The darkest area of all was around the breached Industrial Canal, the 51?2-mile-long waterway that connects the Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain. Duckworth knew that lock master Michael O’Dowd stayed in the canal’s lock house during the storm and was worried about him. O’Dowd had brought his family to ride out Katrina in the lock house, which had hurricane-proof shutters. In its report on the Industrial Canal break, the National Weather Service said that three to ten feet of flooding was possible. “You’ve got no idea how bad the water got,” O’Dowd, a forty-one-year-old U.S. Army Corps of Engineers veteran, recalled. “I just worried about the poor people who didn’t evacuate.”56
None of Duckworth’s Coast Guard boat team would go AWOL during Katrina—nor did Lieutenant Shelly Decker’s helicopter pilots—even though many of them lost their homes. Every night over the next week Duckworth would ask his exhausted lieutenants and enlisted men, “Are you in the game? Have you heard about your house?” One of the computers in the ICP was set up so the boatmen and helicopter pilots could find their houses on Yahoo! Earth to see whether they had flooded. It was an ironclad Coast Guard rule that when people needed saving no heirloom and brick-and-mortar mourning was allowed. But one lieutenant, Hector Clinton, got off watch and came to make a special appeal to Duckworth. “My house is in Slidell,” Clinton said. “Everything we’ve got is in the house. My wife’s jewelry and everything else. And I’d really like permission to go to my house and gather some stuff.” Duckworth played firm. “Hector,” he said, “we’re in Alexandria. You’ve got to be back on watch. I need you at 1800 hours. You want me to give you permission to drive home to Slidell, more than 200 miles away, when I’m not sure you can get there and come back in one piece? And then I need you to stand watch again?”
Duckworth figured that would do the trick. Stellar lieutenants like Clinton never talked back to superior officers. But he persisted, looking Duckworth straight in the eyes. “Can I please, sir?” Taking a deep breath, pausing for ten or fifteen seconds, Duckworth bit his lip and said, “Just go.” That green light was all Clinton needed. He was Slidell-bound. And sure enough, when it was his time to go back on watch, there he was back in Alexandria, all salutes. Pleased to see him safe, Duckworth walked up to Clinton. “Did you flood?” he asked.
“Yes, sir. About eight feet.”
“Are you in the game?”
And Clinton replied, “I’m in the game, sir. Don’t worry about me, I’m in the game.”
Ever since Katrina had made landfall, Duckworth had been on autopilot, refusing to be emotional about the fact that Venice and Buras and Empire and Belle Chasse, all those marvelous Plaquemines Parish communities he knew so well, had been washed into the Gulf of Mexico. He concentrated on the task at hand and was so pumped up he could barely eat a ham sandwich. But something about Clinton, losing everything but staying on duty for a second shift, brought tears to his eyes. Not wanting Clinton to detect his sentimentality, Duckworth turned his back to him, regained his composure, and barked, “Carry on.” So many of these Coast Guard youngsters had lost their homes. Lost everything. A one-hundred-dollar bill would have meant a lot to them. But they continued to perform, hovering over floodwater in helicopters and saving Katrina victims from roofs. “You know,” Duckworth later said, echoing Warren Riley, “God bless our GIs working overseas. But when they go to sleep and no matter how bad it is, there’s a home somewhere. There’s a home and you’ve got a mental picture of your house and it exists. It’s a reality. A focal point of your life. To watch these Coast Guard people work after Katrina, knowing that home is no more, was humbling. They never—not one of them—put themselves first. I’m proud. That’s the best I can say.”57
Others were also proud of the U.S. Coast Guard. Reporter Amanda Ripley of Time magazine dubbed them “the little agency that could.”58 Stephen Barr of the Washington Post wrote, “Let’s have a round of cheers for the U.S. Coast Guard.”59 Although the Coast Guard had only 45,000 uniformed and civilian employees, they outshone the National Guard, FEMA, the Red Cross, and everybody else rolled into one. The TV images of them plucking stranded Katrina victims off of rooftops in HH-60 Jay-hawk helicopters with drumbeat regularity became the most breathtaking moments of the Great Deluge. Over the ten-day period following Katrina they evacuated more than 33,500 people using orange helicopters and flat-bottom boats. According to Time this was six times more people than the Coast Guard rescued in the entire previous year. “The pace we kept up was amazing,” Duckworth recalled. “When I say we were working around the clock, I mean it. Both boat and air. We were all go, go, go. Every minute of delay meant a possible loss of life.”
