Up until the hurricane, Williams, a Jehovah’s Witness, had led a fairly routine life in New Orleans. For six years she had worked the night shift at the Quick & Easy Food Store in Kenner. Her husband, a carpenter, traveled a lot. Her rent was $513 a month. During the days leading up to the storm, everybody lampooned her first name—Catrina. “Yes, they all made a joke about it,” she said. “I don’t find it too funny. But you know, I would laugh it off because, after all, my name is with a C, not a K. Don’t get that wrong, you understand?”6
When Katrina hit, Williams’s apartment building was packed with people, including her niece Zoria and nephew Tyreek. With no electricity, Catrina started up a portable grill and cooked ground meat, smoked sausage, and chicken, so that, as she put it, “it wouldn’t go bad.” Cousins, half brothers, aunts, and uncles were all crowded into her two-bedroom apartment, which had become the hub of the entire building. “We started panicking,” she recalled, “trying to keep everyone together. At first, I was like, ‘We’re not going to make it through this here.’ And then I put all of that aside…you know, stopped thinking the worst and tried to think the better.”
Having survived the storm, Catrina turned to the big question on Tuesday, which was how to evacuate. A middle-aged couple from the apartment complex became sentinels, sitting on the roof and waving sheets to try to grab the attention of Coast Guard or National Guard helicopters. There were five mothers and seven children in the building. Before long, everybody started congregating on the fiberglass roof. Catrina brought an umbrella with her to shade De’Mont-e and his younger brother, Da’Roneal, from the sizzling heat. “It was so hot on the second floor,” Williams recalled. “At least you could breathe a little bit at night on the roof.”
Catrina, as it turned out, was a good helicopter spotter. All day Wednesday, if a chopper was even vaguely heard, she would jump up and down and scream, “Us…us…us!” She wanted her baby boys out of New Orleans, away from the smelly floodwaters and the violence. “On Thursday, I actually flagged a helicopter down,” she recalled. “It landed on the roof. I was like, ‘Okay, God answered our prayers.’ So we all waited in line, and the Guardsman said he’s only going to take the children. When he said that, I freaked out. They only took one mother because she had a baby that was actually disabled. He was one of the seven and he required extra attention, so she felt like she was going to go with her baby. We could not go, they was like if we don’t let our kids go, there’s going to be a lot of trouble.”7
Catrina put De’Mont-e onboard and handed him his five-month-old brother. For a mother to give up her two sons to an unknown man in a helicopter was clearly a distressing situation. But the rescuers insisted that they would be back in twenty-five minutes. Williams carefully told her son what to expect and how to act; not to be afraid. He was young but bright as a button, and he listened to everything Mom said. “Don’t let him out of your sight,” she instructed De’Mont-e, referring to the baby, “clutch him always.” Two cousins and three other children were also on the first helicopter flight, making seven kids in all. “It was really loud,” De’Mont-e recalled of his chopper experience, “and when I looked down, I saw all the houses under water. The little kids were crying a lot. But I didn’t cry.”8
The National Guard pilot dropped De’Mont-e, Da’Roneal, and the other five children off at the Causeway Boulevard/I-10 junction, a prospect that would have been confusing even for an adult. People were aimlessly wandering around and no one was in charge. De’Mont-e shepherded his flock to a safe spot. Mom had given him the order to be a “little man,” so he had to step up and become the protector. Holding tight to Da’Roneal, as Mom had instructed, he told the other children to hold hands. “We formed a circle chain,” De’Mont-e later explained. “Nobody was gettin’ away from anybody.”9 As the hours passed, his mother didn’t arrive; the Guard helicopter had never returned to the roof for the other adults. “We waited for five hours and no helicopter,” Catrina Williams recalled. “We thought something terrible happened to the kids. You’ll never know the pain we had, having our children stripped from us like that.”10
Later in the day, a National Guard helicopter picked the I-10 children up from the overpass and took them to Louis Armstrong International Airport, where Robert Clement, a medic with Acadian Ambulance Service, took charge. De’Mont-e carefully gave his name and spelled it out, before reciting his address and telephone number, just as his mother had taught him on the roof. Remembering her instructions, he explained that his father had put them on the apartment roof to avoid floodwaters and looters. Clement took one of the other children, a two-year-old named Gabby, into his arms. He was afraid that their parents were dead. Eventually, a Social Services caseworker from Baton Rouge arrived to take the group of seven children away, loading them into an ambulance. Clement felt ill as he handed over tiny Gabby, fearing for her future. “When I gave her away on the ambulance,” Clement said, “I cried all the way home.”11 They were placed under the supervision of National Guard Major Steven Trisler.
