Released on the cusp of a new hurricane season and smack dab in the middle of a mayoral election in New Orleans, historian Douglas Brinkley’s impressively researched investigation into last year’s Hurricane Katrina catastrophe, “The Great Deluge,” is an important, poignant and often-infuriating look at the tragedy – natural and man-made – that struck the United States’ most colorful city.
Brinkley names names and pulls no punches in describing Katrina’s ravages as the monster blew up in the Gulf of Mexico to a Category 5 storm and blasted ashore in the tiny Plaquemines Parish village of Buras southeast of New Orleans before slamming broadside into the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
But it is the aftermath of the storm that demands our rapt attention, and Brinkley wisely limits his focus to the week of Aug. 27, the Saturday before the storm hit overnight on Sunday, to Sept. 3, the following Saturday, when the city at long last was essentially evacuated.
Brinkley’s take on the story was informed further by the fact that he is a resident of New Orleans who relocated his family to Houston ahead of the storm.
This is a story of heroes and villains. It’s a story of massive suffering only made worse by bureaucratic bungling and political infighting. As Brinkley sees it, nature gave the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast a terrible punch in the face and humans kicked them while they were down. It is clear that Brinkley, a well-known historian with several books to his credit (“The Boys of Pointe du Hoc: Ronald Reagan, D-Day, and the U.S. Army 2nd Ranger Battalion,” “Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War”), wants to set the record straight and let the chips fall where they may.
Blame to spare
In Brinkley’s mind, the chips fall in several places, but most important, they fall with the federal and local governments. Of course, the Federal Emergency Management Agency comes in for the lion’s share of the criticism. FEMA, after all, is charged with responding to natural disasters.
And while much finger-pointing was aimed at Michael Brown, FEMA’s man on the scene, and deservedly so, according to Brinkley, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff was even more culpable. “… the ultimate responsibility for the lackluster federal response lay entirely with Chertoff …” he says.
He adds, “The one quality … not evident in Chertoff’s handling of Katrina, was caring about what the storm inflicted. While fellow citizens were dying, screaming for help, clutching chunks of floating wood and palm fronds trying to stay alive, Chertoff, the one American who could have helped the most, turned a casual, cold, indifferent eye to their plight.”
And, he adds, simply but pointedly, “Chertoff’s inaction cost lives.”
But Brown isn’t spared. Brinkley describes Brown as a weak-kneed bureaucrat who was clearly out of his depth in the catastrophe. Or, as he puts it: “Self-centered and comically suave, Brown was a cuff-link- shooting Republican dandy.”
Brinkley does not, however, level all of his criticism at the feds. Not by a long shot. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who is in a runoff May 20 with Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu for re-election, comes across as not just ineffectual, but as a sniveling basket case afraid for his own safety and putting his own comfort ahead of the citizens of the city he headed.
It’s not a pretty picture. Nagin is described as a no-show official. “One person not often seen on the streets, at the Superdome, or on a rescue boat of any kind was Mayor Ray Nagin,” Brinkley writes. Rather, he was holed up in the Hyatt Hotel, avoiding even the city’s command post at City Hall.
Cops fled, looters romped
There were other villains as well, like the New Orleans Police Department, many of whose members cared about their own hides more than the citizens they were hired to protect and serve. Many simply left town, and some of these took stolen Cadillacs with them. Brinkley puts it this way: “The NOPD’s mode was singular: self-preservation.”
To top it all off, Gov. Kathleen Blanco and President George W. Bush were pitched in an unseemly behind-the-
scenes political battle. Bush wanted to federalize the Louisiana National Guard to avoid allowing Blanco, a Democrat, to look like a hero. Blanco refused to go along.
But that was only after Bush took several days to become involved at all. “The President could have moved mountains,” Brinkley writes, “but was sadly aloof himself, as the storm and its spinoffs passed before him.”
It gets worse. “Every time the Bush administration and the State of Louisiana hesitated, lawyered-up, and read the fine print on Homeland Security procedure,” Brinkley says, “an American died prematurely. One of the biggest lessons of Katrina was that in times of disaster, bad bureaucracy plus presidential hesitation equals corpses.”
But it’s not only government that is open to criticism. Some of the people of New Orleans didn’t respond to their neighbors with the milk of human kindness. Looting was widespread and mean-spirited, and the destruction of property by some people showed no rhyme or reason. Others were quick to gouge their fellow sufferers.
Heroes saved lives
While there was plenty of blame to go around for the lack of a quick government response, Brinkley shows us that there also were heroes, both government and private, whose actions clearly saved lives.
Take the U.S. Coast Guard for example. Alone among federal responders, the Coast Guard had the foresight to establish a base of operations outside the disaster area and were on the scene from the get-go, rescuing people by helicopters and boats from their flooded neighborhoods.
On the state level, the people of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries also were johnnies on the spot with a flotilla of boats that spread out in the many afflicted areas to take people to dry land.
And then there were the private citizens who quickly lent a hand. “The very first responders,” Brinkley writes, “will never be known by name. When the levees broke, and the bowl started filling, hundreds of residents with recreational vessels went into high gear.”
Known at a local watering hole as the NOLA Homeboys, they were “conducting rescues with yachts, dinghies, ferries, canoes, rafts, sailboats, scows, skiffs, sloops, tubs, catamarans, diries, draggers, baiters, and ketches …
“They were bartenders and insurance salespersons and clerks – regular folks,” says Brinkley, “It never dawned on them to wait for the FEMA trucks or the Oregon National Guard.”
Then there was the Cajun Navy, an armada of private boats that traveled from Lake Charles, in Southwest Lousiana, to New Orleans to help the cause.
Other individuals also showed fine mettle during the crisis, in sharp contrast to the many who did not. Brinkley lauds people like the legendarily plain spoken Junior Rodriguez, president of particularly hard-hit St. Bernard Parish, who asked Lt. Gov. Landrieu (and meant it) if he should blow up a levee to relieve strain on Chalmette.
And Col. Terry Ebbert was one city official who seemed to know what he was doing, according to Brinkley. Ebbert, in charge of municipal Homeland Security, directed first-responders. Brinkley writes, “… without Ebbert everything in New Orleans would have collapsed; he was almost a one-man Command Center, an unsung hero.”
Of course, the battle for the resurgence of New Orleans continues, and the jury is still out on what it will become in its new incarnation. Will it even resemble its old eccentric, exotic and complicated self? Hard to say.
It certainly is changed today. Although they may be suspect to some degree at this early date, the official figures from the state of Louisiana are staggering: More than 200,000 homes destroyed with an additional 45,000 declared unlivable; some 400,000 displaced residents; and two adjoining parishes, St. Bernard and Plaquemines, 90 percent obliterated.
But while the story continues, and is likely to for many years, Brinkley has provided posterity with an invaluable, clear-eyed look into the early days after the maelstrom that turned New Orleans and the Gulf Coast into the U.S. equivalent of a Third World nation, complete with its own Diaspora. And he does this while pointing out the best and worst of human nature and human capabilities when faced with almost unimaginable sadness.
It’s what good historians do.
Books editor Tom Walker can be reached at 303-820-1624 or twalker@denverpost.com.
—————————————-
The Great Deluge
Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast
By Douglas Brinkley
HarperCollins, 720 pages, $26.95
