Katrina: After the Flood (20 page)

Salt water was poisonous to a storm-drainage system that needed to produce its own power. But pump operators needed water to both operate and cool their machinery, and without power there was no way to siphon river water from the freshwater Mississippi. Employees painstakingly disassembled all the system’s electrical equipment, then baked it dry, to remove even traces of salt water. They then used the only available coolant to get the pumps working again—the salty, corrosive waters covering much of the city. “I made the decision to destroy everything again,” St. Martin said. “Our mission was to dewater the city, so that’s what we would do.” Once they got the first few pumps thundering again, the city would drain in eleven days. They would worry about what a second dose of salt water would do to their equipment once the city was dry.

WHOSE JOB WAS IT
to remove the dead after a disaster such as Katrina? Normally, the coroner would be responsible for collecting bodies, but those offices, too, had been flooded. The coroner would swim through muck and spend two days outside the criminal courts building on Tulane Avenue until he was rescued. FEMA had its Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Teams, or DMORTs, but they identified victims, performed autopsies, and stored the remains until they could be claimed. They did not retrieve the bodies. A colonel with the Eighty-Second Airborne volunteered his troops, but he was overruled by a commanding officer. A colonel with the National Guard offered his people, but higher-ranking officials inside the Defense Department in Washington said they were worried about risk of infection. A state police commander was also told to stand down. Finally, the state hired a British-based private firm called Kenyon International Emergency Services. They carted bodies to a collection point near the Convention Center, where they were loaded into a refrigerated tractor-trailer and brought to St. Gabriel, Louisiana. In this small town about an hour west of New Orleans, FEMA had leased a giant warehouse that it converted into a makeshift
morgue. Blackwater, the security firm, patrolled the grounds, and black tarp covered the chain-link fence FEMA had installed to block the prying eyes of the media.

The grisly task of searching for bodies inside homes fell on the National Guard, which fanned out across the city to conduct a house-by-house search. They’d use boots and rifle butts to open doors, and then, once a team had looked around, they spray-painted a large
X
on the front of the house—the famous “Katrina X” still visible on the occasional home even years after the storm.
^IV
They discovered far fewer human remains than they feared. The number of dead in New Orleans would end up closer to a thousand than the ten thousand Nagin and others were predicting.

ENTERGY NEW ORLEANS FILED
for bankruptcy protection twenty-three days after Katrina. It accounted for less than 7 percent of the revenues of Entergy Inc., but its parent company sought to protect itself from $325 million to $425 million in estimated storm-related costs. “When do you ever hear of a utility company going bankrupt?” Dan Packer would ask once he had stepped down as Entergy New Orleans CEO. “It just doesn’t happen.” Packer had been assuring people the company was “ahead of the game,” but bankruptcy also required the utility to terminate any contracts it had for outside workers. In the early months after Katrina, Entergy had a repair crew of roughly two hundred divided between electric and gas repairs. It would be up to them and the goodwill of outside agencies willing to lend volunteers to fix the crippled systems.

The National Rifle Association presented another distraction. The organization sued the city because the police were confiscating any gun
they came across following Katrina—a blatant violation of the Second Amendment, the NRA charged. “With looters, rapists and other thugs running rampant in New Orleans, Ray Nagin issued an order to disarm all law-abiding citizens,” the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre declared in a press statement. “With no law enforcement and 911 unavailable, he left the victims vulnerable by stripping away their only means of defending themselves and their loved ones.”

New Orleans’s reputation was another casualty of Katrina and represented one more mess that needed cleaning up. LaPierre’s comments, while harsh, underscored that challenge: to recover, the city would need to resurrect its $5-billion-a-year tourism industry, yet who would want to visit a city where even the mayor and the top cop had suggested their residents had acted like barbarians terrorizing a darkened city. In those first days after the storm, the cable stations had little concrete to report, and they often repeated rumors and half-truths to fill out their round-the-clock coverage.
^V
So much of what was reported in the early days of the coverage turned out to be false. Babies weren’t being raped at the Superdome, despite what Eddie Compass, the police chief, told Oprah Winfrey. People didn’t sit in “that frickin’ Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people,” as Nagin claimed. Six people died in the Superdome that week. One man threw himself off a balcony, another perished from a drug overdose. The other four died from natural causes. Two rape attempts but no rapes were reported. The crimes committed tended to be the petty thefts of people who broke into vending machines and concession stands in search of food.

