THE BUSTED LEVEE BLUES
I seek ye vainly, and see in your place
The shadowy tempest that sweeps through space
A whirling ocean that fills the wall
Of the crystal heaven, and buries all.
And I, cut off from the world, remain
Alone with the terrible hurricane.
—William Cullen Bryant, “The Hurricane”
I
STRANGE TO THINK THAT the editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune started off early Monday morning, even with Katrina taking aim, in a relatively chipper mood. Hurricanes often forged a special camaraderie between Jim Amoss and his reporters. He could feel the electricity in the newsroom and smell the storm. It was exhilarating to lead a team of committed journalists on the front line, poised to offer blanket coverage from landfall to aftermath. Every summer, just when he was feeling deskbound, a touch too complacent, the possibility of the Big One reared its ugly head and Amoss got in combat mode. His hunch about Katrina, however, was that it would strike around Mobile. “I came back from this lunch in Chalmette [on Friday] and into the newsroom and I was just standing around and Mark Schleifstein, our hurricane reporter, happened to be standing next to me,” Amoss said. “I said something about the unremarkable weekend ahead, and Mark looked at me with this strange pallor, with this vacant stare in his eyes, and said, ‘Jim, I have to show you something.’ He motioned me over to his terminal, and on his screen was displayed the latest cone of the hurricane aimed straight at New Orleans.”1
As editor of the newspaper since 1990, Amoss had prepared his company’s offices at 3800 Howard Avenue for hurricanes many times before. Diligently he had ordered extra food for the cafeteria, welcomed employees (and, in some cases, their extended families) to sleep in the newsroom hallways, and shooed everybody away from the storm-vulnerable windows. Regardless of whether Katrina was a Category 1 or 5, he planned on bringing out a newspaper Tuesday morning. As the cliché went, come hell or high water, there would be exclusive coverage of the breaking news in his pages. Inside his third-floor office hung framed front pages from the now defunct New Orleans States-Item with World War II headlines like “Invasion” (June 7, 1944) and “Germany Surrenders” (May 8, 1945). Who knew, maybe late Monday he might have to run a historic banner of his own for Tuesday that read “Bull’s-eye,” “Direct Hit,” or “Big One Smashes Big Easy.” But it was just as likely the bravado headline would read, as it usually did during hurricane season, “Dodged Bullet Again” or “Alabama Shore Takes Brunt.” That’s what was great about both the newspaper racket and the hurricane season—they were ultimately unpredictable.
The fifty-seven-year-old Amoss looked like a Hollywood casting agent’s perfect big-city newspaper editor. The native New Orleanian was conscientious and fair-minded and had a deep feel for local history. Even though he had spent ten years of his childhood in Germany and Belgium, where his father worked for Lykes Brothers steamship company, his life orbited around his hometown. The trilingual Amoss graduated from Yale, was a Rhodes scholar, and was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam war.
Instead of doing military service, he had worked as an orderly, often pushing patients’ gurneys from ward to morgue. In the Massachusetts hospital where he was assigned, he witnessed firsthand the plight of the poor and underinsured. Without universal health care, children died unnecessarily of everything from asthma to pneumonia. Prenatal care just didn’t exist for the underclass. “Being in the gritty world of Boston City Hospital, which is kind of like Charity Hospital in New Orleans, cured me of any desire to be a professor of comparative literature or some other such marketable skill,” he said. “I met reality head-on, saw how tough life was for average people. I wanted to write about the real pulse of life that I was experiencing. It gradually dawned on me that journalism might be something I was able to do.”2
So Amoss came home to New Orleans, and got a job as a States-Item intern for the summer of 1974. He handled general assignments, covering auto fatalities, drug-related murders, suburban fires, city council squabbles—standard cub-reporter fare. “The paper was heavily dependent on street sales,” he recalled. “So crime was played up.” For six years, Amoss worked as a reporter and loved every minute of it. He broke some big stories with his investigative partner, Dean Baquet (now managing editor at the Los Angeles Times), on such topics as police corruption in the French Quarter and mafia boss Carlos Marcello’s crime syndicate. By the time New Orleans became a one-paper town in 1980—the Times-Picayune acquired the States-Item and dropped the name—Amoss was St. Bernard Parish bureau chief. He was promoted to an editorship two years later and ascended the ladder during the 1980s. When he took the helm in 1990, he knew every aspect of the Times-Picayune inside and out. “I took pride in knowing my community,” he said. “Everything that happened in the New Orleans area was of interest to me and my paper.”
