Examining Hurricane Katrina from every angle

One person who really catapulted Governor Blanco into action mode that Saturday was Cedric Richmond, the president of the black caucus in the Louisiana legislature. He spent the entire weekend telling everybody in New Orleans East, part of the Ninth Ward, to “get the hell out.” Only thirty-one years old, he had grown up in NOE, throwing rocks into Lake Ponchartrain as a kid, and later hanging out at the video arcade at Lake Forest Plaza. Richmond was a cautious lawyer and workaholic; his great indulgence was eating baby back ribs dripping in fat at the City Club once a week. On Saturday morning he had attended a Little League game in Gorretti Playground, with about eight or nine hundred people in attendance. “It was incredible,” Richmond recalled. “Because the mayor’s warning was so soft, nobody was taking Katrina seriously. Baseball. That’s what they were up to. So that night I went from barroom to barroom saying, ‘Y’all need to go.’ ”⁹

When Richmond told Blanco that afternoon about the blasé attitude at the ball game, the governor grew alarmed. Telephoning her assistant chief of staff, Johnny Anderson, she requested that all African-American ministers in below-sea-level areas dedicate their Sunday sermons to the need to evacuate at once. They would be called “pray and pack” sessions.¹⁰ “She really tried to help,” Richmond recalled. “But Nagin just ignored everything. He should have called a mandatory evacuation earlier; the governor was having to do his job.”¹¹

II
To those driving around New Orleans that afternoon, the sky pale and sunless, it was clear that the business community was taking Katrina seriously. All seven of the city’s Starbucks coffeehouses closed early. The massive Wal-Mart on Tchoupitoulas Street locked its doors. Gas stations started shutting down their pumps. ATM machines were empty. Mini-markets sold out of Spam and Planters peanuts — survival snacks. The Audubon Zoo began safeguarding gorillas and bears. The aquarium exterminated its piranhas, worried that if they got loose they’d breed in the Mississippi. The Whitney Bank had not only closed, it had evacuated computers and files to Chicago. Delta Air Lines, in a wrongheaded corporate bungle, canceled all flights into or out of Louis Armstrong International Airport as of 1 p.m., leaving hundreds stranded in New Orleans (by contrast, Continental Airlines evacuated people up until the last possible minute on Sunday). Production was suspended on several film projects, including "The Last Time" with Michael Keaton, "The Reaping" with Hilary Swank, and "Vampire Bats," starring Lucy Lawless. The Hollywood stars and crews left town.¹² Tulane University was holding its orientation weekend, when incoming freshmen are squired around campus and Mom and Dad get to see just what a $32,000 tuition check meant. Normally, it is an exciting event for everyone. The approach of Katrina, however, forced Tulane President Scott Cowen to make a wrenching decision. Even though it wasn’t good public relations at the time, he did the right thing and officially closed the campus at 5 p.m. The school encouraged all students, parents, staff members, and faculty to leave the city for safety. Most other colleges in the vicinity — including Xavier, Loyola, and the University of New Orleans — did the same. “We closed Saturday so our people could board up and get out of town fast,” Nick Mueller, director of the National D-Day Museum, recalled. “Having lived through Camille, I knew Katrina was going to be an ordeal.”¹³

Most of New Orleans’s political bigwigs, both past and present, congregated that Saturday in the Lawless Memorial Chapel at Dillard University for the funeral of Clarence Barney Jr., the longtime leader of the local Urban League. As the Associated Press reported, the funeral was a who’s who of Louisiana politicians. The Landrieu clan was there in force: Senator Mary Landrieu, Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu, and the family patriarch and former New Orleans mayor Moon Landrieu. Those in attendance couldn’t help but wonder what Ray Nagin was doing at the Dillard chapel when the poor and elderly needed to be evacuated out of the bowl. They thought, “Ray has it under control,” or else “he wouldn’t be hanging around.”¹⁴

Hanging over the funeral, like a dark shroud, was the specter of the Big One. While eulogies paid homage to Barney’s twenty-five years as the executive director of the Urban League in Greater New Orleans, virtually everybody in attendance was distracted by the storm. Everyone knew the “bowl” analogy. Was New Orleans going to fill up? Was the Great Deluge just around the river bend? Even as Bible passages from Luke and Isaiah were being read in the chapel, mourners could hear the sound of plywood being hammered over building windows and traffic helicopters flying overhead. Amid the prayers, trepidation was the collective sentiment; Nagin gave out handshakes and hugs, seemingly in a calm and carefree mood, until he made an early exit to get back to City Hall. “In a surreal way it seemed like almost a funeral for the city, or at least an era in the city,” Jacques Morial, the brother of the former mayor, recalled. “Another interesting thing about the funeral was everybody was on edge, because something else was in the air. Usually, after a funeral service, people hang around and mingle and visit for a long time. That really wasn’t the case on that Saturday. After three hours of services, people bee-lined it out of town right afterward.”¹⁵

During the service, a staffer came up to the pew where Lieutenant Governor Landrieu sat and whispered in his ear that Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin needed him at a City Hall meeting. “I didn’t go,” Landrieu recalled, “because I didn’t want to leave the funeral early.” After the funeral at 2:30 p.m. he immediately drove home to Octavia Street, in the Uptown neighborhood, and prepared to evacuate his five children. “My wife, Cheryl, and I had a discussion about when we should be leaving,” he recalled. “I wanted to leave soon. She didn’t want to leave, so we compromised and got up Sunday at 6:30 a.m. and drove to Baton Rouge. Dropped my kids off and then went to the EOC.”

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