Katrina: After the Flood (8 page)

RAY NAGIN HAD FIGURED
on riding out the storm on the large leather couch in his office on the second floor of City Hall. But someone woke up the mayor at around midnight the Sunday before Katrina hit. The winds were causing the building to sway, and people were nervous about staying inside the cement structure. So in the middle of the night, the mayor and key staff moved across the street to the Hyatt. That first night Nagin chose to sleep on a cot in a fourth-floor ballroom, where the city had set up an auxiliary command center, rather than in a suite that had been reserved in his name on the twenty-seventh floor. “Raindrops so large they sounded like gunshots as they hit the building,” Nagin wrote in a self-published memoir. Winds that screamed “louder and crazier than a wild banshee,” and a “constant drone like sci-fi possessed Gods chanting ominous incantations.” The night’s most frightening moment came when the windows on the northern face of the hotel blew out, forcing the occupants of hundreds of rooms to flee to safer quarters. Nagin figured he got maybe two hours of sleep that first night.

On Monday morning, Nagin spoke with the deputy police chief overseeing the city’s 911 system. During one twenty-three-minute period, he told Nagin, the system received six hundred calls. To learn what was going
on, the deputy had listened in on a sampling of calls. He told the mayor, “It was people begging and screaming for help. ‘The water’s up to my neck. Please come now.’ ‘My husband has blown off the roof.’ ‘My children are drowning.’ ” All day Nagin learned about more levee breaches, but his meeting that night with FEMA’s Marty Bahamonde underscored for Nagin the tragedy in the making. Water was covering three-quarters of the city. Thousands of people were stranded on rooftops, and thousands more wading through the waters to get to the Superdome, which was already nearing capacity. Alone in his suite that night, Nagin told himself that nothing mattered more in the coming days than his appearing calm.

Around midday Tuesday, Nagin got his first glimpse from inside a Black Hawk helicopter of the watery Atlantis over which he now presided. The mayor fixated on the Seventeenth Street Canal, where Lake Pontchartrain was pouring through a large gash in the levee wall. To his eye, the city would continue filling with water until they plugged this breach that measured 450 feet. From the air, he saw the restaurant in the middle-class enclave of Lakeview where he and his wife and the youngest of his three children had dined on the Saturday night before the storm. Ten feet of water now covered it.

“What do you need, Mr. Mayor?” Bush asked Nagin when the two spoke by phone on Wednesday night. By that point, Nagin and his people had calculated that they needed more than one thousand buses. A small caravan of trucks carting water and food rations would have helped make a terrible experience a little less miserable for thousands of people. The city needed military medevac teams at both the Superdome and the Convention Center. Nagin instead chose to make a single request of the president: plug the Seventeenth Street Canal. His communications director, Sally Forman, jumped on him as soon as he was done talking to the president. Nagin cut her off, snapping, “Let him do this one damn thing, Sally, and then we’ll move to the next set of needs.”

In some ways, Wednesday was the week’s low point for the mayor and his people. “Absolutely brutal,” Nagin said of the weather that day. “It felt like it was at least one hundred and ten degrees with one hundred percent humidity.” The hotel’s bathrooms had stopped working, so people started using the stairwell when they needed to relieve themselves. Every day Nagin, a former athlete hobbled by a bum knee, and his
staff used those same overheated stairwells to reach their rooms on the twenty-seventh floor. “I worked hard not to step in the excrement,” Sally Forman said of her regular treks from their fourth-floor command center to her hotel room down the hall from the mayor’s. Nagin described the experience as “stiflingly putrid.”

The Superdome next door was becoming a bigger worry. The cavernous indoor stadium had several large holes punched in its roof. The facility was without electricity or working toilets and was critically low on water, food, and medical supplies. It also connected to the Hyatt via a second-floor pedestrian bridge. The National Guard, who were responsible for security there, had been asking for reinforcements, but none were coming. They were vulnerable, Chief Eddie Compass told the mayor and others. From an informant inside the Superdome, the chief claimed, he was hearing that a small cabal was plotting a kind of insurrection. It would start with a diversionary action, the informant said. They would then overwhelm the National Guard, rush the pedestrian bridge, and take over the command center the city had established on the hotel’s fourth floor.

