Читать книгу Words Whispered in Water - Sandy Rosenthal - Страница 9

Chapter

2

The Flood

Early in the morning on August 31, 2005—two days after the floodwalls broke—Harvey Miller awoke to someone yelling in front of the house. It was a man in a tiny canoe, paddling with a kitchen broom. He told Harvey that two neighbors a few houses away had chopped their way out of their attic and that he had canoed them both to safety. The neighbors had made him promise to return and get the Millers. Harvey eyed the tiny canoe. Renee did not know how to swim, and this looked just too dangerous. He asked Canoe-man if he could send someone back with a larger boat. Reluctantly, Harvey watched him broom-paddle away.

***

On most mornings before the 2005 flood, I woke up slowly, cherishing that warm, comfortable place next to my husband. But on Wednesday (August 31), in a hard bed at the Drury Inn, I snapped to full-blown awake as though someone had thrown ice water on me. I would wake up like that every day in the coming months.

Few people can viscerally comprehend surviving a catastrophe that claims not just an entire neighborhood but hundreds of neighborhoods in the space of a few hours. The scope of the disaster was now becoming apparent as images of men, women, and children standing on rooftops flashed across the videosphere. These people had lost much more than their homes and all their contents. They also lost their places of worship, their favorite stores, their doctors’ offices, and their hospital. Many lost a car. They might have lost the plants and foliage they loved to tend that were destroyed in the briny gulf water.

The 2005 flood also affected their parents, their sisters, and their brothers. Too many had lost loved ones. When the counting was over, the catastrophe had claimed the lives of 1,577 people in Louisiana, including 1,300 directly due to flooding or wind according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).29 The number rises to 2,000 when you include the trauma of relocation, illness, and suicide.30

Everyone who got through the trauma managed it differently. Some worked nonstop; some cried nonstop. During these dark days, I leaped out of bed because of the long list of things that needed to be done. What about people who were depending on me? I was now living in a different city. Every waking moment, I focused on caring for the needs of my two sons and little dog which pulled my attention away from the radio’s depressing (and often wrong) information slowing oozing out of the city. It would take months before anyone knew the full scope of the flood disaster, and it would be years before those responsible would be identified. But on Wednesday—two days after the floodwalls broke—we clung together, often silently soaking up every bit of news we could find. None of it was encouraging.

The storm had passed north of the city, and surge levels had dropped, but water continued to flow through breached levees fed by the swollen Lake Pontchartrain just to the north. Water also flowed into neighboring suburban Jefferson Parish to the east. Floodwaters equalized with the lake and reached their highest point around midday on Wednesday. The news reported that it would be months before New Orleans could be drained—another falsehood. Responsibility for the lack of reliable information falls squarely on FEMA, and it may have been FEMA’s single most egregious crime. Here’s why.

A FEMA team, led by Phil Parr, had helicoptered into the Superdome at noon on Tuesday (August 30). Parr had expected to work out of Red October—a high-tech, mobile communications center with thirty computer workstations on the back of a tractor trailer. Its satellite phones and internet capability could have provided a makeshift network and allowed first responders to communicate, something literally worth life and death.31 But Red October was still a six-hour drive away in Shreveport because two people had ordered it—Phil Parr and Michael Brown—and the request was countermanded by FEMA headquarters.32 Now it was too late to get it to the Superdome due to the water and debris, and Parr’s job was irrelevant. Imagine how different it could have been with Red October for police and first-responder rescue teams! So many people could have been saved. And it would have damped many of the rampant, ridiculous rumors.

The summer of 2005 should be the last time in history that an entire metropolitan area is cut off from the rest of humanity.

***

In this unreal world, Renee and Harvey were still trapped in their two-story safe house. Several hours after Harvey had declined help from Canoe-man, Harvey became angry. For days now, he had been watching while his neighborhood disintegrated and their clean water supply ran low.

“This is ridiculous!” he said aloud. “Why is no one coming for us?”

So he stripped to his shorts, descended the stairs into the cold water, and swam out the front door. Large, speckled trout surrounded him and traveled alongside him as he breast-stroked to his house on Charlotte Drive. Harvey had to see for himself if everything in his home was gone.

Then he saw a helicopter and started to splash and yell, “HELP!”

The helicopter’s strong wake threatened to drown him, so he swam to an oak tree and wrapped his arms around a thick branch. The helicopter flew away.

Clinging to the tree, Harvey shook his fist and yelled, “Why is this happening to me?”

Months later, on a trip back to the city, Harvey would see that the oak branch, to which he had clung three days after the floodwall broke, was easily twelve feet above the ground.

***

As Wednesday morning became afternoon, the Rosenthal family continued to do what every evacuated family did: focus on the most basic things in life. Where will we work? Where will the children go to school? And, after those first two things were decided, where will we live?

Our first priority was finding office space for my husband’s company to operate, which also included me. I did the outreach marketing for the company with a specialty in copywriting. We still did not know the condition of the office on Edenborn Avenue in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie. Nor did we know which employees had flooded homes. But even if the Edenborn office was not flooded or wind-damaged, few people would be living in the Greater New Orleans region.

Steve dispatched his office manager to find space in Baton Rouge. Moving quickly was critical. Other businesses were doing the same thing by moving their operations temporarily to Baton Rouge, to Lafayette, and to the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain. Waiting even a day or two could mean finding nothing at all.

With quick wit and fast driving on I-10, Steve managed to find office space at 5700 Government Boulevard. The building was a bit run down, but we got an excellent price and the space fit our needs. We would move in twenty employees as soon as furniture, equipment, and supplies were delivered—compliments of the Great American Insurance Company, the joint-venture partner with my husband’s company. They had come to the rescue by providing these things gratis. The plan was to open on Wednesday, September 13.

