The Great Deluge

Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast

Douglas Brinkley

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061744730
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

In the span of five violent hours on August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina destroyed major Gulf Coast cities and flattened 150 miles of coastline. But it was only the first stage of a shocking triple tragedy. On the heels of one of the three strongest hurricanes ever to make landfall in the United States came the storm-surge flooding, which submerged a half-million homes—followed by the human tragedy of government mismanagement, which proved as cruel as the natural disaster itself.

In The Great Deluge, bestselling author Douglas Brinkley finds the true heroes of this unparalleled catastrophe, and lets the survivors tell their own stories, masterly allowing them to record the nightmare that was Katrina.

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

I

NO WIND WAS BLOWING when forty-four-year-old Laura Maloney arrived at the Louisiana Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (LSPCA) on Japonica Street in New Orleans’s Ninth Ward. With the exception of some storefront windows plywooded-up and Mandich’s Restaurant, which was closed, August 27 was, by and large, a fairly normal Saturday morning. In a building across the street from the Industrial Canal, Maloney’s LSPCA staff had lots of work to do. Hurricane Katrina—a possible Category 5 storm—was headed toward New Orleans and the shelter had a total population of 263 stray pets, ranging from boxers to Heinz 57 mutts and Siamese cats. All of them had to be evacuated. “Each animal got its own digital picture shots,” Maloney recalled. “We made sure each pet’s paperwork was in order. And we IDed each collar; we had a tracking system, in case any animal got separated from their paperwork.”¹

Maloney could have been a fashion model, with her long blond hair, perfect white teeth, and eyes that implied an internal kindness. The only problem was that she didn’t care for high fashion; her passion was animals. Raised in Maryland, Maloney had earned her undergraduate degree at West Virginia University and her MBA at Tulane University. She had worked at the Philadelphia Zoo and New York’s Central Park Zoo before landing employment at the Aquarium of the Americas near the French Quarter. She loved everything about New Orleans, except the way stray animals weren’t properly cared for. Her husband, Don Maloney, also an animal enthusiast, was general curator of the Audubon Zoo, where he took care of everything from apes to zebras and every species in the alphabet in between. “Animals were a big part of our lives,” she recalled. “We shared a deep appreciation for them.”

Back in 1997 they had gone to the LSPCA together to adopt what Laura called “the muttiest dog we could.” They succeeded in their quest. Tucked away in the back of a kennel was a black-tan German shepherd mix inflicted with chronic tics, heartworm, and a hip crack from what they assumed was an automobile accident. “She was on death row,” Laura recalled. “About to be put down, so we adopted her. We named her Filé.”

Maloney was hooked. She quit her job as assistant to the president of Freeport-McMoran, a huge New Orleans–based mineral exploration company, and took over the LSPCA as executive director. Many of New Orleans’s nursing homes may have been a shambles, and the housing projects that populated the city in a state of ghastly disrepair, but under her tutelage, the Louisiana SPCA was run with the spic-and-span efficiency of a Swiss hospital. She wouldn’t have it any other way. That Saturday morning, Maloney, dressed in blue jeans and a T-shirt, and her staff created an assembly-line approach to load all the animals into a pair of climate-controlled refrigerated trucks headed for Houston’s SPCA on Portway Drive. Although the two animal shelters were independent agencies, they operated under the mission statement of the 140-year-old national organization: “Compassion and mercy for those who cannot speak for themselves.”²

Transporting 263 dogs and cats was no small task, but there weren’t any other options. “The Louisiana SPCA,” according to its own stated policy, “evacuates its shelter for Category 3 hurricanes and above.”³

At 5 A.M., the National Hurricane Center (NHC) had released an update from its headquarters in Miami. Advisory Number 16 on the tropical storm named Katrina affirmed that with sustained winds of 115 mph, the disturbance had already become a Category 3 hurricane and, moreover, that “some strengthening is forecast during the next twenty-four hours.”⁴ Katrina was still about 350 miles out in the Gulf of Mexico. It had ripped through Florida as a Category 1 hurricane two days before, leaving approximately 500,000 people without power. About eighteen inches of rain had fallen. Driving winds had torn doors off houses, bent trailers like horseshoes, sent sloops surfing onto front lawns, and chewed up industrial parks, coughing out plywood and shards. There were seven reported storm-related deaths from falling trees and other mishaps. Despite the horror, Floridians were hardened to hurricanes. In 2004 alone they had been hit with four of them. The state recovered quickly from Katrina’s blow, with the lightning-fast help of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which trucked in water and ice, hospital supplies, and even microclips to properly tag dead bodies. But just because Florida had recovered quite quickly didn’t mean that Katrina, still growing in fury, was through with the American coast. “It could be,” meteorologist Christopher Sisko told the New York Times, “an extremely dangerous storm.”⁵ According to Advisory 16, in fact, forecasters expected Katrina to turn west-northwest, toward the city of New Orleans, during the weekend.

