The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  Parties all over town were ending early on Saturday. Andy Ambrose, the son of the late historian Stephen E. Ambrose, was supposed to be celebrating his forty-second birthday that afternoon. A soulful rhythm-and-blues vocalist, Andy planned to party at the Maple Leaf Bar on Oak Street, a smoky music club that showcased New Orleans’s finest talent. The bar was holding a midsummer Mardi Gras party featuring the legendary George Porter, founder of the Meters, the seminal New Orleans funk band that influenced everybody from Phish to Widespread Panic. Ambrose decided to forgo his party, though. Instead, he picked up a hammer and spent his birthday boarding up his neighbors’ windows on St. John Court in Mid-City, on the Carrollton Avenue side of the bayou. “Saturday evening, people who said they were going to stay put for the storm started to have second thoughts,” Ambrose recalled. “By midnight it was ominous. The town was desolate: my wife and I decided to skedaddle. At 3 A.M. we drove to Columbia, Mississippi, and got a room.”41

  On Saturday morning U.S. Senator David Vitter, a Jefferson Parish resident, woke up to learn that a major hurricane was headed toward Louisiana. He just stared at the television with his wife, Wendy, and shook his head. He had one prevailing thought: Welcome to the Big One. “We both said let’s not kid around,” Vitter recalled. “We’re leaving.” While his wife started packing the minivan, Vitter called his brother Al, a mathematics professor at Tulane, and his sister Martha in Atlanta. They were worried about their mother. She lived on Vincennes Place in Uptown, which was susceptible to flooding. Moreover, she had an enlarged heart. Around-the-clock medical attention—or the possibility of it—was necessary. A decision was made to evacuate her by airplane to Atlanta, ASAP. With that plan in motion, David Vitter headed up Highway 61 to Memphis, dropped his family off at a relative’s house, and then flew back down to Louisiana. He was going to remain available in Baton Rouge, much like Mitch Landrieu, at the EOC. Vitter would sleep in a dormitory room provided by the state police and take part in the relief efforts. That Saturday afternoon, however, Vitter couldn’t help but wonder why Mayor Nagin wasn’t calling for the mandatory evacuation of the city. “Hindsight is twenty-twenty,” Vitter later said. “But it was clear to me very early Saturday that, yes, it should have been ordered.”42

  Ronald Mack Jr. of the Seventh Ward thought all those people evacuating on I-10 and I-55 were fools. Everybody knew the Big One always veered east when it approached the mouth of the Mississippi—everyone, that is, except his wife. “I was going to suck it up,” he later recalled. “But she starting nagging me. She made us leave for Houston.”43 Officials could count themselves successful in the cases of Ambrose, Vitter, Travers, Mack, and hundreds of thousands like them. Last-minute evacuation was preferable to no evacuation at all.

  VII

  But there were many who heard the dire predictions for Katrina and decided to stay put. Kenny Bourque, a twenty-two-year-old bartender from the French Quarter, counted himself among their ranks. The only precaution he took, as he brazenly defied meteorologists, was purchasing a life preserver for his dog—just in case of a flood.44 He adhered to the spiritual lament that goes, “Bury me down in New Orleans/so I can spend eternity aboveground/you can flood this town/but you can’t shut the party down/ain’t no drownin’ the spirit.” Street performer Gaetano Zarzana, full of aperçus, told the Houston Chronicle he was going to “have fun and watch God’s fury” and “hang out in Johnny White’s bar on Bourbon Street and watch the flood come up.”45 Then there was Michael Barnett, who decided to hole up in his office on Poydras Street in the central business district, stating on Saturday that he was determined to keep an hourly blog of Katrina. “Like when P. Diddy sang, ‘we ain’t goin’ no where,’” he logged at 8:19 A.M. “Come on with it then, storm. Bring me what ya got. Let’s see who wins.”46 Officials could count themselves powerless in the cases of defiant citizens like Barnett, Bourque, and Zarzana.