As Katrina hit New Orleans, a calm Amoss was stretched out in his sleeping bag, in front of the very office where he had been hired when Richard M. Nixon was about to resign. Things had changed in the ensuing thirty-one years, but the paper was still a place where young talent was nurtured. Amoss, in fact, was a talent scout. Mentoring came easy for him. He always saw a flicker of himself in those upwardly mobile reporters trying to succeed in the Newhouse empire, the chain that owned the Times-Picayune. His patience with guiding new blood straight out of schools of journalism—particularly Louisiana State University—was legendary. He always had around him a bevy of talented young journalists. And who knew? Perhaps the next Ida Tarbell, David Halberstam, or Maureen Dowd had just joined his stable. Without exception these newcomers wholeheartedly admired Amoss—even if, behind his back, they sometimes ridiculed his pop culture doltness (for instance, he mistook Rambo for the French symbolist Rimbaud). But his employees truly respected his unflinching Brooks Brothers demeanor and the courtesy he gave every honest request for an assignment. You had to. Under Amoss’s dedicated leadership, the paper won the 1997 Pulitzer Prizes for both public service and editorial cartooning; the Times-Picayune’s first since its inception in 1837.
What it all added up to was that Amoss—with his wife and two kids safely evacuated to Texas and his Esplanade Avenue home boarded up—was in for the Katrina long haul. Whatever it took, the Times-Picayune ink barrels would spill damage assessments and death tolls. “It was a community obligation,” he later explained. “I wasn’t thinking about getting out and I don’t think anybody else was. We’d planned on not only weathering the storm here, but also weathering the aftermath here. We’d get up this system of computers powered by generators in the core of the building, just for the purpose of putting together the newspaper, designing pages electronically, and then transmitting them to some remote location, where the paper would theoretically be printed and trucked back to New Orleans. We were still in that mode as of Monday morning, when the storm was at its height. We thought, We’re going to be here two or three days and then things will gradually return to normal and we’ll be able to get power restored and run our presses.”3
Theoretically this sounded noble. Such confidant musings, however, didn’t last long. One of the big plate-glass windows on the business office floor exploded Monday morning. Katrina had arrived. Amoss wondered how his intrepid reporters deployed in suburban New Orleans were holding up in the colossal winds. Word was out, through Garland Robinette on WWL radio, that the Industrial Canal levee had breached and the Ninth Ward was flooding. Times-Picayune photographer Ted Jackson volunteered to go to the area around the St. Claude Avenue Bridge. Amoss was anxious to see those photographs; they would be early indicators of how his old stomping ground St. Bernard Parish was holding up. And he also knew the National Guard was holed up in the Ninth Ward, at the Jackson Barracks along the Mississippi. If the Industrial Canal levee had breached—as the rumor mill was asserting—400 Guardsmen wouldn’t be able to be first responders. Instead they would have to save themselves from what the early-twentieth-
century journalist Frank Harris called “the illimitable prospect of the waste of water.”4
Phone service at the Times-Picayune that morning was sketchy, but occasionally Amoss tapped into an open line and was told horrific stories about the devastation in coastal parishes. All he could mutter was “Poor Grande Isle,” “Poor Buras,” or “Poor Venice.” Since the building was operating on just a couple of generators, there was no air-conditioning. By noon, the staff was transported back to the days when Southerners used hand fans and ate pecan pie on porches. All the Picayune employees suddenly sympathized with what the heat-exhausted throngs were enduring at the Superdome; it was enough to turn you into Camus’s Meursault, losing your equilibrium in the heat with a pistol in hand. “We still hadn’t put two and two together,” Amoss recalled. “What we didn’t realize was what Katrina meant, personally, for us as a news operation. We knew that it was disastrous, but still pictured ourselves operating out of Howard Avenue and reporting on the disaster in the days ahead. It was only really that evening that we noticed that the water was creeping up on our front doorstep here. We kept looking at it, thinking, This is really deep for rainwater. When’s it going to start draining out? We knew the pumps were incapacitated, but we thought it gradually had to subside. We were downtown; the London Avenue Canal and 17th Street Canal levee breaches, which Doug MacCash and James O. Byrne reported on from their bicycles, and the Industrial Canal in the Ninth Ward were all pretty far away from us.”5
II
Around two on Monday afternoon, two of the Times-Picayune’s indefatigable team, features editor James O. Byrne and art critic Doug MacCash, volunteered to do a reconnaissance mission, to see what damage the 17th Street Canal and London Avenue Canal breaches had wrought. They were an unlikely pair, but it was an unlikely hour. Both had brought twenty-speed bicycles to work—Byrne a forest green Diamond Back and MacCash a blue-gray Giant model. Venturing outside the Times-Picayune building, MacCash later recalled, they saw “trees down in front and a good bit of flooding, but we didn’t recognize it as being catastrophic flooding. The industrial park in which the Times-Picayune sat frequently flooded. But it was worse than that. Looting had begun, and we could stand in our back parking lot and watch people carrying stolen furniture on Earhart Boulevard. That was our first glimmer that this was not business as usual. Things were different.”6 According to the forty-five-year-old Byrne, looters had already ransacked Coleman’s retail outlet near their headquarters. “We knew it was going to be dicey on the streets,” Byrne said, “that no business was safe.”7 Born in San Jose and raised mostly in Denver, Byrne was a proud Irish American. As of Monday afternoon, he didn’t know if his Lakeview home had survived: the verdict for the area along Lake Pontchartrain was still out.
