Katrina: After the Flood (4 page)

Chief Lawson and several of his people were at the meeting on Thursday morning where they decided to shut down the Crescent City Connection. The head of the bridge police was there; the meeting was in his office, inside the small administrative building located on the West Bank side of the bridge. That was technically Orleans Parish, yet no one on their side of the bridge even tried to contact their counterparts in New Orleans. “The radios were out,” Whitmer explained. “The phones were out.” Yet somehow their group included a deputy representing the Jefferson Parish sheriff’s office. NOPD had set up an impromptu headquarters at the foot of Canal Street, just on the other side of the bridge, under the entrance to the Harrah’s casino—as anyone listening to a police scanner or even CNN would know. Including New Orleans in their multijurisdictional decision would have required just a ten-minute drive across the river to extend an invitation.

The chief of the bridge police, Michael Helmstetter, when asked to explain his rationale for voting to shut down the Crescent City Connection, said, “I guess to protect the pedestrians that were crossing.” Chief Lawson cited any number of explanations for his decision. He needed to think about his men, he said, who were on their fourth or fifth day working twelve-hour shifts. The city had ample food and drink, but not if they had to share it with every person who crossed its city limits. “We aided as long as we could,” Lawson said.

No notes were taken during the meeting, but by all accounts there
wasn’t much dissension. Mainly the talk was about the logistics of shutting down the bridge. The bridge police would block anyone already on the interstate from walking toward Gretna. Jefferson Parish posted several deputies at a ramp near the Superdome, while Gretna took responsibility for blocking the entrance ramp at Tchoupitoulas (pronounced “chop-a-two-liss”) Street, also on the New Orleans side of the bridge and a short walk from the Convention Center. At around 10:30 a.m. on Thursday, September 1, 2005, with the thermometer near ninety degrees on a day that promised to be as hot and humid as the one before, the first three Gretna patrol officers took their post at the top of the Tchoupitoulas ramp. The Crescent City Connection was now closed to any pedestrian seeking a way out of New Orleans.

KATHLEEN BLANCO WAS AT
the state’s emergency operations center in Baton Rouge when she learned about the bridge closing. The governor was furious. “They had no authority to do what they did,” Blanco said. The Crescent City Connection fell under the jurisdiction of Louisiana’s Department of Transportation. Blocking pedestrian traffic from crossing the bridge would have been her call and a decision she would not have made.

“Nothing needed to be shut down,” Blanco said. “It was totally unnecessary and a horrible reaction based on fear.”

Ray Nagin might have been even angrier than Blanco—if he knew what was happening. On Thursday morning, Nagin was angry at Blanco, not anyone in Gretna. The governor had been promising buses for at least two days, yet now he was hearing reports of buses picking up people on the roadways
before
they even reached the city. Reports came as well of buses skipping past the city to pick up people in the suburbs. In protest, Nagin called for a “freedom march” across the Crescent City Connection. Tap out a press statement on your BlackBerry, he instructed Sally Forman, his communications director. “We said, ‘If you want to walk across the Crescent City Connection, there’s buses coming, you may be able to find some relief,’ ” the mayor wrote in a self-published memoir based on those few weeks when he was the most famous mayor in America. He also instructed his police chief to spread word among
officers working near the Convention Center: the buses are just on the opposite side of the bridge.

KEVIN FERNANDEZ, GORDON MCCRAW,
and Lawrence Vaughn were the first Gretna officers assigned to the Tchoupitoulas entrance ramp. Their orders had been minimal. “You’re to stop people,” their sergeant, James Price, had told them, “and tell them they weren’t going to be allowed to cross.” On their own, the three decided not to allow through even pedestrians carrying an ID showing they lived on the West Bank. Each carried a department-issued Glock .45 and a pump-action shotgun. Sergeant Price had not instructed his men to use the shotguns, but then, he had not forbidden them from using them, either.

The police felt for the people they couldn’t let pass. “I would have tried to get out, too,” Kevin Fernandez said. Instead they repeated the same few things. There was no food or water for them on the other side of the bridge. There was also no way out. “We kept explaining,” Officer Fernandez said, “that there were buses going into Orleans Parish to evacuate them, that if they would wait, they’d shortly be evacuated.” Lawrence Vaughn, who was black, suggested that people find a ride across the bridge. People were not permitted to walk to the West Bank, Vaughn said, “but I told them that they were welcome to use any other means of conveyance, a vehicle.”

