The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  Riley also helped set up an emergency operations center on the ninth floor of City Hall. While it would be headed by Assistant Police Chief Danny Lawless, a whole beehive of representatives—from the state police, harbor police, National Guard, Coast Guard, Air National Guard, Homeland Security, fire department—would be ensconced there. For some reason it never seemed to dawn on any of these official representatives that they were in the bowl, that if City Hall flooded there would be no command center. When asked if this kind of consolidation was smart, Riley stiffened, claiming it made perfect sense. “Every storm we’d been through,” he said, “that command center at City Hall had been sufficient.” For all his street smarts, Riley, like most city officials, ignoring the Pam exercises and the five-part Times-Picayune doomsday series, felt like a man on top of his game. He was going to ride out Katrina at police headquarters on 715 Broad Street with his men—the men who were his brothers of the shield.

  In most cities, first-rate police officers garnered the respect of its citizens. But not in New Orleans. For residents, the problems of the projects were intertwined with the attitude of the police. But the housing projects at least possessed the virtue of being located in the inner city. Hardworking families living there could walk to work or ride the trolley or the bus. Many project residents, therefore, didn’t own a car. Truth be told, they couldn’t afford one. When the St. Thomas, Desire, and Florida projects had been condemned, as well as the Melpomene project in Central City, new housing for the evicted needed to be found. Two bad solutions were hatched by City Hall, both contributing mightily to the unfolding Katrina tragedy. The first blunder in social engineering occurred in 2000, when those families living in the defunct St. Thomas project were shipped to live at the St. Bernard project in the Seventh Ward. It soon became known in the black community as “St. Bathomas.” What the merger accomplished was an increase in violence, as gangs fought over drug turf. This mistake of ghettoizing thousands in “St. Bathomas” contributed to New Orleans’s skyrocketing murder rate. The other unhelpful local-state solution was to relocate residents of other projects to New Orleans East, a long ten-mile drive from downtown, in areas like Little Woods and Michould Boulevard. This was where Cedric Richmond saw the last Little League game of the New Orleans summer. Packed into flimsy apartment complexes, ugly condos, and tiny houses near Lake Pontchartrain, these residents had no reliable public transportation. Carjacking became epidemic in New Orleans East. Many of those new to the neighborhood had worked in what blacks called the “servant industry,” toiling as hotel maids, parking attendants, or domestic help for well-to-do whites. It was an honest living. Suddenly, with their relocation, they had no easy way to get to work downtown. Singer Aaron Neville, a resident of New Orleans East, gave the failed relocation a name, the “Outer City Blues,” and even wrote an unrecorded song about it.

  These powerless city poor were what sociologist Michael Harrington once called “the Other America”—those living in desperate poverty, living on minimum wage or welfare checks, hidden from the view of the mainstream, and often denied basic services, like proper sewage, reliable electricity, or decent schools. On any given day, you could encounter them redeeming aluminum cans at Walgreens on St. Charles or holding cardboard signs asking for money around Lee Circle. They didn’t hear about Katrina on television, for a simple reason: they didn’t own a set. Even if they did hear about the storm, they didn’t have the money to leave. They had no credit cards with which to rent a car and reserve a motel room in Dallas, Memphis, Little Rock, or Baton Rouge. Poorly educated, and often illiterate, they couldn’t figure out what all the evacuation commotion was about. With no driver’s license or other form of identification, some were afraid the NOPD would arrest them at city-run shelters or handcuff them for hitchhiking on I-10.

  V

  At 4 P.M. on Saturday, the Louisiana State Police turned over all lanes to outward traffic on four New Orleans interstate highways. The metro area’s two toll roads, the Crescent City Connection and the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, were now free. Called “contra-flow,” the redirected traffic represented the one plan that the state had worked out in enough detail to operate effectively in the face of Katrina. Governor Blanco oversaw the creation of the surprisingly complex contra-flow plan after the bottleneck traffic debacle caused by the approach of Hurricane Ivan in September 2004. Later, when preparing to testify before a congressional committee, Blanco offered a defense of her contra-flow plan. She rightly pointed out that her plan had been designed in collaboration with appropriate parish leaders and that, as bad as Katrina was, it “would have been far worse if the initial evacuation had not been so efficient and safe.”24

