The Guard had armed patrols inside and outside the Superdome. A large medical/triage station was set up with plans to transform the Arena, next door to the Superdome, into a permanent hospital. “Most folks were appreciative of our efforts,” McLaughlin recalled, “especially the older folks. Many of the younger set, however, wearing sagging pants, tattooed, street gang types, were surly and rude. I felt sorry for lots of the kids, as they had no control over what family they happen to be born into.”
On Wednesday, McLaughlin’s mandate was to keep law and order in the Superdome. He also had the difficult job of letting the stranded know that it might be another day before buses arrived. His fellow Guardsmen ranging in age from eighteen to twenty-eight started working a series of twenty- to twenty-two-hour days, taking only the occasional catnap. McLaughlin’s diary entry shows how hard the Guard’s work was:
The Dome situation is deteriorating rapidly—the crowd is in a bad mood, many want to leave the Dome, we tell them they can go if they want but they will probably miss the buses which we are staging to take them to Houston. Quite a few are thankful for our presence…. My mediation skills are handy for letting people vent and then redirecting their focus to solutions rather than conflict. Young thugs are harassing and threatening the weak and sick, our food distribution area is mobbed and almost overrun, as people push, shove, curse and fight. I disarm a number of punks armed with sticks and metal rods, including taking a hammer from one and a socket wrench from another, which are obviously being carried as weapons. It is a hot, brutal day—the Dome is reeking of sweat, feces, urine, discarded diapers, soiled clothing, discarded food, and the garbage strewn about is almost frightening in its sheer volume. People are openly cursing and fighting, many are openly angry with Mayor Nagin. Our focus is maintaining order and keeping things in control until the buses arrive.
In late afternoon, I accompany MP Teams doing a sweep of the box suites, as looters have infiltrated that area, we arrive and find every single box suite has been looted with the doors or ventilation grills kicked in and stripped of all liquor, in total, we take down about twenty looters, confiscate liquor (which some of [them] tell us they brought with them to the Dome, we are talking $50 and $60 bottles of scotch, bourbon, etc); the looters are flex-cuffed and turned over to the NOPD; they have not only ransacked the suites, they have crapped on the furniture and rugs….[It’s a] senseless, wanton destruction of property. As our [rules of engagement] limit us to self-defense, not much we can do to deter looters, unless we are in the immediate area. The public bathrooms on Levels One and Two are trashed—urine and crap on the walls, stalls, counters, a fetid, reeking stench permeates the air.
As evening descends, we have various groups chanting very negative things, primarily along the lines of destroying the Dome and the city. The night is a descent into hell…. One of our MPs is shot, several fires are started, we continue to confiscate and destroy liquor, which is fueling much of the violence. Yes, there are those who respond to our acts of kindness as we try to make sure the kids and the elderly are taken care of. I place 6 British university students, pretty young ladies, in a safe area, along with 5 Polish students who had worked in Six Flags. The big problem is sorting out the troublemakers from those who are behaving well. I stay up all night, crisscrossing the Dome in hundreds of mini-missions, each a human vignette of its own.28
The Louisiana National Guard did a pretty good job of maintaining order at the Dome on Wednesday. But they weren’t alone in New Orleans. Other states were nimble in offering assistance to the ravaged states, none more so than New Mexico. Its governor, Bill Richardson, telephoned Governor Blanco on Sunday, concerned that the hurricane was indeed going to be the killer storm so long dreaded along the coast. “We had offered our assistance,” recalled Richardson’s spokesperson, Paul Shipley, “and told Governor Blanco and her people that we’d be ready to help, and we had already put our National Guard on standby.”29 The next day, when Richardson realized how damaging the storm had been, he ached. “The New Mexico National Guard had extensive experience in disaster relief,” said Governor Richardson on Monday, “and after my discussion with Governor Blanco, I have ordered two hundred members of the New Mexico National Guard to leave immediately.”30 Unfortunately, they would not leave immediately.
