Katrina: After the Flood (6 page)

Finding a hotel room in Baton Rouge was impossible. For those first few days he was in town, McDonald couch-surfed. Even when providence delivered a house in Baton Rouge to use indefinitely, the well-connected bank president continued to live like a much younger version of himself. This house that in normal times might comfortably have slept five or six more resembled a youth hostel during the summer high season. Several people from the bank, including his son Todd, took up more or less full-time residence there. And what was he supposed to do when someone such as Ronnie Burns, an old family friend who also sat on the Liberty board of directors, called to say he needed to be in Baton Rouge for a few nights? “People were sleeping on floor space wherever they could find it,” Burns reported. “There must’ve been like
twenty people staying there.” At least McDonald usually managed to keep a bedroom for himself.

EVERYONE CALLED IT THE
“Southern branch,” this Liberty outpost in Baton Rouge across the street from Southern University, a historically black college that sits along the banks of the Mississippi. The branch wasn’t much to look at—a tan-brick building with a corrugated-tin roof damaged in one corner. McDonald even had considered tearing it down and rebuilding something nicer. But this functional facility had a set of back offices that would serve as a temporary command center. Long before Katrina, McDonald had thought to install extra T1 lines and store extra phones and other backup equipment on-site. For the foreseeable future, this modest-size branch housing a single ATM machine would serve as headquarters for a bank with $350 million in assets and thirty-five thousand customers.

McDonald could list a hundred things he needed to do to save Liberty, and then another hundred things after that. But nothing preoccupied his attention like his lack of a centralized computer. Tuesday came and went and still the disaster backup firm had not received a backup tape. No package arrived on Wednesday or Thursday, either. Liberty owned two mainframe computers. Yet one was underwater and the other was useless in a city without electricity. Until the computer tapes showed up in Philadelphia, no interbank networks such as STAR or Plus could monitor how much money a Liberty customer had in his or her account.

The satellite imagery the cable networks broadcast in the hours before Katrina made landfall showed a giant white pinwheel of angry clouds stretching some five hundred miles across. That was McDonald’s mistake; he had not counted on the storm’s vastness. Airports across the Southwest were affected by Katrina and packages were stacking up in Memphis, where FedEx had its main hub. Both packages McDonald had sent for overnight delivery were being stored somewhere on the grounds of FedEx’s sprawling facility. McDonald spent upwards of $15,000 to charter a plane to ferry someone first to Memphis and then to Philadelphia, once he had located one of the missing tapes.

Yet that wasn’t enough. On Friday, McDonald’s IT chief broke the bad news: the backup firm needed more from the bank before Liberty could be back on the interbank network. Worse, what was needed was inside the bank’s New Orleans headquarters. McDonald could only laugh over the tens of thousands of dollars he had paid to the recovery company about the years. “It was that or cry,” he said. Did a customer who had temporarily relocated to Tallahassee, Florida, have the money to cover the $300 she was requesting from an ATM? Who could say until the bank was back on the interbank network.

Russell Labbe didn’t flinch when McDonald asked him to go into New Orleans and pick up what they needed. “I knew this had to happen or we had no bank,” Labbe said. Discretion dictated they wait for the authorities to empty New Orleans of most of those trapped there. On Saturday, Labbe decided he would head into the city early Sunday morning. He would bring a gun, he said, because “you’d be crazy to go into that scene without one. When you have a hurricane like this, they’ll steal your boat. They’ll steal your truck. People will shoot you.”

I.
The Inner Harbor Navigation Canal, as the Industrial Canal is formally known, was built in the 1920s as a shortcut between Lake Pontchartrain, the enormous body of water lying just north of New Orleans, and the Mississippi River.

2

AIR FORCE ONE

Sally Forman was asleep when her BlackBerry rang for the first time in several days. It was 5:30 a.m. on the Friday after Katrina. Forman, who was Mayor Ray Nagin’s communications director, was lying on a mattress on the floor of the Hyatt, across the street from City Hall. She had been dreaming that she was drowning when the ringing phone woke her up. Her husband, Ron, who would in a few months announce he was running for mayor against her boss, was lying next to her and still asleep. “Sally?” It was a woman’s voice. “This is Maggie Grant from the White House.”