Compass’s wife was eight months pregnant and staying with him at the Hyatt, along with their three-year-old daughter. The chief didn’t hesitate when he heard a gunshot in the parking lot outside the Superdome on Wednesday afternoon. He burst into the city’s fourth-floor emergency command center and ordered people upstairs for their own safety. “We all ran up twenty-three flights of stairs to the twenty-seventh floor,” said Nagin. Others stayed behind to barricade the second-floor walkway. “Yes, we boarded ourselves into the Hyatt,” said Greg Meffert, a top city official at Nagin’s side that week. “There was this real fear that there was going to be this mass break-in.” That night, lying in a hot hotel room with windows that did not open, Nagin heard gunshots on the street. “I really didn’t think we’d make it through Wednesday night,” he wrote, “without an Armageddon-like war occurring in the total darkness.”

Thursday brought more of the same. There were no convoys of supplies and no buses, only the occasional coach pulling up in front of the Superdome. Nagin was livid with Bush and even angrier with Blanco. On a hand-cranked radio in his suite, surrounded by staffers, Nagin caught a snippet of a Blanco press conference on the one local station still broadcasting, WWL-AM. Mainly what he heard was a governor boasting about all
that the state was doing to help New Orleans. “I’ve had it with all this bullshit,” he told people around him. “I’m calling in to set the record straight.” They had given up trying to get their satellite phones to work, but Greg Meffert, the city’s chief technology officer, figured out a way to make an analog phone work over a computer line. They reached Garland Robinette, the well-regarded talk-show host, in WWL’s studios. On air, Nagin mocked the president for his Air Force One flyover and then lit into both the governor and the president. Maybe it’s Bush’s fault, maybe it’s Blanco’s, Nagin told Robinette, but either way the president needs to get his “ass on a plane” so he can sit down with the governor and figure things out.

“Get off your asses and do something,” he implored both Blanco and Bush, “and let’s fix the biggest goddamn crisis in the history of this country.”

NAGIN FINALLY WOKE UP
to some good news on Friday morning. Looking out the window, he saw several buses on the interstate, headed toward the Superdome. He also spotted a convoy of military supply trucks. He called out and people came rushing in. That’s when Sally Forman shared the news about her early-morning call. “So buses just happen to start arriving the day the president makes his first visit,” Nagin said.

Air Force One left Washington at around nine o’clock on Friday morning. The president’s first stop was the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where he held an airport press conference. He was joined by a pair of Republican governors, Bob Riley of Alabama and Mississippi’s Haley Barbour.

“I want to thank Mike Brown and his staff,” Bob Riley said. “FEMA has absolutely been great.”

“I want to join with Bob,” Barbour said. “The federal government is great—FEMA and all of your people who are on the ground.” When it was his turn to speak, the president used those compliments to give a public pat on the back to his beleaguered FEMA director: “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job!”

Maggie Grant had asked Sally Forman to have Nagin at the airport about an hour before Bush’s scheduled arrival at around 1:00 p.m. For security purposes, the government flies two Air Force Ones, one as a conveyance for the president and his entourage, the other as a decoy. They would have Nagin wait in the second Air Force One, Grant had said, until
the president’s arrival, which gave Forman an idea. It had been days since any of them had bathed. “Forgive me for asking, but is there any way the mayor could take a shower while he waits?” Forman asked. The president’s trip was in part to make a friend in Ray Nagin. Grant seemed pleased to provide so easy a deliverable. “Absolutely!” Forman remembers her enthusing. Nagin would be able to use a bathroom on the decoy plane.

The chief flight attendant was named Reggie, whom Nagin described as a “brother from New York.” “I’m not sure who you are,” Nagin remembers Reggie telling him as he ushered the mayor to the president’s private quarters, “but it’s very rare that someone other than the president uses this part of the plane.” Nagin figured he was in the shower barely ten minutes when Reggie knocked on the door to warn him of the president’s imminent arrival. Rather than finish up, Nagin soaped a second time and then a third for what he described as a “triple-lather shower.” He took his time shaving and waxing his head for the coming photo ops. “We had waited for the president for several days,” he said, so “he could at least wait a few minutes for me.” For his meeting with the president, Nagin wore a pair of dress slacks and a clean white T-shirt stamped with the word
DESIRE
.

