The Emergency Operations Center, built in 2002, featured the latest radio, computer, and Web-based communication systems for emergency management. Once Governor Blanco activated the EOC, at 7:30 a.m. Saturday, it was where state, parish, and city emergency directors met with military and FEMA officials, along with the governor’s staff and scores of others. That Saturday afternoon Mitch Landrieu went to the EOC and began monitoring the storm. He was particularly worried about a Katrina surge damaging Plaquemines and St. Bernard parishes. The high-tech “command table” was in an underground overview room, which resembled NASA’s mission control during the Apollo moon shots of the late 1960s. A large electronic map of Louisiana was on a ten-foot wall. Just studying the map while the NHC was telephoning in cyclonic data was disconcerting to Landrieu. You didn’t have to be a meteorologist to recognize that 145 mph winds blowing water up the various rivers, canals, and waterways of Louisiana was a recipe for disaster. Wisely, Landrieu, without informing the understandably busy Governor Blanco, established pre-Katrina cell phone contact with government and emergency officials in most of the coastal parishes. His message was essentially twofold: keep evacuating the residents and then let him know where the officials were going to hunker down. If Katrina hit hard, and communications vanished, at least Landrieu would know exactly where the Coast Guard, state police, and Louisiana National Guard were congregated. They would be the state’s first responders. He could get frank assessments from them on where further evacuations via helicopter and boat needed to take place. “Now I’m in a bit of a difficult situation because my role in the EOC is to be passive and to pay attention and to basically just watch,” Landrieu said. “It’s Governor Blanco’s show and the governor as the commander in chief dictates what everybody is supposed to do, at the advice and consent of [Louisiana National Guard General Bennet C.] Landreneau and [Colonel Henry] Whitehorn and her cabinet secretaries and other people who are basically in charge. So basically there was no role for the lieutenant governor at EOC except educate yourself before the storm. That’s what I did.”

City Councilman Oliver Thomas, a hulking, soft-spoken, lighthearted Creole with a face full of freckles, had also made an appearance at Barney’s funeral, but it was a brief one. With Katrina coming, he was on a mission to evacuate his boyhood stomping grounds, the Lower Ninth Ward, a tight-knit largely African-American community nestled along the Mississippi River across the St. Claude Avenue Bridge on the way to St. Bernard Parish. Growing up there in the 1960s, Thomas had the river for a backyard, whether he was sprint-racing along the levee, poling for the fattest catfish, or hunting for wild pigs behind the Florida Avenue Bridge. Because whites had dynamited the levees back in 1927, causing the Lower Ninth Ward to flood, African Americans in the two-square-mile neighborhood didn’t trust government authority to take care of them. “We had trouble with law enforcement,” Thomas recalled. “Even when we were little kids, the wrong deputy would show up and shoot over our heads and run us back just for sport.”¹⁶

Basketball was Thomas’s ticket out of the Lower Ninth. After graduating from Clark High School, he was recruited as a forward to the University of Wisconsin-Parkside and given a scholarship. Uncomfortable in Wisconsin’s cold climate, Thomas transferred to the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico. Surrounded by the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and finding art galleries even down gravel roads, Thomas flourished. He got involved in drama and studying Native American painters such as R.C. Gorman. Watching the famous dramatization of Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road was to him a revelatory experience, poverty transformed into art. “I became an artsy person,” Thomas explained. “Native American art helped me understand my plight; they were always expressing their plight and victories on canvas. I said that I was never moving back to New Orleans. To me New Orleans was a place you could socialize but not advance.”

In 1985, after living in Los Angeles, New York, and Boston, Thomas did come back. His mother was ill and he wanted to take care of her. Quick on his feet, he got a job at Hughes Aircraft, dabbled in sales, and eventually found his way working as an assistant to veteran City Councilman Jim Singleton. “Jim was a real hard-edged military person at the time,” Thomas recalled. “A lot of community issues, issues for women, gays, and lesbians — he was hard on those issues. And I was always of the opinion that everyone mattered. Even if you don’t agree with them, they’re human beings. So I think I helped Jim be more tolerant, to understand people.”

Entering politics, Thomas became a spokesperson for the underdog, New Orleans’s tireless proponent of affordable housing for the poor and a lobbyist for all things advantageous to the Lower Ninth. Urban planning became his bailiwick and he spearheaded an effort to refurbish historic homes in the Lower Garden District, transforming the neighborhood from skid row to middle-class prosperity.

But it was the Lower Ninth that had Thomas worried those last days of August. It was New Orleans’s orphan neighborhood, separated geographically from the rest of the city by the Industrial Canal. Historically, the Lower Ninth was grossly neglected. When the rest of New Orleans had running water and sewers, it had open drainage canals. When every other ward had paved streets, it had dirt roads. After Katrina, Newsweek did a story delineating the Lower Ninth’s chronic urban problems, deeming the area fifteen times more crime-ridden than New York City.¹⁷ Suspicion of the “white power structure” was part of the neighborhood’s DNA, and in the Family Tree Restaurant on St. Claude Avenue on the eve of Katrina, Lower Ninthers were talking about how rich honkies were going to dynamite the levees (a repeat of 1927) and turn Reynes Street into a river. Ironically, even though the neighborhood was troubled, 60 percent of the residents were home owners, compared with 46 percent in the rest of New Orleans. “Washington D.C., Baton Rouge, the city leaders, they just don’t have any idea of the history of that all-black community,” Thomas said. “They’ve been pissed on before. They’re used to it. They survived it. And that little property down there, it may not be much but it’s theirs. People took pride in owning those little shacks.”

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