Katrina: After the Flood (18 page)

After dinner, Bush invited his companions to join him on the top deck for some fresh air. Bush offered them Dominican cigars and nonalcoholic beer. In return, Nagin said nothing, but instead gave the president a self-satisfied, happy nod. “He knew he was working a brother,” Nagin wrote in his memoir of those first couple of weeks. “First I got to take a shower on the ultimate pimpmobile. And now I was smoking a cigar and sipping a cold beer in the mild night under the stars.” Rather than talk about Katrina, Nagin remembered, “We just talked about life. We all formed an interesting bond.”
^V

THE PRESIDENT WAS BACK
in New Orleans three days later, this time to address the nation. The backdrop the White House advance team had chosen was the St. Louis Cathedral, a triple-spired architectural masterpiece that towers above Jackson Square in the French Quarter. The Quarter still had no electricity, but the president’s people flew in generators, klieg lights, and communications equipment (and then carted it away the next day, to the chagrin of the city’s Greg Meffert, who was still scrambling for equipment). During the speech, the Eighty-Second Airborne Division patrolled the Quarter’s darkened streets. “I am speaking to you from the city of New Orleans, nearly empty, still partly underwater, and waiting for life and hope to return,”
President Bush began. The effect was stunning. The president was wearing a blue dress shirt but no jacket or tie. The podium was positioned so that the television cameras captured the full effect of the iconic white cathedral gleaming against the black sky.

The bold speech was as strong as Bush’s Rose Garden press conference two weeks earlier had been weak. “As all of us saw on television, there is also some deep, persistent poverty in this region,” Bush said. “And that poverty has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America. We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action.” Hard decisions lay ahead as communities needed to devise realistic rebuilding plans, Bush warned, but he assured state and local officials that they could rely on Washington. “We will do what it takes, we’ll stay as long as it takes, to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives.” He was speaking about the entire Gulf region, but he also added, closer to the end, “And all who question the future of the Crescent City need to know, there is no way to imagine America without New Orleans, and this great city will rise again. . . . We will not just rebuild, we will build higher and better.”

Nagin had no doubt what tack he would take. “To hell with the state,” Nagin told Sally Forman. From where the mayor sat, the president was offering them the keys to the Treasury. Bush himself had asked Nagin for regular briefings, and Bush’s top people had offered the mayor a back channel that allowed him to bypass Blanco. “Mr. Nagin has emerged as the leading advocate for the Bush administration’s post-Katrina agenda,” the
Wall Street Journal
reported a few months after the storm. Nagin had a pinch-me attitude over the access he was getting, but that same article, by the
Journal
’s Corey Dade, noted that the federal government’s aid package favored Mississippi by a ratio of around five to one.

I.
In 1927, the bankers and businessmen running New Orleans conspired to blow up the levees south of the city to relieve pressure on the levees protecting the city. The decision saved New Orleans but also left thousands of downriver citizens homeless.

II.
Nagin was there as an actor, to play the part of a corrupt mayor.

III.
Brown remained on the federal payroll for several months after his resignation, Chertoff would claim, because the department needed his “expertise.”

IV.
Speaking to a group of graduate students at the Metropolitan College of New York seventeen months after Katrina, former FEMA director Michael Brown said, “Unbeknownst to me, certain people in the White House were thinking, ‘We had to federalize Louisiana because she’s a white, female Democratic governor, and we have a chance to rub her nose in it. We can’t do it to Haley because Haley’s a white, male Republican governor.’ ”

V.
“They met a bunch of times and always got along fantastic,” Greg Meffert, the top mayoral aide, said of his boss and Bush. “Ray got along better with George Bush than he did Barack Obama.”

9

RITA

Ray Nagin was in an expansive mood three weeks after Katrina. For the first time since the storm, he was again the relaxed CEO whose communication style sounded more DJ than elected official—doing his “Ray-Ray thing,” as some locals described it. When he spoke without notes and felt confident, his speech had a musicality; he was jazzbo Nagin, the hepcat scatting his words, adding a little snare and brushwork to his sentences. “Man, I’m tired of hearing these helicopters,” he told the reporters gathered for a press conference after he returned from Dallas. “I want to hear some jazz.” The mayor was thinking about all those New Orleanians temporarily living in Atlanta or Dallas or San Antonio. “The last thing we need is people putting down roots somewhere,” Nagin said. “We need to get them back to town.” That would require that the city have lights and drinking water, along with some semblance of police and fire departments.