Kathleen Blanco was sitting at a table in the belly of the president’s plane when Nagin arrived. So, too, were Senators Mary Landrieu and David Vitter and several congressmen, including Bobby Jindal, the thirty-four-year-old Republican whom Blanco had defeated for governor, and Bill Jefferson, a black Democrat who represented New Orleans East. Michael Chertoff and Michael Brown were also there.

The president entered after Nagin, who was struck by the president’s “swagger”—a “cowboy-type walk with slight bow legs.” Bush took a seat at the head of the table and lunch was served. The elected officials took turns sharing their frustrations with FEMA. Nagin, sitting to the president’s immediate left, went last. Some around the table felt as if they were watching a man unglued. By several accounts, his eyes grew wider the longer he spoke, and he began to tremble. Senator David Vitter remembered Nagin angrily slamming down his hand and barking at Bush and Blanco. Blanco thought the mayor was on the verge of a breakdown. “My adrenaline was flowing, and my pulse was a bit elevated,” Nagin said.

After their meeting, Bush and Blanco met in private. There in the Oval Office in the sky, the president pressed her to sign a document
that would allow him to federalize the National Guard troops, which otherwise fall under a governor’s jurisdiction. The governor, whose staff opposed the idea, asked the president for twenty-four hours to consider the proposal. She knew that even without her signature, the president had the authority to take over the National Guard. (Bush’s father had done so after the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles in 1992.) Bush also had the power to send military forces to an area that Blanco had declared to be in a state of emergency even before Katrina made landfall. But Blanco’s staff feared that by making a big show of the governor handing control to the president, Bush and his people could later cast her as not up to the task of command—a woman paralyzed by fear.

Senator Mary Landrieu, a Democrat, cornered Nagin while Bush and Blanco met. You’re being played, she warned the mayor. Landrieu thought she was stating the obvious: the president’s people were hoping to use Nagin to help discredit Blanco and distract attention from their own failures in the days after Katrina. Nagin saw Air Force One as bringing to their disaster the worst of Washington politics. “She was going on and on about us not smiling if we stood beside the president,” according to Nagin. “I remember telling her, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’ ” In an air-conditioned mobile unit parked on the tarmac nearby, Blanco’s staffers were delivering a similar warning to their counterparts from New Orleans: don’t allow yourselves to be used by the Bush administration.

Three helicopters were parked near Air Force One to take the presidential entourage on a tour of the city. The president walked a little ahead of the pack and called for Nagin to join him. Nagin remembers the president slipping an arm around his shoulder and asking him if he was still angry. “My staff said you used some strong words yesterday on the radio,” Bush said. Nagin apologized but asked the president what he would have done if he were in the same spot. “Mr. Mayor, I know we could have done better,” Nagin quotes Bush as telling him. Blanco joined Bush and Nagin on Marine One, the presidential helicopter. The other politicians rode the second helicopter, followed by the media documenting the president’s tour of the flood-ravaged city.

As they flew over New Orleans, Bush peppered Nagin with questions. The helicopters landed near the breach in the Seventeenth Street Canal. Where there had been no activity the day before, crews of soldiers were
now working with trucks and sandbags.
^I
Nagin walked off to get a closer look, but a Secret Service agent jogged over to fetch him. “Apparently, the president had been calling for me,” Nagin later wrote. The two spoke for another fifteen minutes. Blanco and Landrieu were fuming, Nagin said, because “the president’s people kept them out of all the key photo shoots.” Back at the airport, Bush looked into the television cameras and said, “I believe that the great city of New Orleans will rise again and be a greater city. I believe the town where I used to come to enjoy myself, occasionally too much, will be that very same town, that it will be a better place to come.”

THAT NIGHT, AFTER A
debriefing with his staff, Nagin stood by the window in his suite with several of his top people. He looked over his darkened city. Ever since the levees had broken, he had been asking himself, “Why me?” Today he had spent time with the president of the United States and watched buses clear people from the Superdome. Things were progressing more slowly at the Convention Center, but at least people there had food and water. Finally the Army Corps of Engineers was working to seal the Seventeenth Street levee breach. The mayor’s face brightened as he stared at his reflection in the glass. He had his answer.