Examining Hurricane Katrina from every angle

Another problem facing the Nursing Home Association was a shortage of nurses and caregivers. Even in good times the more than three hundred nursing homes in Louisiana were understaffed; when news of Katrina’s path broke, many essential medical assistants left the state for higher ground.⁵³ And finally, transportation was hard to find, and getting more scarce by the hour. “We really needed busing help, and just didn’t get it,” Donchess recalled. “The state office of emergency preparedness didn’t listen to our needs. They thought that because we were an association we surely knew how to evacuate all the nursing homes. That wasn’t the case. We needed a mandatory evacuation, called earlier, and buses to help us move thousands of patients.”⁵⁴

Although Donchess was correct that city, parish, and state officials needed to help homes evacuate, the ultimate responsibility lay with the individual homes. At single-story St. Rita’s Nursing Home near Poydras, Louisiana, Coroner Bryan Bertucci pleaded with owner Mabel Mangano to close the facility. The NHC was predicting 140 mph winds and a twenty-foot storm surge for St. Bernard Parish. A Category 3 or 4 storm was nothing to mess around with. “I told her I had two buses and two drivers who could evacuate all seventy of her residents and take them anywhere she wanted to go,” Bertucci recalled. “She told me, ‘I have five nurses and a generator, and we’re going to stay here.’ ”⁵⁵

According to the Times-Picayune, terrible misjudgment was nothing new at St. Rita’s. Back in 1999 the home had been cited twice for endangering the lives of residents and was denied U.S. government funding for more than forty days for failing to rectify the malfeasance. The nursing home didn’t properly stop patients’ infections from spreading. Under constant regulatory heat, St. Rita’s did, in November 2004, finally meet health inspectors’ basic standards. But it was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a good place for your grandparents to spend their twilight years. As Katrina approached, the business practices of Mabel Mangano and her family were putting patients’ lives at great risk. “They had a duty as a standard of care to people who could not care for themselves,” Louisiana Attorney General Charles Foti later said of the Manganos. “If you or I decided we are going to stay, we do it of our own free will .... The people at the nursing home don’t have that chance.”⁵⁶

Most of the elderly in New Orleans, however, couldn’t even afford to be cared for in a home like St. Rita’s. Fully one-quarter of the families in New Orleans lived on a per capita annual income of $15,000 or less.⁵⁷ Even worse, many of the elderly had no family. They were all alone against the storm. And August 31 — the last day of the month — was when social security and welfare checks were handed out. Many poor, elderly people just weren’t going to evacuate without that check.

When it came to hurricane evacuation, there was nothing new or novel about the poor or elderly having a harder time fleeing than the rich. Zora Neale Hurston, in her brilliant 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, captured the helpless attitude African Americans around Lake Okechobee had about an evacuation during the Great Depression. On the evening before a mammoth hurricane was supposed to slam South Florida, Janie Crawford and her boyfriend, Tea Cake, decide to stay at their rickety fishing camp, despite the fact that it was extremely vulnerable to storm surge. “Everybody was talking about it that night,” Hurston wrote. “But nobody was worried. You couldn’t have a hurricane when you’re making seven or eight dollars a day.” Just as in New Orleans on August 27, 2005, Hurston’s economically depressed characters believed they were protected by flood walls and levees. “The folks in the quarters and the people in the big houses further around the shore feared the big lake and wondered,” Hurston wrote. “The people felt uncomfortable but safe because there were the seawalls to chain the senseless monster in his bed. The folks let the people do the thinking. If the castles thought themselves secure, the cabins needn’t worry.”⁵⁸

IX
Even on Saturday at 5 p.m., with the highways leading out of New Orleans crammed with drivers escaping the coming hurricane, nothing much was moving out of poor neighborhoods like the Carver-Desire section of New Orleans East, Lower Ninth, and Tremé. A few people were leaving, but operable buses were a rare sight. And hardly anyone was arriving to help — with some very notable exceptions. Driving into New Orleans on Saturday against the contra-flow traffic was thirty-nine-year-old Willie Walker, senior pastor of Noah’s Ark Missionary Baptist Church, located on South Saratoga Street, about a mile west of the Superdome. The area surrounding his church was a depressingly blighted Central City neighborhood, the domain of dope dealers, garbage heaps, and a high crime rate. Many residents relied on their monthly food stamps just to survive. But the neighborhood also had a rich civil rights history. In 1957, in fact, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was founded in Central City at the Mount Zion Baptist Church, with Martin Luther King Jr. holding court. Reverend Willie, as his parishioners called him, was a true man of God — not the bombastic Bible-thumping kind, but a coolheaded servant of the poor. Born in 1966 at Charity Hospital, Walker was the son of a Marine sergeant who served during the Vietnam war. He may have inherited his exterior toughness from his leatherneck father. But, as in too many African-American households, that father abandoned his family; Walker was only four at the time.

Walker’s mother, by contrast, was devoted to her four children, always ready to cook up a pot of okra gumbo or to read Psalms out loud. She would have them pray to Jesus as a family, hands clasped and eyes closed. Mrs. Walker worked as a secretary for the New Orleans public schools. Often the gospel records of Reverend James Cleveland and Mahalia Jackson blared out at full volume from their old-time phonograph. Although the Walker kids were all baptized in Noah’s Ark Missionary Baptist Church, he and his two sisters and brother were raised as Catholics, attending St. Raymond on Paris Avenue.

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