Unlike the Marines, who are given macho monikers like “jarheads,” the Coast Guard had long been denigrated in military circles as fey “puddle jumpers.” But just as 9/11 brought a newfound respect to firemen, Katrina did the same for the reputation of the Coast Guard. At the peak of rescue operations they had 62 aircraft, 30 cutters, and 111 small boats stepping up in rescue and recovery operations. They did it all one person at a time. And with virtually no exceptions, they treated the suffering with respect. They didn’t wear their humanity on their patches, it was in their hearts. When Sheriff Jack Stephens of St. Bernard Parish was asked later by the U.S. Accountability Office how to improve FEMA, he said, “I would abolish it. I’d blow up FEMA and ask the Coast Guard what it needs.”60
VIII
Governor Blanco was in a disheartened mood on Monday afternoon. Every time the word “breach” was uttered, she visibly cringed. What she called “the double punch” of Katrina—hurricane winds and surging floodwaters—had left southern Louisiana in dire peril. Murphy’s law was clearly in effect: everything that could go wrong did. Especially concerning the National Guard.
Unlike the Coast Guard, with its Alexandria ICP, the National Guard was in Jackson Barracks in New Orleans, and the 280-acre compound was now swamped by the Industrial Canal breach. The National Guard didn’t have a “Jackson’s Victory” fiddle moment or “The Eighth of January” War of 1812 jubilee, just a Katrina fist in the face. More than 400 Guardsmen were marooned at the barracks at the time of the breach. According to local lore Andrew Jackson had designed the barracks in the 1830s as a fortress against attacks from the British, French, Spanish, and Native Americans. Over the decades its brick walls had intimidated all of those intruders. But not Katrina. “It basically didn’t stop until it got six feet inside the building, and the building was three feet off the ground,” Master Sergeant Stephen Cockerham, of the Louisiana Air National Guard’s 236th Combat Communications Squadron, recalled of the water. “I’d say within fifteen minutes it was six feet deep within the building. We were right in the midst of the strongest winds when the levee broke.” Desperate, Cockerham and others waded into the water to save their truck batteries before their vehicles floated toward Arabi and Chalmette. They would need them for radio communications.61
The Guardsmen were instructed to congregate at the headquarters building, built on higher ground in the 1830s. It had eighteen-inch-thick walls, which withstood the storm’s hammer just fine. Like soldiers looking for reprieve in a foxhole, the Guardsmen took stock of the situation in the safe haven. Many of them, spitting in the eye of Katrina, wanted to go save lives—that’s why they joined the National Guard. Even though most of their equipment was destroyed, they had boats, and they knew their Lower Ninth Ward neighbors probably needed help. With bolt cutters in hand, they swam in the tempest and liberated four or five chained-down boats. All around them was debris. “I was not in favor of staging assets in the Lower Ninth Ward because I feared flooding. Luckily they had gotten the five trucks out of Jackson Barracks at midnight before the Monday storm,” Terry Ebbert recalled. “They were pre-positioned at the Hilton next to the Convention Center. In the hours after we got hit, it’s those Guard trucks that brought us around. I heard about the flooding of Jackson Barracks, but we got some boats out. But, yes, it was a mistake to leave so many assets ther
e.”62
The enemy had arrived at Jackson Barracks without a sword or tomahawk. There was no general calling “Charge!” or horse hoofs galloping to battle. At the Military Museum, housed in an 1837 powder magazine, the water level inside reached ten feet. Like the scene from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn when the Robert E. Lee sinks in the Mississippi River, hundreds of Jackson Barracks historical artifacts were churned into debris. Confederate documents, Civil War knapsacks, and the saddle of General P. G. T. Beauregard were underwater, a muddy circle of wet wood and clayey yellow paper virtually impossible to reclaim. A buffalo soldier mannequin toppled into the water, its head slamming into a brick wall. There were families living at Jackson Barracks who wanted to rescue the heritage crumbling all around them, but there was nothing they could do. The muzzles of antique rifles that used to guard this Mississippi River fortress had become nothing more than scrap metal in the muck.
