Katrina: After the Flood (65 page)
Read Katrina: After the Flood Online
Authors: Gary Rivlin
I interviewed Ray Nagin numerous times before he shut himself off from the media. Lucky for me, he wrote
Katrina’s Secrets: Storms after the Storm
, his memoir about those first few weeks after Katrina. I was fortunate, too, that Sally Forman self-published
Eyes of the Storm: Inside City Hall During Katrina
. Sally set up several interviews with me and was generous with her time, but her well-written account of her time inside City Hall served as an additional source. Edward J. Blakely’s memoir,
My Storm: Managing the Recovery of New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina
, also proved invaluable in offering Blakely’s perspective on the recovery.
Any number of writers took on Nagin as a topic. I’m partial to Ethan Brown’s terrific profile of New Orleans’s then mayor in
Details
in 2008 and the pieces that Stephanie Grace, Mark Moseley, and Jarvis DeBerry wrote about the mayor over the years. And then there’s that trio of locals—Gordon Rusell, Jason Berry, and David Hammer—whose reporting practically demanded that the US Attorney indict the former mayor on corruption charges. The Nagin trial itself was a good source for the crimes and misdemeanors Nagin committed in office.
Lolis Eric Elie’s
Faubourg Tremé
gave me my first in-depth introduction to black history in New Orleans. Katy Reckdahl also deserves a shout-out for the moving piece she wrote for the fiftieth anniversary of the desegregation of the Orleans Parish schools.
I relied on a
Gambit
profile of Kathleen Blanco, written by Tyler Bridges, to fill out my portrait of the governor in these pages. An article written by the
New York Times
’ Adam Nagourney and Anne E. Kornblut was my source for information on the “war room” the White House set up to combat criticisms of the president post-Katrina. Helping me to round out my portrait of the Bush administration: the
Washington Post
’s Joby Warrick (“White House Got Early Warning on Katrina”) and Paul Alexander’s book
Machiavelli’s Shadow: The Rise and Fall of Karl Rove
. Details about the “overly ornamented” Katrina bill that Senators Landrieu and Vitter introduced shortly after the storm were taken both from an article written by the
Washington Post
’s Michael Grunwald and Susan B. Glasser and a James Gill column appearing in the
Times-Picayune
.
The
Advocate
in Baton Rouge broke the story of the state troopers from Michigan and New Mexico who felt they had been enlisted to intimidate rather than police in the days after Katrina. My account of the fight over the future of Charity was enriched by the work of my former colleague, Adam Nossiter, who wrote about disagreements between the state and the hospital’s medical staff.
I learned from reading a Mark Schleifstein
Times-Picayune
article that 250 billion gallons of water covered the greater New Orleans area after Katrina. The story of evacuees who were made to feel unwelcome at their new school, including Dominique Townsend, was captured in
Education in Exile
, a short documentary by Lloyd Dennis. I found the Joe Canizaro quote about the city’s lack of a plan for helping those of modest means return to New Orleans in an excellent AP story by Robert Tanner. I lifted the Ronald Lewis quote about the indignity of being cast as a poor person from Dan Baum’s
Nine Lives
.
Nine Lives
was also my source for information on the search for someone—
anyone
—who might pick up the dead bodies scattered around New Orleans after the floodwaters receded.
The
New York Times
’
Stephanie Strom was my source for reporting on the Red Cross’s share of post-Katrina charitable giving. It was
reading Olshansky and Johnson’s
Clear as Mud
that revealed that the infamous green-dot map on the front page of the
Times-Picayune
was actually based on an obscure graphic meant to show generally where the city might add parkland if the residents of a community chose to allow low-lying parts of their neighborhood revert to wetlands. Ceci Connolly wrote movingly in the
Washington Post
about the spike in suicides after Katrina, which I allude to in the book. My depiction of the reopening of the Lower Ninth Ward three months after Katrina was aided by a report by NPR’s Anthony Brooks and a Deborah Sontag article in the
New York Times
.
The
Times-Picayune
’s Jeffrey Meitrodt and the
Times
’ Adam Nossiter wrote articles chronicling the city’s decision to revise the damage estimates of most any homeowner choosing to rebuild. Both helped in the writing of that section of the book. A Nossiter article was also my source for a FEMA official’s lament over the sheer scope of people seeking the agency’s help after Katrina and Rita. I learned of the giant shredder the government dispatched to the Gulf Coast to help with the garbage problem in an entertaining report (“Katrina’s Garbage Rates a Category 5”) written by Andrew Martin, then of the
Chicago Tribune
.
Mike Davis, writing in
Mother Jones
, documented Louisiana’s unsuccessful attempts to convince FEMA to help officials reach potential voters in New Orleans’s pending municipal elections. Linton Weeks was the author of the
Washington Post
’s “A 20-Ring Political Circus: Strange Crew Populates New Orleans Mayoral Race.” I picked up Stephen Bradberry’s “whiter city” quote in an article by the
Post
’s Peter Whoriskey. Whoriskey also wrote a story about a criminal justice system in shambles that helped me tell that part of the story.
