The Great Deluge Read online

  THE GREAT DELUGE

  Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans,

  and the Mississippi Gulf Coast

  Douglas Brinkley

  For the U.S. Coast Guard first responders,

  whose bravery was unparalleled,

  and

  Houston, Texas,

  whose efficient openheartedness was breathtaking

  Things are going to slide in all directions

  Won’t be nothing

  Nothing you can measure anymore.

  —Leonard Cohen, “The Future”

  Deluge:

  1. a. A great flood. b. A heavy downpour.

  2. Something that overwhelms as if by a great flood

  —American Heritage Dictionary

  Oh, Oh Deep Water

  Black, and cold like the night

  I stand with arms wide open

  I’ve run a twisted line

  I’m a stranger

  in the eyes of the Maker

  I could not see

  for the flood in my eyes

  I could not feel

  for the fear in my life

  From across the Great Divide

  In the distance I saw a light

  I saw Jean Baptiste

  Walking to me with the Maker

  My body is bent and broken

  by long and dangerous sleep

  I can’t work the Fields of Abraham

  and turn my head away

  I’m not a stranger

  in the hands of the Maker

  Brother George

  Have you seen the homeless daughters

  standing there

  with broken wings

  I have seen the flaming swords

  there over East of Eden

  burning in the eyes of the Maker

  —Daniel Lanois, “The Maker” (Katrina adaptation)

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  1. Ignoring the Inevitable

  AUGUST 27 (Saturday)

  2. Shouts and Whispers

  AUGUST 27 (Saturday)

  3. Storm vs. Shoreline

  AUGUST 28 (Sunday)

  4. The Winds Come to Louisiana

  AUGUST 28–29 (Sunday–Monday)

  5. What Was the Mississippi Gulf Coast

  AUGUST 29 (Monday)

  6. The Busted Levee Blues

  AUGUST 29 (Monday)

  Photographic Insert 1

  7. “I’ve Been FEMA-ed”

  AUGUST 29 (Monday)

  8. Water Rising

  AUGUST 30 (Tuesday)

  9. City Without Answers

  AUGUST 30 (Tuesday)

  10. The Smell of Death

  AUGUST 31 (Wednesday)

  11. Blindness

  AUGUST 31 (Wednesday)

  12. The Intense Irrationality of a Thursday

  SEPTEMBER 1 (Thursday)

  Photographic Insert 2

  13. “It’s Our Time Now”

  SEPTEMBER 1 (Thursday)

  14. The Friday Shuffle and Saturday Relief

  SEPTEMBER 2–3 (Friday–Saturday)

  15. Getaway (or X Marks the Spot)

  SEPTEMBER 3 (Saturday) and Beyond

  Timeline

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Searchable Terms

  About the Author

  Other Books by Douglas Brinkley

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Author’s Note

  Strange how people who suffer together have stronger connections than people who are most content.

  I don’t have any regrets, they can talk about me plenty when I’m gone.

  You always said people don’t do what they believe in, they just do what’s most convenient, then they repent.

  And I always said, “Hang on to me, baby, and let’s hope that the roof stays on.”

  —Bob Dylan and Sam Shepard, “Brownsville Girl”

  IT WAS A RIPLEY’S “Believe It or Not!” moment. “Looking out the window of a fifteenth-floor condominium at One River Place on New Orleans’s East Bank on August 29, 2005, I witnessed a stunning aberration. Just below me, the whitecapped Mississippi River was roaring backward—northward—due to Hurricane Katrina’s wrath. Earlier that morning I had left my Uptown home and evacuated vertically to this supposed safe haven. Now, as I gazed at the churning river, my miscalculation was evident. A few minutes later I took my wife and two young children to the crowded lobby, where a sense of panic ensued. A lone generator flickered on and off, while children huddled around a small refrigerator where baby bottles were stored. Storm-phobic dogs paced back and forth, their hindlegs quaking. Outside you saw everything from trembling street signs to lost umbrellas flying by as the piercing rain whipped needles and knives. You could hear glass shattering all around, and see the nearby Hilton parking garage lose its supposedly hurricane-proof roof.

  A day earlier, the name “Katrina” had conjured whimsical images of a Gaelic ballad or a Vegas cocktail waitress. A close friend of mine, in fact, was named Katrina. There was no menace in the echo. Perhaps if the storm had been named “Genghis Khan” or “Attila the Hun” or “Caligula,” I would have fled. But now, as the raging Mississippi frothed with primal madness, gushing around Algiers Bend, ripping open the huge riverfront warehouses where Mardi Gras floats were stored, it was clear that Katrina was no mere hurricane or flood. It was destined to be known as “the Great Deluge” in the annals of American history.

  Because Hurricane Katrina devastated 90,000 square miles along the heavily populated Gulf Coast, it’s truly impossible to capture the morose terror endured by each and every survivor. Certainly the people trapped in attics, desperately punching holes in their rooftops with axes and hammers hoping to be rescued, cannot be forgotten; they’ve earned a special spot in our collective memory. Neither can the indomitable Coast Guard helicopter pilots and Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries boatmen who hoisted stranded people out of the muck. But in the weeks after the hurricane first made landfall near Buras, Louisiana, on Monday, August 29, dozens of other horrific words and repellent images became part of our national discourse: feces contamination, storm surges, toxic soup, pervasive damage, highway triage, police suicide, FEMA’s indifference, and so on.

