In the Shadow of Statues

by Mitch Landrieu

  CHAPTER 4

  Politics in Disaster Time

  In 1960, the year I was born, my grandmother Loretta Landrieu paid fifteen thousand dollars for a patch of land along Lake Pontchartrain, about thirty miles out from New Orleans, near the town of Slidell. That “camp,” which was a small house that looked like a triple-wide trailer, had a long wooden pier that jutted out into the saltwater lake. By the early 1970s we were nineteen kids in all, counting the ten children of my aunt and uncle. We grew up swimming and skiing on the lake, as well as playing baseball, football, and volleyball on the grass. We would fish off the pier with cane poles. My grandfather Joe Landrieu hovered like a sheepdog, watching each of us with an eye that didn’t miss a lick. As soon as someone caught a fish, usually a croaker or catfish (or, God forbid, a stingray), the gaggle of us exploded in excitement—poles clattering, fish lines flying about. And as we circled the triumphant one gripping the pole with that fish on the hook, amid a mess of lines piled on the pier, “Paw Paw,” someone would call, “my line is tangled!”

  Most people would look at a ball of twisted fishing line, clear it away, and start anew. Not my grandpa. He would sit there stoically, sometimes thirty minutes at a time, and methodically untangle the clump. He wasted nothing. I never heard him yell or curse; he rebaited our hooks and put us back in place on the pier, making sure that we held our cane poles—until someone caught the next fish and our tiny world broke into squeals and excitement all over again. As time went on and my grandparents passed away and the children became adults with children of their own, my father bought out my uncle’s share of the place. He and my mother would never dream of leaving the house where we grew up on South Prieur Street; but they relished the time at the lakeside camp, where the gradual addition of rooms could accommodate the growing number of grandchildren, though not all thirty-eight at once. To this day, the camp holds our family together.

  In 2002, it had been fifteen years since my election to the State House, which met a few months a year and was not full-time work. I had built a solid business with a solo law practice. That year, I traveled the state stumping for U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu in her campaign for a second term. Mary had a tough race against Republican opponent Suzie Haik Terrell. President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, former President George H. W. Bush and Barbara Bush, and Bob Dole and Rudy Giuliani all campaigned for Terrell. They wanted that seat for a 52-vote GOP majority. Mary won the race by carrying Acadiana, sugarcane country, attacking Bush’s support for the Central American Free Trade Agreement, a move that augured steep losses for growers and Louisiana’s farm sector. In a state tilting red, she was reelected by forty thousand votes.

  I was forty-three and ready to move beyond the legislature. The gubernatorial election of 2003 drew a crowded field on the Democratic and Republican sides. I sought the lieutenant governor’s seat, which had been a springboard to higher positions for previous holders. A former lieutenant governor, Melinda Schwegmann, whose husband owned a New Orleans–area supermarket chain, and former congressman Clyde Holloway, both Republicans, entered the race, as well as a few others.

  I traveled the state calling for a strategy to attract more business and boost tourism, the office’s major function. I wanted to bring people together and spoke openly of embracing the New South, with diversity a strength as we came together across the lines that once divided us. My rhetoric was not earth shattering, but in the dozen years since the Duke nightmare I wasn’t sure how many whites had turned a corner, so to speak. Nor did I grasp how difficult it would be to achieve the agenda, in light of events that lay ahead. Nevertheless, the campaign message resonated, despite some rooted resentment about my father’s role in integrating New Orleans. I won the primary with 53 percent, hence no runoff—a rarity in a state where Democratic officials kept migrating to the Republican Party. I carried most of the sixty-four parishes and won 80 percent of the vote in my home parish of Orleans.

  The lieutenant governor manages the Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism, which also has an appointed secretary. You can also do whatever is assigned by the governor, but the tourism duties give a certain degree of self-definition. I embraced growing the “cultural economy.” Tourism and culture was one of the largest employment sectors in the state.

  As a onetime struggling actor, I knew that the contributions made by back-of-the-house workers—from set designers and sound techs to photographers and makeup artists—made a real difference. We implemented a grant program for creative people on a range of projects that was designed to get funds directly into the cultural economy without layers of bureaucracy. I saw creative people—directors, writers, painters, sculptors, and folk artists—as the backbone of the glitzy tourism industry. New Orleans had 130 art galleries, one of the highest number per capita of any city. A grant of several thousand dollars made a difference to an artist needing supplies to create works for an exhibition.

  Early in my term I began streamlining how the department functioned, while expanding its mission. In my campaign travels I had been struck by the beauty and history of Louisiana; I was also disappointed by the lack of diversity in what we honored in our parks, museums, and cultural spaces. For all of the achievements of African Americans, we had little to show for that formally. I appointed the first African American assistant secretary of tourism, Chuck Morse. We knew that securing legislative funds for an entire new museum would be a stretch, so we decided to consider the state as a living museum and created the African American Heritage Trail, promoting and explaining important destinations and learning experiences from New Orleans to Shreveport and in between, sites like churches, gravesites, museums, and plantations. Later, we created a marketing fund dedicated to attracting African American visitors. We put a huge focus on promoting growing major events, from the Essence Music Festival to the Bayou Classic to the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. These efforts solidified Louisiana as the number-one destination for African Americans in the country.