During the one-hour drive back to our hotel room in Lafayette, we tuned in yet again to Garland Robinette on WWL (AM) radio in New Orleans. “Garland,” a well-known, trusted voice, was filling in for a sick friend when he went on the air on August 29, 2005. Later, due to the station’s strong signal, Garland was dubbed “the voice of New Orleans” because his was practically the only one heard during that interminable week. On this day, we found out that the Coast Guard’s search for people in immediate danger was still ongoing, and there was no contingency plan for people who were in relative safety but trapped in appalling conditions.33

We arrived back at the Drury Inn just as two busloads were pulling in from disaster zones. Most were elderly residents of south Louisiana, and each had a story more harrowing than the next. It seemed that there were two predominant reasons why aging residents had chosen against evacuation: they had never flooded before or they had to care for their pets—or both. The stories of howling dogs being peeled from their crying owners’ arms by rescue workers haunts me to this day.

***

Harvey Miller clung to the oak branch and started to further despair as he saw the helicopter fly away. But then he saw that a Coast Guardsman had been let out of the helicopter onto a nearby roof.

He yelled to Harvey, “We can bring a boat for you and your wife!”

As Harvey breast-stroked back to the house, a forty-foot motorboat towing a pirogue (a long narrow canoe) pulled up. Two big, burly men helped Renee and Monet through the window and into the boat. Harvey was too big to fit through the window, so he went downstairs, and the boat pulled up to the front door.

In that incongruous moment, with the helicopter chugging overhead and a boat backing away from the house, Renee called out, “Did you lock the front door?”

Everyone in the boat laughed.

***

On Thursday morning (September 1), we woke up in our insular world. Our cell phones were charged but useless. Email communication was effective but only for those who used it. Therefore, I was still not able to contact my family in New England. I could only imagine what horrors they envisioned if they were watching television. I needed to tell my family that we were all fine and that we evacuated with clothes and supplies for several weeks.

On this morning—three days after the floodwalls broke—in a world unto ourselves, we at least knew where Steve and I were going to work. Now we needed to take care of the second order of business. We—and 40,000 to 50,000 other families in the Greater New Orleans region—needed to find a place for our children to go to school. We had it easier than most because we had just one child to worry about, and we now knew that our office would be in Baton Rouge. We looked first to that city for a school for Stanford and scheduled a visit for the very next day (September 2) at the Episcopal School of Baton Rouge.

I drove to a nearby Walgreens to purchase a few supplies that we had not brought with us. Our planned three-week motel stay had just been expanded to a disquietingly unknown amount of time. I found an electric pot to boil water for my favorite Lipton tea and inexpensive mugs to drink it in. I also found a Chase Bank close by where I was able to confirm access to our bank account. At least we could get to our money. For the hundredth time in those awful days, I was glad for life’s most basic things—a mug of tea and having my sons and husband with me at night! We knew for sure that many people were dead. In time, we would learn just how many. And it was rude to feel anything but grateful.

***

Meanwhile, the Millers had basic survival on their minds. The Coast Guard boat brought Harvey, Renee, and Monet five miles away from their safe house to the point where I-10 splits. The trio was dropped off at a ramp, which led to the dry land on the west side of the 17th Street Canal. They walked up to medical stations where people were being registered. There were dozens of trucks parked but no toilets and no food.

Renee, who had had open-heart surgery just one month earlier, was dizzy, so a medical team agreed to take her in. But not Harvey and Monet. Harvey tried to board one of the buses, but no animals were allowed. Harvey walked to the curb, and the obedient Labrador sat down next to him. Someone came by and gave them K-rations (US Army food that heats up by itself). It was red beans and rice, and it tasted horrible. Even the dog wouldn’t eat it. Someone else came and gave them a bottle of water. With Monet next to him, Harvey fell asleep on the I-10 entrance ramp with his feet in the road.

***

In this surreal world, we got an encouraging dose of reality during the afternoon on Thursday when we received an emailed copy of a forum post from our daughter Aliisa. In the days after the 2005 flood, the forums of the Times-Picayune (the local daily newspaper) were, for most, the only mode of communication. The forums, lifelines for much of the citizenry, were posted by NOLA.com, the digital version of New Orleans’s single major newspaper. The paper’s main office and printing presses on Howard Avenue had flooded, so the paper production was relocated to offices of the Houma Courier in Houma, Louisiana, about an hour southwest of the city. Jon Donley, NOLA.com’s founder and editor-in-chief, was a visionary who had clear ideas about how the new online medium would be instrumental in putting evacuees in touch with each other and later in rebuilding New Orleans. On this day, the forum post that my daughter Aliisa sent brought us very welcome news: the portion of New Orleans where we lived had not flooded! And it stated that reports of vandalism and looting could not be verified.

***

The sound of someone yelling, “Buses are coming!” woke Harvey. He tried yet again to get on a bus, but again authorities said that no dogs were allowed. At one point, a National Guardsman offered to shoot Monet for him—humanely—if that would get him onto a bus.34 Harvey declined! Meanwhile, twelve ambulances were lined up and waiting, but no one was getting into them.

Harvey walked up to a driver and said, “I will pay you if you take me to Baton Rouge.”

“I cannot, sir,” he said. “This is the FEDS.”

Just then, the driver looked at Harvey’s black Labrador and asked, “Is that Monet?” He had grown up in the Lake Vista neighborhood and recognized her. Becoming more helpful, he offered, “Look, we’re getting together transportation for the pets because like you, people are refusing to leave without them.” The driver then guided Harvey to a kind-looking woman with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

The woman gave Monet some dog food and then said to Harvey, “I am collecting animals and bringing them to a shelter in Baton Rouge. You cannot come, but I will give you a receipt and later you can get your dog.” Then she tried to put Monet into a cage.

