The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  Just as her frustration level peaked, she looked at her cell phone, which was serviceable for the first time since Katrina. She dialed Libby Goff. “You’ve got to convince this policeman that we’ve got a private plane waiting for us,” Dr. Berggren told her friend. “I can’t get through to him.” A brazen, “let me at him” Libby agreed. Hopping off the bus, Dr. Berggren, told the officer that “Texas” wanted to talk to him, and she handed over the cell phone. A polite, fast-talking Libby pulled some mumbo jumbo about how Governor Perry, Ross Perot Jr., and other Lone Star heavyweights were waiting in Dallas for the arrival of these VIP Nine Westers and he, the roadblock cop, was screwing up the entire gambit. “I was never rude,” Goff recalled. “But somehow I found the right words. His whole demeanor changed. He backed off and said, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t want to prevent anybody from having an evacuation.’”121

  The passengers cheered. At last, Nine West was at the departure location, the Signature Aviation Terminal. This private hangar was a ghost town: totally abandoned, not a security guard or private plane in sight. Stacked up in boxes on the floor were thousands of heated MREs. Why weren’t they being distributed? Who was keeping them stashed here? What in the hell was FEMA up to? She never found out the answers to those questions. All of the staff sat down and rested on the cool concrete. Unfortunately, Berggren’s cell phone was once again dead. The last word was the private plane from Chicago would arrive at 10 P.M., so they waited, eating MREs and dozing off. Hours passed—there was no plane at ten, nor at one, three, or five in the morning. Finally, at dawn, Berggren got a signal on her cell. It was Goff, who had been trying to reach her all night; the jet was coming at 10 A.M.—not P.M.—and its tail number was 933. “When the plane finally arrived at 10:15 Saturday morning, the nurses all said they were going to name their next child 933,” Dr. Berggren recalled. “We were treated like royalty on this plane, with food and drink and wipes. I’d been telling Libby all of our woes. She had prepped our pilots about what provisions we most needed; so they bought wipes. The nurses, a lot of them had never been on an airplane. They were thunderstruck. They got giddy and one of them started drinking.”122

  When Nine West landed in Meacham International Airport in Fort Worth, there was even a welcoming committee of old neighbors from when Berggren had lived in the area and others. In flight the doctors, nurses, and staff of Nine West had agreed to kiss the ground when they landed. Instead, when they disembarked, everybody started crying. Dr. Berggren was the only one with enough composure to follow through with their plan. “I kissed the ground,” she recalled. “Yes, I did. Everybody else spent the next twenty minutes crying. It was an incredible catharsis. We had all kept it together for a week, but as soon as we got on the ground in Fort Worth, we just all fell apart.”123

  Some of the nurses and staff were flown to Houston or San Antonio, but most stayed on in Dallas. An automobile caravan chauffeured Dr. Berggren and the others to three homes in University Park. Libby Goff, who had arranged the rescue, had made a huge banner and draped it across her house. It read, “We’re So Glad You’re Here!” She had also stocked her living room with shopping bags full of deodorant, toothpaste, underwear, T-shirts, and everything else they needed. Dr. Mike Harris, another friend of Dr. Berggren, was on hand to disseminate medication. The deluge was over. “Beautiful sight of complete strangers talking, hugging, holding, crying,” Goff wrote in her diary about the event. “Father Powers is called to aid with counseling. No questions asked, he is there in minutes. Weary put to bed, strangers crying with strangers, holding them in their arms.”124

  Months after her evacuation, Dr. Berggren was still extremely emotional about their Texas-size welcome. A prismatic wave of memory gave her chills, in a good way. Crying to her, however, was a sin of sentiment. She tried to stay stoic. “We were so embraced that I have to fight back tears,” she said. “Just think about it. The message to these humble people from Charity, who had really just been doing their best to survive, was that they were of great value. As one of the Charity nurses said, ‘To get to Dallas and feel like you were worth something. It redeems my faith not just in America, but in the whole concept of humanity.’”125

  Chapter Fifteen

  GETAWAY (OR X MARKS THE SPOT)

  I have little knowledge of the Bible. It seems to me, though, that when God made the rain fall for forty days and nights, he fully understood that Noah would rebuild human society after the Great Flood ended. If Noah had been a lazy man, or a hysterical man given to despair, then there would have been great consternation in God’s heaven. Fortunately, Noah had the needed will and ability, so the deluge played its part within God’s plan for man, without playing the tyrant beyond God’s expectations. Did God, too, count on a built-in harmony of “balancing out”? (And if so, does God not seem rather vicious?)

