Katrina:
After the flood.
Gary Rivlin. Simon &
Schuster. 2015.
Rivlin’s book is just in time for Katrina’s tenth
anniversary. The early chapters tell a
familiar tale, albeit still an engrossing one.
Armed with shotguns already racked, the Gretna police closed the one
exit from the storm, the Crescent City Connection, since this white suburb
feared inundation by hungry, homeless blacks.
This was illegal, since the bridge was the province of Orleans Parish
and the state, but Gretna was not distracted by legal niceties. The bridge police sided with Gretna. “Pedestrians are not permitted on the bridge
at any time!” hollered one cop. A Gretna
officer clarified: You couldn’t walk to the West Bank, but you “were welcome to
use any other means of conveyance, a vehicle.” This is known as Gretna
Logic. The deputies were more forthright
in their one-sided conversations with would-be evacuees: “They responded that
the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans, and there would be no Superdomes
in their city.”
Nagin notified trapped residents to walk to the
Connection, where, he said, buses were waiting – although they weren’t. Nagin’s only good decision, during the days
when he was the most infamous mayor in the US, was to order evacuation. Otherwise, he became increasingly erratic,
antagonizing Blanco and Bush when he knew that he would need their help. Maybe he was playing to the bleachers. But then, so were Blanco and Bush. After Nagin blasted Bush on national radio,
W. phoned him the next morning to ask what he needed.
Instead of asking for food, water and buses,
Nagin requested that the feds close the 17th Street Canal, which was
like padlocking the barn after the horses had escaped. The fed engineers – I suppose that they were
from the Army Corps – were busy on 17th Street the next day, during
the photo ops. They disappeared on the
morning after.
Bush’s blitheness infected his emergency
leaders. The head of Homeland Security,
Michael Chertoff, said on the Thursday following the hurricane, on NPR: “Actually, I have not heard a report of
thousands of people in the Convention Center who don’t have food and water.” Had he switched on his TV, he could have
watched the CNN newscast live from the Center.
On ABC, Brown told Ted Koppel that only 5,000 were in the Center; the
actual figure was closer to 25,000.
Homeland’s Matthew Broderick was asked why he delayed reporting that the
Big Easy was under water. He explained
that he had seen a TV report of interviews in a French Quarter bar. “How bad could it be, Broderick thought, if
people were drinking and carrying on in the center of town?”
Ironically, a FEMA official from Boston, Marty
Bahamonde, did more than anyone else to get the folks at the top to wake up and
smell the java. He went to New Orleans and forced his way onto a Coast Guard
helicopter so that he could survey the city.
He told Nagin that most of New Orleans was under water, which was news
to Nagin. Unlike his superiors,
Bahamonde went to the Superdome to see the situation for himself. When Michael Brown, in Baton Rouge, begged
for a two-hour respite so that he could enjoy his dinner in peace, Bahamonde
Blackberried back: “Tell [Brown’s press
secretary] that I just ate an MRE [Meal Ready to Eat, from the Army] and
crapped in the hallway with 30,000 other close friends so I understand her
concern about busy restaurants.” Brown
resonated more with the underling who advised him: “In this crisis and on TV,
you need to look more hard-working. ROLL
UP THE SLEEVES!”
The book cleared up one mystery for me. I was in New Orleans, teaching at Tulane
University, when Katrina came calling.
Before I was evacuated on Thursday, four days after landfall, I rode out
the storm in my Tulane office, since I figured that the Uptown wouldn’t
flood. (Yes, I was wrong.) From my window, I often saw helicopters
circling above Audubon Park. I thought
that they were looking for stragglers to evacuate. Now I know better: Audubon Place residents
with personal helicopters were using the Park as a helipad. – Leon Taylor tayloralmaty@gmail.com
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