The dog had never been caged before, and she didn’t bark. She screamed. She screamed and screamed. Harvey took his receipt, tucked it into a pocket, and forced himself to turn his back and walk away as Monet continued to scream. With each step, he told himself that she, at the very least, would be safe.

As Harvey dragged himself away from Monet, a young man, who was driving a bus, pulled up to him and asked, “Are you a single? I have one seat left.”

Harvey climbed the steps and collapsed into a seat without even asking where he was going. He learned later that the bus was going to Houston. Harvey didn’t know where Renee was, his dog was going to Baton Rouge, and he was now headed for Texas.

***

In New Orleans, between 12,000 and 15,000 people had converged on the Superdome and at the New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center.35 Supplies were slowly reaching the Superdome, but none were brought to the convention center. Apparently, Brigadier General Matthew Broderick had access in Washington, DC, to high-tech capabilities but hadn’t consulted a basic street map. He thought they were part of the same complex when, in fact, the two structures were a mile apart.36

There was another casualty caused by the lack of communication. Rescue of special-needs patients from hospitals and the Superdome was suspended due to rumors of an organized riot. In truth, bands of young black men—many of them armed—were indeed roaming the corridors of both venues, but they were acting as self-deputized sheriffs rather than gangs of marauders.37 They were searching for food and water. Nonetheless, it contributed to a rumor that there would be an attempt to take control of the buses at ten in the morning. In response, the National Guard blocked busloads of supplies from entering the city because there were not enough soldiers to protect the drivers.38 When the buses were finally allowed in, it appeared that these same “marauding youths” were the ones who organized the crowds and moved older people to the front of the line.

***

At seven o’clock, just as the sun was setting, Harvey’s bus arrived at the Astrodome. There were about a thousand cots on the ground floor, all taken. Harvey went to the second floor and saw a woman in a Red Cross uniform. He asked her if he could make a phone call. She replied that along the edge of the stairs were phones and Harvey could call anywhere in the United States for free. In therapy months later, Harvey would recall that the woman looked as though a golden aura surrounded her. He walked to a phone and called his daughter Beth.

“Dad! Where are you?” she almost hollered.

“I am in the Astrodome in Houston,” he answered.

“I heard from Mom,” Beth said. “She’s in Lafayette in a hospital.”

Beth explained that her husband’s parents in Lake Charles were driving to Lafayette to get Renee. Her husband’s brother Pat offered to drive to Houston and fetch Harvey. Harvey suggested that Pat try the south entrance because no one seemed to be there. They agreed to meet at 12:30 a.m.

***

Thursday night (September 1), Mayor Nagin, who had sheltered with his staff at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, called Garland, who was, as usual, on the air at WWL (AM) radio. It was now more than three and a half days since the levees had broken, and no cavalry was in sight. Nagin’s frustration was more than apparent in his tirade which was heard across twelve states.

“This is a national disaster. Get every doggone Greyhound bus line in the country and get their asses moving to New Orleans… This is a major, major, major deal. And I can’t emphasize it enough, man. This is crazy… Don’t tell me 40,000 people are coming here. They’re not here. It’s too doggone late. Now get off your asses and do something. And let’s fix the biggest goddamn crisis in the history of this country.”39

The interview was looped for days on the local stations that could broadcast it, on CNN, and on all the networks. The interview commanded attention from leaders all the way to the White House.

***

Harvey Miller was still in survival mode. At 12:15 a.m. on Friday (September 2), Harvey sat in the dark at the south entrance to the Astrodome. Down the road, huge searchlights shined. Harvey waited as 12:30 a.m. came and went. Then at 12:50 a.m., Harvey saw a silhouette moving toward him and knew—just knew—that it was Pat.

“He’s here to save me!” thought Harvey.

He stumbled to the tall figure, who was indeed his son-in-law’s brother, and wrapped his arms around him for a long moment. And, just like that, Harvey changed. Up until then, Harvey’s mind was always working, surviving, trying this and trying that. But after Pat found him, it was as though Harvey’s mind partially shut down.

For the entire car ride, Pat talked about watching television—or, more accurately, being glued to it—and how no one was able to do anything else. There seemed to be only one broadcast, said Pat, being piped to all the television stations around the nation.

Harvey listened in silence.

***

For Steve, Stanford, and me, most of that day (Friday, September 2, four days after the levees broke) was spent in the car. We drove seventy-five minutes from Lafayette to Baton Rouge and checked out the Episcopal High School. But we were too late! The school had already maxed out on the applicants that it could accept. Just then, an unusual thing happened. Stanford’s cell phone rang! It was his classmate Reid Chadwick from Isidore Newman School in New Orleans. Reid and his first cousin Mark Allain were staying with family members in New Iberia, twenty-four miles south of Lafayette. Stanford was good friends with both. He and Mark had just enrolled with the Episcopal School of Acadiana, a small town about midway between New Iberia and Lafayette. And the school still had openings for the ninth grade!

We leaped into the car, got back onto I-10, and flew back to Lafayette before turning south onto I-90. Ninety minutes later, we pulled up to the little school. To me, it looked magical with the air of a summer camp. But Stanford was most interested in being in the same place as his New Orleans classmates. After a tour of the school, we met with the principal for about twenty minutes and requested enrollment for the fall semester. The principal was obliging but had a caveat: we needed to pay tuition for the entire year. Otherwise, he said, the school could not make ends meet. We complied. We had little choice.

When the administrative assistant was finished processing Stanford’s enrollment, she turned to us and said that she understood how we felt. “I can relate!” she said. She explained that the previous year, while no one was home, lightning struck her house and burned it to the ground. We smiled in appreciation at her attempt to be supportive. But we imagined that she couldn’t understand at all. As devastating as that must been—losing her entire home and its contents—at least she still had her family, friends, neighborhood, and all the things that create a community. We said goodbye, climbed into the car, and drove the thirty minutes back to the Drury Inn. As always, we turned on the radio and listened to the nonstop coverage of the levee failures and flooding.

***

Garland raged at the indignities. What was taking the cavalry so long? Two days after Hurricane Charley hit Florida in 2004, FEMA had moved two million meals into Florida and 8.1 million pounds of ice.40 It was now four days after the hurricane’s winds had died. A Republican-dominated House investigative committee would later note, “We cannot ignore the disparities between the lavish treatment by FEMA of Hurricane Charley survivors and the survivors of this 2005 hurricane.”41

Later that day (Friday September 2), one thousand troops finally arrived. Their commander was Lieutenant General Russel Honoré, a cigar-chomping, no-nonsense leader.42 He brought the army’s 82nd Airborne and 1st Cavalry Divisions. After stopping at the Superdome, he walked the half block to the staging area for the troops and talked to guard commanders. These troops were not under his command and were expecting to see chaos. But he told them to keep their weapons lowered at all times.

“This is not a military operation,” the lieutenant general barked. “This is not Iraq.”43

Video footage shows Honoré ordering them to lower their guns and cursing at those slow to obey. Lieutenant General Honoré’s strength was his restraint.44

With the ever-present cigar, Honoré got into the lead vehicle, and the convoy headed toward the convention center at 12:25 p.m. and was greeted with cheers. One little boy saluted. It took about twenty minutes for the general to establish control and set up six food-distribution stations along the length of the convention center. A team of Arkansas guardsmen were assigned to sweep the enormous building. A hundred people were splayed out on the floor, nearly dead of heat, dehydration, and starvation. But they found no gangs of thugs.

As described by Jed Horne with the Times-Picayune,45 “Rumors of gang rapes and wanton murder needed to be repeated only two or three times before reporters decided the rumors had been corroborated and repeated them in print.” In the end, four bodies were found, all died from natural causes.

Finally, President George W. Bush was going to make an appearance in Jackson Square. A gesture like that meant a lot to all of us—to those who evacuated and those who stayed.

***

Away in Texas, Harvey Miller had, at last, reached safety. At the house, Pat showed Harvey to a guest room with a connecting bath. Harvey refused food but took a hot shower. He went to bed and fell immediately to sleep. He woke up an hour later, got up, and took another shower. A few hours later, he took another shower. Months later, in therapy, Harvey said that he felt like he needed to wash everything away. Harvey slept until almost noon on Friday (September 2). When he awoke, he got the word that Renee was in Lake Charles, safe and sound.

***

With Stanford now registered in a school, we returned to the Drury Inn. As we walked down the long hotel hallway, we could hear our little dog barking. Reunited with Chester and our older son Mark, we returned to the obsessive-compulsive activity of watching television.

By now, Wal-Mart was in New Orleans,46 and supply trucks were making regular runs to the Louisiana Superdome and newspaper reporters and television news crews were moving around the city.47 But FEMA’s Red October still had not arrived, sitting now in Baton Rouge eighty miles away.

In contrast, our world, while turned upside down, was quite comfortable in a Lafayette hotel. Our biggest challenge was competing for its single coin-operated washer and dryer. In other words, our troubles were small and petty compared to the majority of the Greater New Orleans’s survivors.

Dinner that night was an excellent meal, stewed turkey and gravy over rice, courtesy of the Red Cross. Over our comfort food, we discussed how we had succeeded in figuring out two of life’s most basic things: where Steve and I were going to work and where Stanford would go to school. It was now time to figure out where we would live. Indeed, we should have been working on this much sooner, but that was impossible without knowing where Stanford would go to school. Unfortunately, it was already too late. Everything rentable was snatched up. Our only option was to purchase a house or condominium. And even then, we were behind the eight ball.

***

Saturday morning (September 3), after breakfast in the crowded hotel restaurant, I was startled by the sound of my cell phone ringing. It had become a “texting machine” and not a phone. I answered and heard the voice of my youngest brother Mike, a firefighter in North Attleboro, Massachusetts. This contact was the first I had with any of my family members since the levees broke.

I quickly explained that my own family and my husband’s relatives were all safe and that none of our homes had flooded. Then I asked my brother if he had been following the news reports about the flooding in New Orleans.

“Sandy, you’ve got to be kidding!” Mike almost shouted. “That’s all we do! That’s all everyone is doing!”

Unbeknownst to us, practically every person in the nation had been glued to the television since Monday (August 29). This was especially the case now, five days after the levees broke, because it was the Labor Day holiday weekend. I told Mike that I was glad that this was getting a lot of national attention. With the community-oriented attitude that seems universal in firefighters, he wanted to come to New Orleans and help with the rescue. I explained that the feds were now present in the city and that everyone was being evacuated. I believed that the best thing he could do was assist the evacuees in his region.

“It’s a terrible disaster, Mike. Everyone is in shock. People will be talking about this flood ten years from now.”

I had no idea that the resulting 2005 flood would likely be talked about for the next hundred years, no different than the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 which took the lives of 1,517 people, roughly the same as the 2005 disaster.48 And, like the Titanic, the levee-breach event was a pivotal moment in history. Directly due to it, changes to US law were passed that improved life for the 55 percent of the American population living in counties protected by levees.49 But, of course, I knew nothing of these things yet; I was still in survival mode.

All across the City of New Orleans, floodwater was penetrating more than homes and buildings; it was invading electrical wires, fiber-optic cables, and natural gas lines. Nearly all the city’s pumping stations were damaged. Hospitals lost emergency power when generators and fuel tanks flooded in basements. City and state building codes required generators, but codes made no specific mention that the generators should be located above the floodplain, as should electrical switching equipment and fuel.50 About 134,000 housing units were severely damaged in New Orleans alone.51

***

Harvey Miller finally learned that Monet was safe at a kennel in Baton Rouge. Another one of Pat’s brothers drove there and fetched her. On Saturday morning (September 3), Harvey was reunited with Renee and a very happy Monet in Lake Charles. The following Monday (Labor Day), the Millers relocated to Little Rock, Arkansas, because they had a daughter and son-in-law there. The Red Cross offered to put them up in a motel for two weeks.

***

All day Saturday (September 3) and Sunday (September 4), we drove around the city, looking at impossibly expensive houses to live in until we were allowed back home. They were all much too large. We were too late in starting the hunt. However, at 7:15 a.m. on Monday morning (September 5), a lucky break came our way. Steve had been watching real estate notices online, and on Labor Day there was a new listing—by owner—at a less outrageous price. We ran to the car and sped off to a house on North Roclay, in a subdivision west of Lafayette. At precisely 8:00 a.m., we rang the doorbell and the owner—a young woman with a cheerful, bright face—answered. Her name was Mrs. Thibodeaux, and she showed us around the home. The asking price was more than we wanted to spend, but we signed the paperwork on the spot. Just as we were signing, another couple pulled into the driveway, also intending to look at the house.

Later, Ms. Thibodeaux would confide that the couple, upon hearing that we had just signed a contract, had said to her, “Whatever price you agreed on, I will pay you $10,000 more.”

This illustrates how desperate people had become while trying to put a roof over their heads. Ms. Thibodeaux could have taken the larger offer, but she didn’t feel that it was the right thing to do.

We now had found solutions to our three basic questions: Where would Stanford go to school? Where would we work? Where would we live? All were decided upon at breakneck speed. But we were lucky in our quickness to act. Many people were so shell-shocked that even thinking was just too much to bear, never mind acting.

***

The Monday after the 17th Street Canal levee broke (September 5), the breach was sealed with seven thousand sandbags, each weighing ten thousand pounds.52 Dewatering the city was originally expected to take months, but the weather remained hot and dry and a significant fraction of the water evaporated.53 Even so, the Army Corps reported pumping out 250 billion gallons of water.54 Meanwhile, businesses in New Orleans were scrambling to find employees. Burger King was offering six thousand dollar signing bonuses to anyone who agreed to work for a year at one of its New Orleans outlets.55

Had the levees not broken, my older son Mark would have returned to college the following Thursday (September 8). However, Mark decided to return to Denver early and stay with his grandmother until the university opened for the 2005–2006 academic year. He was not enjoying life at the Drury Inn among hundreds of traumatized people. The airline allowed us to book a ticket out of Ryan Field in Baton Rouge to Denver without a penalty.

On Monday afternoon (September 5), I drove the one-hour trip to drop off Mark. I offered to stay with him until the flight, but he insisted that he was fine and I shouldn’t wait with him. As I hugged him goodbye, I sensed that Mark wanted—as soon as possible—to put the whole traumatic mess behind him.

We all wanted to. Few could. Some never would.

***

The Millers were allowed to use the motel’s breakfast bar every morning, and local church groups brought dinner for them each night. They were safe and surrounded by caring people. But Harvey was not himself. He spoke little and allowed himself to be led around.

***

The next day was Tuesday (September 6, the day after Labor Day), the maiden day for the Rosenthal family to practice one of the weirder post-flood rituals: waking up in a hotel room and preparing to send a child off to school. One does not normally awake in a hotel room before feeding a child his breakfast, fixing his sandwich for his bagged lunch, and driving him to the school bus stop. Even so, the ritual of waking and preparing to send a child to school provided another touchstone to reality. It felt normal and familiar and helped keep us sane and focused during those insane days.

We discovered how little we needed. Some basics one cannot live without. For example, I had to have boiling water and a mug for my Lipton tea in the morning. I had to have my laptop. And in that turbulent time, a television set became necessary. But, beyond that, as long as my husband, my son, and my little dog were nearby, I was content. A year later, upon reconnecting with friends, we would all report this same feeling. All of us would report feeling a need to “purge” ourselves of unneeded things. Even people whose houses had flooded and who had lost everything felt the same way.

On Wednesday morning (September 7), Dan Silverman, one of the senior members at Steve’s business, and Dave LaBruyere, the company comptroller, drove back to the flooded New Orleans region to check out the status of the Metairie office. They found that the building had taken on a couple of inches of water. Under normal circumstances, an inch or two of water would be considered “inconvenient” because the region’s pumping system could have removed the water in a few hours. But in this case, the water would sit for weeks because the pump-station operators had been sent away.

In the days leading up to the 2005 flood, the president of Jefferson Parish chose to adhere to its now defunct “Doomsday Plan,” which evacuated two hundred drainage-pump operators the day before the hurricane made landfall.56 Without a pump system, the water sat and allowed mold to accumulate. With closed windows and no ventilation, mold growth became a significant challenge that required extensive cleaning and disinfecting. In addition, the mold reached levels associated with respiratory symptoms and skin rashes.

After finishing their assessment of the office, Dave and Dan drove to our house and, using the key we gave them, let themselves in. First, they checked for flooding. As we had hoped, the flooding did not reach our house, stopping about six blocks away. Then, they emptied the refrigerator and freezer.

Our placing blocks of ice in the freezer and refrigerator to buy time would have worked had we been gone for just a couple of days, but a week was too long. The food was rotted, and all had to be discarded. But there was an unexpected benefit. The ice blocks saved the appliances from being destroyed by rotting food. Nearly everyone else in the city had to throw out their large appliances. But the ice blocks saved ours.

The dynamic duo then proceeded to their own homes before returning to Lafayette. Now, we could stop thinking about the status of our house and start focusing on getting through the next three months. We had just learned that our son’s school in New Orleans—Isidore Newman School—had announced that it would reopen in January 2006. So we set our sights on returning home after Stanford completed his fall semester at the little life-saver Episcopal school.

***

On Saturday morning (September 10), Stanford, Steve, Chester, and I went on our own trip back to New Orleans. There was the natural, albeit morbid, curiosity to see it for ourselves. And we also needed to get my car, which we had left to help relieve congestion on the interstate during the evacuation. We needed to check on the fish, and Steve wanted to get some pots and pans for cooking when we moved into the house.

The mood was cheerful enough as we traveled through the westernmost suburb of New Orleans to the city of Kenner. The famous, blue-tarped FEMA roofs were not yet installed and, to the untrained eye, the damage in Kenner and Metairie did not look serious. But our mood changed as we entered New Orleans. The great outdoors went from green to gray in a second. We had passed from the west side of the 17th Street Canal to the east side.

Driving was tricky because no traffic lights were working and downed trees blocked most roads and streets. We zigzagged our way down St. Charles Avenue to our home on Soniat Street. The garage door was down and, since there was no electricity, we entered the house through the front door. Search and rescue teams had marked the door with the omnipresent “X” and code numbers to indicate whether any people—or bodies—were inside.

The first thing we noticed in the front garden was that the wind strength wasn’t enough to knock the papaya fruit off our trees—a testament to the relative weakness of the hurricane’s wind in New Orleans. We opened the door. Even though the September day was blazing hot, the house was rather cool due to the boarded-up windows. Chester ran to his water bowl, and Stanford ran upstairs to check on the fish, who were all accounted for. Stanford replaced the batteries in the tank’s aerator and gathered up the clothes and items he wanted to bring back to Lafayette. At the other end of the house, I packed up my small desktop computer and several framed family photos.

Steve manually opened the garage door, I backed my car out of the driveway, and Chester hopped back and forth from my lap to the passenger seat. We picked our way to the house of our friends, Cherry and James Baker, who lived at the corner of Napoleon and Claiborne Avenues. Their home was elevated six feet from ground level, but still they had flooded. Two large motorboats rested on the dead, gray grass, moored to the porch rail in front of their house. Steve made a futile attempt to call James on his cell phone. Amazingly, he got through on the first try. “I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that you had a foot and a half of water in your house.”

“What’s the good news?” James asked.

“You now own two motorboats!”

This is how we survived. If you are going to hear the news from one of your closest friends about how much water your house had sustained—something that houses are not built to handle—you needed to hear the news with a joke. Humor relieved the nagging tension that clung to your very bones, to your cells. So many unknowns, so many unanswered questions, so many whys! And, most nagging of all, what was going to happen to all of us? Gentle humor made it bearable.

***

We got back into our two cars and continued our strange trip. We wanted to see the site of a levee breach. We tried to access the 17th Street Canal, which was about three blocks from one of our favorite tennis courts. To get there, we took the I-10 because it was the only dependable roadway.

As we exited at West End Boulevard, we looked up in shock to see a gigantic pile of debris! We continued down the boulevard toward the lake. But, as soon as we turned onto Old Hammond Highway, we were intercepted by armed guards, who told us that access to the 17th Street Canal was blocked because the Army Corps was doing emergency repairs to the levee and floodwall. It was for our own safety, they said. We would learn later that the Army Corps also blocked independent levee investigators, who flew in from California with the very same logic.

Having seen enough lifeless houses, downed trees and telephone poles, Xs on doors, and the sad, dead color of gray, we decided to return to our Land of Oz.

As we rode back to Lafayette, a “secret meeting” was taking place at the Anatole Loews Hotel, just north of Dallas. The room was reserved by James (Jimmy) Reissa, a wealthy, uptown blue blood who was chair of Mayor Nagin’s Regional Transit Authority. The meeting was attended by Nagin and members of the Business Council of New Orleans: Dan Packer, CEO (chief executive officer) of Entergy, and Joe Canizaro, a real estate developer and personal friend of President George W. Bush. Others from the Business Council included Jay Lapeyre, owner of Laitram Industry and the Greater New Orleans Business Council chair, Gary Rusovich, Gary and George Solomon, and William Boatner Riley.

During the Dallas meeting (September 10, which was twelve days after the 2005 flood), Canizaro had Karl Rove—senior advisor and assistant to President George W. Bush—on the phone. Rove had a directive for the mayor: “Put together a blue-ribbon panel of businesspeople and community leaders who would vouch for a rebuilding before the federal government committed to spending tens of billions.”57

In later interviews, Nagin’s attorney would describe the ensuing conversation as “a lot of dry talk of the best way to dewater the city, fix the infrastructure, and rebuild the battered business community.” Nagin, in his memoir, would recall that the businessmen in the suite reserved by Reiss were “intent on engineering a very different New Orleans.”58

***

The new temporary office in Baton Rouge opened on Wednesday (September 14), due to a gargantuan amount of work on the part of Leslie, Steve, and many others who were working for Strategic Comp, and due to the remarkable generosity of Great American.

***

Help and generosity were extended to the Millers as well. Harvey and Renee accepted the Red Cross’s largesse of putting them up in a hotel in Little Rock for two weeks. During that time, they, with the help of their daughter Beth, found an apartment. They moved in on September 19. Despite her recent surgery, Renee fared well, but Beth was worried about Harvey. She noticed that her father wasn’t talking and would answer questions only in monosyllables. When Harvey didn’t improve, she became frightened. Beth called a psychiatrist friend who suggested that Harvey see a trauma counselor. Harvey might be in shock.

***

As soon as the Thibodeaux family moved out of the North Roclay home, we could move in. The target date was September 30 because the new house they had bought would not be available until then. Of course we were dismayed, but the housing shortage created this weirdness. For the next twenty days, we continued the odd life in a hotel. Stanford went to school during the day, and Steve spent all day keeping his workers’ compensation business operating from a laptop. At night, I tried to create a normal environment for Stanford to do his homework in our hotel room by rearranging the furniture and placing framed photos under the lamps.

***

As we and 100,000 other families struggled, a horrified world was demanding answers. From the start, the Army Corps had told CNN and other big media outlets that the storm surge during the August 2005 hurricane was greater than what the floodwalls were designed to withstand.59 But on September 21, 2005, Michael Grunwald with the Washington Post cited computer models and eyes-on-the-ground evidence from scientists and engineers at LSU Hurricane Center. They concluded that storm surge had not come even close to flowing over the tops of the floodwalls along the 17th Street and London Avenue Canals.60

Former senator J. Bennett Johnston (D-LA), who was influential in pushing the Army Corps to build floodwalls along the London Avenue Canal,61 was surprised: “It shouldn’t have broken.”62

When Johnston provided his comment to Grunwald, he recalled numerous briefings from Army Corps officials about the danger of a hurricane overtopping the New Orleans levees. But he said that he never envisioned wholesale breaching: “This came as a surprise.”63

The implications of this report were dire for the Army Corps. It could mean that improper design caused the failures of these levees. Right after Grunwald’s above-the-fold story in the Washington Post, Governor Blanco arranged a meeting with LSU Hurricane Center experts and with Johnny Bradberry, Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development. The group selected a tousle-haired professor from South Africa, deputy director of LSU Hurricane Center Ivor van Heerden, to lead an investigation of the levee breaks. It was called Team Louisiana, and van Heerden was provided a budget of $130,000.64 The McKnight Foundation also provided $250,000.65

Dr. van Heerden might be the first person to have stated publicly that the Army Corps was not being honest with the public. The outspoken deputy director claimed that, for New Orleans, the 2005 storm was a “decidedly mild” hurricane. “Call it a blame game if you must,” Dr. van Heerden said, “but some of us were determined to find out exactly what happened and to demand justice from the responsible parties.”66

Van Heerden did not support the Army Corps’ statements to the public that the hurricane had been a monster storm that was just too huge to hold back. But his early statements were educated guesses, not investigative conclusions. At this early stage, it was impossible, even for the experts, to wrap their heads around so large a disaster.

***

I drank up these news stories at night on my desktop while Steve worked on his laptop, holding his company together, and Stanford studied. I was reading, reading, reading about the 2005 flood. This odd ritual went on for a month. Every day was pretty much the same except for one memorable interruption: Hurricane Rita.

The September storm formed in the Gulf of Mexico only a few weeks after the August storm, making it the first time on record that two hurricanes reached Category 5 status in the Gulf of Mexico in one season. Initially, it was headed toward west Louisiana where we—and thousands of others—had evacuated to. Grandma Rose was moved to safety several days before the storm arrived. But at the Drury Inn, the mood was calm among the evacuees, due perhaps to the realization that, in New Orleans, the most harm done was due to water that flowed through the breached levees. At the Drury Inn, we had the protection of steel-reinforced concrete far from water or levees.

On Wednesday (September 21) in the neighboring State of Texas, the mayor of Houston made an official call to residents to flee, embellishing his pleas by adding, “Don’t follow the example of New Orleans and think someone’s going to come get you.”67 But Houston experienced an evacuation that was rife with gridlock, emergencies, and empty gas stations. A subsequent Houston Chronicle article reported that people would have been better off staying home. The evacuation contributed directly to sixty deaths, twenty-four of which occurred when a bus, carrying nursing home residents, caught fire and exploded on I-45 near Dallas.68

Stanford’s school was closed the day before Rita’s arrival to allow for preparations. We took advantage of the day off to attend to an important milestone in a young man’s life: getting his learner’s permit to drive a car. During the paper shuffling and processing at the Department of Motor Vehicles, all the talk around us was about the impending storm. NOAA had just declared it one of the strongest storms on record for the Atlantic Basin, with peak sustained winds at 175 miles per hour. On the night of September 24, 2005, Rita made landfall on the Texas-Louisiana border as a Category 3 storm with wind speeds of 120 miles per hour.

Hurricane Rita’s worst damage was the southwestern area of Louisiana where storm surge topped agricultural levees and flooded low-lying coastal parishes.69 Rita drowned thousands of cows and dispersed others ten miles inland or more with only brackish water to drink. In New Orleans, the Industrial Canal breached again and flooded the Lower Ninth Ward for the second time in a month.

Our next day in Lafayette was unlike our bewildering days after the New Orleans flood. It was just a day of heavy rain with nothing to do because businesses and restaurants were ordered closed.

***

In Washington, DC, on September 28, the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development hosted a hearing associated with the August 2005 flood.70 Members of Congress—who were responsible for how much aid the people of Greater New Orleans would receive—needed accurate information. This may well have been the single most important hearing for the people of New Orleans’ welfare.

Anu Mittal, Director of Natural Resources and Environment, testified on why the levees were still not complete when storm surge arrived. She read from a script, which she later destroyed and which bore little resemblance to the General Accounting Office (GAO) report she had submitted that day. Here is a transcript of a key excerpt:

After the (levee) project was authorized in 1965, the Corps started building the barrier plan…parts of the project faced significant opposition from local sponsors and they did not provide the rights of way that the corps needed to build the project on schedule. But most importantly there were serious concerns relating to environmental impacts of the control barriers that were supposed to be constructed…on the tidal passages to the lake. This ultimately resulted in a legal challenge and in 1977 the courts enjoined the corps from constructing the barrier complexes. [Emphasis added.]71

The effect of the testimony was lethal. The clear takeaway from Ms. Mittal’s verbal testimony was that, in the years leading up to the levee breaks, the Army Corps struggled to complete the flood protection on schedule and were hamstrung by local officials and environmentalists. In fact, Ms. Mittal’s accompanying GAO report stated none of these things. But the damage was done. In the videotaped recording, the listeners sitting behind Ms. Mittal can be seen registering expressions first of being appalled and then of indignation.72

Members of Congress at this hearing were led to believe that the people of New Orleans had brought this levee-breach situation upon themselves. One Congress member stated, “It’s obvious. It’s their fault!”73

Where did Ms. Mittal’s verbal testimony come from? Years later, after painstaking research, I figured out that the material Ms. Mittal presented in her verbal remarks was loosely based on what was, at that time, a twenty-two-year-old GAO report.74 Ms. Mittal had presented cherry-picked data from statements made by Army Corps officials in 1982. Ironically, the document’s final judgment, even with its tone of neutral “government speak,” reprimanded the Army Corps officials for their glacial pace in building the levee-protection system for New Orleans in light of the critical need for project completion.75

In recorded audio ten years later, Ms. Mittal readily admitted that her verbal testimony in September 2005 was “from three or four decades ago.”76 When asked if she still had a copy of her verbal testimony from September 28, 2005, she said no. When asked if she remembered who assisted her in preparing her verbal testimony, she said it was not retained. In my mind, someone had coached Ms. Mittal. The Army Corps has an established and documented policy of creating talking points for influencing people in high places.77

The damage from Ms. Mittal’s verbal testimony cannot be understated at a time when all eyes were watching and all ears were listening. In a phone interview on November 10, 2015, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) confirmed that videos of post-disaster congressional hearings—like Ms. Mittal’s—were circulated and became highly influential on members of Congress. When queried on whether she believed that this testimony may have biased or prejudiced Congress members against the people of New Orleans, the senator responded, “It was well understood that there was pressure from the White House, constantly and early on, to assign blame on the residents of New Orleans for the failure of the levee system.”

So, it began. Four weeks after the flooding that took the lives of at least 1,577 people78 and nearly drowned an entire city, our Congress had a false perception. And every resident of New Orleans would soon pay the price. The local officials were considered guilty until proven innocent. Years later, I searched the internet and could locate no congressional record of Ms. Mittal’s testimony. I also learned that no transcript of the hearing was sent to the Government Publishing Office. The hearing was also missing from a list compiled by the American Geosciences Institute.79 If it were not for C-SPAN—a private company—all information about the first congressional hearing may have been gone forever.

***

The next day was a turning point for me. My husband forwarded a written story about Anu Mittal’s testimony to me that contained a link to download the full GAO report. Ms. Mittal’s written GAO report explained the history of the levees that encircled New Orleans. The key factor was that the Army Corps was charged by Congress for the design and construction of the levees. And the local sponsor was responsible for maintaining the structures once completed. Period. There it was in black and white. Energized by this report and by Ivor van Heerden’s admonitions in Grunwald’s Washington Post article, I formulated my own version of the flooding event: the federal government was responsible.

Two days later (September 30, one month and one day after the 2005 flood), Mayor Nagin unveiled his Bring New Orleans Back Commission (BNOBC) at a press conference in the high-rise Sheraton Hotel on Canal Street. Cochaired by Maurice (Mel) Lagarde (a white blue blood) and Barbara Major (a black woman who was raised in the Lower Ninth Ward), the commission was composed of fifteen men, seven of whom were CEOs. Three were bank presidents.80 Jimmy Reiss, chairman of the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority, had recommended that the commission also include education leaders, so Scott Cowen, president of Tulane University, was added.

***

Back in New Orleans at about this time, the Army Corps sent in teams of engineers to collect data in order to explain the levee breaches while it was also doing emergency breach-repair. The repairs were causing crucial data to be degraded. As this was happening, crews of independent civil-engineering experts attempted to access the levee-breach sites. But Dr. Paul Mlakar, senior research scientist with the Army Corps’ Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC), denied entry to all of them over concerns for their “safety” and concern that their presence could impede emergency operations.81

One of these outside crews denied entry was an elite team assembled by the University of California, Berkeley, and funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). It was called the Independent Levee Investigation Team (the Berkeley team),82 chaired by civil-engineering experts Raymond Seed and Robert Bea with the University of California as well as Dr. J. David Rogers, professor at the Missouri University of Science and Technology.83 The trio found it strange that Dr. Mlakar repelled them. After all, they were specialists with extensive experience in early arrival at major catastrophes, including earthquakes in developing countries where there were thousands of bodies in rubble and where issues like sanitation and safe water were even bigger problems than in New Orleans. Often, there were frenzied emergency-rescue attempts still going on. After all, these experts understood field operations and how to stay out of the way. Besides, they were a tiny group.84