  Thousands of healthy, well-informed citizens simply made the personal decision that they didn’t want to leave. Some were traffic-phobic while others believed such natural forces as hurricanes were in the Lord’s hands. A few thousand of the unmovable were gamblers, long ago courting risk like a lover. There was a Good Samaritan contingent who wanted to keep an eye on their neighborhoods, and the doctors and nurses who just couldn’t leave. There were thrill seekers, tarot-card readers, and professional squatters. A parochial pride informed some New Orleanians’ decision to stay; this was their town, by God, and they weren’t going to abandon it in its time of peril. An unusually high number of boat owners stayed, convinced that—worst-case scenario—if their houses flooded, they could just sail away until the water receded. Some people saw Katrina as a chance to hole up and get long-overdue chores done, write delinquent thank-you notes, and file the tax extensions they’d been putting off. Taken all together, these people were a breed unto themselves. As the city emptied out, and New Orleans felt like a forlorn tomb, they had unknowingly volunteered to be first responders in the worst natural disaster in modern U.S. history. A large part of the civic burden of saving the poor, infirm, elderly, and confused in Katrina’s wake would fall on their vigorous shoulders.

  It was getting late for everyone in southeastern Louisiana. Ninety-year-old Amantine Marie Verdin, a member of the Pointe-au-Chien Indian tribe, lived in St. Bernard Parish with her mentally handicapped son Xavier. Another son, Herbert, and other relatives lived nearby. As the storm approached, Herbert’s daughter, Monique Michelle Verdin, drove down from her home in Baton Rouge to check on them all. “When I got to my grandmother’s house that Saturday,” Monique said, “I found her frying fish and cooking shrimp étouffée. My father, Xavier, and my first cousin were all at the house living like it was just another day.” Monique took a box of her grandmother’s keepsakes, and wrote out a list of storm precautions. When she left, though, nothing had much changed. “Clothes were drying on the line outside,” she said. “Xavier was sitting on the porch.”47

  In other arenas, there was only confusion and, under the circumstances, that was an outrage. Benjamin Johnson, a U.S. Marine from 1977 to 1987, was employed as a security guard. “The biggest mistake in New Orleans history was Nagin’s not calling a mandatory evacuation on Thursday or Friday, at the latest,” Johnson declared. “My view was that if it wasn’t mandatory it can’t be a bad storm. I did sneak out under the wire on Sunday. It took me eleven hours to drive from New Orleans to Baton Rouge. But the people in the projects, those I knew, kept saying, ‘Katrina ain’t nothing. They ain’t even askin’ us to leave.’”48

  For others, evacuating in the face of Katrina was not entirely a matter of impetus or money, but of finding help collecting their treasured belongings. Some simply refused to abandon their dogs or cats. The very sick were afraid to be disconnected from their oxygen supply, respirators, or dialysis machines. In the case of the elderly, many suffered from dementia or chronic fatigue, and barely knew what was going on around them. In effect, City Hall deemed automobile drivers the first-class citizens. If you didn’t have a car, you were second-class. As Saturday came to a close, city officials were despicable, ignoring the car-less, not just because they didn’t help such people evacuate, but because they didn’t even know who they were. As far as Mayor Nagin was concerned, it seemed the down-and-outers were an inconvenience to City Hall—pure and simple. There wasn’t much he could do for their welfare so late in the game. And, in many cases, he was right.

  Stone Phillips of NBC’s Dateline—among other journalists—would hound Nagin for his pre-Katrina blunders. He asked Nagin why Regional Transit Authority buses sat idle on Chickasaw Street. Why was the fleet of yellow buses padlocked away on Metropolitan Street? Why weren’t all the buses used to evacuate large numbers of folks? Why was nothing in New Orleans mobilized? Why weren’t National Guard troops in proper post-hurricane position? Why wasn’t there a high-tech hurricane command center? Why weren’t rescue helicopters and evacuation buses standing by on the periphery of the storm, ready to swoop down a
nd rescue Superdome evacuees and the poor when Katrina passed? All Nagin, skirting any personal responsibility, could meekly answer to Stone was “I don’t know.”…Those were questions for someone else.49