That was enough for the Louisiana SPCA, which brooked no discussion and no debate: with the announcement that a major hurricane was on the way, the preset plan went into motion. The two trucks arrived at the Japonica Street shelter. “We reached out to them and offered our shelter for the New Orleans animals,” Kathy Boulte of the Houston SPCA recalled. “They arrived in Houston and later we all watched on television while the storm grew into a Category 5.”⁶ Laura Maloney had overseen the evacuation of her four dogs, all of the stray pets, and fifteen staff members. “If we had stayed at Japonica Street,” Maloney recalled, “we’d have all been goners.”⁷

Twenty miles to the west of New Orleans, near the town of Taft in St. Charles Parish, the Waterford 3 nuclear plant also heeded Saturday’s warning. Relying on its own advance plan, the generating facility, owned by Entergy Corporation, which employed 14,000 people in the region, was required to shut down completely in the face of a Category 3 storm. Crews prepared diesel-fueled generators to supply the facility with enough current to maintain the reactor, as part of an emergency action level called an “unusual event” (the lowest of four emergency action levels). Because Waterford 3 had an output capacity of 1091 megawatts of electricity, the shutdown was certain to result in a blackout in southern Louisiana. But, rightly, Entergy wanted to make sure its employees—and the reactor itself—were safe. Entergy, New Orleans’s only Fortune 500 company, performed according to plan.⁸

St. Charles Parish’s president, Albert Laque, responded to the NHC advisory by issuing a mandatory evacuation order for all residents. A few other Louisiana parish presidents did the same that Saturday. Plaquemines Parish lies south of New Orleans, where it escorts the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico. Locally, some refer to the parish as “the ragged boot heel of Louisiana.” Suburban in the north and rural in the south, it had about 26,000 residents. Not surprisingly, it was dependent on the waters that surrounded it—commercial fishing being the main livelihood and sport fishing the biggest tourist draw. With this reputation, visitors to Plaquemines were often astonished to see rows and rows of citrus trees lining the Mississippi River for more than forty miles. Unlike the sandy dirt of Florida, the alluvial soil of Plaquemines was soft and rich, derived from the thirty-one states drained by the Mississippi. If you gave even a cursory glance at a map of Louisiana, you quickly saw that the parish was, even in normal times, half under water, vulnerable to massive flooding even if Katrina were a low-grade tropical storm. Nobody in Plaque-mines ever really believed the levees would withstand a powerful hurricane. “After [Hurricane] Betsy [in 1965] these levees were designed for a Category 3,” Sheriff Jeff Hingle of Plaquemines Parish told CNN that anxious weekend. “You’re now looking at a Category 5. You’re looking at a storm that is as strong as Camille [in 1969] was, but bigger than Betsy was size-wise. These levees will not hold the water back. So we’re urging people to leave. You’re looking at these levees having ten feet of water over the top of them easily.”⁹

When Plaquemines Parish President Benny Rousselle declared a mandatory “Phase I” evacuation on August 27—that Saturday when there was still plenty of time to flee—parish employees fanned out on preappointed routes, picking up residents with special needs and busing them to state-run shelters in Shreveport, Alexandria, Houma, and Lafayette.¹⁰ The parish not only knew which residents required special help, it knew exactly where they lived. “We were putting them on buses that Saturday morning and, you know what?” Rousselle recalled. “When we ran out of drivers, I went up to evacuees, determined which ones had valid driver’s licenses and knew how to drive stick shift, and told them to bring folks north. They were tapped…deputized or whatever you want to call it. They were now official parish drivers. Out…out…out. I wanted everybody out of Plaquemines Parish. We were able to get our people out.”¹¹

