♪ Do you know what it means ♪
♪ To miss New Orleans ♪
♪ And miss it each night and day? ♪
♪ I know I'm not wrong ♪
♪ The feeling's getting stronger ♪
♪ The longer I stay away... ♪
♪ Miss the moss-covered vines ♪
♪ The tall sugar pines ♪
♪ Where mockingbirds used to sing ♪
♪ And I'd like to see ♪
♪ The lazy Mississippi ♪
♪ A-hurrying into spring ♪
♪ Oh, the Mardi Gras, the memories ♪
♪ Of Creole tunes that fill the air ♪
♪ I dream of oleanders in June ♪
♪ And soon I'm wishing that I were there ♪
♪ Do you know what it means ♪
♪ To miss New Orleans ♪
♪ When that's where you left your heart? ♪
♪ And there's something more ♪
♪ I miss the one I care for ♪
♪ More than I miss New Orleans. ♪
We come to you with facts.
We come to you with eyewitness accounts.
We come to you because we were there before the storm hit,
we were there when the storm hit,
we were there after the storm, and we're still there.
Are your teams, is FEMA ready for this?
Because you guys have been pretty taxed lately, with all the hurricanes of last year
and this year's busy hurricane season.
Well, we have been taxed.
Right now we're still doing recovery operations in Florida,
and I've got a long-term recovery office down there.
And some people have been trying to second-guess
how FEMA responded and recovered in Florida.
Well, let me say to all those critics--
we are ready, we're going to respond,
and we're going to do exactly what we did
in Florida, Alabama, and the other places.
We're going to do whatever it takes to help victims.
That's why we've already declared an emergency.
President Bush had no reservations about doing that.
We're going to lean forward as far as possible
and do everything we can to help those folks
in Louisiana, Alabama or Mississippi.
New Orleans In Peril,
Friday, August 26, 2005, 1:57 p.m.
There were forecasters out there--
there were legitimate meteorologists who were saying this is a threat.
And the National Hurricane Center was saying
there's a wide range of area that could be hit by this hurricane,
ranging from the Florida Panhandle all the way over to Louisiana.
So New Orleans was within their strike target.
I first heard about Hurricane Katrina--
I want to say, because it was on the 29th...
maybe the 26th-- kind of like word that it was out there
and what it was building to, the strength it was building to.
Anytime a hurricane gets into the Gulf,
we become very aware here in New Orleans.
Friday morning I was in Detroit,
and Saturday morning when I saw that the hurricane
had reached Category Five,
I began to call my family members
and pretty much implored them to leave out of town.
I had flown in for the funeral of Clarence Barney,
who had run the Urban League of Greater New Orleans.
About two-thirds through the funeral,
my communications director Michele Moore
who was with me,
slipped me a note up at the front of the church,
and the note said, "We must leave.
The storm is a Category Five now."
I was living in Metairie.
I was living there with my ex-fiancée,
her three kids, and two grandchildren.
Saturday, before the hurricane,
that morning at 11:00 a.m.,
I sent her, two cars, all the kids, the grandkids
and two friends that had come down from Illinois,
and sent them away to get to a safe spot.
I came down here that Saturday for a vacation
before I was going to work in Baltimore,
and arrived, and at the airport everyone was just trying to get out.
There was this huge exodus trying to happen. And I'm like, "What's going on?"
They said, "Oh, you didn't hear about the hurricane?"
And I actually hadn't been in touch with the news or weather or whatever.
So I came to my parents' house and we just said, "Look, let's just wait."
I think it was probably about Saturday about noon,
they really started saying that it was going to come and hit us.
And my house was kind of unprepared.
I had stuff in the yard, windows needed to be boarded up,
all of that. So I just started going to it.
I was here during Hurricane Katrina
because my mother-in-law decided--
as many New Orleanians did--
that they could weather the storm.
We haven't had a major hurricane since 1965.
I remember I was five years old. It was called Hurricane Betsy.
I remember driving and the water coming up behind us and surviving that,
so I have always been afraid of hurricanes.
Herbert Freeman, My mother, she had been bedridden for a while,
so she was in good spirits.
I told her, I said, "Another hurricane coming."
She said, "Oh, yeah. Well, we survived Betsy. You remember that?"