The three Gretna cops had been stopping people for around two hours when the mood, Officer Vaughn said, turned “a little more hostile.” Somewhere around eight hundred to a thousand people were gathered by the Tchoupitoulas on-ramp on a hideously hot day that again saw temperatures in the nineties. It fell on him, Vaughn decided, as the only African American, to calm people down.

Instead, Vaughn’s race gave people a focus for their frustrations. People in the crowd called Vaughn an Uncle Tom. He was a traitor. A black man holding a child around two years old was particularly cruel. Why was he doing the white man’s business, he asked Vaughn, when so many of his own were in need? “Where are we supposed to go?” the man with the small child pleaded. Sit tight, Officer McCraw advised people. The
buses were on their way. Others in the crowd yelled that they’d heard the opposite from NOPD.

The heckler handed off his child. As Vaughn told it, “The one doing all the talking says, ‘We’ll bum-rush them two white boys and jump this nigger here—we can get across this bridge.’ ” At that point, Vaughn had worn a badge for more than twenty years, including a stint in the military police in the US Army. “There was too many of them against the three of us,” he said. Scared, he pointed his shotgun over the water “and fired off a round to get their attention.”

“You Uncle Tom,” the man who had been doing most of the talking said.

“Yessir.”

“You stupid fucking nigger.”

“Yessir.”

“I’m going to whup your fool ass.”

“Yessir. But you’re still not crossing the bridge.”

“THE THING THAT DISAPPOINTED
us a great deal were the canceled flights,” Kathleen Blanco told CNN a few days after Katrina. Continental Airlines had heroically continued to fly people out of New Orleans through 3:30 p.m. on Sunday, but Delta discontinued its passenger air service out of New Orleans at just after midnight on Saturday. “A lot of people got stranded like that,” Blanco said. It fell to the city’s hotels to care for those who couldn’t get out of New Orleans ahead of the storm.

Plenty of lodgings booted lingering guests on Monday or Tuesday, pointing the way to the Superdome or the Convention Center before shuttering their doors. The staff of the Hotel Monteleone, in contrast, acted valiantly in those first days after the storm. This stately building in the heart of the French Quarter housed and fed around five hundred people—a group that included a mix of tourists and locals seeking refuge. By Thursday, though, the hotel was running out of water and food and also the fuel needed to operate its generator. Here are some maps, management told people. Go to the Convention Center. There’ll be buses for you there.

Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky of San Francisco were
among those who had gotten stuck at the Monteleone. They were in New Orleans for a conference of EMS (emergency medical services) workers, of all things, and were among those unable to catch a flight out of town ahead of Katrina. Now they were part of a group of around two hundred, the majority tourists, on the streets of New Orleans, left to fend for themselves.

The group ran into National Guardsmen a few streets from the Monteleone. They were no longer letting people inside the Convention Center, the soldiers told them, but didn’t have an answer when people asked where they should go. “The guards told us that this was our problem—and, no, they didn’t have extra water to give us,” Bradshaw and Slonsky wrote in an article about their experience published in the
Socialist Worker
eleven days after Katrina. A few blocks later, they came across the impromptu command center the New Orleans police had set up in front of Harrah’s. No one there could tell them where they were supposed to go, so as a group, they decided they would camp out across the street from Harrah’s. By that time, their group numbered around three hundred. Maybe their size would make them impossible to ignore.

Their gambit worked—after a fashion. A police commander crossed the street to talk with them. Walk across the bridge, he advised. “I swear to you that the buses are there,” he supposedly told them.

With “great excitement and hope,” Bradshaw and Slonsky wrote, they headed toward the bridge. They passed by the Convention Center, where their determination to find a way out of New Orleans must have been infectious. “Quickly our numbers doubled and doubled again,” the couple wrote. “Babies in strollers now joined us, as did people using crutches, elderly clasping walkers, and other people in wheelchairs.” A torrential downpour drenched the lot of them, but the group, now a majority black, kept walking.

