Examining Hurricane Katrina from every angle

Virtually every local official in the Hurricane Belt states — except Ray Nagin — knew of Max Mayfield. He was a critical figure in the most important role of government, protecting people from danger. The mayor later recalled, “I got a call from the head of the hurricane center, Max somebody ... and he said, ‘Mr. Mayor, I’ve never seen a storm like this. I’ve never seen conditions like this.’ ”³³

Nagin claimed that he ordered the mandatory evacuation of his city after speaking with Mayfield on Saturday night, but there is no evidence that he acted then. He certainly did not make any public announcement. One of the others who received Mayfield’s message was Walter Maestri, emergency director of Jefferson Parish, which abuts New Orleans on the south. A longtime hurricane watcher, he immediately called Jeff Smith, the deputy director of the Louisiana Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness. Maestri impatiently asked if Mayfield had called Smith yet. “He said, yes, he had received the call,” Maestri recalled later. “So I said, ‘Then you know what he’s sharing?’ And he says, ‘Yes, but the storm right now’ — and I said, ‘Please, please. You’ve indicated you don’t know Max. Let me tell you. When he calls you like that, he’s telling you you need to be ready, be prepared.’ ”³⁴

On CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, on January 20, 2006, Nagin, to his credit, stopped passing the blame and took personal responsibility for not properly preparing New Orleans for Katrina. “There’s ... things that I would do totally different now,” he told Cooper. “I wish I had talked to Max Mayfield earlier, number one ... so the possibility of a mandatory evacuation would have been done 24 hours earlier ... [w]hen I got that call, and he was so emphatic and so passionate, we had never — this city had never done a mandatory evacuation in its history. I immediately called my city attorney and said, look, in the morning, I don’t care what you have to do. Figure out a way for us to do this. I wish I had done that earlier.”³⁵ For all of the weak, confused, and bureaucratic messages from government officials, there were many who heard the NHC warnings and decided on evacuation pronto. Elizabeth Daigle, of the New Orleans suburb of Metairie, was determined to leave town on Saturday evening. At forty-four, she had heard warnings before and had even survived one major hurricane, 1965’s Betsy, which killed sixty-five people in New Orleans. “We just have a bad feeling about this one,” she explained, “We just don’t know. That’s what’s scary.”³⁶ Likewise, Garden District resident Janine Butscher, originally from Oxfordshire, England, was planning to stay in New Orleans for Katrina. Then she woke up on Saturday and talked to her next-door neighbor, who worked for Schlumberger, an oil services company specializing in geophysical data collection and analysis. “He said his company had been notified to get out. That this was the Big One. He scared me so much that I grabbed my two-year-old daughter and drove to Houston in my flannel pajamas.”³⁷ Real estate broker Judy Oudt, famous locally for selling Garden District mansions, had planned to stay in her Lee Circle condominium and ride out the storm. But when she visited her local pharmacy, she saw hordes of semi-panicked locals filling their shopping carts with hurricane provisions. The line to pay was twenty people long. “Hell, if this many people are freaking out,” she said, “so will I.”³⁸ She walked out of the pharmacy with no purchases and headed to Seaside, Florida.

It took others just a little longer than Daigle, Butscher, and Oudt to get out of town. Andrew Travers, a graduate student in history at Tulane, for example, spent his Saturday evening at Pat O’Brien’s French Quarter bar, downing “hurricanes,” a potent rum–fruit juice concoction created in the early 1940s by reckless revelers waiting out a ferocious tropical storm.(According to New Orleans chef Emeril Lagasse, the best recipe for a “hurricane” was 2 ounces light rum, 2 ounces dark rum, 2 ounces grenadine, 1 ounce orange juice, 1 ounce sour mix, 1 teaspoon of sugar, and orange wedges for garnish.)³⁹ O’Brien’s was packed that night. It was a giant “hurricane party” with cocktails being pounded back by rebels determined to booze and boogie their way through the natural disaster. (In August 1969, a group of young people drank hurricanes at a beachside party in Pass Christian, Mississippi, daring Camille to make landfall. It did, and twenty of them drowned.) When Travers sobered up the following morning, he looked at CNN on television and learned that Katrina seemed to be developing into a Category 5 storm. “They were rehashing the doomsday scenario we’d been talking about for years,” Travers recalled, “a direct hit and broken levees and an American Atlantis.” He telephoned his girlfriend, who had stockpiled water and nonperishables in her apartment and invited a handful of friends to stay through the storm. She wisely called off the would-be survivors party, saying, “It would have been fun, but yeah, we gotta go.” They fled town in a Honda Civic coupe, with two dogs crammed in the backseat.⁴⁰

Parties all over town were ending early on Saturday. Andy Ambrose, the son of the late historian Stephen E. Ambrose, was supposed to be celebrating his forty-second birthday that afternoon. A soulful rhythm-and-blues vocalist, Andy planned to party at the Maple Leaf Bar on Oak Street, a smoky music club that showcased New Orleans’s finest talent. The bar was holding a midsummer Mardi Gras party featuring the legendary George Porter, founder of the Meters, the seminal New Orleans funk band that influenced everybody from Phish to Widespread Panic. Ambrose decided to forgo his party, though. Instead, he picked up a hammer and spent his birthday boarding up his neighbors’ windows on St. John Court in Mid-City, on the Carrollton Avenue side of the bayou. “Saturday evening, people who said they were going to stay put for the storm started to have second thoughts,” Ambrose recalled. “By midnight it was ominous. The town was desolate: my wife and I decided to skedaddle. At 3 a.m. we drove to Columbia, Mississippi, and got a room.”⁴¹

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