I said, "Yeah, I remember that. But I'm going to board up the windows and things.
We're just going to try to survive it out."
You know, on the 26th, as I recall,
the governor and I had talked a little bit
about this particular situation,
and we were already in the mode of evacuating people.
I signed a Declaration of Emergency for the state of Louisiana
to begin activating all of the assets
that could be brought to bear,
so that we could petition
the federal government to help us
to also pay for the big things that needed to happen.
Katrina is now in the Gulf of Mexico
and growing stronger rapidly
after leaving at least six people dead in South Florida.
Many heavily populated areas there
are in deep water and without power.
New computerinformation just coming in
tells us that now there's a possibility
of this storm even shifting further west,
perhaps even involving the New Orleans metropolitan area.
Of course, New Orleans among-- one of the most vulnerable hurricane places,
if not the most vulnerable in the country.
I was having dinner with my family,
getting ready to evacuate them the next morning.
Got a call from Max Mayfield.
He said, "Mr. Mayor, I am calling you.
"I just finished talking to the governor.
"This is one of the worst storms
"that I've ever seen in my 33-year history.
"The conditions are the worst I've seen,
"and this storm is one of the worst that I've seen.
"If I were you, I would issue a mandatory evacuation
"and try and get everybody out that you can,
'cause this is the real deal."
This is very serious.
This is the storm that everybody was afraid of.
And when you get somebody like the head
of the Hurricane Center to say
that in 33 years they hadn't seen anything like it,
we should be-- we should take heed to it.
The City of New Orleans had never in its history
issued a mandatory evacuation.
There's all sorts of legal concerns,
because you have so many residents
who rely upon public educ-- transportation,
and there's a question about whether you can really deliver
on that order.
I basically called my city attorney
after that Saturday night conversation with Max Mayfield
and said, "I don't care what you have to do,
"figure out a way for us to order
a mandatory evacuation."
And we did that the next morning.
I pretty much just disregarded the fact
that the hurricane--
Hurricane Katrina was headed towards New Orleans.
A few of my friends seemed to be particularly worried.
But I guess I'd been through enough of them that I just--
and I'd never particularly been very worried about it.
It was a Saturday night at 4:00 in the morning.
I went to bed that night,
and my son-in-law called me about 4:00 in the morning,
said, "Well, you better get up and watch TV,"
and turned on Margaret Orr, and we watched her.
And when they showed you what was happening--
that thing was covering the Gulf.
Hurricane Katrina will likely affect the Louisiana coast
with tropical-force winds and heavy rainfall by this evening.
Governor Blanco and I, Mayor C. Ray Nagin,
have each declared a state of emergency.
Every person is hereby ordered
to immediately evacuate the city of New Orleans.
Hurricane Katrina is now designated
a Category Five hurricane.
We cannot stress enough the danger this hurricane poses
to Gulf Coast communities.
I urge all citizens to put their own safety
and the safety of their families first by moving to safe ground.
My name is Tanya Harris,
and I'm a Lower Ninth Ward resident.
This is-- actually, this is three generations of us right here.
This is my grandmother Josephine Butler,
and that's my mother Chirrie Harris.
We evacuated the Sunday before the storm.
My sister's van had broken down,
and we all-- basically she didn't want to leave--
she just had no desire to leave, because, you know,
evacuating can get kind of costly.
And a lot of times, we'd always just leave and nothing happens.
So she didn't want to leave.
And we-- my grandmother said, "You know,
"I think this is going to be a pretty strong storm.
And so I think we ought to get out of here."
And my sister still wouldn't leave. But if one of us doesn't go,
none of us will go. We all stay.
I told them-- I got a stick, I went around there,
I said, "Y'all going to leave out of that house." I said, "Right now."
I said, "Come on, get in the car. If you don't have anything,
get in the car. Let's go. We got to go."
So they got in the car. We all packed up in the car and then we left.
We begin with two words coastal residents
never want to hear-- Category Five.
Hurricane Katrina now threatens to bring catastrophic damage
to coastal Louisiana and Mississippi.
This monster of a storm is now
at the most powerful level for a hurricane,
and it's taking aim at a wide swath of the Gulf Coast.
And thatincludes New Orleans--
a city six feet below sea level.
