendid Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, probably made my early coverage a little geography-obsessed. But I couldn’t have asked for two better primers. Two more recent works, Richard Campanella’s Bienville’s Dilemma: A Historical Geography of New Orleans and Lawrence N. Powell’s The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans, helped round out my understanding of the geography and history of New Orleans.

  There have been any number of excellent books written about New Orleans immediately after the flood. At or near the top of any list would be Douglas Brinkley’s The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, a vivid snapshot of those first terrible days after Katrina that’s as well written as it is insightful. I valued the brawling spirit of Jed Horne’s Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City, which might be my personal favorite among this first batch of Katrina books. Also making my top tier: Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers, which tells the harrowing tale of Abdulrahman Zeitoun in the first couple of weeks after Katrina; City of Refuge, Tom Piazza’s beautifully rendered novel about those first months after the storm; Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans, by Dan Baum; and 1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina, by Chris Rose.

  Robert B. Olshansky and Laurie A. Johnson’s Clear as Mud: Planning for the Rebuilding of New Orleans proves it’s possible to fall in love with a book about urban planning. Valuable, too, was Kristina Ford’s engaging book The Trouble with City Planning: What New Orleans Can Teach Us. Sarah Carr’s evenhanded, clear-eyed account of school reform in post-Katrina New Orleans, Hope Against Hope: Three Schools, One City, and the Struggle to Educate America’s Children, is an impressive work of journalism, as is Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security, by Christopher Cooper and Robert Block. I also appreciated Michael Eric Dyson’s incisive Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster; Tom Wooten’s heartfelt book We Shall Not Be Moved: Rebuilding Home in the Wake of Katrina ; and Ivor van Heerden’s engaging account of his pursuit of the truth in The Storm: What Went Wrong and Why During Hurricane Katrina—the Inside Story from One Louisiana Scientist.

  Also deserving mention: Resilience and Opportunity: Lessons From the U.S. Gulf Coast after Katrina and Rita, edited by Amy Liu, Roland V. Anglin, Richard M. Mizelle Jr., and Allison Plyer; A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, by Josh Neufeld; Unnatural Disaster, a collection of articles from the Nation magazine edited by Betsy Reed; The Fight for Home: How (Parts of) New Orleans Came Back, by Daniel Wolff; Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six, by Jordan Flaherty; The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, by Naomi Klein; There Is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster: Race, Class, and Hurricane Katrina, edited by Chester Hartman and Gregory D. Squires; Overcoming Katrina: African American Voices from the Crescent City and Beyond, by D’Ann R. Penner and Keith C. Ferdinand; City Adrift: New Orleans Before and After Katrina, by the Center for Public Integrity; The Ravaging Tide: Strange Weather, Future Katrinas, and the Coming Death of America’s Coastal Cities, by Mike Tidwell; and Who Killed New Orleans? Mother Nature vs. Human Nature, by Diane Holloway.

  Spike Lee’s sensational When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts proved a much-needed jolt for the city when it premiered in August 2006. More high-quality documentaries followed, including Lee’s sequel, If God Is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise. Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s Trouble the Water was a 2008 Oscar nominee that deserved all the praise it received and then some. Lolis Eric Elie’s excellent Faubourg Tremé is a touching, poignant film that, true to its subtitle, offers “the untold story of black New Orleans.” Other favorites that helped in the creation of this book: The Big Uneasy, by Harry Shearer; Race, by Katherine Cecil; and Getting Back to Abnormal, by Peter Odabashian, Andrew Kolker, Louis Alvarez, and Paul Stekler.