  But the office I won was soon hit by a force that none of my staff or I could have imagined.

  * * *

  —

  On August 27, 2005, a Saturday, I sat in Lawless Memorial Chapel at Dillard University for the funeral of Clarence Barney, the longtime leader of the Urban League in New Orleans. Marc Morial, Dutch’s son, who had served eight years as mayor of New Orleans before becoming president of the National Urban League in New York, sat next to me. Both of us worried about the news of a massive storm building in the Gulf of Mexico. Hurricane Katrina was growing in scope and intensity more than any storm we had ever seen. Mayor C. Ray Nagin and Governor Kathleen Blanco were discussing whether to order a mass evacuation. That would mean a huge allocation of state and local resources for first responders and public shelters. Many people weren’t waiting to be told to leave. By Saturday afternoon a record outflow of vehicles from the metropolitan area, including Jefferson, St. Bernard, and low-lying Plaquemines parishes, had caused gridlock on the highways headed east, west, and north. Everyone was racing away from the monster gaining force in the Gulf.

  At four in the morning on Sunday, August 28, Cheryl and I gathered the five children and headed west to Baton Rouge; a drive that typically took ninety minutes became a seven-hour bumper-to-bumper grind. Gracie was in her senior year at Dominican, where Emily was a junior. Matt was a freshman at Jesuit; Benjamin was in middle school at Christian Brothers, and Will was in grade school at Lusher, a public school. Like everyone else in emergency mode, we assumed that a few days after the hurricane passed, we’d head home, like we always did.

  On Sunday, Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco called for mandatory evacuation, the first ever for New Orleans. When I got to the Emergency Operations Center in Baton Rouge and saw the staggering size of the storm on computer models and National Weather Service data, I telephoned my parents, who were still at home in New Orleans. I asked my father what they were planning.

 
“We’re going to ride it out. Son, you know, we’ve been through this many times.”

  “Look, Dad, you’ve gotta go.”

  “Son, we’re not leaving.”

  “Would you put Momma on the phone?”

  My mother came on. “I’m at the Emergency Operations Center, Mom. I’m looking at this storm.” I told her it was worse than Hurricane Betsy in 1965—which flooded a huge area of the Lower Ninth Ward, killing 81 people in Louisiana. I said it was going to be more severe than Hurricane Camille in 1969—which had killed 259 people in the Gulf South and hit the Mississippi coast like a sledgehammer, splintering beachfront homes and businesses.

  “Oh, honey, we’re really thinking about staying.”

  “Mom, this is your lieutenant governor speaking, and I am basically ordering you to leave because you’re going to get killed!”

  “Well, son, you tell that lieutenant governor it’s none of his business!”

  We didn’t get very far after that. With events converging around me, I called a sibling to echo my message and had to let it go.

  The Emergency Operation Center was what I imagined the White House Situation Room to be in times of crisis. Governor Blanco and her key advisers, various department heads, and officials of the State Police and National Guard were hunkered down. We were going to have to open the Superdome as a shelter of last resort. There’s an irony here that’s often missed. The vast damage caused by Hurricane Katrina and the flooding after the levees broke left enduring images of catastrophe, but with 1.5 million people leaving the greater New Orleans area over a two-day period, despite the traffic, the Katrina evacuation was the most successful in American history. Imagine how much worse the human suffering would have been had most of those people stayed.

  Hurricane Katrina was a disaster unlike anything Americans had ever seen in real time, on television. The flooding exposed a global audience to epic damage, great suffering, and a breakdown in government operations without precedent in recent American history. We also saw uncommon heroism and resilience as people did their best to help others. But for all of the striving to restore togetherness in times of crisis, there is a deeper, more difficult story to Katrina that also tells us about America as a nation. It is not a story about coming together to face all obstacles, when goodness prevails. It is a coming-apart story. The underbelly of it all.

  In 2005, the overriding concern by many hurricane experts was that a storm path would swirl upriver from the Gulf along the Mississippi, producing a funnel, spilling waves over the river levees and causing widespread flooding. Katrina took a different route. Pushing east of the mouth of the Mississippi, the winds sent a mammoth sheet of water toward eastern New Orleans over fragile wetlands interlaced with thousands of canals carved for offshore oil production. One side of that large lane straddled a levee along the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway; the other levee shouldered the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet (MR-GO). Katrina did not hit the Mississippi River but swept across that denuded area between the Intracoastal and the MR-GO as if it were a bowling alley, a giant water wall barreling toward the city. It was those canal levees that gave way, not the river’s.

  Environmentalists had long decried the shredding of the wetlands, a coastal forest and hurricane buffer of yesteryear. One man I knew well had railed against MR-GO for years—Henry “Junior” Rodriguez, the St. Bernard Parish president. A descendant of eighteenth-century Spanish settlers called Los Isleños, who once inhabited islands in the lakes south of the city, Junior Rodriguez is massive presence at three hundred pounds. With a silver mane and a fondness for cowboy boots, Junior is a native son of an area where many families rely on commercial fishing, or earn their livelihoods on the river or in the oil industry. Junior Rodriguez is a force of nature. To say that he hated MR-GO, dug through coastal wetlands in his political territory, is a huge understatement; he shouted about it to anyone who would listen. He said other things I prefer not to put in a book. Building MR-GO destroyed twenty thousand acres of marshland as the Army Corps of Engineers dredged an artery five hundred feet wide to create a shipping channel to move cargo from the Mississippi River to the Gulf. It was finished in 1963.

