The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  St. Bernard Parish was even worse off. The water was deeper there, and it rose more quickly. Most people scrambled to the roofs and attics. Some couldn’t. At St. Rita’s Nursing Home in St. Bernard Parish, between the towns of Violet and Delacroix, the owners had decided not to evacuate residents on the assumption that Katrina would be less potent than originally predicted as so many New Orleans storms were, most recently Hurricane Ivan. Of the five nursing homes in the parish, St. Rita’s was the only one that did not evacuate. According to state law, a nursing home had to have an evacuation plan, but the law did not specify under what conditions implementing the plan became mandatory. Approximately seventy residents were in St. Rita’s when Katrina hit, along with about thirty staff and friends, who believed that the twenty-year-old, single-story brick building would be a safe place to weather the hurricane.

  At about 9 A.M., the people inside heard a rumbling sound. It was the water, coming from the storm surge. Within twenty minutes, the rooms of the nursing home were flooded to the ceiling. Those twenty minutes were horrific. “People were screaming like somebody was murdering them,” said Gene Alonzo, a retired fisherman who was at the home to be with his brother, a resident, during the storm.71 The able-bodied frantically tried to put the residents onto mattresses and float them out the windows. When the windows filled with water, they chopped a hole in the roof and tried to pull people through, still on their mattresses. Many of the residents were in wheelchairs. Some couldn’t get out of bed at all. Others were too much in shock to move. Trishka Stevens hadn’t walked in five years when the surge broke the air-conditioning ducts and filled her room. Holding the sides of her bed, she used her strength to tip her head above the water. Steve Snyder, a twenty-nine-year-old oil worker, had just been flooded out of his own house nearby and was driving by on a boat when he heard the screams from inside the building and from the roof, where survivors were clinging to life. Snyder broke the window in Stevens’s room and pulled her out. “I thought that man was my angel,” Stevens said later. Snyder tried to help others, but time was running out. And even for a strong young man, it was almost impossible to move the inert weight of a debilitated person. Still, he kept going back inside the building as long as he could, to rescue more. “It was such hard work because they were all wet and heavy,” he said. “After we pulled out as many as we could, I had to swim out of there. There were bodies floating around us.”72 In the end, thirty-five elderly or handicapped people died in the flood at St. Rita’s; five more would die within a week, probably from stress of the ordeal. (Louisiana Attorney General Charles Foti launched an investigation into the deaths shortly after the revelations were made public, and later had Mabel and Sal Mangano Jr., the owners, indicted for negligent homicide.

  With St. Bernard Parish under ten feet of water and New Orleans’s Ninth Ward continuing to fill up, those managing the disaster still didn’t know the extent of the destruction. Nita Hutter, the state representative from Chalmette, for example, had decided to weather the storm with her constituents. Along with other local leaders, she holed up in the parish government complex on Judge Perez Drive. At the height of Katrina, they clocked 175 mph winds just outside the front doors. “I thought the building would collapse,” Hutter recalled. “The women were crying and the men were crying too. I called my sister in Kansas City and told her, ‘I’m not going to survive this. Tell everybody I love them. Good-bye.’”73

  At only fifty-six, the irrepressible Hutter wasn’t ready to die. If this was her fate, however, she wanted to make sure everybody in the steadily collapsing building wrote their name on a list. It would help the FEMA body removers and cadaver dogs to properly identify them. “So I started a head count,” she recalled. “Just then somebody shouted that the parking lot was filling with water. We were now in double jeopardy, wind and water. In just ten minutes the water was fourteen feet high and we were floating.” Just down the road in the town of Arabi, Hutter’s house for thirty years also filled up like a fishbowl, destroying everything she owned. “Overwhelming is one word that comes to mind,” Hutter later explained, choking up. “But that would be trite. Maybe unreal, frightening, heartbreaking…there is no word. I just assumed I was dead.”