At Jackson Barracks, like everywhere else, it was the isolation that sent the mind racing. There was no way to know whether the French Quarter or City Park or Hollygrove was underwater. That was the consensus, the one fiasco everybody agreed on—whatever else Katrina did to New Orleans, it had clearly broken down all standard modes of communication. President Bush, in fact, later chose this communication breakdown factor as the one that delayed federal assistance.63 Telephone lines, computer networks, and cable systems were knocked out of service. Many cell phone antennas were damaged or destroyed, making wireless communication in the region extremely patchy. Cellular service for phones registered in the 504 area code was vastly overloaded. Satellite telephones, which cost more than $2,500 to purchase, with commensurate charges for calls, worked perfectly, as long as they were charged up before the deluge. In the aftermath of Katrina, however, virtually no city government official was equipped with a working satellite telephone, even though in 2003 the federal government had provided New Orleans with a $7 million grant to connect all first responders like ambulance drivers, police, and firemen. What had happened to the money? Nagin, a former communications industry executive, was himself without communication after his cell phone battery died. “People that are too hard on Ray need to remember how difficult it was for him to operate,” Boisie Bolinger, a Nagin advisor, said in his friend’s defense. “He couldn’t get in touch with anybody.” But when pressed to explain why Nagin had never procured a satellite telephone and hand-crank recharger before Katrina, Bolinger turned quiet. “That’s a different story,” is all he said. “That’s a fair question.”64
For stranded individuals, the best chance at communication was a handheld computer device, like a BlackBerry or a Treo 650, which sent e-mails using relatively little bandwidth, meaning that the networks were not easily overloaded. The arduous process, however, of typing on a tiny keypad made for abbreviated messages, decreasing their effectiveness. Brief text messages like “I’m ok” or “We survived just fine” or “Any damage?” were common. Renee Marcus, a mother of five, spent Katrina in a high-rise New Orleans condominium with her family. Her mother, however, had stayed at her house across from the New Orleans Country Club. Marcus tried to reach her mom by phone, to no avail. Somehow, however, on something like the hundredth try, she got through, relieved to hear her mother’s sweet, loving voice. “The water is rising, every minute,” she told Marcus in a terrified tone. “I don’t know what to do.” Then click—the phone died. Marcus was left in the lurch, fearing her mother had drowned.65
With the lines of communication shattered, the general feeling of relief emanating from New Orleans on Monday night was not based on anything like accurate fact gathering. Individual impressions replaced the consensus necessary to draw a true picture of a whole region’s plight. With gusts continuing to blow debris around New Orleans and power lines down, few people ventured very far that afternoon. A falling street sign or tree branch to the head and you could die, becoming another Katrina statistic. Some, like the Zumbado-Holm and Byrne-MacCash duos, did so in the name of journalistic obligation.
One person not often seen on the streets, at the Superdome, or on a rescue boat of any kind was Mayor Ray Nagin. Occasionally he’d pop up inside the Superdome, clinging to the exit doors, then disappear. Since the storm had approached the Crescent City, Mayor Nagin had been cloistered in the Hyatt, lording over the Superdome. From the get-go he was terrified for his own personal safety. And for good reason. At the storm’s peak, many of the windows of the Hyatt blew out. The high-rise was a jagged, ripped concrete-and-steel monstrosity, swaying in the feverish winds. Frightened, Nagin refused to make City Hall a command center. Terry Ebbert, the New Orleans director of Homeland Security, ostensibly ran the city. “I went over to the Superdome numerous times,” Ebbert recalled. “I didn’t carry a weapon. I walked all around without a real problem.”66
Unlike Ebbert, Nagin was apparently repelled by the idea of speaking at the Superdome, to offer the evacuees both information and a morale boost. He refused to give a pep talk, blaming the city’s communications breakdown for his decision. His primary post-storm initiative was to get a generator hooked up to the elevator so he wouldn’t have to walk all those stairs. A timid Nagin had squandered a historic opportunity for a “bullhorn moment.” With a touch of guts he could have walked over to the Superdome with Teddy Roosevelt exuberance and tried to calm the jittery crowd. When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April 1968, riots broke out in thirty-one American cities, but Robert F. Kennedy, shirtsleeves rolled up, fearlessly marched into the midst of an angry African-American mob in Indianapolis, easing their confusion and hurt with words of uplifting encouragement. RFK had seized the “golden moment” that Maureen Dowd wrote about.67 At the Superdome in New Orleans, scared citizens needed Nagin. But he feared that if he mounted a soapbox at the Superdome, he’d get shot, lynched, or bloodied up. He made the costly mistake of viewing the displaced persons as malcontents. He had squandered the golden moment, putting his own personal safety ahead of those poor and elderly in trouble.