  In 2001, Christopher Hallowell published Holding Back the Sea, a prescient book on the crisis of Louisiana’s wetlands: “Erosion from ships and storms has gouged it 2,000 feet wide and made it a freeway to New Orleans for any hurricane that happens to come from the right direction,” wrote Hallowell. “The surrounding marsh, now vulnerable to storms and salt water, has all but died . . . along with 40,000 acres of mature cypress trees. Now, storm surges can invade the marsh through the straight-arrow channel and smash into New Orleans.” That is exactly part of what happened with Hurricane Katrina.

  As I stood in the operations center in Baton Rouge, calling officials, allies, and friends across the southern parishes, Junior Rodriguez was on my mind. His cell didn’t answer. The levees, we learned later from federal investigations, had been compromised through faulty design and maintenance by the Army Corps of Engineers. Since then, the levees have had a major $14.6 billion upgrade. Yet even today, if you know that a mammoth storm is heading toward the New Orleans area, the smart thing to do is go far away as fast as you can.

  I was in regular contact that Sunday with Doug Thornton, the manager of the Louisiana Superdome, and officials in parishes near New Orleans. The Superdome had taken in twenty-five thousand people—for the most part, poor people who had no cars or means to leave. And it was bad in there. In my last call to Thornton at about 2:00 A.M. on Monday morning, he yelled over the din, “It’s really bad in here! Water’s coming in from the roof!” Then the phone went dead.

  I finally got through to Junior Rodriguez in Chalmette, the parish seat of St. Bernard. He was on the second floor of the municipal complex, the first floor was under water, and he was nervous. “The water is rising. We don’t know how far it’s going to get.” Junior’s phone went dead.

  I caught a few hours of sleep overnight in the Emergency Operations Center. On Monday, we got word from General Bennett Landreneau of the Louisiana National Guard that the storm surge from the Gulf had crashed into the St. Bernard Parish levee.

  On Tuesday, the day after Katrina hit, I went into New Orleans with Department of Wildlife and Fisheries first responders—tough, capable people who knew how to navigate rivers. They had boats, which were crucial. We headed toward New Orleans from Baton Rouge on I-10, and on passing Louis Armstrong airport, began to see downed power lines and cars sitting on the side of the interstate as people waited for rescue. We had to snake along River Road to get from Jefferson Parish into the city, and as we made our way onto Magazine Street, with the zoo on our right and Audubon Park on our left, the city had the eerie silence of a ghost town. Over the next few days, as we drove back and forth from Baton Rouge to get boats into flooded neighborhoods and pull people to safety, the city I adored for its greenery had turned upside down—there were branches and upended roots everywhere. And it had an awful stench. You drive through your day and take sounds for granted—birds warbling, cars chugging, children yelling at play. New Orleans was brown and still, as if a bomb had hit, shutting off sound.

  We made it downtown to the Superdome, where I had memories of Saints games, concerts, and extravaganzas during Carnival season. Now people were bunched on the sidewalks out front, trying to escape the heat and miserable conditions in the Dome. Doug Thornton gave me a list of immediate needs—water, ice, food, and transportation to carry people stuck in that fetid environment out of the flooded city, out to someplace else. I jotted down the things he needed and kept moving.

  Because of Louisiana’s history of hurricanes and flooding, I had long been interested in emergency response mechanisms, how to connect on-the-ground assets with the highest reaches of government. Trivial as it may seem, you need a clear command and control, clear coordination, and clear communication. I needed to get solid information back to the EOC in
Baton Rouge. But because cell towers were down, there were no communications with Baton Rouge until I could get back physically. Five years later, when I became mayor of New Orleans, I was obsessed with coordinating City Hall and law enforcement on crowd control, given the major ball games and entertainment events we have throughout the year—and even more so in advance of storms. The wave of mass shootings had not hit New Orleans in 2005, though when it did we made policy changes with the police. Not a day goes by that my team doesn’t hear me talk about downline logistics, that the weakest link will destroy the best strategy. Without a stable line of communications, you invite failure.

  When you see the city you love so wounded, your first thought is to rescue as many people as you possibly can. But on leaving the Superdome we had to go next door to the Hyatt Regency hotel, behind City Hall, to meet with Mayor Ray Nagin and coordinate with the city. The mayor and Governor Blanco were very different personalities; it was no secret that they got along poorly. She was a former teacher, legislator, and hands-on veteran of state government; he had been a cable company executive with a background in sales. Blessed with charm and a natural charisma, Nagin vaulted into office with no experience in governing, nor in getting along with officials you may not like. In politics you have to deal with people you do not like if you want to deliver for the common good. I had gotten along well enough with Nagin, but when I found him on an upper floor of the hotel, I became concerned.