  Without question, Blanco’s contra-flow plan saved lives. All of New Orleans’s hospitals, for example, started evacuating patients—those they could move—in a reliably easy fashion. At every hospital, supervisors decided not to move critically ill patients; Charity Hospital, for example, the oldest continuously operating hospital in the country, had fifty beds occupied in its intensive care unit.25 A group of doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, and other staff were staying behind to take care of them. “I was assigned as teaching physician for the infectious diseases unit on the ninth floor of the hospital,” Ruth Berggren later wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine. “There were eighteen patients in the unit, of whom four had active tuberculosis and thirteen had opportunistic infections related to HIV and AIDS. We also had a boarder from surgery—with a complicated gunshot wound and vascular access problems.”26

  Even with contra-flow, however, traffic moved at a snail’s pace, and by late Saturday afternoon, it was virtually impossible to reserve a motel room in towns as far north in Louisiana as Alexandria, Monroe, and Shreveport. Prophecies of bad weather for the Gulf South area had reached a saturation point. Still, cars were making hasty dashes about, drivers looking for the last flashlight batteries and bottled water in each vulnerable parish.

  One person who was extremely worried that City Hall wasn’t recognizing the devastation a Category 3, 4, or 5 hurricane would wreak was the outspoken Nick Felton, president of the New Orleans Firefighters and captain of Engine Company 21. Six feet tall, with salt-and-pepper hair, Felton was a twenty-two-year veteran, a hardboiled, no-nonsense professional, the kind who would have rushed up the fateful stairs of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. He was appalled that the New Orleans Fire Department didn’t own a single boat. At a ninth-floor EOC meeting he spoke bluntly about the Big One, telling Superintendent of Fire Charles Parent and Deputy CAO Cynthia Sullivan-Lear that he felt firemen needed water reserves, compensation for working the storm, family protection, and food supplies. If flooding occurred, and natural gas pipelines broke, they were going to be putting out raging infernos for a week. When he was finished with his demands, Sullivan-Lear—with not even an iota of tact—told Felton he was being “an alarmist.” Felton couldn’t believe she was copping a lackadaisical attitude when he was in crisis mode. “They just couldn’t comprehend that this was it,” Felton said. “I kept saying, ‘Aren’t you guys watching the Weather Channel?’ I had been through Camille and Betsy and this damn thing, at least on the Weather Channel, looked far worse.”27

  An hour after the contra-flow changes were put into effect, at 5 P.M., Governor Blanco arrived in New Orleans for a press conference with Mayor Nagin. They were visibly uncomfortable with each other, a crackle of tension in the air. They jointly announced that a voluntary evacuation order had been issued for the city in anticipation of Katrina. The year before, Ivan had been on a similar path, heading straight for New Orleans, but it swerved eastward at the last minute, missing the city. So, as the illogic went, Katrina would probably do the same thing. Hope had become Nagin’s main evacuation strategy. “We strongly advise citizens,” the mayor said, “to leave at this time.” In the ears of longtime New Orleanians, his cautionary words ringed of the chance for yet another hurricane reprieve. “We want everyone to not panic,” Nagin contin
ued, “but to take this very seriously. Every projection still has it hitting New Orleans in some form or fashion.”28

  In some form or fashion—a New Orleans resident could take that to mean a lot of things, most of which were far removed from the pessimism of the National Hurricane Center’s latest bulletin. Issued that afternoon, Advisory 18 warned that “there remains a chance that Katrina could become a Category 5 hurricane before landfall.”29 That should have been Nagin’s lead. It was, at least, in the Times-Picayune’s early Sunday edition (which came out Saturday night). The paper ran a big-block headline: “Katrina Takes Aim.”30 The chain of responsibility for urban evacuation, highly debated after Katrina, was really quite simple. The pecking order, according to protocol, was (a) the mayor; (b) the New Orleans director of Homeland Security (a political appointee of the mayor, who reports to the mayor); (c) the governor; (d) the secretary of Homeland Security; and (e) the U.S. President. Both Nagin and Blanco, even before Katrina hit, recognizing they were unable to cope with the impending doom, were already chastising the federal government for New Orleans’s rank unpreparedness. The blame game had begun even before Katrina made landfall.