The first rule of hurricane reporting was “See the damage for yourself,” so the two men cycled out into the residual winds. MacCash was in shorts and waterproof sandals, Byrne in standard jeans and T-shirt ensemble. They were fortified with granola bars and bottled water. Byrne had also stashed two fine bottles of champagne in his office, so when they came back, if the mood struck, they could celebrate their surviving the twelfth named storm of the season. With helmets strapped on, they waded and cycled their bikes up I-10, headed toward the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway. There was no traffic, of course, and they certainly didn’t see other bikers. Their first destination was Byrne’s home on Louisville Avenue. Was it damaged? Did the street flood? Were people really stranded on rooftops? They would soon find out. They pedaled, wind in their faces, onto an overpass. They could see the flooding was extensive, kicking up whitecaps over miles of residential streets. Everywhere they gazed over the omnipresent water were triangles, rooftops peeking out of a glassy lake like shy survivors. They stopped at the Old Metairie Road exit, which was severely flooded, and passed a failed pumping station. St. Patrick Cemetery, where corpses were buried in mausoleums, was likewise inundated, and they kept a watchful eye out for caskets. What happened next was straight out of a Mad Max movie. A spiky-haired punker suddenly emerged from the floodwater, introducing himself as “Grizzly Bear.” He had been stranded in Metairie and decided to “swim the pond” to make it to the French Quarter, where he had friends in a garret. He spoke in alarmed survivalist terms about how widespread the flooding was. “Okay,” MacCash recalled thinking, “we’re in for a strange run.”8
Byrne and MacCash had their own obstacles to overcome. They lifted their bicycles over a highway fence and headed to the railroad tracks, which, they knew, stood on high ground. By following the train tracks, they eventually made it to the quaint Plantation Coffee House on Canal Boulevard—or saw it drowned from a distance—the road a torrent of raging water, like the Missouri River way up in the Rocky Mountains after spring thaw. “For James it was clear that he was wiped out, that his house had to be real bad,” MacCash said. “The water was moving so quickly that I watched a watercooler flow under the railroad tracks, toward the city and then make a left. The path of water, at that point, was flowing from Lakeview up Canal Boulevard and making a left into City Park. It was very distinct. Roads were now rivers.” Although Byrne didn’t see his home with his own eyes, he knew it was lost. He used his cell phone to call his wife in Shreveport and, quite astonishingly, reached her. No punches were pulled. “Our house is gone,” he said. You had to admire a man who could give bad news so cleanly.
Before long, Byrne and MacCash ran into Generation Z first responders who had saved a mildly retarded woman who thought she could walk across the riverlike Canal Boulevard. The current snagged her. If nineteen-year-old Joshua Bruce hadn’t harnessed her in, MacCash recalled, she would have surely drowned.9 The only organized rescue going on was one NOPD officer trying to throttle-start a clunker speedboat. “We asked the officer what the Coast Guard was doing,” Byrne said. “He didn’t know—they had no communication. I knew then and there the people in Lakeview were in deep trouble.”