When I heard the Category Five was coming,
I decided to evacuate.
I took my-- you know, my entire family
and I went to north Louisiana, stayed with my brother.
They said, "Well, we got to leave. The hurricane coming."
I said, "Listen, man...
"you know, everybody who's afraid should leave,
"but I-- I ain't for that leaving.
I'm gonna stay right here."
The main reason that I decided to leave
is I hadn't gone shopping. I had intended to.
So I was out of food
and I knew the grocery stores would be shutting down.
I left late, once I took a good look inside my icebox,
and that was Sunday evening.
I had never evacuated from New Orleans for a hurricane.
We've had others. And we didn't know how severe
this one was going to be.
But my wife and my sons convinced me--
"Well, just leave the house and let's go downtown to a hotel,
then you can come back tomorrow."
So I said, "Fine, I'll do that."
The same thing was happening that happens with a lot
of... hurricanes coming to New Orleans.
There's a group that says, "I'm going to leave,
you don't have to tell me twice."
And then there's the other group that says, "I rode out Betsy,
I'm going to stay here, and it's going to be okay."
We left the city that Sunday when they made it a mandatory evacuation.
I was at a hotel right across the street
from the Convention Center and the Superdome.
Went to get my bags, and as I was driving back home to pick up my parents...
...there was lines of people
already going into the Superdome.
And they were holding them back, saying, "This is a place of last resort,
so don't go yet." So people were just lined up like a parade,
waiting for the Superdome to open to go into it.
As the storm was bearing down on us,
we had opened up the Superdome for people with special needs,
medical needs, which we always do.
The Superdome is used
because there's no other facility
in the New Orleans area
that is capable of sustaining winds
higher than a Category Three storm.
We have been very fortunate
to get food
for you tonight.
The mood in the beginning
was kind of like, "Okay, we're okay."
You know, we was cheering when they were speaking, you know?
It was kind of exciting to know they had food.
We wanted to see the TVs.
We wanted to know what was going on with the news out there.
And so everybody kind of like, was kind of,
I guess, accepting, you know,
where they was at at that particular time,
even though the storm was coming.
At 7:38 this evening,
we are continuing to track Hurricane Katrina,
as we are now starting to feel some of the effects of Katrina.
This right here is a, well, empty street here in New Orleans.
It actually looks a little eerie, you know?
To see our city looking like this on a Sunday evening.
I started praying, a lot.
And I called my sister Cheryl in California--
she could see the news-- 'cause we had already lost power.
So she could see the news in California on CNN,
and she was giving me the update.
Well, this was before it actually full-blown hit us.
And she said, "Phyllis, it's 30 minutes away."
So I hang up, I'm praying, I'm praying, I'm praying,
I'm getting my husband prayed up, I'm getting me prayed up.
I'm like, "Ron, you know what I never thought about? God's will.
"What if this is actually God's will
"for us to die right now,
for this to be the time, for us to die like this?"
We both know how to swim,
but Jahiya's a better swimmer than I am.
And I talked to her about if the storm starts hitting,
we found ourselves in the water and having to swim,
if she could get to safety
and if I was trailing behind her,
to keep going.
Don't worry about me. Get herself to safety.
And she said, "Mom, you know I wouldn't leave you."
You know?
Because we knew it was a life-or-death situation.
The potential danger,
the threat of the storm was enormous.
CNN is your hurricane headquarters.
We are watching a Category Five hurricane, Hurricane Katrina,
as it makes its way towards the city of New Orleans,
the expected landfall about 5:00 to 8:00 a.m. tomorrow morning.
I wasn't in good physical condition,
but it was about 12:00 before I left.
And I really was--
had anticipated not leaving the house.
I was going to ride this one out.
And so-- but then I made a decision
that I needed to go up to the complex.
So I asked my wife, after I got in the car,
I told her-- we only live about a block away from...
the levee that surrounds--
the Chalmette Back Levee that surrounds St. Bernard,
and the area I live in is Verret.
I told my wife just to take the back road, and she asked me why.
I said, "Well, it's a scenic route."
And I said, "I just want you to look at it and just remember," I said,
"because if this thing hits, that's all you going to have is memories of this place."