  Any number of national media outlets remained committed to the Katrina story long after the hurricane was no longer headline news; all offered rich reserves of material for me to sift through. Any list would start with the New York Times and include CNN, NPR, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Houston Chronicle, and the Chicago Tribune. I mention many of my Times colleagues by name within these pages, but a more thorough list includes Dan Barry, who deserved the Pulitzer in my eyes for the columns he wrote in those first days and months after Katrina, and also Deborah Sontag, Eric Lipton, Jennifer Steinhauer, Jeré Longman, and Leslie Eaton. The Associated Press also deserves a special shout-out for its commitment to covering post-flood New Orleans. When was the first jury trial post-Katrina? A search uncovered an AP article (carrying no byline) published in June 2006, ten months after Katrina, documenting jury selection for a man accused of stealing a car. The piece was short but included an estimate of the backload of cases (five thousand) and the approximate repair bill ($4 million) for the criminal court complex. Cain Burdeau, Michael Kunzelman, Becky Bohrer, Robert Tanner, and Michelle Roberts were the names I’d see most frequently on AP stories that carried a byline.

  The Times-Picayune coverage of New Orleans post-Katrina was as impressive as it was invaluable to the writing of this book. Going through stacks of old clips and printouts, I’d see the same names over again: Gordon Russell, David Hammer, Laura Maggi, Katy Reckdahl, Frank Donze, Michelle Krupa, Mark Schleifstein, Brendan McCarthy, Bruce Nolan, Bruce Eggler, Bruce Alpert, Martha Carr, Sarah Carr, Trymaine D. Lee, Chris Kirkham, Brian Thevenot, Jeff Duncan, Kate Moran, Richard Rainey, Paul Purpura, Gwen Filosa, and Mark Waller. There were also the columnists I regularly read: Chris Rose, Lolis Eric Elie, Stephanie Grace, James Gill, and Jarvis DeBerry.

  The pages of the New Orleans Tribune often offered a very different view than the Times-Picayune on the city’s recovery. In the Tribune I’d read anything by Anitra D. Brown, J. B. Borders, or Beverly McKenna, who writes a regular publisher’s note for the paper. Lance Hill is an occasional Tribune contributor, as is Bill Quigley, a Loyola law professor. The periodic post-storm updates that Quigley published in the Trib and also CounterPunch offered vivid snapshots that, along with the New Orleans Index, published jointly by the Brookings Institution and the Data Center (then the Greater New Orleans Data Center), allowed me to more accurately track the city’s progress, or lack of it. The same is true of the series of articles the New York Times ran around both the first and second anniversaries of Katrina, and the anniversary pieces produced by any number of media outlets.

  The Gambit often came through when I was looking to learn more about a subject. There were Clancy DuBos’s entertaining columns about New Orleans politics and also the long features at which the paper’s alternative weekly excelled. There was also the crew at the Lens, a local investigative news site, who always offered high-quality work whether on the schools, the coast, or city politics. I mention Karen Gadbois and Tyler Bridges within these pages, but other Lens staffers, past and present, deserve mention, including Jessica Williams, Mark Moseley, Charles Maldonado, and Jeff Adelson.


  Dan Baum wrote “Deluged” and “The Lost Year,” which might be my two favorite magazine pieces about New Orleans just after Katrina. Both appeared in the New Yorker, and both served as great sources while working on this book. I appreciated the occasional New Orleans dispatch Josh Levin filed for Slate, and I also found insights reading Robert Morris (the Uptown Messenger), Jeff Crouere, the New Orleans Business Journal, and the Louisiana Weekly.

  THE PROLOGUE TO THIS book was based on a blend of interviews and depositions. An article appearing in the Los Angeles Times was my source for Blanco’s quote expressing her frustration with the airlines.

  I relied on numerous sources for the FEMA portions of this book. That includes an interview with Marty Bahamonde but also numerous books and articles. Cooper and Block’s Disaster offered an invaluable history of FEMA along with a withering dissection of the federal government’s many blunders after Katrina. Daniel Franklin, writing in the Washington Monthly in 1995 (“The FEMA Phoenix”), offered a vivid portrait of FEMA’s earliest years and James Lee Witt’s attempts to save the agency. So, too, did Jon Elliston in his excellent “FEMA: Confederacy of Dunces,” appearing in the Nation a few weeks after Katrina. Also helpful were Spencer S. Hsu’s reporting in the Washington Post and an Evan Thomas article appearing in Newsweek.

