Katrina: After the Flood (64 page)

Geoff Sanborn played hero by giving my draft a speedy read at an anxious time—and then served as English professor with useful comments, suggestions, and corrections. This manuscript was also improved by suggestions from the two Mikes, Loftin and Kelly. I also want to thank others who helped me keep my moorings through this project: Jonathan Rabinovitz, Sue Matteucci, Mike Buchman, and Jeff Cohen. Thanks, too, to Jackie Stewart and Dina Harris, keeper of the cabin where large sections of this book were written. Thanks as well to Linda Santi, my sometime New Orleans landlord.

My two sons, Oliver and Silas, kept a smile on my face through the endurance test that is the writing of a book. And my spouse, Daisy Walker—this book wouldn’t be possible without my Daisy. She picked up the slack when I needed more writing time. She provided the love and support when that was what I needed. And she also proved a terrific editor, if not a sometimes brutal one. For Daisy, who provided every kind of help I needed.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gary Rivlin, an investigative reporting fellow at The Nation Institute, is a former
New York Times
reporter and the author of five books, including most recently
Broke
,
USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc.—How the Working Poor Became Big Business
. His work has appeared in
The New York Times Magazine
,
Mother Jones
,
GQ
, and
Wired
, among other publications.

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NOTES ON SOURCES

I conducted hundreds of interviews in the making of this book. I sat through more meetings than I care to count. Yet any work of nonfiction almost by definition builds on the work of others. Woven through this book are quotes, data points, and other jewels mined from a long list of books, documentaries, magazine and newspaper articles, radio reports, and Web-based pieces. I mention many by name in the body of the book but also felt protective of the narrative flow. Below is a more thorough rendering of all those works that enriched the tale I set out to tell.

Many books helped in the shaping of this narrative, starting with the first I read post-Katrina,
New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape
. John King, the
San Francisco Chronicle
’s urban design critic, a friend and a former colleague, made sure I read this masterpiece by Peirce Lewis. That and the next book on my reading list, John M. Barry’s splendid
Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America
, probably made my early coverage a little geography-obsessed. But I couldn’t have asked for two better primers. Two more recent works, Richard Campanella’s
Bienville’s Dilemma: A Historical Geography of New Orleans
and Lawrence N. Powell’s
The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans
, helped round out my understanding of the geography and history of New Orleans.

There have been any number of excellent books written about
New Orleans immediately after the flood. At or near the top of any list would be Douglas Brinkley’s
The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast,
a vivid snapshot of those first terrible days after Katrina that’s as well written as it is insightful. I valued the brawling spirit of Jed Horne’s
Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City
, which might be my personal favorite among this first batch of Katrina books. Also making my top tier:
Zeitoun
, by Dave Eggers, which tells the harrowing tale of Abdulrahman Zeitoun in the first couple of weeks after Katrina;
City of Refuge
, Tom Piazza’s beautifully rendered novel about those first months after the storm;
Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans
, by Dan Baum; and
1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina
, by Chris Rose.

Robert B. Olshansky and Laurie A. Johnson’s
Clear as Mud: Planning for the Rebuilding of New Orleans
proves it’s possible to fall in love with a book about urban planning. Valuable, too, was Kristina Ford’s engaging book
The Trouble with City Planning: What New Orleans Can Teach Us
. Sarah Carr’s evenhanded, clear-eyed account of school reform in post-Katrina New Orleans,
Hope Against Hope: Three Schools, One City, and the Struggle to Educate America’s Children
, is an impressive
work of journalism, as is
Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security
, by Christopher Cooper and Robert Block. I also appreciated Michael Eric Dyson’s incisive
Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster
; Tom Wooten’s heartfelt book
We Shall Not Be Moved: Rebuilding Home in the Wake of Katrina
; and Ivor van Heerden’s engaging account of his pursuit of the truth in
The Storm: What Went Wrong and Why During Hurricane Katrina—the Inside Story from One Louisiana Scientist
.

Also deserving mention:
Resilience and Opportunity: Lessons From the U.S. Gulf Coast after Katrina and Rita
, edited by Amy Liu, Roland V. Anglin, Richard M. Mizelle Jr., and Allison Plyer;
A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge
, by
Josh Neufeld;
Unnatural Disaster
, a collection of articles from the
Nation
magazine edited by Betsy Reed;
The Fight for Home: How (Parts of) New Orleans Came Back
, by Daniel Wolff;
Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six
, by
Jordan Flaherty;
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
, by Naomi Klein;
There Is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster: Race, Class, and Hurricane Katrina
, edited by Chester Hartman and Gregory D. Squires;
Overcoming Katrina: African American Voices from the Crescent City and Beyond
, by D’Ann R. Penner and Keith C. Ferdinand;
City Adrift: New Orleans Before and After Katrina
, by the Center for Public Integrity;
The Ravaging Tide: Strange Weather, Future Katrinas, and the Coming Death of America’s Coastal Cities
, by Mike Tidwell; and
Who Killed New Orleans? Mother Nature vs. Human Nature
, by Diane Holloway.