  The general feeling emanating from New Orleans—at first—was that the storm could have been worse; outside the region, this was interpreted to mean that it wasn’t too bad. Once Katrina had passed, everybody patted themselves down, pleased that their vital organs were in place and that their pulse registered. Most New Orleanians who survived Katrina felt eerie, though, as if something ominous still lingered over the port city like a gothic shroud. Katrina had been a palpable monster, an alien beast that had gotten under the goose-fleshed skin of those who lived through the storm. Many of these non-evacuees felt vaguely ill that Monday evening. They sensed that something was horrifically wrong with their beloved city, something deeper than surface wounds. The ornate St. Louis Cathedral and the elegant Garden District mansions were only slightly battered, however, looking as opulent as ever. If there was a wave of post-storm optimism at first, it was because the pallid veil of Katrina had lifted, prematurely assuring residents in trickster fashion of their supposed safety. Unbeknownst at first to anyone but the Katrina victims within neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth Ward, Lakeview, Hollygrove, Gentilly, and New Orleans East, large areas of the city were gone—perhaps gone forever. With the exception of WWL radio, nearly all communication within the Greater New Orleans area had broken down. People were left to rely on their own firsthand experiences, hunches, and instincts. Virtually nobody in New Orleans knew what had happened just a few lonely blocks away.

  As a
historian I knew a wicked hurricane could alter world history. One, in fact, prohibited Kublai Khan from conquering Japan in 1274. Somewhere along the line I had learned in a biography of Mahatma Gandhi that during World War II over 35,000 Indians were killed by a major storm just south of Calcutta. Last year, when reading Ron Chernow’s fine biography of Alexander Hamilton, I was reminded of how on August 31, 1772, a hurricane near the tiny island of Dominica crashed into the harbor, smashing all anchored boats and destroying the sugarcane crop. A seventeen-year-old Hamilton, traumatized by the storm, wrote an essay about it which was subsequently published in the Royal Danish-American Gazette, launching his career as a polemicist. “It seemed as if a total dissolution of nature was taking place,” Hamilton said. “The roaring of the sea and wind, fiery meteors flying about it [sic] in the air, the prodigious glare of almost perpetual lightning, the crash of the falling house, and the ear-piercing shrieks of the distressed, were sufficient to strike astonishment into angels.” I was also well aware that the great Galveston hurricane of 1900 killed between 8,000 and 10,000 people, and that when John F. Kennedy was president a tropical cyclone in East Pakistan annihilated over 22,000 citizens. Hurricanes mattered. I knew that much.

  As to storms in my own times, I remember reading about the ravages of Hurricane Gilbert of 1988, Hurricane Hugo of 1989, and Hurricane Andrew of 1992 (which inflicted the costliest hurricane damage in U.S. history—$44.9 billion). These hurricanes, however, were abstractions to me, dramatic New York Times accounts and NBC News visuals that I watched from safety. I never fully comprehended their power or their tricks—or their ability to unleash widespread devastation on all aspects of civil society. Hurricane Katrina was my adult-dosage wake-up call.

  This book attempts to document what novelist Saul Bellow in Ravelstein called “the freaky improvisations of creatures under stress.” Hurricane Katrina had created widespread anarchy. In helter-skelter situations, citizen-heroes like Reverend Willie Walker of Kenner; Mama D of New Orleans; Sara Roberts of Lake Charles, Louisiana; and Mayor Eddie Favre of Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, rose to the forefront among first responders and performed beyond expectations. In New Orleans an ex-con, a newspaper reporter, an animal-rights activist, a reggae dreamer, a states’ rights advocate, an AIDS doctor, and a prep-school teacher became civic leaders while the New Orleans Police Department, with notable individual exceptions, was the face of fecklessness.

  But this book is not just about New Orleans. Too often during the Great Deluge the national media focused on New Orleans rather than the Mississippi-Alabama Gulf Coast area. To a degree this was understandable. While the hurricane devastation was much worse in towns like Bay St. Louis (where I lived for eight years) and nearby Waveland (where I often wrote along the beach front), the New Orleans drama unfolded in an escalating way once the 17th Street Canal, London Avenue Canal, and Industrial Canal levees breached. As evenhandedly as possible, I try to flash back and forth between New Orleans, the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and southeastern Louisiana parishes such as St. Bernard and Plaquemines, with an occasional look at Alabama. An apology, however, must be offered at the outset. The magnitude of the Great Deluge was so great, the implications for the Gulf South region so mindbogglingly huge, it was impossible to tell what happened to every town or hamlet. Now that I’m finished with the text, and my publisher is preparing an index, I see that communities such as Pearlington, Moss Point, D’Iberville, Delacroix, Port Sulphur, Grand Isle, and Vinton aren’t meaningfully included. This is regrettable. My hope in writing this book is to give historical dignity to the people and places that seized the moment, however surreal, and took charge.