  —Kenzaburo Oe, Hiroshima Notes

  I

  STANDING OUTSIDE THE SUPERDOME, waiting for an MRE, Diane Johnson thought about dying. The man-made misery was worse than the storm. And she wondered about whether her brothers and sisters at Noah’s Ark Church survived the deluge. Her fortitude was vanishing under the unrelenting sun. It hurt to breathe. “Here I was waiting for a sip of water, being held up; I couldn’t walk.” Stripped of her medications, absentminded due to the dizzy spells, Johnson was taxing her high threshold for pain. You name the ailment—from a dropping bladder to a damaged liver—she was afflicted by it. Somehow, through the miracle of modern medicine, she had created a prescription pill regiment for herself that worked. Every day, under doctor’s orders, she gobbled pills and capsules. While waiting to be evacuated from the Superdome, however, sitting in a wheelchair, it wasn’t the medication she was missing most. “I wanted my electric chair,” she said. “When we swam out of our house [in the Lower Ninth], there was no way to take it along.”1

  An ambulance finally picked up Johnson at the Superdome and rushed her to a hospital in Baton Rouge. Her husband was at her side. The ill Johnson knew that her time was growing short. Funny thing about death, she thought. Most people think you shrivel up and pass. Not always so. She was like a balloon, getting bigger by the minute: bloated neck and bloated eyes, bloated stomach and bloated behind. So be it. She was a Christian woman. Devoted. Soon all the drudgery would be over. She was headed to the Maker. She was on the ethereal borderline between life and death. “When the spittle dries up,” she later said, laughing, “you know you’re in trouble.”2 But on Saturday, at least, Johnson’s New Orleans nightmare was over. Baton Rouge was taking care of her.

  Ivory Clark and his eight dependents were also queued up in MRE lines at the Convention Center that Saturday morning. Water was being distributed next to a huge outdoor Wyland mural depicting underwater life: humpback whales, schools of dolphins, and a stingray frolicking in the blue ocean. Things were finally looking up. The Louisiana National Guardsmen were marching around, securing even the transplanted palm trees that lined the median on Convention Center Boulevard. Nearly all of the nearby shops had been looted. Helicopters were hovering low, blowing the street garbage in every direction, unceremoniously dropping twenty-four-bottle cases of water, which burst out of their packs, forcing those who were thirsty to scramble as if on an Easter egg hunt. Clark, the gatherer, was able to snag six or seven bottles. “My real concern was Auntie,” he recalled. “She was on her last legs. We had to get her medical attention fast. For a ninety-one-year-old, Sedonna Green was hanging tough. I kept rubbing my brass cross, keeping my fingers crossed.”3

  Lieutenant Colonel Bernard McLaughlin of the Louisiana National Guard was helping to orchestrate evacuations from the Convention Center that Saturday. Because the center had never meant to shelter 20,000 people, everything was being done in ad hoc fashion. People jammed the entrances to the center like a dense herd of human flesh. Everybody wanted out. Pushing was the norm. The Hilton parking lot had been transformed into “feeding lanes,” the spot where Ivory Clark was getting MREs and plotting his next course of actio
n. Approximately ten bus lanes had been established along Tchoupitoulas Avenue. McLaughlin’s biggest chore was setting up a security perimeter around the entire center and kicking looters out of the Riverwalk Marketplace. Besides his own Guardsmen, McLaughlin, still in regulation uniform, was assisted by seventeen or eighteen Louisiana State Police Alcohol and Tobacco agents. He had with him a Beretta M-9 9mm pistol and fifty rounds of ammunition.4 “What shocked me was when I got to the Convention Center, I expected to see a lot of NOPD,” McLaughlin recalled, “but I realized very quickly that there were very few.”5