  But Hutter didn’t perish. A couple of hours after the tempestuous winds died down, she changed her attitude, from passive resignation to glorious action. Putting fear at bay, she waded into the floodwater to save human lives—or at least to lend a helping hand. Hutter now saw herself as an eyewitness to history. She watched the most incredible heroic acts by everyday people—people she had thought of as clerks or bureaucrats. It was mind-boggling. She never suspected Chalmations had the gallantry of Superman or Wonder Woman in them. Hutter herself was worried that Chalmette had become Waterworld, and like Kevin Costner in that flop movie she would have to find food and water for desperate people. At one point over the next few days she actually got in a boat, a true plow-woman of troubled waters, and fished for food. She gave her catch away to people stranded along the slips and docks. “We had to help ourselves,” she recalled. “And I thought about all those Americans out there, well removed from Chalmette, not able to imagine what was going on. I wondered if they realized that someday it could happen to them.”74

  As CNN, Fox News, and the other networks showed high-tech simulations of the New Orleans levees cracking, and the consequences thereof, TV viewers all over America did worry about their own neglected infrastructure. Citizens in northern California worried whether the Bay Area could survive a huge earthquake, and some fretted about the deteriorating levees along the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers—a collapse could poison the state’s water supply. Then there was also the possibility of a tsunami overwhelming Puget Sound or northern Oregon. People in Montana and Idaho had a volcanic eruption of the Old Faithful at Yellowstone National Park to fear, while those in the Great Plains wondered if there wasn’t a more sophisticated way to prepare for tornadoes than merely to head for basements and cellars.75 People in otherwise idyllic waterfront communities in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and Suffolk County, Long Island, knew that their own areas were due for a Category 4 or 5 hurricane sometime in the future.

  X

  The Ninth Ward, the Hyatt-Superdome area, New Orleans East, Lakeview, and St. Bernard Parish weren’t the only Greater New Orleans locales battling Katrina’s wicked aftermath. Although it generally didn’t really flood, something was seriously wrong in Uptown—at least that was what fifty-one-year-old Jimmy Deleray sensed late Monday. A cagey working-class New Orleanian, Deleray had weathered Katrina at his small shotgun house on Dante Street in the Riverbend section of Uptown. It was an unpretentious part of New Orleans filled with singles like himself (i.e., musicians, artists, and laborers who didn’t want to raise children). On any given night from his front porch, he could see the Mississippi River levee and hear the streetcar clank down Carrollton Avenue. Just a few blocks away was his “living room,” the Maple Leaf Bar, where New Orleans music greats like the Radiators, Snooks Eaglin, and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band would perform, sometimes until dawn.

  Because Deleray was a Hurricane Betsy survivor and full of frank bluster, he wasn’t going to let Katrina drive him from his comfortable Riverbend home. Always thinking ahead, he had purchased a generator a while ago. If New Orleans experienced a prolonged blackout, he would have light. Fortified by his trusty generator, he certainly wasn’t going to flee down I-10 to sterile places like Houston, Dallas, or Beaumont. All three Texas cities, he believed, lacked culture and old-time soulfulness. So he was staying put. Taking a page from New Hampshire, he adopted a “N’Awlins or Die” philosophy as his rough-and-ready motto. He actually made posters of the Louisiana state flag, a real “Pelicanhead,” as they joked at the Maple Leaf Bar. Besides, he owned an ax. He wasn’t afraid to chop a hole in his attic to get out. He’d rather be stuck on a New Orleans rooftop flagging down the Coast Guard for help than be ensconced in some high-rise condo with the Lone Star flag flapping on top.

&nbs
p; For a while, his strategy made perfect sense. Then things went awry. Staring out his attic window, he watched as a gale blew away his fence. Then he saw a thirty-foot pine tree break in half. That made him queasy. His house wasn’t particularly well built. Whenever the water truck drove past, in fact, his wooden floor used to rattle, not to mention the dishes in the cupboard. By contrast, Katrina was like a fleet of water trucks racing down Dante Street in madcap procession. Unsure how to cope with the relentless caterwauling, he put his pillow over his head and went to sleep. Dealing with Katrina was like dealing with a drunk gone bad; it was best to pass out and wait to attack the hangover with coffee in the morning.