While Mississippi Coast mayors like Eddie Favre in Bay St. Louis, A. J. Holloway in Biloxi, Brent Warr in Gulfport, Tommy Longo in Waveland, and Matthew Avara in Pascagoula were out and about, putting their lives at risk on Monday afternoon, checking up on everything after Katrina’s onslaught, Nagin found out what was happening by turning on his battery-operated, hand-cranked radio straight out of The Waltons and following WWL reports. He didn’t realize, as the Times-Picayune reporters did, that it’s best to see with your own eyes, boots on the ground. Go see the 17th Street Canal breach for yourself.
All that Nagin knew was basically what every land-bound reporter knew late that Monday morning; and that was only what he could survey from his Hyatt perch. The Chicago Tribune’s first story on the storm was typical. It led with the observation that, “Until nearly the last minute Monday, it looked like Hurricane Katrina might deal New Orleans the cataclysmic blow that scientists have long feared for the low-lying city…. What saved [it] from even worse damage was the storm’s last-minute turn to the east.”68 But CNN and Fox News reporters warned that if a levee had broken, as claimed, then parts of New Orleans might soon be underwater. Meanwhile, at City Hall, Ebbert stayed cool, collected, and in charge. While others were cracking up all around him, he concentrated on problem solving. “My Vietnam experience probably helped,” he said. “Once you’ve seen the Maker a couple times like I did after being shot, you don’t get rattled too easy. The Marines teaches you that.”69
IX
Much of the water pulled from the Gulf of Mexico by Katrina was trapped in Lake Borgne, which is not a lake at all but a lagoon on Louisiana’s eastern shore. A protected sac-shaped body of water, Borgne was filled to bursting by the storm surge—and burst it did, down the path of least resistance: the Mississippi River–Gulf Outlet (MRGO). The MRGO—or Intracoastal, as it is also known—was completed in 1965 as a 500-foot-wide shortcut into New Orleans that bypassed most of the serpentine Mississippi River with a deep-channel, straight-shot
, cement-sided waterway connecting the city and the Gulf. In the 1990s, federal funds that might have been used to strengthen the levees around New Orleans were diverted to widen the 75-mile-long MRGO, which watermen and captains called “Mr. Go.” Running almost due east from the city, the ship channel was built to shepherd oceangoing vessels as expeditiously as possible to the Gulf. Boosters hoped it would be a good investment in industrial development. It was never fully utilized, though, and in trying to entice more traffic, officials forced through improvements that saw the MRGO grow in some places from 500 to 2000 feet wide. The result was the same as if a team of top-flight engineers had been assigned to build an instrument for the quick and effective flooding of New Orleans; they could not have come up with a better design than the MRGO. When the water came flashing out of the sea, via Lake Borgne, it was forced through the MRGO and then crashed into the perpendicular Industrial Canal, causing an 800-foot-long breach at 8:14 A.M. on Monday.70 The MRGO channel also overflowed on the eastern side of the Industrial Canal, destroying New Orleans East communities like Huntington Point, Lake Barrington, and Spruce Lake. St. Bernard Parish was also laid waste by the drastic overtopping of the MRGO.
The water from the broken Industrial Canal, shooting out into the streets, added more water to the flood in St. Bernard Parish, bordering New Orleans East. Water also gushed into parts of the Ninth Ward, the New Orleans neighborhood that was not only closest to the canals but low enough in elevation to draw the overflow. By 9 A.M., up to six feet of water flooded the Ninth Ward, and it was still rising. On Japonica Street, the Louisiana SPCA took eight or nine feet of water. If Laura Maloney hadn’t evacuated the animals from there to Houston, they all would have died.
The Great Deluge Page 27