  The insensitive, brutish, sloppy police work McLaughlin saw “in the game” made him livid. “I will never forget this and it shocked me,” McLaughlin said. “On Saturday I’m with first-rate Louisiana State Police and we’re trying to answer questions for the crowd. They had a bunch of vehicles and we were like a security corridor to be able to react to things, because people were filtering in and out, answering questions left and right. I saw marked New Orleans [police] units driving through the crowds. I’m talking about elbow-to-elbow people, their lights flashing, their windows rolled up. They weren’t stopping and that’s when I started seeing these Cadillac Escalades driving through and I was wondering where they were getting those vehicles, not realizing till later that they got them from the [Sewall] dealership. But I was unimpressed with how NOPD handled that because we could have used some of them there with us. I know and understand that some of them had lost homes and their families were gone and stuff. But a lot of us were in the same boat. I left my home in Lake Charles and was down there. I lost a home two weeks later in Hurricane Rita. My point being, we’re down there thinking that we’re facing the same risk, we’re professionals. We expected them to do what we did in the National Guard, which is to act like Katrina was their primary mission, everything else, family, possessions, that comes second, and I was disappointed in them.”6

  But why would the NOPD just drive by throngs of stranded people in stolen cars? For what purpose? What were they trying to prove? “I don’t know,” McLaughlin said. “I thought it cold and impersonal. This was their city. Those were their people. And their driving through with lights flashing was an obvious ‘Get out of our way!’ They’d hit the siren now and then. It was interesting because I commented to some of the state police, who were as critical as I was, like what was the deal with these guys? Did they not understand basic policing? Everybody should understand basic policing: Get out, stop, help, circulate with the crowds. Maybe they were going somewhere. But it seemed to us like they were driving through to look at the situation, not stopping to help and try to deal with it.”7

  Since Katrina hit, he hadn’t gotten much sleep. Even with his eyes half-closed, however, he had the look of an army field officer who didn’t suffer fools lightly. On Friday night at the Convention Center, he slept right next to the feeding lanes on a little grassy mound. He was working twenty hours a day. “I hadn’t had a bath in a week,” he recalled. “I’m stinking. I’m filthy dirty. I took my boots, kind of made a little pillow out of my boots. I was about to get a couple hours’ sleep. And I’m thinking, ‘I can’t believe this! I’m a lawyer with a great law practice and I’m literally homeless, sleeping in New Orleans, next to the CC.’ I was thinking that it couldn’t be real, it was the Comedy of the Absurd or something.”8

  The security task-force commander for the Convention Center was Lieutenant Colonel Jacques Thibodeaux, a jack-of-all-trades who did a remarkable job keeping the morale of the Louisiana National Guard high all week. His main order was: Talk to the people…. They don’t bite. As leader of Louisiana’s Special Reaction Team (SRT), he was in charge of evacuating the approximately 20,000 from the Convention Center. He felt sorry for the destitute. He didn’t like that Blackwater troops had arrived in New Orleans to secure buildings; they had no authority and were confusing people. Thibodeaux, who was also a deputy U.S. marshal, was a great believer in listening to complaints, wearing compassion on your sleeve, and creating an openhearted environment. Social inequity, however, was not his evacuation mandate. To him the Convention Center was divided into just two kinds of displaced people: armed and unarmed. He wanted all the weapons collected by Saturday morning before the helicopters and buses started evacuating. The best way to know who had a gun or knife was for somebody to provide a tip.

  Most Louisiana National Guardsmen—along with those from Arkansas and California, who had also arrived at the Convention Center—believed that alcohol was the real culprit of the mass social unrest at both the Superdome and the Convention Center. On Saturday morning McLaughlin and other Guardsmen went on “booze-busting patrol,” an essential element of crowd control in general. He was dumbfounded that about one-tenth of the people at the center were openly walking around with liquor. It was an unwholesome, quarrelsome trend. The National Guard didn’t need drunkards getting dehydrated in the sun. He saw bottles of Tanqueray, Smirnoff, Jack Daniel’s, and Cuervo. These were clearly looted, most from the nearby Cajun Market.