  Nearly five months after Katrina, however, under stinging criticism from U.S. senators and congressmen, Nagin admitted guilt, in hesitant fashion, for failing to evacuate his city’s buses before Katrina made landfall. “If I had to do it again,” he told CNN, “I would probably go to the school board, cut a cooperative endeavor agreement with them, move all the city-controlled buses to another section of the state probably up north, so that they’re readily available, and we will just deal with the driver issue later.”50

  VIII

  That Saturday Joe Donchess, executive director of the Louisiana Nursing Home Association, was extremely worried. An Ohio native and a 1975 graduate of Southern University Law School in Baton Rouge, Donchess became the state’s leading voice on issues pertaining to health planning. Ensconced at the EOC in Baton Rouge, Donchess had been closely monitoring the sixty to seventy nursing homes likely to be affected by Katrina. Electricity blackouts were a certainty. That meant elderly patients would be disconnected from life-support machines, alone in the clammy darkness. Evacuating elderly and disabled people on beds and in wheelchairs took time—a couple of days. It was, in fact, a logistical ordeal for them. Every two hours or so on Saturday, Donchess at least e-mailed the nursing homes, updating them on Katrina. There was one major stumbling block regarding New Orleans, and it made him edgy. “Because Mayor Nagin refused to call a mandatory evacuation, the nursing homes didn’t feel compelled to evacuate,” Donchess explained. “It was not my job to tell homes whether to leave, it was up to the mayor…. Nagin and other Orleans Parish officials were dilatory in not calling for a mandatory evacuation earlier. I know, for sure, that twenty-one facilities would have evacuated on Saturday if he had called it. That would have been just enough time for buses to properly bring the patients out of harm’s way.”51

  The dilatory response in New Orleans, however, was not shared by surrounding parishes. In St. Bernard Parish, for example, a mandatory evacuation was declared on Saturday; nevertheless, there were nursing homes that chose to ride out the storm, with tragic results. Donchess was in a difficult position. As he updated the nursing homes about millibars and storm surge predictions, he felt like a nag. Every time he heard back that a nursing home was evacuating, he cheered. By late Sunday twenty-one of the homes had evacuated while around forty hunkered down and sheltered in situ. One reason a number of nursing homes didn’t evacuate was bad memories of Hurricane Ivan. Back in September 2004, when Ivan was in the Gulf, many of these homes had buses pick up their patients and then transport them on I-10. The bumper-to-bumper traffic—and the uncomfortable fact that it took eight hours just to get from New Orleans to Baton Rouge—caused two elderly patients to die in transit. An eighty-six-year-old woman also died of a heart attack when she was evacuated from a nursing home during Hurricane George in 1998.52 The word in the state nursing-home world was that the pre-storm commotion was potentially harder on seniors than the hurricane itself.

  Another problem facing the Nursing Home Association was a shortage of nurses and caregivers. Even in good times the more than three hundred nursing homes in Louisiana were understaffed; when news of Katrina’s path broke, many essential medical assistants left the state for higher ground.53 And finally, transportation was hard to find, and getting more scarce by the hour. “We really needed busing help, and just didn’t get it,” Donchess recalled. “The state office of emergency preparedness didn’t listen to our needs. They thought that because we were an association we surely knew how to evacuate all the nursing homes. That wasn’t the case. We needed a mandatory evacuation, called earlier, and buses to help us move thousands of patients.”54

  Although Donchess was correct that city, parish, and state officials needed to help homes evacuate, the ultimate responsibility lay with the individual homes. At single-story St. Rita’s Nursing Home near Poydras, Louisiana, Coroner Bryan Bertucci pleaded with owner Mabel Mangano to close the facility. The NHC was predicting 140 mph winds and a twenty-foot storm surge for St. Bernard Parish. A Category 3 or 4 storm was nothing to mess around with. “I told her I had two buses and two drivers who could evacuate all seventy of her residents and take them anywhere she wanted to go,” Bertucci recalled. “She told me, ‘I have five nurses and a generator, and we’re going to stay here.’”55