Technically, New Orleans had had at least some electricity since the Wednesday or Thursday after Katrina. Several days after Katrina, Nagin had asked Entergy CEO Dan Packer to give him lights somewhere in the city to show the world New Orleans was still standing. It meant
jury-rigging fifty miles of wire and diverting power from two parishes away, but that week Entergy lit up the trim lights on the Crescent City Connection bridge, of all icons, lighting up its path across the Mississippi. Yet that was nothing but a parlor trick by a utility unable to turn on the lights even in dry parts of New Orleans. Entergy operated twenty-two substations scattered around the city, and nearly every one had been flooded. So, too, had two of its power plants. “The important thing was getting all the water out of the system,” Packer said, “so we could turn things back on without blowing everything up.” Entergy’s parent company shipped pumps and other equipment to New Orleans, and other utility companies pitched in. Within a few weeks, the utility was delivering electricity to the West Bank, the French Quarter, the central business district, and Uptown. Gas lines in those areas would work, too, at least once Entergy could dispatch a repairman to restore service at a home.

Water proved a more complicated issue. The quality of the water in New Orleans wasn’t anywhere near its pre-Katrina levels, but it was still better than what was coming out of the faucets in places like Mexico City. Some around Nagin were telling him that if water was the only reason for not reopening the city, he should lift the evacuation order. People would do just as any of them would do if a tourist in a third-world country—drink bottled water—but otherwise the tap was fine for showers and boiling. State inspectors, however, were reluctant to certify the city’s drinking water. Nagin saw it as another example of Blanco’s missing the urgency of the crisis.

Despite the state, Nagin announced a phased-in repopulation that started with anyone living in a section of the city with electricity and running water. The White House, which didn’t need any more bad news out of New Orleans, sided with the state. The mayor is being “extremely ambitious,” said the White House’s Thad Allen, who also called Nagin’s plan “extremely problematic.” How would they get out the message that people should avoid drinking from the tap? And what if people ran out of bottled water in a city with no functioning local economy? In response, Nagin sarcastically referred to Allen as the “federally appointed mayor of New Orleans.”

A confrontation over repopulating the city was avoided only when
another megastorm formed off the Gulf Coast: Rita. Forecasters were predicting Rita would hit west of New Orleans, but with another storm seemingly as large as Katrina aimed at the general area, no one was moving back to the city. Instead of inviting people back to dry parts of New Orleans, Nagin encouraged anyone still inside the city limits to leave.

Rita was enough to make a heretic think the religious fanatics might have a point that a divine power had it in for New Orleans. It was the eighteenth tropical storm of the season, a Category 5 hurricane that ranked as the Gulf Coast’s fourth most powerful storm on record. The country might have been talking about a storm that ended up causing $15 billion in damage—a dollar figure that placed it among the most expensive disasters in US history—except people were already predicting that Katrina’s price tag might exceed $200 billion.
^I

Rita caused widespread flooding in low-lying areas along the coast. It wiped out several smaller towns in southwestern Louisiana and east Texas. A half a million Houstonians would be without power. But in New Orleans they rejoiced over the tragedy that had been averted. At a press conference after the rain and wind had died down, Nagin said, “Rita set us back about three to five days, but we’re very much on schedule,” as if an actual timetable existed against which New Orleans could measure its progress.

RAY NAGIN HAD ALWAYS
been too conservative for Greta Gladney’s tastes. “Ray Reagan,” she and other activists had dubbed the mayor because of his moderate, generally business-friendly policies. But anyone wanting to know why she would run against him for mayor a few months after Katrina could start with that first phone call the mayor had with the president on the Wednesday after the storm. Nagin had the leader of the free world on the line but only spoke about the breach in the Seventeenth Street Canal levee—the breach pouring water into Lakeview and the surrounding neighborhoods—when holes were everywhere in the city’s flood-protection system. Helicopters hadn’t dropped masses
of sandbags to plug holes in the breaches that had flooded the Lower Ninth. Rita had pushed a modest seven-foot water surge through the Industrial Canal, but that was enough to topple the rickety, makeshift solution that the authorities had cobbled together. The flooding in the Lower Ninth was as bad on September 24, the day after Rita, as it was on August 30, the day after Katrina. It would take at least another week to pump out the new floodwaters.