  When he woke up Monday evening, it was silent outside, although there were still residual winds. He strained his ear, in fact, determined to hear a peep, but heard nothing. The stillness was eerie. Immediately, he turned on WWL to find out the score. A public service announcement was being made for citizens with boats to make their way to Kenner. Parts of New Orleans had flooded and fellow Louisianans needed help. To Deleray’s surprise, Dante Street was bone-dry. It appeared, however, that some crazy King Kong creature with an enormous buzz saw had whacked every tree and bush on his street. The cleanup was going to be a pain in the ass. But he didn’t mind laboring for a worthy cause, and nothing was more noble than helping out his Riverbend neighbors. He was a chivalrous community guy with a sailor’s taste for liquor. The yeoman cleanup would come soon enough with no complaints. Perhaps they would buy a keg and do the dirty work inebriated. First, however, he had to drive to Kenner and volunteer to rescue stranded folks. When he arrived in Kenner—not far from the airport—he was struck by a disconcerting sight. There was New Orleans Police Superintendent Eddie Compass in Jefferson Parish, all out of sorts. It wasn’t his jurisdiction. “I went up to him, but he was crazed,” Deleray recalled. “He looked stoned or drunk. All he could manage to mumble was ‘It was bad, man, real bad.’ People had arrived with boats, but nobody knew what to do, so I decided to head home.”76

  Back in the central business district, in his high-rise office on Poydras, blogger Michael Barnett of directnic.com was firing off communications to the outside world. He felt New Orleans survived Katrina fairly well, but he mentioned debris being everywhere. His biggest concerns were how to use his toilet, looters, “idiots” driving around, and whether the NOPD had its act together. “Last night there were three flags flying across the square from us—the IRS building—and one on the building on the eastern side of the square—the Federal Court of Appeals building I believe it is,” he posted. “Last night the flags were all flying strong! Visibility was low all night and into the morning but when I walked out onto our balcony on the 11th floor overlooking the square, two of the three flags were still flying. Well I guess you’d have had to have been there, but man, it reminded me of [Francis Scott] Key and the SSB [Star-Spangled Banner]. When I got out there, the flags were flapping and you can just imagine the feeling of not being sure if anything was gonna be there when all was said and done and there she is.”77

  XI

  Around nightfall Governor Blanco was in a helicopter flying over the Louisiana devastation. She refused to let a couple of pool reporters come with her. Her lack of media savvy proved to be a serious Achilles heel. Only “lifesaving people can go out,” she scolded the press. That was her prerogative. It was also the media’s prerogative to stick a knife so deep in her back that even Karl Rove winced. A perception grew nationally that the Louisiana governor was a hack. She had never explained to the press properly that her 200 Wildlife and Fisheries boats were in high-rescue mode. Another 200 were on the way to the flood zone. And likewise Louisiana sheriffs and firemen were operating at breakneck speed to save the stranded. Refusing to throw in the towel, she was encouraging every available boat from St. Augustine to Corpus Christi to help out. She launched unprecedented state rescue initiatives to help Plaquemines and St. Bernard parishes, both of which had been nearly wiped out. “We didn’t have room in boats for media people,” she said. “We needed every spot on the boat to put survivors in the boat. Media kept begging us to go out. I think it cost us.”

  Meanwhile, her aides were nervous that the breaches were growing in size. They began studying the big three breaches: Industrial Canal, 17th Street Canal, and London Street Canal. “Monday afternoon, Ray Nagin called me and told me that he was going to get the water in downtown from the 17th Street Canal breach,” Blanco said. “I hung up the phone and called General Landreneau [of the Louisiana National Guard] and I asked him if he had any engineers who could start dropping sandbags to try and stop some of the action already. He couldn’t get anything in the air on Monday. Not all helicopters can fly at night. You had to have helicopters that were able to do those big lifts. They started dropping three-thousand-pound sandbags into the breach on Tuesday. The general tracked me down after they had done some of it and told me, ‘Governor, the hole is so deep we drop the sandbags and it’s like nothing.’”78

  Every second in the helicopter, Governor Blanco, surveying the devastation, grew more and more bitter at President Bush. She felt that too many Louisiana National Guard members were in Iraq. It was a specious, liberal, Democratic argument. “In the early hours of the disaster you need as many bodies as you can get for lifesaving missions,” she said. “We supplemented the lack of our own people in the early hours with Guard members from some of our neighboring states. But it’s always easier if you have your own people and you don’t have to deploy all the men from somewhere else. That’s what they’re designed for. Their first responsibility is to local disaster recovery efforts. We didn’t have our Louisiana National Guard stateside.”79

  Yes, she did. Instead of setting up outside the New Orleans bowl, north of Hurricane Alley, like the U.S. Coast Guard did in Alexandria, the Louisiana National Guard chose to set up at Jackson Barracks in the below-sea-level Lower Ninth Ward. The rest, as they say, was history.