  I interviewed Ray Nagin numerous times before he shut himself off from the media. Lucky for me, he wrote Katrina’s Secrets: Storms after the Storm, his memoir about those first few weeks after Katrina. I was fortunate, too, that Sally Forman self-published Eyes of the Storm: Inside City Hall During Katrina. Sally set up several interviews with me and was generous with her time, but her well-written account of her time inside City Hall served as an additional source. Edward J. Blakely’s memoir, My Storm: Managing the Recovery of New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina, also proved invaluable in offering Blakely’s perspective on the recovery.

  Any number of writers took on Nagin as a topic. I’m partial to Ethan Brown’s terrific profile of New Orleans’s then mayor in Details in 2008 and the pieces that Stephanie Grace, Mark Moseley, and Jarvis DeBerry wrote about the mayor over the years. And then there’s that trio of locals—Gordon Rusell, Jason Berry, and David Hammer—whose reporting practically demanded that the US Attorney indict the former mayor on corruption charges. The Nagin trial itself was a good source for the crimes and misdemeanors Nagin committed in office.

  Lolis Eric Elie’s Faubourg Tremé gave me my first in-depth introduction to black history in New Orleans. Katy Reckdahl also deserves a shout-out for the moving piece she wrote for the fiftieth anniversary of the desegregation of the Orleans Parish schools.

  I relied on a Gambit profile of Kathleen Blanco, written by Tyler Bridges, to fill out my portrait of the governor in these pages. An article written by the New York Times’ Adam Nagourney and Anne E. Kornblut was my source for information on the “war room” the White House set up to combat criticisms of the president post-Katrina. Helping me to round out my portrait of the Bush administration: the Washington Post ’s Joby Warrick (“White House Got Early Warning on Katrina”) and Paul Alexander’s book Machiavelli’s Shadow: The Rise and Fall of Karl Rove. Details about the “overly ornamented” Katrina bill that Senators Landrieu and Vitter introduced shortly after the storm were taken both from an article written by the Washington Post’s Michael Grunwald and Susan B. Glasser and a James Gill column appearing in the Times-Picayune.

  The Advocate in Baton Rouge broke the story of the state troopers from Michigan and New Mexico who felt they had been enlisted to intimidate rather than police in the days after Katrina. My account of the fight over the future of Charity was enriched by the work of my former colleague, Adam Nossiter, who wrote about disagreements between the state and the hospital’s medical staff.

  I learned from reading a Mark Schleifstein Times-Picayune article that 250 billion gallons of water covered the greater New Orleans area after Katrina. The story of evacuees who were made to feel unwelcome at their new school, including Dominique Townsend, was captured in Education in Exile, a short documentary by Lloyd Dennis. I found the Joe Canizaro quote about the city’s lack of a plan for helping those of modest means return to New Orleans in an excellent AP story by Robert Tanner. I lifted the Ronald Lewis quote about the indignity of being cast as a poor person from Dan Baum’s Nine Lives. Nine Lives was also my source for information on the search for someone—anyone—who might pick up the dead bodies scattered around New Orleans after the floodwaters receded.

  The New York Times’ Stephanie Strom was my source for reporting on the Red Cross’s share of post-Katrina charitable giving. It was reading Olshansky and Johnson’s Clear as Mud that revealed that the infamous green-dot map on the front page of the Times-Picayune was actually based on an obscure graphic meant to show generally where the city might add parkland if the residents of a community chose to allow low-lying parts of their neighborhood revert to wetlands. Ceci Connolly wrote movingly in the Washington Post about the spike in suicides after Katrina, which I allude to in the book. My depiction of the reopening of the Lower Ninth Ward three months after Katrina was aided by a report by NPR’s Anthony Brooks and a Deborah Sontag article in the New York Times.

  The Times-Picayune’s Jeffrey Meitrodt and the Times’ Adam Nossiter wrote articles chronicling the city’s decision to revise the damage estimates of most any homeowner choosing to rebuild. Both helped in the writing of that section of the book. A Nossiter article was also my source for a FEMA official’s lament over the sheer scope of people seeking the agency’s help after Katrina and Rita. I learned of the giant shredder the government dispatched to the Gulf Coast to help with the garbage problem in an entertaining report (“Katrina’s Garbage Rates a Category 5”) written by Andrew Martin, then of the Chicago Tribune.