Tales about what happened inside the Convention Center had been similarly overblown. The police were largely absent from inside
the building,
^VI
but the scene wasn’t so much
Lord of the Flies
as a made-for-TV movie. As reported, bands of young black men, many of them armed, roamed the corridors of the Convention Center. However, they acted as self-deputized sheriffs rather than gangs of marauders. Teams of scouts were dispatched to search for food and water. Others collected luggage carts from nearby hotels so they could move the trash into big piles. Once the buses started to arrive, these same young men organized the crowds so that the older people were placed at the front of the line, followed by women with children.

The stories of widespread looting were real. Anyone out on a boat long enough was bound to encounter someone breaking into a store or someone’s home. City Council president Oliver Thomas was on the water with members of the Kentucky National Guard when they came across three young people on a raft going into the second floor of someone’s home. The trio claimed to be helping out with the rescue, but Thomas, a streetwise pol who had grown up in the Lower Ninth, knew better. “They were breaking and entering, plain and simple,” Thomas said. Liberty Bank was hit by looters as were scores of businesses, including an Uptown Walmart.

Some of the worst perpetrators, though, ended up being those who were supposed to be keeping the peace. Police in uniform appeared in a video taken inside the Uptown Walmart after Katrina. One cop was shown in the shoe section pushing a loaded cart. Prior to the storm, Nagin had signed an emergency order giving law enforcement the right to commandeer private property—yet even before the levees broke, witnesses saw cops driving Cadillac Escalades with dealer plates. The president of Sewell Cadillac Chevrolet told a reporter that he lost more
than two hundred cars during the storm—many because the cops were in so much of a hurry, they failed to properly secure the lot before driving away.

Yet even the looting was overblown by an overzealous media. There’s no doubting that the person walking off with a flatscreen television in a city with no electricity is guilty of looting (though at least one man used a pilfered TV to buy a spot on the back of a truck headed out of town). Someone taking clothes or shoes from a Walmart presented a trickier ethical question. But nothing seemed complicated about the morals of a man stepping into a darkened store to get food for his hungry family. The press, however, seemed to judge a person’s behavior based on race rather than the immediate need for the item taken. Van Jones, an environmentalist and civil rights activist, juxtaposed a pair of wire-service photos he had found online. The caption on one picturing a young white couple: “Two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store after Hurricane Katrina came through the area.” The caption accompanying a photo of an African American: “A young man walks through chest-deep floodwater after looting a grocery store in New Orleans on Tuesday, August 30, 2005.” Apparently, “black people ‘loot’ food,” Jones concluded, while “white people ‘find’ food.”

Eventually, Eddie Compass, the city’s top cop, would help clear the record—sort of. Sally Forman was in a borrowed house in Baton Rouge, spending a couple of days with her family, when Compass came on the TV. He spoke during a press conference carried live on CNN and MSNBC about the “vicious rumors” of children being found murdered and other wild claims made in the days after Katrina. Forman couldn’t help herself. “Chief,” she yelled at the television, “this would be a perfect time to apologize for perpetuating those rumors!” Four weeks after the storm, Nagin announced that he had accepted Compass’s resignation.

The department’s number two, Warren J. Riley, was now in charge.

RON FORMAN, SALLY’S HUSBAND,
was thinking a lot about his late-night conversations with Ray Nagin in those first days after Katrina. His
wife would be there, of course, and also a couple of others. The mayor would be in the corner of his suite, fiddling with his hand-cranked radio, pumping its handle, seeing if he could pick up any bits of news. Eventually, the hotel would send up some food. At first it was sandwiches and a few pieces of fruit, but then it was the military-issued MRE. “We’d eat by candlelight or flashlight and talk about what needed to be done to rebuild the city,” Forman said. “At that point, I would’ve said Ray was focused on what needed to get done. I was still a believer.”