  According to the Times-Picayune, terrible misjudgment was nothing new at St. Rita’s. Back in 1999 the home had been cited twice for endangering the lives of residents and was denied U.S. government funding for more than forty days for failing to rectify the malfeasance. The nursing home didn’t properly stop patients’ infections from spreading. Under constant regulatory heat, St. Rita’s did, in November 2004, finally meet health inspectors’ basic standards. But it was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a good place for your grandparents to spend their twilight years. As Katrina approached, the business practices of Mabel Mangano and her family were putting patients’ lives at great risk. “They had a duty as a standard of care to people who could not care for themselves,” Louisiana Attorney General Charles Foti later said of the Manganos. “If you or I decided we are going to stay, we do it of our own free will…. The people at the nursing home don’t have that chance.”56

  Most of the elderly in New Orleans, however, couldn’t even afford to be cared for in a home like St. Rita’s. Fully one-quarter of the families in New Orleans lived on a per capita annual income of $15,000 or less.57 Even worse, many of the elderly had no family. They were all alone against the storm. And August 31—the last day of the month—was when social security and welfare checks were handed out. Many poor, elderly people just weren’t going to evacuate without that check.

  When it came to hurricane evacuation, there was nothing new or novel about the poor or elderly having a harder time fleeing than the rich. Zora Neale Hurston, in her brilliant 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, captured the helpless attitude African Americans around Lake Okechobee had about an evacuation during the Great Depression. On the evening before a mammoth hurricane was supposed to slam South Florida, Janie Crawford and her boyfriend, Tea Cake, decide to stay at their rickety fishing camp, despite the fact that it was extremely vulnerable to storm surge. “Everybody was talking about it that night,” Hurston wrote. “But nobody was worried. You couldn’t have a hurricane when you’re making seven or eight dollars a day.” Just as in New Orleans on August 27, 2005, Hurston’s economically depressed characters believed they were protected by flood walls and levees. “The folks in the quarters and the people in the big houses further around the shore feared the big lake and wondered,” Hurston wrote. “The people felt uncomfortable but safe because there were the seawalls to chain the senseless monster in his bed. The folks let the people do the thinking. If the castles thought themselves secure, the cabins needn’t worry.”58

  IX

  Even on Saturday at 5 P.M., with the highways leading out of New Orleans crammed with drivers escaping the coming hurricane, nothing much was moving out of poor neighborhoods like the Carver-Desire section of New Orleans East, Lower Ninth, and Tremé. A few people were leaving, but operable buses were a rare sight. And hardly anyone was arriving to help—with some very notable exceptions. Driving into New Orleans on Saturday against the contra-flow traffic was thirty-nine-year-old Willie Walker, senior pastor of Noah’s Ark Missionary Baptist Church, located on South Saratoga Street, about a mile west of the Superdome. The area surrounding his church was a depressingly blighted Central City neighborhood, the domain of dope dealers, garbage heaps, and a high crime rate. Many residents relied on their monthly food stamps just to survive. But the neighborhood also had a rich civil rights history. In 1957, in fact, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was founded in Central City at the Mount Zion Baptist Church, with Martin Luther King Jr. holding court.

  Reverend W
illie, as his parishioners called him, was a true man of God—not the bombastic Bible-thumping kind, but a coolheaded servant of the poor. Born in 1966 at Charity Hospital, Walker was the son of a Marine sergeant who served during the Vietnam war. He may have inherited his exterior toughness from his leatherneck father. But, as in too many African-American households, that father abandoned his family; Walker was only four at the time.

  Walker’s mother, by contrast, was devoted to her four children, always ready to cook up a pot of okra gumbo or to read Psalms out loud. She would have them pray to Jesus as a family, hands clasped and eyes closed. Mrs. Walker worked as a secretary for the New Orleans public schools. Often the gospel records of Reverend James Cleveland and Mahalia Jackson blared out at full volume from their old-time phonograph. Although the Walker kids were all baptized in Noah’s Ark Missionary Baptist Church, he and his two sisters and brother were raised as Catholics, attending St. Raymond on Paris Avenue.