  Mike Davis, writing in Mother Jones, documented Louisiana’s unsuccessful attempts to convince FEMA to help officials reach potential voters in New Orleans’s pending municipal elections. Linton Weeks was the author of the Washington Post’s “A 20-Ring Political Circus: Strange Crew Populates New Orleans Mayoral Race.” I picked up Stephen Bradberry’s “whiter city” quote in an article by the Post’s Peter Whoriskey. Whoriskey also wrote a story about a criminal justice system in shambles that helped me tell that part of the story.

  Anne Rochell Konigsmark reported on the return of crime to New Orleans for an article she wrote for USA Today sixteen months after Katrina. Around that same time, the Christian Science Monitor’s Patrik Jonsson wrote about the challenges still confronting the criminal justice system in a hobbled city. Pieces of the Doris Hicks/King Charter School story were gleaned from a terrific series written by Education Week’s Lesli A. Maxwell. I picked up details about UNOP’s Community Congress–II in an article by the Times-Picayune’s Coleman Warner. Writing in the Times-Picayune, Gwen Filosa told the story of several locked-out public housing residents trying to move back home, even to units without utilities.

  An article by the New York Times’ Leslie Eaton was my source for the comparison of public dollars spent to help small businesses after September 11 and after Hurricane Katrina. Leslie’s writing, too, provided me with the warning from Dr. David Myers not to bring sick people back to New Orleans, and data on the lack of hospital beds in New Orleans two years after Katrina. I plucked the Richard Campanella quote from another Leslie story. I picked up Alphonso Thomas’s “90 percent suicidal” quote in a Times article written by Shaila Dewan. Albert Felton’s quote about a lack of contractors working in Gentilly two years after Katrina was plucked from an Adam Nossiter article in the Times.

  Leslie Eaton and Joseph B. Treaster wrote about homeowner dissatisfaction with their insurance carriers two years after Katrina in a long article that ran as part of the Times’ “Patchwork City” series. That was my source for data about complaints with the state and lawsuits filed. Both the Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg reported on the record profits booked by private insurers in 2005.

  I learned
about Ed Blakely’s hesitancy to take the job as recovery czar in reading J. B. Borders’s profile of Blakely (“The Master of Disaster”), which appeared in the New Orleans Tribune a few months into his tenure. Clear as Mud is great in describing the press conference where Blakely first shared his rebuilding plan, as was a Times-Picayune article written by Gary Scheets.

  David Hammer at the Times-Picayune led the pack with his vigorous reporting on the many shortcomings of the Road Home program. Also contributing to the cause were NPR’s Steve Inskeep and PBS’s Betty Ann Bowser, both of whom broadcast powerful reports about people’s frustration with Road Home. It was in the Shreveport Times that I found the Pearson Cross quote after Blanco announced she would not seek a second term. Vincanne Adams tells the story of Anthony and Sylvia Blanchard in her book Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith: New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina, though she gives them the pseudonyms Henry and Gladys Bradlieu.

  Patricia Jones was one of the few people who declined to talk with me for this book. Tom Wooten’s We Shall Not Be Moved allowed me to tell the story of Jones and other dazed residents showing up at the Sanchez Community Center starting around six months after Katrina. Jones spoke at length to Wooten and also talked with NPR’s Larry Abramson, who told her story in the “Gulf Coast’s Everyday Heroes” series the radio station ran two and a half years after Katrina. Jones’s story was also captured by a Tulane project called MediaNOLA, which bills itself as “a portal for histories of culture and cultural production in New Orleans.”

  The Times’ Campbell Robertson arrived in New Orleans in 2009 and produced a number of stories that enriched the book’s final set of chapters. An article he wrote about the significance of a Super Bowl win to the New Orleans psyche was beautifully written and also offered a bounty of anecdotes for a hungry author (churches that canceled evening mass on Super Bowl Sunday; schools that canceled class the next day). I picked up a quote from the Reverend Vien The Nguyen from another Campbell story.