The Pentagon, which was supposed to track, but not oversee, such National Guard deployments for up to four days, claimed that certain forms had to clear before permission could be granted for the transportation of troops across state lines.31 If the Pentagon had been purposely keeping the troops from Louisiana, it could not have done a better job of causing delays. Just why the Pentagon wanted to delay the arrival of help was a mystery. But New Mexico’s troops were ready when they were finally allowed into the state on Thursday, September 1. “We were the first responding—outside of Louisiana—National Guardsmen on the ground there, of all the states,” said Sergeant First Class Jim Lee of the New Mexico National Guard. “We beat the active-duty Army—we beat the 82nd Airborne.”
The amount of concern the New Mexico National Guard exhibited was inspiring. “Sergeant Lee and his units were sent to Plaquemines,” he said, “over 50,000 left, not homeless as in ‘they’re homeless and they’re going to go back,’ but homeless forever. Their homes are destroyed. Or they are not on the same property they started, and only frames are there, a rooftop here or there. People who lived in homes that were built by their great-grandfather were going back to nothing. Nothing.” Sergeant Lee shared his memories of the operation with a New Mexico journal, the Desert Exposure. A straightforward storyteller, Lee recalled that the New Mexico troops went to Louisiana with a very specific directive:
Our leadership told us: “We’re not running the boat. We are there to help the people of Louisiana.” So those of us in a leadership position, when we went to our counterparts in the civilian community, it was almost scripted to the extent that I walked up to my counterpart and said, “Hi, I’m Sergeant First Class Jim Lee from New Mexico, and we’re here to help you. What can I do?”
I went to my counterpart, Gene Fox, who was in charge of all the freshwater and sewage facilities in southern Louisiana. He breathed a big sigh of relief, and said, “Man there’s a million ways you can help. I’m so glad to see you.” Later on, he said—I’m using his words—that “we were sitting there looking at each other. We were devastated. Then in the door walks Jim Lee with the New Mexico National Guard and says, ‘What can I do to help?’ And you just tell me, ‘We’re here, we’re gonna do it!’ That spirit that came through my door changed our whole attitude.”32
III
At the Lafon Nursing Home of the Holy Family on Chef Menteur Highway in New Orleans, the supervisor, Sister Augustine McDaniel, made the decision before the storm that moving her 103 residents would be traumatic for many of them. The home was a sturdy, two-story brick building; as Sister Augustine lay in a supply of water, food, and medicine, she assumed that if there was any flooding at all, the residents could be moved to the second floor. She also made sure that there would be plenty of staff members on hand during the hurricane to assist the residents.
When the storm hit, and water rose on the first floor, she and the others moved residents to the second floor, even though hauling those in wheelchairs up the stairs or carrying people, some of whom were hefty, wasn’t easy. McDaniel was the commander, cool under pressure, but seeing the Herculean race against the water to save the residents, recalled one of the employees, “she kept saying, ‘I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.’”33 Nonetheless, she and the staff saved every one of them. When the winds died down, the residents were fed and cleaned. The air on the second floor was fetid and the temperature shockingly high, but staff members fanned the residents and tried to keep them cool. On Monday night, the water receded and by Tuesday morning, a trickle of traffic appeared on Chef Menteur Highway, the staging area of the Cajun Navy rescues.
Lafon employees went out to the street to flag down someone who could help evacuate the residents. A
Department of Wildlife and Fisheries truck pulled over just long enough to say that they were only rescuing people from flooded areas—there was no one to help the largely dry residents of Lafon. All day Tuesday, the resourceful employees tried everything they knew to draw attention to the plight of the ailing residents. Nothing worked—including the telephones. On Wednesday, the story was the same.
The residents at Lafon were among the many people to suffer from the fact that the rescuers on the ground in New Orleans were undermanned and overwhelmed. Officials assigning priorities could not see the 103 residents at Lafon, lined up in hallways, gasping for breath, sniffing the mildewed air. No one, it seems, could see them. That Wednesday the Cajun Navy rescued the destitute at Forest Towers East and Metropolitan Hospice, but they missed Lafon. Lafon would have been better off if it had flooded. In Washington, which still could not locate a fleet of buses in the whole United States of America, they knew nothing of Rosalie Daste, a one-hundred-year-old woman, about whom Anne Hall and Doug Struck wrote in a rich Washington Post article on Lafon. Officials in Washington who thought there was time for more meetings didn’t know “that she had never missed a Southern University football game, that she was famous for her shrimp and okra, and that she made her grandchildren pick up pecans in the hot Louisiana sun because she wanted them to know what life would be like without a college education.”34 She was one of the old and weak, yet irreplaceable people, who had no voice in the cacophony that followed the hurricane.