When the National Guard helicopter finally came back to 3223 Third Street to pick up a second group, it only took the women; Catrina had to leave her husband behind. “They took us to somewhere on dry land,” she recalled. “Some Navy base in the West Bank. We spent the night there, outside on the water, along the Mississippi River. Then they took us to Kenner airport. We was trying to get ourselves situated. We weren’t going anywhere until we found where our kids was at.” Fortune shone on Catrina at that airport. Across the terminal, she saw both her husband and her father, who had just been evacuated from Third Street. “When we had got to where we was at in Kenner, we just prayed on it and everything,” Williams recalled. “Just hoped and prayed we’d somehow find De’Mont-e and Da’Roneal. That’s all we could do.”12
Taken by bus to San Antonio, Catrina Williams and her family were assigned to the Kelly U.S.A. Shelter. She was grateful to be fed, even though the “beans looked like soup” and the lettuce was brown. Williams spent every waking hour trying to locate her boys through the Red Cross, FEMA, the National Guard, and anyone else who would listen. She was frantic. Over a week after Katrina hit, she got a telephone call from the National Center of Missing and Exploited Children. With De’Mont-e’s help, social workers there had traced Williams to San Antonio on Sunday, September 4. “They had found my boys,” she explained. “They were in Baton Rouge. We hopped in a car and started driving. Our reunion was at Baton Rouge airport. That was the best moment right there. That was all the headache gone, being able to try and pick up your pieces once you’re reunited with your kids, all the hugs and kisses…. That night there was just unexplainable, the relief right there just to be with my children. I thanked God because I got them back.”13
De’Mont-e, who had kept the other children safe, entered first grade at Harmony Hills Elementary School in San Antonio. He later received a national award for his courage in protecting the others. Former state senator Joe Neal of Nevada, a political commentator, concluded that the heroism of De’Mont-e Love proved “that a six-year-old demonstrated more leadership than the President of the United States.”14
With children like De’Mont-e Love feared lost, FEMA in disarray, and the politicians trying to fling blame off their shoulders, one Louisiana businessman, Richard Zuschlag, stepped into the leadership void and saved lives, seven thousand of them. Zuschlag, a Pennsylvania native, living in Lafayette, Louisiana, was cofounder of Acadian Ambulance Service. At the time Katrina hit, Acadian was the largest privately held ambulance service in the nation, with two hundred ambulances, two thousand employees, and seven air ambulance helicopters. “I founded Acadian Ambulance because I thought it was a shame that cement trucks and beer trucks had better two-way radios than what the ambulances had with the hospitals,” Zuschlag recalled.15
In fact, communications was Zuschlag’s obsession, which made him a bit of an oddity in the world of private-sector emergency rescue work. Not only did his company have its own
large communications tower in Gray, Louisiana, he had satellite telephones by the thousands and, as Inc. Magazine explained, “his back-ups had back-ups.”16 Bold, unflinching, and on the job while FEMA and Homeland Security had a command breakdown, Zuschlag evacuated chronically ill people and newborns from six hospitals and opened a triage center at the Causeway Boulevard/I-10 junction, using his fleet of two hundred ambulances. His helicopters worked as frenetically as the Coast Guard did. “I tried the best I could to keep a medic with a satellite phone on the roof of every hospital,” Zuschlag said. “I had a difficult time, because the numbers kept perplexing me. It was one thing for a hospital like Tulane to have 300 patients, but I had no idea that they had 500 employees and another 1,500 family members.”17