Well, everybody left. I went out, ran 10 miles,
came back, boarded up my house,
called my man, we went to the hospital to see my brother,
and then we went up to the... Hyatt,
parked the car, went up to the 27th floor.
About 11:30, a guy came on the P.A. system,
says, "Everybody place your belongings in the bathrooms,
grab your spread, your pillow, and come to the Fourth Floor Ballroom."
I guess about 2:30 in the morning,
it got rough.
We started listening to the wind,
and that sound-- I'll never forget that sound,
the wind hitting the glass at the Hyatt.
And those glasses started breaking.
And that's when you could see the true power of Mother Nature.
The winds woke me up and I got up and looked outside
and saw trees in the courtyard across from me just like swaying.
You could hear the squall through the window,
going "Shh-hh," like a tornado.
I thought a tornado was by the hospital, it was so loud.
Moved all our patients out into the hallway,
because we didn't want any windows cracking on them, any windows breaking.
This is August 29th, 2005.
About 6:00 in the morning, everybody kind of sleeping.
And then, all of a sudden, you just hear...
It sounded like a New York City subway train.
Others said they thought it was thunder or someone hammering.
And in a way, it was. It was Katrina
hammering away at the roof, trying to get in.
And then this-- the first break visible in the roof.
That is daylight coming through, and the rain soon followed.
There are reports about the Superdome.
Some reports that we have gotten from people in the Dome
tell us that there has been-- ahem--
a portion of the roof that is leaking.
The structure is sound.
Right now there is no structural damage.
They have moved the people
who were on the floor of the Superdome
in a very orderly fashion to get them
out of the water that's coming through.
Now, having said that, we have several more hours to go,
watching the situation and...
the rains are pretty heavy.
The wind is rolling.
It's rolling too much. I mean, there's tin flying off this.
Everything is ripping, the whole aluminum siding of the building--
you can actually hear it being peeled like--
like somebody-- it's just like that Darryl Hannah movie
from a long time ago, "The 50-Foot Woman" or whatever the hell she was.
That's what Katrina was. She was peeling our shit apart.
And it just got worse and worse and worse.
I mean, it was-- it was just incredible, the sound.
It was like having a freight train
in your ear for hours on end.
Just this...
It's just almost--
you can't describe it 'cause it's deafening.
You can't even hear yourself think after a while.
All I could think of was one word and I said it out loud.
And I remember my daughter looking at me like, "What is she saying?"
But all I could say was, "Stabilize."
I just wanted the winds
and the house to stop shaking and to stabilize.
What's up?
How you doing, man? I had to leave out of my house, man.
I don't know whether that water's coming over that levee or what.
The storm missed us. I can't hear you.
The storm went east. So you haven't heard about that water
coming over that levee from the lake?
I'll check it out. 'Cause the water start rising so high
in my two-story apartment, I had to get out, man.
Where's that at? Right across from Robinson's Overpass.
Okay. Around Clouet and Louisa Street.
Around 9:00, we heard a big boom noise.
Boom! And it was loud, loud, loud.
Yes, I heard the explosion.
We heard it first, the echo from here.
Then it was here. I said, "Oh my God,
it's the end of the world."
We heard some explosions-- two, three.
We thought about-- I thought maybe it was an electrical transformer
or something popping in the distance.
First I heard one boom. I thought it was a big transformer.
'Cause Fred said, "It's a transformer."
But I said, "We've been sitting in the dark now for about two hours, three hours."
But it went again, boom-boom.
I think the levee cracked
and they helped it the rest of the way.
They had a bomb. They bombed that sucker.
I didn't only hear the explosion,
I felt the explosion.
And there should be somebody else heard
and felt the explosion besides me.
I don't believe that the levees were blown.
I believe that my people heard explosions
when the water gushed through a... gaping hole.
You know, you have a crack that goes
from being a crack to a gaping hole,
you're going to hear some type of sound.
The levees gave.
I don't think it was blown up. I'll be honest with you.
I think what they heard was-- it was a possibility--
they could have heard the snapping of the ropes
that hold these barges together.
I almost have to believe that they heard the barge
hit that concrete wall.
Because it just looks to me like that barge
was the thing that knocked that wall down.
I'm 45 years old. I'm a New Orleans native.
I've been in New Orleans all my life.