By Wednesday, some of the residents at Lafon had died; their bodies had been taken to the chapel downstairs and laid out respectfully. One employee’s cell phone gained a signal just long enough for her to call her brother, Irvin Boudreaux, who lived near Atlanta. He had no luck, either, in eliciting help from any official source, and so he heroically made his way to New Orleans to assess the situation. A day and a half after his sister’s call, he finally managed to hire a bus from a company outside of New Orleans, at a cost of $1,000 of his own money, and collect forty of the residents for transportation to another nursing home in Houma. When he tried to return for a second group, though, the bus driver heard an explosion in the city and flatly refused to go. Irvin Boudreaux, the only hope for Lafon, had reached a dead end. It was Friday before two FEMA employees happened to pass the facility and see someone who told them of the crisis inside. By then—five days after the storm and four after Sister Augustine had started trying to call for help—twelve residents were dead, from the heat or the lack of medicine. Within an hour, a convoy of helicopters had evacuated the residents. A grateful Sister Augustine, soaked with sweat from her tribulation, was standing in the parking lot in a T-shirt.
On Wednesday afternoon, people outside of the Gulf South coast were shocked when they realized that absolutely nothing was getting better in New Orleans and almost everything was getting worse. Americans were not used to seeing their country in ruins, their people in want. They began to feel ashamed that their country was either unable or unmotivated to provide the basic necessities of food, water, and shelter within its own borders. As Terry Ebbert, head of local homeland security, later told a Tulane University audience, “for the first time in my life I was ashamed to be an American.”35 Senator Mary Landrieu wasn’t ashamed, but she was frustrated. She was standing in front of the Superdome on Wednesday trying to find buses. She borrowed Marty Bahamonde’s official telephone in order to call her office in Washington, D.C. “It didn’t work,” she said. “I thought to myself, This isn’t going to be pretty.”36
All through the day on Wednesday, as television film crews focused on the dramatic rescues, still photographers fanned out across New Orleans. They may have been trained in the tradition of Walker Evans, the renowned photorealist who spent a few years during the Depression documenting the city in a time when “the weather was balmy and the pace of life unhurried.”37 However, the most incredible images of Katrina seemed to have been influenced more by Man Ray. As the Washington Post headlined a story, “Houses Walk and the Dead Rise Up.”38 The second most commonly bandied-about word in response to the post-storm scene—after “debris”—was “surreal.” And photographs are the permanent testimonial of why.
The work of Kathy Anderson, staff photographer for the Times-Picayune, was a case in point. As she wandered around Gentilly, the Lower Ninth Ward, and the Garden District, snapping color photographs, she developed a truly surreal portfolio, which was collected together as a feature entitled “The Ways of Water.” The captions gave an indication of the subject matter: “Mattress on Telephone Pole,” “Refrigerator on Roof,” “Door on Wire,” and the favorite of every posthurricane photographer with a lens, the proverbial “House on Car.” Her two classics, photographs that would make a flaming Dadaist proud, were “Barge on Bus” and “Rocker in Tree.” When asked to explain her art, Anderson had a minimalist answer: “They captured the storm in all of its terrible and absurd power.”39
In the immediate response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, those affected were at no loss for courage and dignity, but Katrina was a different story. As the events in southeastern Louisiana were shown all day on TV and described in detail in newspaper reports, Americans came face-to-face with a weak, pathetic, and perhaps even shoddy side to their national disposition. Across the country, whether sitting by a lake in upstate New York, at a theater in Chicago, or in a pristine park in downtown Portland, Oregon, Americans were aware of an ill-fitting guilt: their fellow citizens were at that very moment stuck in grinding misery, and yet it was a benign, carefree summer day elsewhere. Viewers used to seeing natural disasters on television are aware that they unravel with a certain rhythm and the first day or so is bound to be chaotic. By the second day some sense of order should emerge. After that improvement runs on a course and generates an aura of hope. No matter how distressing the original crisis, the expectation in the human heart is that it will be followed by a sense of renewal. But when the government fails, each American fails, too, and feels it inside.
