Examining Hurricane Katrina from every angle

In most cities, first-rate police officers garnered the respect of its citizens. But not in New Orleans. For residents, the problems of the projects were intertwined with the attitude of the police. But the housing projects at least possessed the virtue of being located in the inner city. Hardworking families living there could walk to work or ride the trolley or the bus. Many project residents, therefore, didn’t own a car. Truth be told, they couldn’t afford one. When the St. Thomas, Desire, and Florida projects had been condemned, as well as the Melpomene project in Central City, new housing for the evicted needed to be found. Two bad solutions were hatched by City Hall, both contributing mightily to the unfolding Katrina tragedy. The first blunder in social engineering occurred in 2000, when those families living in the defunct St. Thomas project were shipped to live at the St. Bernard project in the Seventh Ward. It soon became known in the black community as “St. Bathomas.” What the merger accomplished was an increase in violence, as gangs fought over drug turf. This mistake of ghettoizing thousands in “St. Bathomas” contributed to New Orleans’s skyrocketing murder rate. The other unhelpful local-state solution was to relocate residents of other projects to New Orleans East, a long ten-mile drive from downtown, in areas like Little Woods and Michould Boulevard. This was where Cedric Richmond saw the last Little League game of the New Orleans summer. Packed into flimsy apartment complexes, ugly condos, and tiny houses near Lake Pontchartrain, these residents had no reliable public transportation. Carjacking became epidemic in New Orleans East. Many of those new to the neighborhood had worked in what blacks called the “servant industry,” toiling as hotel maids, parking attendants, or domestic help for well-to-do whites. It was an honest living. Suddenly, with their relocation, they had no easy way to get to work downtown. Singer Aaron Neville, a resident of New Orleans East, gave the failed relocation a name, the “Outer City Blues,” and even wrote an unrecorded song about it.

These powerless city poor were what sociologist Michael Harrington once called “the Other America” — those living in desperate poverty, living on minimum wage or welfare checks, hidden from the view of the mainstream, and often denied basic services, like proper sewage, reliable electricity, or decent schools. On any given day, you could encounter them redeeming aluminum cans at Walgreens on St. Charles or holding cardboard signs asking for money around Lee Circle. They didn’t hear about Katrina on television, for a simple reason: they didn’t own a set. Even if they did hear about the storm, they didn’t have the money to leave. They had no credit cards with which to rent a car and reserve a motel room in Dallas, Memphis, Little Rock, or Baton Rouge. Poorly educated, and often illiterate, they couldn’t figure out what all the evacuation commotion was about. With no driver’s license or other form of identification, some were afraid the NOPD would arrest them at city-run shelters or handcuff them for hitchhiking on I-10.

V
At 4 p.m. on Saturday, the Louisiana State Police turned over all lanes to outward traffic on four New Orleans interstate highways. The metro area’s two toll roads, the Crescent City Connection and the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, were now free. Called “contra-flow,” the redirected traffic represented the one plan that the state had worked out in enough detail to operate effectively in the face of Katrina. Governor Blanco oversaw the creation of the surprisingly complex contra-flow plan after the bottleneck traffic debacle caused by the approach of Hurricane Ivan in September 2004. Later, when preparing to testify before a congressional committee, Blanco offered a defense of her contra-flow plan. She rightly pointed out that her plan had been designed in collaboration with appropriate parish leaders and that, as bad as Katrina was, it “would have been far worse if the initial evacuation had not been so efficient and safe.”²⁴

Without question, Blanco’s contra-flow plan saved lives. All of New Orleans’s hospitals, for example, started evacuating patients — those they could move — in a reliably easy fashion. At every hospital, supervisors decided not to move critically ill patients; Charity Hospital, for example, the oldest continuously operating hospital in the country, had fifty beds occupied in its intensive care unit.²⁵ A group of doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, and other staff were staying behind to take care of them. “I was assigned as teaching physician for the infectious diseases unit on the ninth floor of the hospital,” Ruth Berggren later wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine. “There were eighteen patients in the unit, of whom four had active tuberculosis and thirteen had opportunistic infections related to HIV and AIDS. We also had a boarder from surgery — with a complicated gunshot wound and vascular access problems.”²⁶

Even with contra-flow, however, traffic moved at a snail’s pace, and by late Saturday afternoon, it was virtually impossible to reserve a motel room in towns as far north in Louisiana as Alexandria, Monroe, and Shreveport. Prophecies of bad weather for the Gulf South area had reached a saturation point. Still, cars were making hasty dashes about, drivers looking for the last flashlight batteries and bottled water in each vulnerable parish.

One person who was extremely worried that City Hall wasn’t recognizing the devastation a Category 3, 4, or 5 hurricane would wreak was the outspoken Nick Felton, president of the New Orleans Firefighters and captain of Engine Company 21. Six feet tall, with salt-and-pepper hair, Felton was a twenty-two-year veteran, a hardboiled, no-nonsense professional, the kind who would have rushed up the fateful stairs of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. He was appalled that the New Orleans Fire Department didn’t own a single boat. At a ninth-floor EOC meeting he spoke bluntly about the Big One, telling Superintendent of Fire Charles Parent and Deputy CAO Cynthia Sullivan-Lear that he felt firemen needed water reserves, compensation for working the storm, family protection, and food supplies. If flooding occurred, and natural gas pipelines broke, they were going to be putting out raging infernos for a week. When he was finished with his demands, Sullivan-Lear — with not even an iota of tact — told Felton he was being “an alarmist.” Felton couldn’t believe she was copping a lackadaisical attitude when he was in crisis mode. “They just couldn’t comprehend that this was it,” Felton said. “I kept saying, ‘Aren’t you guys watching the Weather Channel?’ I had been through Camille and Betsy and this damn thing, at least on the Weather Channel, looked far worse.”²⁷

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