My mother was born in New Orleans, my father was born in New Orleans,
my grandmother was born in New Orleans.
And I was there when Hurricane Betsy hit.
In 1965 during Hurricane Betsy,
there was an intentional dynamite of the levees,
and that caused the Lower Ninth Ward to flood.
People were on their roofs.
Several people lost their lives.
They dynamited the levees and flooded the Lower Ninth Ward
in order to save some of the more expensive property
in the Lakefront area.
They're not going to never leave nothing happen
to this French Quarter. Okay?
Nothing. It ain't gonna happen.
If the French Quarter go, everything go.
They blowed that levee
so the water could release on that side of the city.
During Hurricane Betsy, there were rumors,
and it became almost an article of faith
with people in the community, that the Ninth Ward flooded
because there was an intentional breach of the levee.
It was never investigated.
It was neither proven nor disproven.
In this case...
for the government and others
to sort of dismiss it without looking into all of it,
is not doing the people
or the public a service.
These people that live along where it flooded,
that believe it was dynamited,
have a long experience of being ripped off.
The 1927 flood,
when black communities were dynamited,
what happened during Betsy was on their mind.
It's not a far jump to believe
the urban myth that it got dynamited.
I think there are too many similarities
between the 1927 flood and Katrina.
For one thing,
the levee policy of the federal government--
the flood protection policy of the federal government
was directly responsible.
I mean, it was deeply flawed in 1927
and had been widely criticized.
The City of New Orleans
had exercised its political muscle
and dynamited the levee outside the city,
flooded out its neighbors.
And this wasn't about race, it was about money.
The people who were flooded out of their homes
were in St. Bernard Parish. They were almost
all of them, were white. So, as I say, it had nothing about race.
It was an enormous event.
It flooded the homes of over a million people,
which back then was almost 1% of the entire population of the United States.
In Louisiana alone, there were 200,000 people
who were fed by the Red Cross
for months after the flood.
More than half of them were living in tent cities.
Until Katrina, it was the greatest natural disaster
the country had ever seen.
Two years ago, FEMA actually funded a study called "Pam,"
where they did a study, a numerical study,
computer simulation model of what would happen
if a hurricane five-- Category Five hit New Orleans.
Hurricane Pam was a fictitious hurricane
engineers and the Federal Emergency Management Agency designed
to see what happens if we flood New Orleans.
What we are looking at here
is as the storm moved toward New Orleans,
it started to flood New Orleans from east and west,
and eventually, the entire bowl gets flooded.
Hurricane Pam came up with some very, very significant findings.
And unfortunately, these seem to have been ignored
by many, many agencies as we move forward.
One of the most significant
was that we had identified through our own research
that there were 127,000 people in New Orleans
who didn't have access to motor vehicles.
In addition, there were a large number of homeless
and the disabled.
So you were talking about a significant percentage
of the population that couldn't evacuate.
In 1965...
they started those levees.
They haven't finished them today,
and that's 40-something years later.
They haven't put the last lift on these levees.
It's like the guy that used to get up there with--
a number of years back-- hold that oil filter in his hands,
say, "Pay me now, or pay me later."
Well, this is the "pay me later." This is the payback.
It's like, "Oh, it costs too much money."
Now they've failed and now look how much money they got to spend.
You know the old saying, "A stitch in time..."?
Well, we don't deal that way.
We said, "If we look the other way, it'll go away."
And now it's just coming back home to roost, you know?
All the stuff they've done for the last 40 years
came home in a big way.
President Hoover in 1947 in a famous speech about engineers said--
he said that engineering is a great profession.
He said, but engineers, we build stuff.
He said politicians may put their name on it, but we can't deny that we did it.
He said an engineer is unlike a doctor who can bury his mistakes.
He said an engineer is not like a politician who can blame it
on his opponent on the opposite side of the aisle
or hope that the public forgets.
He said a polit-- an engineer is not like a lawyer,
who could blame it on the judge or try to argue it away.
He said an engineer is unlike an architect
who can hide his mistakes with trees and shrubbery.
He said when an engineer makes a mistake, he is damned,
because his mistake is there for the world to see.
The engineer should have designed those
much better and much stronger.
And we haven't seen that.
As for example, 17th Street Canal--
the sheet pile was too shallow
and didn't go all the way it should go.