  If I gleaned one pertinent insight about human nature from writing this book, it’s that love of geographical places is more all-encompassing than most of us imagine. When reading about the horror of the St. Bernard Parish “Wall of Water” or the Bay St. Louis “Lake Borgne Surge,” you might think only a crazy person would rebuild there. Yet people are rebuilding and they are not crazy. I interviewed more than three hundred people, and none, not even those who lost everything they had, want to live anyplace else. They were born in Pascagoula or Ocean Springs or Belle Chasse, and they plan on dying there. It’s their unflappable spirit, with private-sector and federal help, which guarantees that all of these devastated communities—even poor Chalmette, Louisiana—will be back.

  Anybody reading the endnotes will see that I relied on newspaper reporters quite a bit in writing this narrative. What a truly superb job the New York Times, New Orleans Times-Picayune, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Houston Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, Baton Rouge Advocate, Biloxi Sun Herald, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and other dailies did in covering Katrina. When FEMA and the White House were floundering, the media stepped into the fray with gutsy reporting and deep moral principle. They had some details wrong but, more important, they got the urgency exactly right. Likewise CNN, ABC News, Fox News Channel, NBC News, MSNBC, and National Public Radio helped me write this book more than the tiny note numbers assigned to specific quotations indicate. And the Associated Press—as always—did a wondrous job fanning out across the region to make sure no town was left behind.

  It was literature and music that got me through writing this book. I kept thinking that it was too bad John Steinbeck wasn’t around to document the New Orleans diaspora or George Orwell to sleep with refugees at the Reliant Center. Wouldn’t it have been something if Hunter S. Thompson had been alive to vent his spleen at Homeland Security’s Michael Chertoff or if Arthur Miller had written a drama about the daily dilemmas facing evacuees as they started new lives in FEMA trailer camps? But Joan Didion was alive to write The Year of Magical Thinking, which Knopf published just as the Katrina disaster unfolded, a memoir full of grief, loss, and derangement about the death of her husband and the serious illness of her daughter. “Confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred,” she wrote, “the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended on the shoulder with the cars in flames, the swings where the children were playing as usual when the rattlesnake struck from the ivy.”

  Because I was in New Orleans for Katrina, and later took part in boat rescues around Memorial Medical Center and Central City, a memoir of the Great Deluge was possible. Instead I chose to write a history of a single week in the summer of 2005: August 27 (Saturday) to September 3 (Saturday). Eventually I evacuated my family to Houston and interviewed people for days at the Astrodome. I have and always will have a highly personal stake in the Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas regions, which might color some of my judgments; my extensive eyewitness interviews helped me forge strong feelings about what went down on the plain of the Gulf South; but my job, as I saw it, was to chronicle the plight of others, not my own. And in these pages you’ll read only prose in the past tense. The historical narrative stops on September 3, when the U.S. 82nd Airborne took control of New Orleans and evacuation buses finally arrived at the Convention Center. “That Saturday, the combination of troops and buses was like taking a great big wet blanket and dropping it over the city,” Terry Ebbert, director of Homeland Security for New Orleans, later recalled. “By nightfall command and control had been stabilized. The crisis was over.”

  Perhaps, someday, I’ll write a sequel titled After the Deluge, about how the Mississippi Coast, with casino gambling, came back, I hope—stronger than ever—and how Louisiana flourished once the rotten politicians and corrupt cops were flushed out of the system. About how New Orleans reimagined itself as the Afro-Caribbean capital of the world with a New South self-confidence and how Plaquemines Parish reclaimed its land from the sea in a saga as glorious as that of the province of Zeeland in the Netherlands. But maybe not. History is still being made in the Gulf South, and only a foolish booster would try to sell you a “Better Than Ever” paddle. Really, it’s too early to say. Before the Gulf South can rebuild, it needs time
to heal. While entrepreneurial zeal is the rightful engine of the rebuild, the Gulf South needs to take a breath, to pause, and to remember what transpired on August 29, 2005—the day it was so gravely wounded. History, in the end, is homage; it’s about caring enough to set the record straight even if reliving the past is painful or disappointing. Buried history leads to rank defilement of the human spirit. Any politician involved with Katrina, who espouses the cliché that “the blame game” is unnecessary is probably harboring a chestful of guilt.

  My hope is that this history, fast out of the gates, may serve as an opening effort in Katrina scholarship, with hundreds of other popular books and scholarly articles following suit. There is, in my opinion, no such thing as too many Great Deluge anecdotes and offerings. Only by remembering, and holding city, state, and federal government officials responsible for their actions, can a true Gulf South rebuild commence in the appropriate fashion. Meanwhile, I stand by something Christopher Columbus once wrote from the Caribbean: “I don’t say it rained, because it was like another deluge.”

  Douglas Brinkley

  March 17, 2006

  New Orleans

  Chapter One

  IGNORING THE INEVITABLE

  More than once, a society has been seen to give way before the wind which is let loose upon mankind; history is full of the shipwrecks of nations and empires; manners, customs, laws, religions—and some fine day that unknown force, the hurricane, passes by and bears them all away.

  —Victor Hugo, Les Misérables