Ron Forman tried not to feel frustrated when a week later the mayor had still failed to act on some of the ideas they had discussed. Between the zoo and the aquarium, Forman had plenty to keep him busy as head of the city’s Audubon Nature Institute, but it was hard not to think the mayor was procrastinating. The two had talked about the idea of a citizens’ commission that would oversee the rebuilding plan, and the mayor had even told Forman that he would give him first consideration as chairman. Yet there had been no movement on that idea, nor any progress on a more pressing project that the mayor had asked Forman to spearhead. CEOs of some of the globe’s best-known companies were offering help. So, too, were the famous and fabulous, from pop stars to Prince Charles to Bill Gates. The mayor said it was a great idea when Forman volunteered to take on coordination of that. Forman had even found a New York–based firm willing to log the offers and help the city sort through them all. “I’d call for follow-through,” Forman said, “but he’d just do his whole Ray-Ray thing: ‘Hey, man, what’s up, how you doing?’ Then he’d tell me he’ll need to get back to me.”

Forman had enough sense to avoid Dallas and the Business Council’s meeting with Nagin. “I stayed away from that mess,” he said. But plenty of the participants had described for him the petulant mayor who made no effort to reassure them that he was in control. Forman’s Uptown neighbors started calling him. “Where’s Ray?” neighbor after neighbor asked, and Forman would respond in a way both loyal and disloyal to a mayor he also described as a friend. He shared his own frustrations with a man who didn’t seem to want his help—who seemed to vanish when his city needed him most. But then Forman gave each the same spiel: He’s our mayor. He understands the central role business can play. He
must recognize that he can’t do this by himself. “He knows he has to include us in any recovery efforts,” Forman would reassure people.

DAVID WHITE, THE FRIEND
who had served as the mayor’s campaign treasurer, was in Houston when Nagin called. White didn’t hesitate when his friend asked for his help. White waited for the National Guard to gain control of the city and then headed to New Orleans. Ten days after Katrina, White set himself up in a room in the Hyatt near Nagin’s.

White was from Cleveland and had spent much of his career in Memphis, where he worked as a logistics executive for Federal Express. He didn’t arrive in the New Orleans area until the late 1980s, when he bought a pair of McDonald’s franchises in Central City—a part of New Orleans as poor as the Lower Ninth, if not as well-known. The stores were so profitable he bought two more, then sold them for a lot of money a few years before Katrina. Nagin and White had met only a couple of years before Nagin became mayor, when both joined a group of black and white businessmen working to bring professional hockey to New Orleans.
^VII
The two had started a car-rental company together while Nagin was still running Cox in New Orleans, but the business never panned out. “I was the unofficial guy the mayor bounced ideas off of,” White said. People in City Hall described him as the mayor’s closest confidant, but that’s not to say, White said, that they were close. “Ray is a very private person,” he said. “I’m not sure he had anyone he was really close to when he was mayor.” At the Hyatt, the group around Nagin was basically his bodyguards, White, and a few key aides, such as Greg Meffert, who described his boss as “hermetically sealed.” Meffert noted, “Ray isolated himself big-time. It got very bin-Laden-in-the-cave there for a while.”

White, a practical man, figured that as bad as things were in New Orleans, they weren’t unprecedented. He researched other cities that had experienced calamity. He spent time reading up on Kobe, Japan, a city
that used a catastrophic earthquake to redesign itself, but he zeroed in on New York after September 11. The physical damage in New York was limited to a small corner of the city, whereas New Orleans saw damage to more than one hundred thousand of its homes, but he had found his template. New York had used special “Liberty” bonds, tax credits, and other tax incentives to fund its recovery. “I told Ray that’s the way I thought we should proceed, and he agreed,” White said.