II

Throughout all nine of Louisiana’s coastal parishes,* only a mandatory evacuation drew the attention of storm-tested residents—anything less was inadequate. In New Orleans (Orleans Parish), no such mandatory evacuation order had ever been issued during the course of the city’s 287-year history. This was not to imply that New Orleans had never before been in harm’s way, the object of a natural disaster. In fact, it had never been out of peril. The city was founded in 1718 by the Sieur de Bienville, a French-Canadian nobleman who believed that the Mississippi River was in crying need of an ocean port. Having explored the delta region for almost twenty years, he had an intimate understanding of its alternating swamps and bayous (naturally occurring canals). With his brother, Pierre Le Moyne, Bienville had been one of the earliest Europeans to set eyes on Lake Pontchartrain: a 630-square-mile body of water at the edge of southeastern Louisiana. Pontchartrain was part bay, in that it opened onto the Gulf of Mexico, and part lake, in that it was generally filled with freshwater. Native Americans called it Lake Oktwa-ta, or “Wide Water.”¹²

For years, Bienville had carefully considered a site for the port he envisioned. With advice from local Native Americans, especially Bayougoulas and Choctaws with whom he had navigated the region in hand-hewn cypress pirogues, he selected a tract of relatively high ground along an eastward curve in the Mississippi River. Bienville calculated that it was about ten feet above sea level; it was probably not quite that high, but the site was distinctly above the surrounding waters in those early days. The Native Americans assured him that it was the driest spot in proximity to both the river and the lake. Bienville was easily convinced that this location—on “the most beautiful crescent of the river”—would grow into the commercial vortex of the Mississippi Valley.¹³ In his view, the site was a great natural port, allowing access to the river, which lay along the southern edge, as well as Lake Pontchartrain, about three miles to the north by way of Bayou St. John.¹⁴ Nor was Bienville dissuaded by the Native American name for the tract: Chinchuba (in Choctaw, that meant “alligator”). He immediately renamed it La Nouvelle Orléans in honor of Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, the prince regent of France. Soon immigrants began arriving from France and Canada.¹⁵ “Unfortunately, the rude wooden huts and log cabins that arose among these mud streets,” historian Jim Fraiser wrote, “seemed far more appropriate residences for bastards than for saints.”¹⁶

During the first year, as Bienville was laying out the first roads in his new city with the help of sixty or seventy laborers, the Mississippi River swelled and put New Orleans, such as it was, under nearly a foot of water.¹⁷ “We are working on New Orleans, with such diligence as the dearth of workmen will allow,” he wrote to the French consul in June 1719. “I myself went to the spot to choose the best site…. All the ground for the site, except the borders which are drowned by floods, is very good and everything will grow there.”¹⁸ But the area’s proclivity toward flooding worried Bienville. He immediately started work on the city’s first levees, earthen berms that would protect the land from floodwater. On September 23 and 24, 1722, the so-called Great Hurricane slammed into New Orleans, bringing with it an eight- to ten-foot storm surge. The town, for all practical purposes, ceased to exist. The stubborn Bienville would have saved a great many people future trouble if only he had abandoned Chinchuba right then and moved New Orleans inland. Higher ground was his for the taking around present-day Baton Rouge, farther north along the Mississippi. Many people surrounding Bienville campaigned for just such a new, safer site. But there was an economic reason for keeping New Orleans where it was. In the eighteenth century, sailing a fully laden ship up a swift-flowing river such as the Mississippi was achingly difficult and, at times, utterly impossible. Sandbars were a particularly mettlesome navigation obstacle. For the sake of commerce, the Port of New Orleans stayed put, while Bienville—thinking himself very astute and a master of nature—redirected his men to build more levees between the town and the river.

No human will ever master the Mississippi River Delta (nor will the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers), as nearly three hundred years of flooding attest. Yet, starting with Bienville and continuing once the Louisiana Purchase became part of the United States in 1803, entrepreneurial delusion became a mind-set in the region. There was money to be made in the burgeoning river port, and that’s what mattered most. Traders were bolstered by unflappable engineers. The river, they insisted, could be tamed with the proper dykes and levees. Charged with keeping the city dry, the U.S. government did build miles of levees. The levees were to be foolproof bulwarks against both the seasonal flooding of the river and storm surges from the sea, via Lake Pontchartrain. Sometimes, however, those levees didn’t work: in 1849, during the Mexican-American War, the collapse of one near the Carrollton neighborhood of Uptown New Orleans sent a cascade of water surging through the Crescent City. Ultimately more than two hundred city blocks were inundated with floodwaters. For more than six weeks, New Orleans rotted, submerged underwater. Another brutal hurricane blew through southeastern Louisiana in 1893, killing more than two thousand. The Great Storm of 1909 had Category 4 hurricane-force winds, causing Lake Pontchartrain to flood along the South Shore, killing hundreds in the New Orleans area. In 1927, the city faced the wrath of the Great Mississippi Flood that devastated the Lower Mississippi Valley. Worried, New Orleans’s civic leaders decided to stop flooding in the city by any means necessary. They actually detonated thirty tons of dynamite on the Caernarvon Levee, just fifteen miles downriver from the French Quarter, breaching the levee in poor black neighborhoods, in the interest of protecting the rest of the city. Ever since 1927, African Americans in New Orleans had been distrustful of the levee boards, believing that if the white gentry did it once, they’d do it again.