Anne Rochell Konigsmark reported on the return of crime to New Orleans for an article she wrote for
USA Today
sixteen months after Katrina. Around that same time, the
Christian Science Monitor
’s Patrik Jonsson wrote about the challenges still confronting the criminal justice system in a hobbled city. Pieces of the Doris Hicks/King Charter School story were gleaned from a terrific series written by
Education Week
’s Lesli A. Maxwell. I picked up details about UNOP’s Community Congress–II in an article by the
Times-Picayune
’s Coleman Warner. Writing in the
Times-Picayune
, Gwen Filosa told the story of several
locked-out public housing residents trying to move back home, even to units without utilities.
An article by the
New York Times
’ Leslie Eaton was my source for the comparison of public dollars spent to help small businesses after September 11 and after Hurricane Katrina. Leslie’s writing, too, provided me with the warning from Dr. David Myers not to bring sick people back to New Orleans, and data on the lack of hospital beds in New Orleans two years after Katrina. I plucked the Richard Campanella quote from another Leslie story. I picked up Alphonso Thomas’s “90 percent suicidal” quote in a
Times
article written by Shaila Dewan. Albert Felton’s quote about a lack of contractors working in Gentilly two years after Katrina was plucked from an Adam Nossiter article in the
Times
.
Leslie Eaton and Joseph B. Treaster wrote about homeowner dissatisfaction with their insurance carriers two years after Katrina in a long article that ran as part of the
Times
’ “Patchwork City” series. That was my source for data about complaints with the state and lawsuits filed. Both the
Los Angeles Times
and Bloomberg reported on the record profits booked by private insurers in 2005.
I learned about Ed Blakely’s hesitancy to take the job as recovery czar in reading J. B. Borders’s profile of Blakely (“The Master of Disaster”), which appeared in the
New Orleans Tribune
a few months into his tenure.
Clear as Mud
is great in describing the press conference where Blakely first shared his rebuilding plan, as was a
Times-Picayune
article written by Gary Scheets.
David Hammer at the
Times-Picayune
led the pack with his vigorous reporting on the many shortcomings of the Road Home program. Also contributing to the cause were NPR’s Steve Inskeep and PBS’s Betty Ann Bowser, both of whom broadcast powerful reports about people’s frustration with Road Home. It was in the
Shreveport Times
that I found the Pearson Cross quote after Blanco announced she would not seek a second term. Vincanne Adams tells the story of Anthony and Sylvia Blanchard in her book
Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith: New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina
, though she gives them the pseudonyms Henry and Gladys Bradlieu.
Patricia Jones was one of the few people who declined to talk with
me for this book. Tom Wooten’s
We Shall Not Be Moved
allowed me to tell the story of Jones and other dazed residents showing up at the Sanchez Community Center starting around six months after Katrina. Jones spoke at length to Wooten and also talked with NPR’s Larry Abramson, who told her story in the “Gulf Coast’s Everyday Heroes” series the radio station ran two and a half years after Katrina. Jones’s story was also captured by a Tulane project called MediaNOLA, which bills itself as “a portal for histories of culture and cultural production in New Orleans.”
The
Times
’ Campbell Robertson arrived in New Orleans in 2009 and produced a number of stories that enriched the book’s final set of chapters. An article he wrote about the significance of a Super Bowl win to the New Orleans psyche was beautifully written and also offered a bounty of anecdotes for a hungry author (churches that canceled evening mass on Super Bowl Sunday; schools that canceled class the next day). I picked up a quote from the Reverend Vien The Nguyen from another Campbell story.
Several people told me about the emotional meeting Mitch Landrieu held at the Household of Faith in New Orleans East shortly after taking over as mayor. I would attend a couple of Landrieu’s “budgeting for outcomes” meetings myself. But my account of the Household of Faith gathering was based largely on the vivid writing of Justin Vogt, who wrote at length about that night in a
Washington Monthly
profile of Landrieu published in early 2011.
NPR’s Alix Spiegel reported on the high rate of suicide five years after Katrina. An article by Richard Campanella taught me the term
gutter punks.
For a book he is apparently writing about gentrification, Peter Moskowitz interviewed Pres Kabacoff and posted a transcript on Gawker that helped in my portrayal of the controversial developer. And last but hardly least, there’s the terrific article Nathaniel Rich wrote for the
New York Times Magazine
about the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority–East’s attempt to save Louisiana’s vanishing coastline by suing ninety-seven oil and gas companies. As the October 5, 2014, cover of the
Times
magazine asked, “Every Hour, An Acre of Louisiana Sinks into the Sea. Who Is to Blame?”
INDEX
A note about the index:
The pages referenced in this index refer to the page numbers in the print edition. Clicking on a page number will take you to the ebook location that corresponds to the beginning of that page in the print edition. For a comprehensive list of locations of any word or phrase, use your reading system’s search function.
Addkison, Donna,
289
Affordable Homeownership Corporation, N.O. (NOAH),
353
–54
Albrecht, Greg,
164
Alexander, Paul,
48
n
evacuations and,
6
–8,
11
health care in,
275
–76
housing in,
273
–75
Algiers Point,
273
–74
Allbaugh, Joe,
36
–37
Alvarez, Louis,
10