“It was like the Lower Ninth didn’t matter,” Gladney said. “It was like people in power were already writing us off.”

Three bridges connected the Lower Ninth to the rest of New Orleans. It had been that way since the early twentieth century, when construction of the Industrial Canal cleaved the Ninth Ward into two. Downriver from the rest of New Orleans, the Ninth Ward had always been a place apart. Yet the Industrial Canal and those bridges meant the Lower Nine, as residents tended to call the neighborhood, seemed its own village, not one neighborhood among many. Large swaths of New Orleans, including Lakeview and large sections of New Orleans East, sit lower than the Lower Ninth Ward. Only around half the Lower Ninth is included in the federally designated flood zone, and most of the area lies within eighteen inches of sea level. It’s “lower” in the same sense as lower Manhattan or the lower forty-eight states. But the split of the community into an Upper and Lower guaranteed that most of the world, including a great many native New Orleanians, would assume the Lower Ninth represented some of the city’s lowest-lying land. The soon-to-be-ubiquitous red shirts printed up by ACORN, the community-organizing group, which had its national field office in New Orleans, read
I’M FROM DAT NINE AND YOU AIN’T TAKING MINE!
The phrase seemed aimed at the rest of New Orleans more than state or federal officials.

That’s not to say the Lower Ninth was a safer place to live than other spongy, low-lying parts of New Orleans. It sat at the mouth of what scientists called the Funnel. The giant Lake Borgne—more an extension of the Gulf of Mexico—sat just east of New Orleans, at the top of the Funnel. Lake Borgne was bordered by MR. GO on one side and the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway on the other. These two man-made shipping channels pinched together right above the Lower Ninth Ward. It was an “excellent storm-surge delivery system,” said Ivor van Heerden, deputy
director of the LSU Hurricane Center, that the “federal powers-that-be had inadvertently designed.”

The visuals were one reason the Lower Ninth dominated the news in the early days after Katrina. The water had pushed homes off their foundations and turned some into splinters. Homes ended up on top of other homes. At least a few ended up in the street. More people died in the Lower Ninth than in any other community after Katrina. The Lower Ninth’s demographics were another reason this small patch of New Orleans came to dominate the early news coverage. The average resident of the Lower Ninth Ward earned $16,000 a year, and more than one in every three residents lived below the poverty line. Sections of Washington, DC, Newark, or Los Angeles—or rural California or Mississippi—were just as poor. But it had been New Orleanians whose forlorn images had been beamed to the world, dressed in tattered clothes and looking dehydrated, famished, and pitiful, and it would be the city’s impoverished blacks who dominated the narrative in the early days of Katrina. The country will be “forever scarred by third-world horrors unthinkable in this nation until now,” Shepard Smith told Fox viewers several days after the flood. The Lower Ninth Ward, for better or worse, served as a proxy for poverty in New Orleans, if not the entire United States. And it would be the Lower Ninth—a mixed-race community before school desegregation but 98 percent black at the time of Katrina—that stood as a synecdoche for anyone debating the rebuilding question starting to dominate the discussion a few weeks after the storm.

The Lower Ninth is relatively small, a compact neighborhood twenty blocks long and twenty-five blocks wide. Prior to Katrina, it was home to just under twenty thousand people—a fraction of the ninety-five thousand who lost their homes in New Orleans East. The Industrial Canal that cut the Lower Ninth off from the rest of New Orleans forms its western border, and the streets bleed into St. Bernard Parish, an almost-all-white suburb just east of the neighborhood. The Mississippi forms the Lower Ninth’s southern border. Locals call the corner of the Lower Ninth closest to the French Quarter and bordering the river Holy Cross. The houses there tend to be bigger and have more New Orleans–style frills. The northern border—back-a-town in back-a-town—was the Bayou Bienvenue. Before the federal government
built MR. GO, the Bayou Bienvenue was a thriving wetlands thick with cypress trees and high grass. But MR. GO caused salt water from the Gulf of Mexico to leach into the Bayou Bienvenue, killing the bayou and the area’s last line of defense. By the time of Katrina, the bayou, separated from the Lower Ninth by a short levee, was basically a giant puddle with little vegetation or wildlife.