  VI

  Unlike New Orleans’s hurricane evacuation strategy, tracking hurricanes was the responsibility of the federal government. Toward that end, Congress had authorized the U.S. Weather Bureau in March 1870. Based in Washington, D.C., it was soon the hub of twenty-four far-flung observatories, connected by telegraph and constantly monitoring meteorological conditions in order to help communities prepare for such climatic curses as heat waves, blizzards, and hurricanes. By 1899, the bureau had opened a hurricane-forecasting center on the island of Jamaica. When the bureau, a component of the Commerce Department, had its centennial, it was renamed the National Weather Service.

  During tropical storm season, August to October, it was the National Hurricane Center, a unit of the National Weather Service, that always took the lead. Based on the campus of Florida Atlantic University, the modern NHC was founded in 1955 and put into the specific business of storm prediction. Everyone seemed to be fascinated by how the center collected its cyclonic data: the NHC grew into a popular tourist attraction, with busloads of schoolchildren, among many others, taking trips to western Dade County to see hydrogen-filled weather balloons launched twice daily and to hear about the Doppler Radar Network, which covers much of the Gulf of Mexico.

  When a powerful weather disturbance first blipped on the radar screen, NHC responded in dramatic fashion, sending manned twin-jet Gulf-stream IV-SP aircraft straight into the eye of the storm to bring back detailed reading on wind force and barometric pressure. If the depression was a tropical storm (i.e., sustained wind speeds between 39 and 73 mph), the NHC alerted governmental agencies, including FEMA and the Department of Defense, regarding the potential threat. The media and civil defense authorities in affected areas were also contacted. Using the Saffir-Simpson Scale, meteorologists could quickly communicate the severity of a storm. Typically, word that any hurricane ranked at Category 3 or above aroused intense interest. Only in the rarest instances was a personal appeal also required.

  Late in the day on Saturday, August 27, Max Mayfield, the mild-mannered, bespectacled scientist who had been the director of the NHC since 2000, grew concerned at the lack of activity in advance of Katrina. As he put it later, he wanted to do “everything that I could do” to warn the country that the Gulf Coast—and New Orleans in particular—was in grave danger. Mayfield made scores of telephone calls, in addition to participating in a teleconference with Michael Brown of FEMA, as he tried to convince officials at all levels that even though Katrina was still out in the Gulf and could go anywhere, his data showed that the hurricane was on a direct track to New Orleans. In case his meteorological explanations were not persuasive enough, he used language anyone could understand. “This is really scary,” Mayfield insisted. “The guidance we get and common sense and experience suggest this storm is not done strengthening.”31

  What concerned Governor Blanco on Saturday evening was that Mayor Nagin, for whatever reason, just wasn’t taking Katrina seriously enough. When she was back at EOC in Baton Rouge, Mayfield telephoned her. They had developed a warm, special friendship over the years. Once again, he wanted the governor to know that Katrina was barreling Louisiana’s way and that he “was sorry.” His voice was maudlin, full of trepidation, so Blanco conveyed to him that she understood. “Thank you, Max,” she said. “But you need to talk to Ray Nagin.” A frustrated Mayfield said, “I’ve been trying to talk to him, but I can’t reach him.” An exasperated Blanco, sympathizing with Mayfield, said, “I’ve got his cell number. Give me your number and I’ll call him.” So Blanco tracked Nagin down. He was at a restaurant with his wife. “So, I gave Nagin Mayfield’s number,” she said. “I put them in touch.”32

  Virtually every local official in the Hurricane Belt states—except Ray Nagin—knew of Max Mayfield. He was a critical figure in the most important role of government, protecting people from danger. The mayor later recalled, “I got a call from the head of the hurricane center, Max somebody…and he said, ‘Mr. Mayor, I’ve never seen a storm like this. I’ve never seen conditions like this.’”33