Employees who witnessed Zuschlag in action compared him to General Douglas MacArthur retaking the Philippines. Nobody in the Gulf South had reliable communications but Acadian Ambulance; all those years of preparation had paid off. Joking, in a letter, Zuschlag claimed that the Acadian Ambulance was the “Cajun Air Force,” and they were. He was, as Inc. Magazine rightfully noted, “the anti-FEMA.”18 Every second wasted on poor logistics infuriated Zuschlag, a Republican who believed Governor Blanco did a first-rate job of keeping the rescue efforts alive. “She was impossible to reach, you only got through one out of eight hundred times, but she encouraged our efforts,” Zuschlag said. “One of the reasons that [Acadian Ambulance] may have been successful was because the New Orleans 504 area code got knocked out. Over here in the 337 area code, we kept on going. Nobody could get through to anybody else, so they’d call me.”19
III
By Thursday, all sorts of “Out-of-Towners”—like James Cardiff of McKinney, Texas, a sixty-one-year-old corporate tax management executive—were arriving in New Orleans to help rescue Katrina survivors. A great admirer of President George W. Bush and of all Republicans for that matter, he was a man of substantive wealth. Reverend Billy Graham was his hero. A deeply committed Christian, Cardiff, a member of the nondenominational Stone Wire Community Church, believed he had a moral obligation to help the storm victims. “I don’t like being called a fundamentalist,” he said. “I’m not a zealot. I just try to live by the Bible, to not be a hypocrite.”20
Cardiff was watching TV on Wednesday and couldn’t believe that the federal government wasn’t sending in the Army and the Marines. He was worried about the stranded. People on life-support machines had only a day to live without electricity. Dialysis patients had only 72 to 106 hours. FEMA had supposedly already sent 25,000 body bags to the region. “So I said to my wife that I can’t just do nothing, what kind of Christian would I be?” Cardiff said. “Immediately, I packed a bag, flew to Houston, and rented a huge white van there. I packed it with gallons of water. I kept thinking about what Jesus told his disciples: ‘What you do to the least, you do unto me.’” His smartest move was also getting 150 gallons of diesel fuel, the rarest of all commodities in New Orleans. And he had printed an official-looking sign that read RESCUE WORKER. “God has always given me great intuitiveness,” he said. “My first idea was to hook up with Harry Heinz in Baton Rouge. He was working around the clock at the LSU shelter, and he showed me a map of where people needed saving in New Orleans, the really bad places below sea level where people were just left. That man worked so hard saving people that his heart went out and he died a few weeks after the storm, once all the forgotten and forsaken were all right.”21
Upon arriving in New Orleans on Thursday, he stayed at the home of Chaplain Henry “Hy” McEnery III on Laurel Street in Uptown. Besides being a chaplain, McEnery was a sergeant in the Mississippi National Guard 20th Special Forces Group 2nd Battalion. A warm, engaging man, large in stature, and a good talker, he was bitter that decades ago the Louisiana governor had abolished the Louisiana Special Forces. So, in protest, he simply joined Mississippi Special Forces. What he had in common with Cardiff was a penchant for humanitarian relief, and the Maker. They were on a mission to save lives. “I love him, but he talks too much,” Cardiff said of McEnery. “But we made a good team.”22
Their first baptism by fire occurred when Cardiff heard that a seventy-nine-year-old man named Alcede Jackson, in their neighborhood had died in his easy chair on August 31. They found the nearby house where his corpse was, offering their services to perform a funeral. The widow, a distraught, extremely ill Violet Jackson, received them, in desperate need of dialysis. The problem was she wasn’t going to abandon her husband’s body, which was decomposing in a chair like a ghost from William Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily.” You could smell the rot. A mentally challenged son was also in the house. “How can I help you to leave?” Cardiff asked Violet in the most reassuring voice imaginable. “How long were you and Alcede married?” She broke into a soft, helpless smile, as if she were an orphaned child. “Forever,” she said, “forever.”23
A negotiation began. Cardiff promised to give Alcede a proper funeral, to wrap him up in blankets, along with some plastic garbage bags to stop the insects from congregating on the corpse. They would hold a proper Christian memorial service on the porch. She, in turn, after the service, would allow McEnery to rush her to Ochsner Hospital. After some easy arm-twisting, she agreed to these terms.