  At a Loews hotel four blocks from the Convention Center, McLaughlin encountered a group of families camping out. He promised them the evacuation buses were en route. A burly fiftyish woman came up to him to lodge a complaint. “‘Sir,’ she said, ‘we got some people next door set up a bar and they’re selling liquor to anybody for a buck.’” A diligent McLaughlin went over to check it out. Sure enough, a man in his thirties had brought a stolen bar into the Loews lobby and was mixing drinks. “I don’t know where they got it, but they took it from somewhere,” McLaughlin recalled. “A real bar, a long, dark wood bar with the liquor bottles that had the metal pourers still on them. They had two pitchers of water and two pitchers of orange juice and I’ll never forget when I walked in this guy’s wiping some double old-fashioned glasses.” McLaughlin asked him, “‘What are you doing here?’ ‘I got a bar,’ the guy said. ‘Do you want a drink?’ ‘No, I don’t think so!’” McLaughlin snapped back. “‘Dude, you’re shut down.’”

  An argument ensued. The bartender insisted he was just being entrepreneurial; why not make a little cash while waiting for the buses and helicopters? he groused, but he was outmatched. “‘Let me tell you something,’” McLaughlin told him. “‘This is looting. You looted that. I could arrest you right now. That’s a fifteen-year felony. That’s a three-year mandatory minimum sentence!’” McLaughlin had had enough and he was getting a little nervous. He was a lone white official in an all-black crowd, playing the prohibitionist. “‘Look,’” McLaughlin said, “‘do me one favor. Turn around and grab the wall.’” The bartender was oddly compliant. McLaughlin started hurling the bottles at a nearby wall, one at a time. “I then proceeded to smash thirty bottles in about ninety seconds,” he recalled. “Everything shattered. They were out of business.”9

  II

  Lieutenant Colonel McLaughlin wasn’t the only one perplexed by the gruntish arrogance of the NOPD surrounding the Convention Center. Professor Lance Hill, executive director of the Southern Institute for Education and Research at Tulane University, had heard John Burnett of NPR’s All Things Considered report on the mass confusion at the Convention Center. As a fifty-four-year-old do-gooder, he cringed with sadness. How could the city not provide bottled water? Why wasn’t food being distributed? Since his Uptown house hadn’t been damaged in the storm, he decided to go help the stranded. Pulling out a can of spray-paint from his garage, he wrote “AID” across his Ford Taurus next to primitive red crosses. He emptied his refrigerator and went into grocery stores, filling his car with water. Then he headed to the Convention Center. He wasn’t a NOLA Homeboy, he wasn’t trying to rescue anyone. All he wanted to do was deliver water. “On my way there, I saw a bloated corpse,” Hill recalled. “I later found out her name was Vera Briones Smith. She had been there for days. The police refused to let people cover her up or touch her. I remember thinking, ‘If that’s how they’re treating the dead, who knows how they are treating the living.’”10

  When he pulled up
at Hall D of the Convention Center, the stranded were overjoyed. The plastic bottles of Kentwood he handed out were guzzled and the bags of chips ripped into. “People started placing orders with me,” he said. “Mothers wanted Pedialyte, milk.” He promised everybody he’d be back. He spent all of Friday dropping off provisions. He encountered no problems save a teenager banging on the hood of his car, asking him about buses. But then a blockade policeman stopped Hill on one of his runs. “What are you doing?” the officer asked. “Bringing water to the folks,” he responded. “No,” the officer said. “If you do that, those guys will rush you.” Hill explained that he’d been bringing water regularly and had encountered no problems. After a lecture, he was allowed to drop off water, but not to interact with the people. “Don’t come back,” the officer told him. “No more.”

  Quite naturally, with people dehydrated, desperate for water, Hill continued his “AID” deliveries. But the police began harassing him, interfering with his drop-offs. At one juncture, as he was driving near the Uptown overpass, a pickup truck with two police officers in it motioned for Hill to pull over. He just ignored them. He wasn’t going through the third degree again. “Then they fired three or four shots over the bow of my car,” Hill recalled. “Then I stopped. Eventually, they let me go. Didn’t arrest me; just told me to slow down.”11