  Nagin claimed that he ordered the mandatory evacuation of his city after speaking with Mayfield on Saturday night, but there is no evidence that he acted then. He certainly did not make any public announcement. One of the others who received Mayfield’s message was Walter Maestri, emergency director of Jefferson Parish, which abuts New Orleans on the south. A longtime hurricane watcher, he immediately called Jeff Smith, the deputy director of the Louisiana Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness. Maestri impatiently asked if Mayfield had called Smith yet. “He said, yes, he had received the call,” Maestri recalled later. “So I said, ‘Then you know what he’s sharing?’ And he says, ‘Yes, but the storm right now’—and I said, ‘Please, please. You’ve indicated you don’t know Max. Let me tell you. When he calls you like that, he’s telling you you need to be ready, be prepared.’”34

  On CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, on January 20, 2006, Nagin, to his credit, stopped passing the blame and took personal responsibility for not properly preparing New Orleans for Katrina. “There’s…things that I would do totally different now,” he told Cooper. “I wish I had talked to Max Mayfield earlier, number one…so the possibility of a mandatory evacuation would have been done 24 hours earlier…[w]hen I got that call, and he was so emphatic and so passionate, we had never—this city had never done a mandatory evacuation in its history. I immediately called my city attorney and said, look, in the morning, I don’t care what you have to do. Figure out a way for us to do this. I wish I had done that earlier.”35

  For all of the weak, confused, and bureaucratic messages from government officials, there were many who heard the NHC warnings and decided on evacuation pronto. Elizabeth Daigle, of the New Orleans suburb of Metairie, was determined to leave town on Saturday evening. At forty-four, she had heard warnings before and had even survived one major hurricane, 1965’s Betsy, which killed sixty-five people in New Orleans. “We just have a bad feeling about this one,” she explained, “We just don’t know. That’s what’s scary.”36 Likewise, Garden District resident Janine Butscher, originally from Oxfordshire, England, was planning to stay in New Orleans for Katrina. Then she woke up on Saturday and talked to her next-door neighbor, who worked for Schlumberger, an oil services company specializing in geophysical data collection and analysis. “He said his company had been notified to get out. That this was the Big One. He scared me so much that I grabbed my two-year-old daughter and drove to Houston in my flannel pajamas.”37 Real estate broker Judy Oudt, famous locally for selling Garden District mansions, had planned to stay in her Lee Circle condominium and ride out the storm. But when she visited her local pharmacy, she saw hordes of semipanicked locals filling their shopping carts with hurricane provisions. The line to pay was twenty people long. “Hell, if this many people
are freaking out,” she said, “so will I.”38 She walked out of the pharmacy with no purchases and headed to Seaside, Florida.

  It took others just a little longer than Daigle, Butscher, and Oudt to get out of town. Andrew Travers, a graduate student in history at Tulane, for example, spent his Saturday evening at Pat O’Brien’s French Quarter bar, downing “hurricanes,” a potent rum–fruit juice concoction created in the early 1940s by reckless revelers waiting out a ferocious tropical storm. (According to New Orleans chef Emeril Lagasse, the best recipe for a “hurricane” was 2 ounces light rum, 2 ounces dark rum, 2 ounces grenadine, 1 ounce orange juice, 1 ounce sour mix, 1 teaspoon of sugar, and orange wedges for garnish.)39 O’Brien’s was packed that night. It was a giant “hurricane party” with cocktails being pounded back by rebels determined to booze and boogie their way through the natural disaster. (In August 1969, a group of young people drank hurricanes at a beachside party in Pass Christian, Mississippi, daring Camille to make landfall. It did, and twenty of them drowned.) When Travers sobered up the following morning, he looked at CNN on television and learned that Katrina seemed to be developing into a Category 5 storm. “They were rehashing the doomsday scenario we’d been talking about for years,” Travers recalled, “a direct hit and broken levees and an American Atlantis.” He telephoned his girlfriend, who had stockpiled water and nonperishables in her apartment and invited a handful of friends to stay through the storm. She wisely called off the would-be survivors party, saying, “It would have been fun, but yeah, we gotta go.” They fled town in a Honda Civic coupe, with two dogs crammed in the backseat.40