Their group made it onto the highway but were stopped before they reached the bridge by a barricade of police cruisers and “armed sheriffs,” according to Bradshaw and Slonsky. The deputies “began firing their weapons over our heads.” Most of their group ran, but Bradshaw and Slonsky, among others, tried talking to the deputies. “They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans, and there would be no Superdomes in their city,” the couple wrote.

Bradshaw, Slonsky, and a small band of others set up camp on the roadway, not far from where they had been turned away. An elevated highway seemed safer than the streets. From their perch they watched others attempt to cross the bridge. Sometimes the police deterred would-be crossers with shouts. Other times they used gunfire to turn people around. Either way, no one was walking across that bridge.

OLIVER THOMAS, PRESIDENT OF
the New Orleans City Council, noticed the blockade after a long day in and out of the water on a rescue boat. (“I had sores on my feet for two months,” he said.) “Let’s talk basic human rights,” Thomas said. “You’ve got these people on the governor’s bridge—stopping Louisiana citizens from crossing the bridge? Old people, children, people peacefully walking through a route literally that’s the only way out of a city covered by water. By whose authority? And let’s talk jurisdictional issues. This is an outside force telling our people they can’t walk across the bridge? By what right?”

1

THE BANKER

The plan was to evacuate vertically. That’s what the Uptown blue bloods did when a hurricane took aim at New Orleans, and so, too, would Alden J. McDonald Jr., president of the city’s largest black-owned bank. With Katrina bearing down on the region, McDonald had his assistant book a block of rooms at the Hyatt in the city’s central business district. That’s where the mayor would ride out the hurricane and where Entergy, the local electric and gas utility, was setting up its emergency center. The Hyatt, a thirty-two-story fortress made from steel and cement, was wrapped in fortified glass. Rising high above its next-door neighbor, the Superdome, just off Poydras Street, the hotel had its own generator and would be stocked with extra provisions. Theoretically, it promised its guests a safe berth above the chaos.

McDonald woke up early in his home on that last Sunday in August 2005. He had slept maybe three or four hours. The National Hurricane Center categorizes every storm based mainly on the strength of its winds. When McDonald and his wife, Rhesa, had gone to bed on Saturday night, the center had rated Katrina a powerful Category 3. By early the next morning, the storm had been upgraded to Category 5. There is no Category 6.

The sixty-one-year-old bank president drank his coffee and readied himself for his day while a radio blared dire warnings. A lifelong New Orleanian, McDonald knew hurricanes could be fickle brutes. They shift in direction without warning. Their winds pick up speed or deflate in strength depending on the warmth of the waters over which they pass, among other factors. But as of Sunday morning, the radio was reporting that Katrina was a Category 5 storm expected to hit the New Orleans region within the next twelve to twenty-four hours. Scientists warned its winds could top 175 miles per hour. The storm surge—a giant tidal wave, essentially—might reach twenty-five feet. This storm looked like the Big One that experts had been warning about for years.

Home for McDonald was “out in the East”—more formally, New Orleans East, swampland that had decades earlier been drained and converted into a series of subdivisions housing a large portion of the city’s African-American middle class, along with a large share of its black elites. McDonald was the son of a waiter whose annual wages had never topped $15,000. McDonald now lived on a quarter acre in Lake Forest Estates, one of the pricier enclaves in this sprawling appendage to New Orleans whose ninety-six-thousand-plus residents represented around one-fifth of New Orleans’s population. His bank, Liberty Bank and Trust, had financed a sizable share of the homes and businesses in the East. Its headquarters were located in New Orleans East, as was its computer center and storage facility. The majority of the bank’s employees lived in the East as well.

At a little past 8:00 a.m., McDonald slipped behind the wheel of his red BMW convertible. Only later would McDonald understand this drive around New Orleans East as a kind of farewell to his home of more than thirty years. “These are my people,” McDonald would say of the residents of New Orleans East after Mayor Ray Nagin, a month after Katrina, appointed him to a blue-ribbon commission charged with determining which portions of drowned-out New Orleans should be rebuilt and which parts might more wisely be returned to marshland in a city certain to lose residents. “These were my neighbors.” McDonald had been twenty-nine years old and a college dropout when, in 1972, Liberty opened in a trailer in a sketchy part of town. Thirty-three years later,
with a massive storm gathering over the Gulf of Mexico, McDonald was readying for yet another storm. At that point, Liberty ranked sixth on a list of the country’s largest black-owned banks.