Instinctively, Forman jumped to turn on a light. Then she remembered the hotel had no electricity. “You’re the first call to come through on my BlackBerry,” she told the caller, her tongue thick and her mind fuzzy. She asked Grant to repeat her name and had the presence of mind to ask her title. Grant identified herself as director of intergovernmental affairs.

“We understand that the mayor has not been saying very favorable things about the president for the last twenty-four hours,” Grant said.

Of course. Forman’s boss’s rant was on the radio the day before. “It’s not personal. It’s been terrible.”

“That’s exactly why I’m calling. The president realizes he may not
have gotten accurate information this week and wants to hear directly from the mayor.” On the fifth day of the still-unfolding disaster, George W. Bush was coming to New Orleans to see the devastation for himself. Could the mayor meet the president at the airport that afternoon?

GEORGE BUSH WAS IN
Crawford, Texas, nearing the end of a monthlong stay at his ranch, when Katrina slammed the Gulf Coast. The vice president, Dick Cheney, was fly-fishing and the president’s chief of staff, Andrew Card, was on vacation with his family in Maine. Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, had ordered every FEMA employee must be on the job, whether or not he or she had a planned vacation, but that sense of urgency was apparently not shared by his bosses.

On Sunday—when the highways out of New Orleans were thick with people trying to escape the storm—Bush logged on to the daily videoconference FEMA initiates when preparing for a potential disaster. Normally, only state and local emergency response officials listen in, but this time the guest list included, in addition to the president, Michael Brown and also Brown’s boss, Michael Chertoff, head of the Department of Homeland Security. “I don’t have any good news,” Dr. Max Mayfield, the director of the National Hurricane Center, began. He compared Katrina to Hurricane Andrew, the 1992 colossus that destroyed or damaged more than 125,000 homes in southern Florida and killed at least twenty-six people. “Right now, this is a Category Five hurricane,” Mayfield said of Katrina, “very similar to Hurricane Andrew in the maximum intensity.” But the ominous difference, he added, was that “this hurricane is much larger than Andrew ever was.” The president spoke near the end of the call: “I want to assure the folks at the state level that we are fully prepared to not only help you during the storm, but we will move in whatever resources and assets we have at our disposal after the storm to help you deal with the loss of property.” Hearing how that might sound, he added, “And we pray for no loss of life, of course.”

Bush kept to his regular schedule on Monday. The White House talking points that week called for the president to focus on immigration reform and the new Medicare prescription-drug benefit, scheduled to
go into effect that January. In the morning, the president flew to Arizona, where his first task was political. August 29 was John McCain’s sixty-ninth birthday, and Bush arrived with a cake. There on the tarmac, in the 110-degree heat, the president posed with his former political rival before the two politicians went their own ways. The president’s motorcade drove to the Pueblo El Mirage RV & Golf Resort, where Bush touted his drug plan in front of an invitation-only audience of around four hundred. He spoke at length about the war in Iraq but offered only a few words about Katrina. It was more of the same after a quick flight to Southern California. The president spoke about Medicare at a senior center that afternoon and again that evening in a town-hall-style meeting in the town of Rancho Cucamonga in San Bernardino County. Only at this last stop did he address the images people were seeing on TV all day.

“For those of you who are concerned about whether or not we’re prepared to help, don’t be,” he said. “We’re in place.” The president and the first lady spent the night in the Hotel del Coronado, where Bush was scheduled to give a speech the next morning.

In New Orleans, Marty Bahamonde was not feeling nearly as confident as the president. FEMA had sent Bahamonde, a regional external affairs director in its Boston office, to New Orleans ahead of the storm. Bahamonde was planning to ride out the hurricane in a hotel near the airport, but at 4:00 a.m. on Sunday someone had knocked on his door to tell him that he had two hours to vacate the premises. Bahamonde phoned the emergency operations center in Jefferson Parish, but when no one there answered, he called the one in New Orleans. He jumped when Ray Nagin’s people invited him to ride out the storm inside City Hall. On Sunday night, he watched the head of the city’s emergency operations order his people to scavenge every last roll of toilet paper they could find and get it to the Superdome as soon as they could. What else hadn’t they thought of? he asked himself.