  Although Jackson Barracks got socked the worst, it wasn’t the only nerve center taking water. The FBI regional headquarters—built along Lake Ponchartrain near the University of New Orleans—got swamped. FBI officers, however, without missing a beat, embedded with the NOPD, doing an amazing job of stabilizing the discombobulated department in the coming days. The parking lot of the Times-Picayune was flooding an inch every seven minutes. A surprised Jim Amoss realized on Tuesday morning that if the water level on the first floor reached three feet, he would have to evacuate all one-hundred-plus employees and head across the Mississippi River Bridge, over by Mardi Gras World, to the Picayune’s West Bank bureau, which he knew was still dry. But as midnight approached Monday evening, with a stillness in headquarters, and everybody crashed on the floor, a party was under way.

  James O. Byrne and a clique of fellow Times-Picayune employees who had lost their Lakeview homes commiserated on the loading dock, watching the water rise. “I uncorked my bottles of champagne,” he said. “It was bittersweet. But the combination of Katrina winds and no electricity led to a sky full of bright stars. Just gorgeous you know, it made it all feel all right. Or so, for a few fleeting minutes, we pretended.”80

  * The Eight Coast Guard District headquarters had set up their EOC in St. Louis, Missouri. Duckworth reported to them.

  Chapter Seven

  “I’VE BEEN FEMA-ED”

  Broken cutters, broken saws

  Broken buckles, broken laws

  Broken bodies, broken bones

  Broken voices on broken phones.

  Take a deep breath, feel like you’re chokin’

  Everything is broken.

  —Bob Dylan, “Everything Is Broken”

  I

  HOUSTON WAS HOT ON Sunday, August 28—a scorching 97 degrees—the morning sun beating on the backs of joggers in Memorial Park, all trying to sneak in a few miles of exercise before the afternoon humidity became unbearable. Ralph Blumenthal, the sixty-three-year-old Houston bureau chief for the New York Times, stayed inside reading his pa
per’s massive Sunday edition. With Katrina fuming in the Gulf of Mexico, he was also monitoring the Weather Channel; the farther east the storm went, the less likely it was the Times would have him chase it. By midafternoon, however, he started getting calls from his editors in New York.

  They were sending down a photographer, Pulitzer Prize winner Vince Laforet, and they wanted Blumenthal to lease a helicopter and fly to New Orleans. None was available. Blumenthal called the local Coast Guard to see whether it had any choppers bound for New Orleans soon, so they could hitch a ride. “A helicopter going in?” an incredulous officer asked. “We’re trying to get everything out. No one flies into a hurricane! We’re trying to get our planes off the ground so that nothing’s damaged!” Undeterred, Blumenthal called Houston Mayor Bill White’s office. “Are any Texas relief groups headed for New Orleans?” he asked. “I quickly found out that really nothing was going in, in the face of the imminent hurricane,” Blumenthal recalled. “But the New York office had this idea that Vince and I could go in the air. Within an hour of calling around, I realized that was complete lunacy and I told them that and they agreed.”

  Plan B was put into action. Laforet would drive a rented SUV with GPS while Blumenthal followed him in his silver Pontiac Grand Prix. Together they started driving east on I-10, but got only as far as the suburb of Baytown by 1 A.M. Monday. Almost everybody in the Gulf South, even in Texas, had battened down the hatches and was out of harm’s way. The motels in Baytown were full of Louisiana evacuees. Eventually, Blumenthal and Laforet found a flophouse tucked next to the Humble Oil refineries, and got a few hours of itchy rest. They woke up before dawn, splashed some water on their faces, and headed to Baton Rouge. “At six or seven in the morning, it was starting to rain and the weather was getting worse,” Blumenthal said. “We just kept keeping tabs on the radio and we just kept driving east.”1