Lifting the corpse was tough duty, gas being dispensed in a long smelly run. The odor was atrocious. “By coincidence, when I was taking provisions for a stay earlier, I had grabbed all the roses that the looters had left behind,” McEnery said. “Now I had them for the service. And I made a homemade headstone with a quote from John. So we had a front-porch service.” Refusing to drop anybody off at the Superdome, the Convention Center, or I-10, because they were “abominable” according to Cardiff, they loaded Violet into McEnery’s car, along with a few other sick people and whisked them off to Ochsner. While McEnery was going to get Violet dialysis, Cardiff was going to look for food and a rescue route to Memorial Medical Center, where he heard that doctors, nurses, and patients were stranded. Unfortunately, Ochsner couldn’t take Violet or the others; the hospital had a huge overflow of patients. What to do? McEnery decided the only other option was Louis Armstrong International Airport. “The airport was crammed with people, medical teams working in rapid-fire fashion to help the truly sick,” McEnery said. “I rushed up to a doctor and told him that this woman, Violet, was going to die if she didn’t get dialysis now.”24
Without even a second of hesitation, the doctor dropped everything he was doing, leaving dozens waiting in the triage line. “She’s bad,” he said. “But I’ll take care of her. She’ll be okay. You can go.” McEnery had grown attached to Violet. He hated to just leave her at the airport, but he had a Christian rescue calling, and there were more New Orleanians to save. “I wondered about what had happened to her,” he recalled. “And then weeks later, out of the clear blue sky, a special nursing center gave me a courtesy call from Alexandria, Louisiana. Violet had just come through, the nurse told me. She was all right.” As McEnery said, “What a blessing.”25
Meanwhile, Cardiff went to Interstate 12 and somehow found a food warehouse. He bought bologna and peanut butter and passed it out among displaced persons along the roadside. Then it was on to the corner of Napoleon Avenue and St. Charles, the driest place to park if you wanted to get to flooded Memorial Medical Center. Money once again spoke. He essentially rented a johnboat to take him to the hospital. He was relieved to see a group of Acadian helicopters evacuating doctors and nurses from the rooftop. But all around the hospital, in the streets of Central City, people were begging to be evacuated. For the next week Cardiff would save hundreds of New Orleanians by boat, living the teachings of Jesus. “There was a hateful NOPD officer who tried to stop my efforts,” he recalled. “But I wasn’t going to let the Devil stop me from doing what was right.”
Asked why he’d driven into New Orleans from Texas when martial law dictated that he stay out, Cardiff had a pat retort. “How could you leave all those poor people behind?” he asked. “How c
ould you have resources and not help?”26
IV
For those who were rescued from their garrets in New Orleans, plucked out of the mire, or picked up off trash-strewn streets, the sense of relief was overwhelming—and short-lived. First responders had neither the time nor the means to offer any further comfort to Katrina victims. Though it sounds callous, survivors were dropped off as quickly as possible on the nearest dry land and left to fend for themselves. Only those in very grave medical condition were given expedited transportation out of the dragonfly zone to Ochsner or Armstrong International Airport. For thousands of others, the struggle to survive continued and sometimes failed. “I stayed in the control center for eight straight days, working sixteen hours a day in Lafayette,” Zuschlag recalled. “To my knowledge, we got everybody out who was sick. We didn’t turn down nursing homes. We did turn down some individual requests from people who needed out. But we just couldn’t do it; we didn’t have enough manpower.”27
That Thursday, in the rest of the country, while New Orleans suffered, Americans went about their business. The Boston Red Sox began the day two and a half games ahead of the New York Yankees in the American League East Pennant race. The debate over Supreme Court nominee John Roberts heated up, with the NAACP, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and the National Women’s Law Center coming out against him. His Senate Judiciary Committee hearings were slated to begin the following Tuesday. The previous day 950 people had been killed in a stampede at a Shiite pilgrimage in northern Baghdad, caused by the hysteria of people claiming a suicide bomber was in the crowd. The number one box-office movie was the raunchy Steve Carell comedy, The Forty-Year-Old Virgin. But in New Orleans and its vicinity, the days of the week ceased to have meaning. Monday was the day of the hurricane; that was the day no one would ever forget. But Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday were eerily all the same to the people trapped in the devastation left by Katrina. Louisianans lost all sense of time, as dozens of rescues turned into hundreds and then thousands. Governor Blanco continued finding evacuation buses from parishes like Sabine, Bossier, and Natchitoches. Familiar Louisiana sights like Six Flags (New Orleans East), Ruth’s Chris Original Steak House (Mid-City), Dooky Chase’s Restaurant (Tremé), and the New Orleans Fairgrounds (where the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival took place every spring) were half-submerged in water. Logic was suspended and no explanation justified the devastation that people saw in New Orleans.
The Great Deluge Page 56