Bahamonde was in the emergency operations center on Monday at around 10:30 a.m. when the city learned of a major breach in a floodwall along the Seventeenth Street Canal. Using his BlackBerry, Bahamonde texted the news to his colleagues. Two hours later, the agency’s deputy director of public affairs was circulating an e-mail reporting the breach. “Water flow bad into New Orleans,” she wrote, adding Bahamonde’s
estimate that parts of the city were under eleven feet of water. All day, the city’s emergency operations center was receiving reports of more failures in the area’s storm-protection system. Late Monday afternoon, Bahamonde insisted room be made for him on a Coast Guard helicopter so he could assess the damage. From his vantage point in the air, he estimated that 75 percent of New Orleans was underwater. By 7:00 p.m. he was on the phone with Michael Brown, who promised to immediately phone the White House. Back at the city’s emergency operations center, Bahamonde ran into Ray Nagin, where he told the mayor that most of his city was underwater. “Nagin was stunned,” Bahamonde said. “He had this vacant expression as he listened to me that said everything.” Bahamonde slept that night under a desk in City Hall. He used a rolled-up shirt as a pillow.

Brown was already in Baton Rouge when he briefed the president by videoconference early on Tuesday morning. The vice president was on the call, as were other top officials. “What’s the situation?” Bush began. “Bad,” Brown responded. “This was the Big One.” Brown confessed it was more than FEMA could handle and raised the idea of sending troops to New Orleans. Speaking from his vacation home in Wyoming, Cheney assured Brown that they would reach out to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. After that call ended, a Black Hawk helicopter flew Brown to New Orleans for a quick tour of the disaster zone, along with Governor Kathleen Blanco and Louisiana’s two US senators, Mary Landrieu and David Vitter. They landed on a helicopter pad atop a parking structure adjacent to the Superdome. Bahamonde pulled Brown aside to speak privately. “It’s critical, sir, especially here at the Superdome,” Bahamonde warned his boss. Barely twenty-four hours after the city started filling up with water, they were already out of food and low on water. Medical personnel were overwhelmed.

The president kept to his schedule on Tuesday. It was the sixtieth anniversary of the Japanese surrender in World War II, and Bush was at the North Island Naval Air Station in San Diego to talk about the war in Iraq. The president compared the fight in Iraq with the struggle to repel the German fascists and Japanese imperialists. “The terrorists of our century are making the same mistake that the followers of other totalitarian ideologies made in the last century,” Bush said. After his speech, the country singer Mark Wills gave the president a guitar stamped with
the presidential seal and Bush pretended to strum a few chords. It made for an odd juxtaposition, the historian Douglas Brinkley wrote in
The Great Deluge
, this “photograph of Bush playing air guitar while Americans were seeing agony in pictures from the Gulf Coast.” The president stopped at the Naval Medical Center in Balboa Park, where he awarded a Purple Heart to a wounded corpsman and met with another two dozen soldiers injured in Iraq. Bush slept that night in Crawford and the next day flew home to the White House, several days earlier than planned.

The last massive hurricane to hit New Orleans was Betsy in 1965. A Category 4 storm, Betsy flooded parts of the city and caused widespread power outages. The next night, President Lyndon Johnson showed up at a shelter, stood on a crate, and, with people shining flashlights on his face, promised to help the city any way he could. Forty years later, another president from Texas demonstrated his concern for those swept up in a disaster by ordering Air Force One to detour over New Orleans and dip below the cloud canopy so he could see the damage for himself. A White House photographer snapped pictures as Bush stared out the airplane window. Even Karl Rove, the president’s top political adviser, would dub the photo op a “big mistake.”

A few hours after landing in Washington that Wednesday, Bush addressed the nation. For the past forty-eight hours, the viewing public had heard about little else except the government’s lack of a response to the human suffering they could see on television. But rather than offer a mea culpa, the president boasted of all the federal government was doing to help. In the Rose Garden, standing flanked by members of his cabinet, he recited statistics: four hundred trucks had been used to deliver 5.4 million meals and 13.4 million liters of water to the stricken area. The
New York Times
editorial page described this halfhearted, stilted address as “one of the worst speeches of his life.” Before going to bed on Wednesday night, Bush spoke to Nagin for the first time. “We’re trying to come and see you real soon,” the president assured him. “Everything is going to be all right.”