For New Orleans residents, peace of mind came from the system of levees and flood walls that protected the city from surrounding water, whether from the lake, river, sea—or, in the form of rain, the sky. If the Dutch reclaimed miles from the North Sea after the tragic 1953 flood, then, logic suggested, certainly the United States could engineer a safe levee system to protect Louisiana from the Gulf of Mexico. New Orleans levee walls were typically ten to fifteen feet high, forming the sides of the saucer in which New Orleans sits. The system of levees was overseen by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which had thirteen hundred employees in the New Orleans office. The Corps of Engineers, the civil engineering arm of the federal government, traced its roots to 1775, when the Continental Congress hired experienced men specifically to take on building projects around Bunker Hill in Boston. Largely staffed by civilians, it had responsibility for domestic construction and maintenance jobs that sought to minimize flooding, drought, and erosion, among other natural phenomena. The New Orleans District of the Corps administered 30,000 square miles, all of southern Louisiana, the most complex section of the United States in terms of water control and, at the same time, the busiest, measured by shipping traffic. If engineering a reliable way to satisfy all the construction demands wasn’t sensitive enough, the Corps also had to balance itself between the often conflicting interests of parochial Louisiana politicians and federal officials. What the national government ordered and what the locals insisted upon were nearly always different. The Corps itself was pushed and pulled just as much as any of the rivers or bayous that it oversaw. Because of the extraneous projects and inefficiencies that resulted, by 2005 overseeing a system of levees in New Orleans based on fifty-year-old engineering and suspect construction techniques was taking its toll. Meanwhile, as the politicians bickered (and the Corps dawdled), the threat of flooding in New Orleans constantly grew.

Through coastal erosion and man-made engineering mistakes, nearly one million acres of buffering wetlands in southern Louisiana disappeared between 1930 and 2005. Public awareness campaigns with names like Coasts 2050 and No Time to Lose were launched but did little good. Too many Americans saw these swamps and coastal marshes as wastelands. “The impact of losing their wetlands was overwhelming,” explained Park Moore, assistant secretary of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. “All the habitat for animals and invertebrates was disappearing along with a vital natural filter, which prevents pollution in the Gulf from toxic agents from oil and gas. Dredging killed the wetlands, which, in time, would leave Louisianans more vulnerable to hurricanes.”¹⁹

Between 1932 and 2000, from the Atchafalaya Basin in the north to the Gulf of Mexico in the south, from Mississippi in the east to Texas in the west, Louisiana lost coastal marshland in twenty parishes, a swath roughly equivalent to the acreage of Delaware.²⁰ (By 2050 it will have lost another 700 square miles.) In 2005 the state was losing critical wetlands at the rate of one football fie...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Chapter One: IGNORING THE INEVITABLE
• Chapter Two: SHOUTS AND WHISPERS
• Chapter Three: STORM VS. SHORELINE
• Chapter Four: THE WINDS COME TO LOUISIANA
• Chapter Five: WHAT WAS THE MISSISSIPPI GULF COAST
• Chapter Six: THE BUSTED LEVEE BLUES
• Photographic Insert 1
• Chapter Seven: “I’VE BEEN FEMA-ED”
• Chapter Eight: WATER RISING
• Chapter Nine: CITY WITHOUT ANSWERS
• Chapter Ten: THE SMELL OF DEATH
• Chapter Eleven: BLINDNESS
• Chapter Twelve: THE INTENSE IRRATIONALITY OF A THURSDAY
• Photographic Insert 2
• Chapter Thirteen: “IT’S OUR TIME NOW”
• Chapter Fourteen: THE FRIDAY SHUFFLE AND SATURDAY RELIEF
• Chapter Fifteen: GETAWAY (OR X MARKS THE SPOT)
• Timeline
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Searchable Terms
• About the Author
• ALSO BY DOUGLAS BRINKLEY
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher