Examining Hurricane Katrina from every angle

In other arenas, there was only confusion and, under the circumstances, that was an outrage. Benjamin Johnson, a U.S. Marine from 1977 to 1987, was employed as a security guard. “The biggest mistake in New Orleans history was Nagin’s not calling a mandatory evacuation on Thursday or Friday, at the latest,” Johnson declared. “My view was that if it wasn’t mandatory it can’t be a bad storm. I did sneak out under the wire on Sunday. It took me eleven hours to drive from New Orleans to Baton Rouge. But the people in the projects, those I knew, kept saying, ‘Katrina ain’t nothing. They ain’t even askin’ us to leave.’ ”⁴⁸

For others, evacuating in the face of Katrina was not entirely a matter of impetus or money, but of finding help collecting their treasured belongings. Some simply refused to abandon their dogs or cats. The very sick were afraid to be disconnected from their oxygen supply, respirators, or dialysis machines. In the case of the elderly, many suffered from dementia or chronic fatigue, and barely knew what was going on around them. In effect, City Hall deemed automobile drivers the first-class citizens. If you didn’t have a car, you were second-class. As Saturday came to a close, city officials were despicable, ignoring the car-less, not just because they didn’t help such people evacuate, but because they didn’t even know who they were. As far as Mayor Nagin was concerned, it seemed the down-and-outers were an inconvenience to City Hall — pure and simple. There wasn’t much he could do for their welfare so late in the game. And, in many cases, he was right.

Stone Phillips of NBC’s Dateline — among other journalists — would hound Nagin for his pre-Katrina blunders. He asked Nagin why Regional Transit Authority buses sat idle on Chickasaw Street. Why was the fleet of yellow buses padlocked away on Metropolitan Street? Why weren’t all the buses used to evacuate large numbers of folks? Why was nothing in New Orleans mobilized? Why weren’t National Guard troops in proper post hurricane position? Why wasn’t there a high-tech hurricane command center? Why weren’t rescue helicopters and evacuation buses standing by on the periphery of the storm, ready to swoop down and rescue Superdome evacuees and the poor when Katrina passed? All Nagin, skirting any personal responsibility, could meekly answer to Stone was “I don’t know.” ... Those were questions for someone else.⁴⁹

Nearly five months after Katrina, however, under stinging criticism from U.S. senators and congressmen, Nagin admitted guilt, in hesitant fashion, for failing to evacuate his city’s buses before Katrina made landfall. “If I had to do it again,” he told CNN, “I would probably go to the school board, cut a cooperative endeavor agreement with them, move all the city-controlled buses to another section of the state probably up north, so that they’re readily available, and we will just deal with the driver issue later.”⁵⁰

VIII
That Saturday Joe Donchess, executive director of the Louisiana Nursing Home Association, was extremely worried. An Ohio native and a 1975 graduate of Southern University Law School in Baton Rouge, Donchess became the state’s leading voice on issues pertaining to health planning. Ensconced at the EOC in Baton Rouge, Donchess had been closely monitoring the sixty to seventy nursing homes likely to be affected by Katrina. Electricity blackouts were a certainty. That meant elderly patients would be disconnected from life-support machines, alone in the clammy darkness. Evacuating elderly and disabled people on beds and in wheelchairs took time — a couple of days. It was, in fact, a logistical ordeal for them. Every two hours or so on Saturday, Donchess at least e-mailed the nursing homes, updating them on Katrina. There was one major stumbling block regarding New Orleans, and it made him edgy. “Because Mayor Nagin refused to call a mandatory evacuation, the nursing homes didn’t feel compelled to evacuate,” Donchess explained. “It was not my job to tell homes whether to leave, it was up to the mayor .... Nagin and other Orleans Parish officials were dilatory in not calling for a mandatory evacuation earlier. I know, for sure, that twenty-one facilities would have evacuated on Saturday if he had called it. That would have been just enough time for buses to properly bring the patients out of harm’s way.”⁵¹

The dilatory response in New Orleans, however, was not shared by surrounding parishes. In St. Bernard Parish, for example, a mandatory evacuation was declared on Saturday; nevertheless, there were nursing homes that chose to ride out the storm, with tragic results. Donchess was in a difficult position. As he updated the nursing homes about millibars and storm surge predictions, he felt like a nag. Every time he heard back that a nursing home was evacuating, he cheered. By late Sunday twenty-one of the homes had evacuated while around forty hunkered down and sheltered in situ. One reason a number of nursing homes didn’t evacuate was bad memories of Hurricane Ivan. Back in September 2004, when Ivan was in the Gulf, many of these homes had buses pick up their patients and then transport them on I-10. The bumper-to-bumper traffic — and the uncomfortable fact that it took eight hours just to get from New Orleans to Baton Rouge — caused two elderly patients to die in transit. An eighty-six-year-old woman also died of a heart attack when she was evacuated from a nursing home during Hurricane George in 1998.⁵² The word in the state nursing-home world was that the pre-storm commotion was potentially harder on seniors than the hurricane itself.

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