Spike Lee’s sensational
When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts
proved a much-needed jolt for the city when it premiered in August 2006. More high-quality documentaries followed, including Lee’s sequel,
If God Is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise.
Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s
Trouble the Water
was a 2008 Oscar nominee that deserved all the praise it received and then some. Lolis Eric Elie’s excellent
Faubourg Tremé
is a touching, poignant film that, true to its subtitle, offers “the untold story of black New Orleans.” Other favorites that helped in the creation of this book:
The Big Uneasy
, by Harry Shearer;
Race
, by Katherine Cecil; and
Getting Back to Abnormal
, by Peter Odabashian, Andrew Kolker, Louis Alvarez, and Paul Stekler.

Any number of national media outlets remained committed to the Katrina story long after the hurricane was no longer headline news; all offered rich reserves of material for me to sift through. Any list would start with the
New York Times
and include CNN, NPR, the
Washington Post
, the
Los Angeles Times
, the
Houston Chronicle
, and the
Chicago Tribune
. I mention many of my
Times
colleagues by name within these pages, but a more thorough list includes Dan Barry, who deserved the Pulitzer in my eyes for the columns he wrote in those first days and months after Katrina, and also Deborah Sontag, Eric Lipton, Jennifer Steinhauer, Jeré Longman, and Leslie Eaton. The Associated Press also deserves a special shout-out for its commitment to covering post-flood New Orleans. When was the first jury trial post-Katrina? A search uncovered an AP article (carrying no byline) published in June 2006, ten months after Katrina, documenting jury selection for a man accused of stealing a car. The piece was short but included an estimate of the backload of cases (five thousand) and the approximate repair bill ($4 million) for the criminal court complex. Cain Burdeau, Michael Kunzelman, Becky Bohrer, Robert Tanner, and Michelle Roberts were the names I’d see most frequently on AP stories that carried a byline.

The
Times-Picayune
coverage of New Orleans post-Katrina was as impressive as it was invaluable to the writing of this book. Going through stacks of old clips and printouts, I’d see the same names over again: Gordon Russell, David Hammer, Laura Maggi, Katy Reckdahl, Frank Donze, Michelle Krupa, Mark Schleifstein, Brendan McCarthy, Bruce Nolan, Bruce Eggler, Bruce Alpert, Martha Carr, Sarah Carr, Trymaine D. Lee, Chris Kirkham, Brian Thevenot, Jeff Duncan, Kate Moran, Richard Rainey, Paul Purpura, Gwen Filosa, and Mark Waller. There were also the columnists I regularly read: Chris Rose, Lolis Eric Elie, Stephanie Grace, James Gill, and Jarvis DeBerry.

The pages of the
New Orleans
Tribune
often offered a very different view than the
Times-Picayune
on the city’s recovery. In the
Tribune
I’d read anything by Anitra D. Brown, J. B. Borders, or Beverly McKenna, who writes a regular publisher’s note for the paper. Lance Hill is an occasional
Tribune
contributor, as is Bill Quigley, a Loyola law professor. The periodic post-storm updates that Quigley published in the
Trib
and also
CounterPunch
offered vivid snapshots that, along with the
New Orleans Index,
published jointly by the Brookings Institution and the Data Center (then the Greater New Orleans Data Center), allowed me to more accurately track the city’s progress, or lack of it. The same is true of the series of articles the
New York Times
ran around both the first and second anniversaries of Katrina, and the anniversary pieces produced by any number of media outlets.

The
Gambit
often came through when I was looking to learn more about a subject. There were Clancy DuBos’s entertaining columns about New Orleans politics and also the long features at which the paper’s alternative weekly excelled. There was also the crew at the
Lens
, a local investigative news site, who always offered high-quality work whether on the schools, the coast, or city politics. I mention Karen Gadbois and Tyler Bridges within these pages, but other
Lens
staffers, past and present, deserve mention, including Jessica Williams, Mark Moseley, Charles Maldonado, and Jeff Adelson.

Dan Baum wrote “Deluged” and “The Lost Year,” which might be my two favorite magazine pieces about New Orleans just after Katrina. Both appeared in the
New Yorker
, and both served as great sources while working on this book. I appreciated the occasional New Orleans
dispatch Josh Levin filed for
Slate
, and I also found insights reading Robert Morris (the
Uptown Messenger
), Jeff Crouere, the
New Orleans Business Journal
, and the
Louisiana Weekly
.

THE PROLOGUE TO THIS
book was based on a blend of interviews and depositions. An article appearing in the
Los Angeles Times
was my source for Blanco’s quote expressing her frustration with the airlines.

I relied on numerous sources for the FEMA portions of this book. That includes an interview with Marty Bahamonde but also numerous books and articles. Cooper and Block’s
Disaster
offered an invaluable history of FEMA along with a withering dissection of the federal government’s many blunders after Katrina. Daniel Franklin, writing in the
Washington Monthly
in 1995 (“The FEMA Phoenix”), offered a vivid portrait of FEMA’s earliest years and James Lee Witt’s attempts to save the agency. So, too, did Jon Elliston in his excellent “FEMA: Confederacy of Dunces,” appearing in the
Nation
a few weeks after Katrina. Also helpful were Spencer S. Hsu’s reporting in the
Washington Post
and an Evan Thomas article appearing in
Newsweek
.