On their bicycles Byrne and MacCash followed the levee along the Marconi Canal and eventually got near to Lake Pontchartrain. People flushed out of their houses by Katrina were wandering about in chest-deep water, only a few screaming or yelling or even crying about a lost dog or heirlooms. Most seemed in shock. For a moment the Picayune team stood still and watched the Southern Yacht Club in Bucktown burn to ruins. The seventeen-hundred-member institution traced its heritage back to 1849, making it the second oldest yacht club in America. Over the decades it had survived good times, wars, bust years, yellow fever epidemics, and storms of varying magnitudes—but not Katrina.10 The stately club had served as the home dock for some of the best-designed yachts and sailboats in the city (and as training ground for four Olympic medalists). Now nothing was left but embers and a billow of smoke.
As dusk approached that Monday, Coast Guard helicopters turned on their searchlights to survey the damage to Lake Pontchartrain. The Filmore Street Bridge over the Marconi Canal, which didn’t breach, had become a refugee camp for flood escapees. Some of the misfortunates had been left there by an engine house, the first responders in crippled Lakeview. “What struck me about the encounter was that people were happy to see reporters,” Byrne recalled. “They knew that somebody would tell their story. They were right. We did. But they also believed that people would rush to their assistance. This was America, after all. Boy, were they wrong in that regard!”11
Around Lake Terrace, a wealthy subdivision along Lake Pontchartrain, Byrne and MacCash stumbled upon a couple of carefree yahoos watching the water rise, sipping cocktails with ice made from their home generator. “Hey,” one of the guys shouted territorially at the reporters. “If you see liquor bottles down there, don’t take ’em! They’re ours.” Like Barataria Bay pirates, they had already claimed first dibs on the bounty of washed-out booze from a nearby bar. Whiskey bottles and Heineken cans were floating everywhere. Once the men got a little more inebriated, they were going to collect them, like kids hunting for seashells. “Just like New Orleans,” MacCash quipped. �
�Alcohol always matters.”12
Byrne and MacCash scribbled down notes on every flooded structure in distress, for example, the Robert E. Lee Shopping Center (7 feet), Hynes Elementary (8 feet), the Plantation Coffee House (7 feet), Walgreens (8 feet), Blockbuster (7 feet). All the businesses on Harrison Avenue had water to their rooftops. Battery-operated home alarms were going off every five or ten minutes, giving Lakeview a feeling not unlike London in the Blitz. Furiously, they recorded details in their spiral notebooks. “This was my neighborhood so it had special meaning,” Byrne said. “You know, ‘That was my Baskin-Robbins with seven feet of water. That’s where I took my kids.’”
MacCash also had children, two of them, along with his wife, Melanie Tennyson, whom he had evacuated to St. Louis. As an art critic, one with a long graying ponytail and a David Crosby moustache, MacCash was used to bizarre juxtapositions and abstract images. But Lakeview blew his mind like no canvas ever could. Manhole covers had been lifted off, warm water shooting out of them like geysers. Oddly, many flood-ravaged senior citizens they encountered refused aid or assistance. They had survived World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and disco; surely they could handle a flood. Eventually, most of the house alarms died out. Eerily, thousands of frogs croaked in unison like a ghastly swamp chorus. Dogs were stuck in trees. Cats were dead in the water. Scum was rising. Sewers were spewing. Trunks of memories had been lost. A woman in a green summer dress stood on top of her two-story Lakeview home, screaming out to MacCash and Byrne to telephone her dad that she was all right. This request struck Byrne as being ludicrous. “She wasn’t all right,” he said. “She was the furthest thing from it.”
The strange, incongruous experiences didn’t stop. An oddball couple they encountered were watching the brown water rise, saying that they had conducted a scientific experiment and discovered that a house brick was three inches tall (they measured one) and that the floodwater rose a brick every twenty minutes. The couple were clearly crazy as loons. Their primitive measuring system, however, was probably accurate. At one juncture Byrne nonchalantly mentioned to a few strangers that his camera needed a battery. A young boy volunteered his services. “Oh, yeah,” he offered. “I’ve got some batteries.” In typical reckless New Orleans fashion, he dove into the flooded street, swam fifty yards to his gutted house, entered through the front door (and oddly closed it behind him), and eventually brought out a package of AA batteries in a plastic Ziploc bag. “Thanks to him,” Byrne recalled, “we were able to get four or five Lakeview pictures in the next edition.”13
The Great Deluge Page 23