At that juncture, the government agency most people were livid about was Homeland Security, particularly its FEMA division. What people didn’t yet fully comprehend was that the overall disaster, the sinking of New Orleans, was a man-made debacle, resulting from poorly designed levees and floodwalls. Although Congress had authorized Louisiana hurricane protection in its 1965 Flood Control Act, the Army Corps of Engineers had failed to live up to its provisions. “Perhaps not just human error was involved [in floodwall failures],” Raymond Seed, a civil engineering professor at the University of California–Berkeley, said ominously of the floodwall failures to a Senate committee. “There may have been some malfeasance.”40
IV
Novelist Richard Ford, sitting at his home in East Boothbay, Maine, was watching New Orleans flood on television. He temporarily put aside work on his sprawling sequel to Independence Day. East Boothbay was a long way from New Orleans, 1,687 miles to be exact, but Ford had lived in the Big Easy for years and it had stayed with him, especially the eccentric people. There was his friend Curtis Wilke, a former Boston Globe reporter with a gray beard to make Whitman proud, and a whiskey drawl to put Jim Beam to shame. Sometimes Ford and Wilke would dine on seafood at Galatoire’s, talking about racehorses, boxing, and dog breeding. But Wilke had moved to Oxford, Mississippi, and Galatoire’s—long unique to Bourbon Street—used the hurricane as an excuse to open up a new branch restaurant in Baton Rouge. Nothing was sacred, even culinary conceits, as the people of New Orleans were finding out.
Then there was Rick Barton, the potbellied provost of the University of New Orleans and movie critic for Gambit Weekly. “Rick the Barbarian” was the kind of guy who won buffalo-wings-eating contests. Ford wondered if Barton had gotten out of the bowl. There was Ken Holditch, who knew more about Tennessee Williams than the playwright had ever known about himself. There were also the folks at the Garden District Bookshop—Britton Trice, Ted O’Brien, Deb McDonald, and Amy Loewy—who used to blow up Ford’s dust jackets to
poster size and have him autograph them with a felt pen. Ford, who had bought a Bourbon Street home in 1990, and then one in the Garden District a decade later, was a yellow-dog Democrat and a friend of trial lawyers—their class-action suits often cheered him up.
One of Ford’s political friends was Marc Morial, the former mayor. Back before 9/11 they would sometimes talk about street crime, cultural trends, or down-home restaurants. Morial—who moved to New York with his wife, Michelle, to become head of the National Urban League in 2003—was a voracious reader; Ford was a literary hero to him. When Katrina hit, Morial was heartbroken. He started working the phones and e-mailing friends. No one in the media was able to express his frustration until he read Richard Ford’s op-ed piece in the New York Times on Sunday, September 4. The prose of the stunning, beautiful “A City Beyond the Reach of Empathy” spoke directly to Morial: “For those away from New Orleans—most all of us—in this week of tears and wrenching, words fail. Somehow our hearts’ reach comes short and we’ve been left with an aching, pointless inwardness.”41
Watching TV that week with Richard Ford was his wife, Kristina. Having worked closely with Mayors Sidney Barthelemy and Marc Morial while she was executive director of New Orleans’ City Planning Commission, Kristina Ford was irate by Wednesday. She couldn’t believe Mayor Nagin was refusing to walk to the Superdome, grab a bullhorn, and reassure the frightened crowd. “My own opinion is that he has no empathy for them and the poor blacks of that town,” she said. “And the black people knew from the get-go that he didn’t care about them. He just made it really plain on this issue. Sidney was a social worker and Marc cared deeply about the poor. You couldn’t have kept Sidney or Marc from going inside. They would have been down there with a megaphone to say, ‘Help is coming. We’re doing everything we can.’”42
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