In St. Bernard Parish, where the levees overtop,
levee material was not strong enough,
and those were not armored.
My understanding is people think we got hit by a hurricane.
We got missed by a hurricane. The hurricane went east.
When the water backed up the lake,
my understanding is the lake backed up
a Category One into our levees,
and they failed. Not a Category Three--
Category Three came up the Industrial Canal and the MRGO,
breached the levees, topped the levees,
but the two main ones that broke,
broke under Category One, Category Two, tops.
So we've been lied to all these years
by the federal government.
And it cost the people, not just New Orleans and the Ninth Ward,
but the whole freakin' southeast Louisiana.
It cost the people their homes and their lives.
I hope the politicians, whoever did this--
the Corps of Engineers, whoever's responsible--
I hope that they can sleep at night.
I hope they can sleep at night...
knowing that they're the ones who's responsible.
And that's not this talking, that's the freakin' truth.
Let's go to Anita in Uptown.
Anita, are you seeing any water
in the streets where you are now?
Yes, it's actually up to the top step, and we have--
How many steps do you have?
We only have four. And we have 12 people in our house,
including a senior citizen and two babies.
I walked over to the sewer drain,
the storm drains on the side of the street,
and I could hear this low, rumbling gurgle coming at me.
It sounded like...
just-- just bubble and boil.
And it just spit out all over, spit all over my shoes.
Then I started hearing "clang-clang-clang" down the street,
and it was the manhole covers popping off,
and the water was just blowing out the manhole covers,
and it was coming out of the storm drains
and it was filling up. And you could see it coming down the side streets.
You know, it wasn't like a wall of water, but it was coming out quick,
and you could see it was starting to rise up real quick.
Judy come and woke me up, and says, "Hey, go out and look at the street."
When I went and looked at the street, the water was pouring in.
I run back in the house, told them
to put on their life jackets and everything. We had to get out of the house.
And Henry was trying to open the back door for us to get out of the house,
because the water was coming up so quickly. It was up to the window.
I got up and I went to my front door,
and I had water
up over my head. If I'd have stepped out on my step...
I'd have drowned.
I'm going to throw you a life preserver, okay?
There it is. You see it? Put your feet on anything.
Go for that life preserver right there. Don't let it drift away from you.
Grab that life jacket. All right, take the life jacket.
Now the water's going to be deep. Come on, ma'am.
Come on-- you can do it. Let go. Let go, come on.
I can't. Yes, you can!
The life preserver will help you.
Don't panic. Just come to us.
Don't make me fall.
Once you get to us, we can get you into the boat.
Come on.
There you go. Don't panic, don't panic!
Hang on, just go right on the top of that.
I went out on the second floor porch to look over
and see the water just kept rising and kept rising.
So I went in the room
and I broke down, got on my knees, and I started praying.
I was like, "I'm not going to let nobody die,
"so I got to get myself together and get my mind right
to focus on how I'm going to do this here."
So I'm steady dialing on my cell phone, 911.
You can't get through, you can't get through. I got so desperate
and lost a sense of intelligence
that I dialed zero for the operator and asked her could she transfer me to 911.
She said, "I can't do it." I said, "Why not?"
She said, "Because they're not taking any calls."
"What do you mean they're not taking any calls?
"I'm dying. I'm fucking dying in here.
We're about to fucking drown,"
because I'm here in the water--
and I'm sorry for cursing,
but the more I think about it, the more angry I get.
Because I'm like...
"I'm here talking to you,
"so if you can hear my voice talking to you,
"then you know a heart must be beating inside of a body,
"which means there's a life here.
So you mean you can't connect me,"
even though I know, they told me,
"If you stayed, we're not gonna help you."
They told me point-blank, channel after channel saying,
"Fill your tub up with water"
so you can flush the damn toilet if you survive this.
My family and I are stranded here
along with about 100 other tenants and their families.
The street water-- we have been monitoring it all day
on the front of Gravier-- is increasingly rising,
and it's now coming through the lobby door,
and it's filling up the basement.
And I expect that our lobby is going to fill up,
and we have nowhere to go.
This is actually the first pumping station
built in New Orleans right here.
It was built here because this is the lowest area in the city.
There are about 27 pumping stations,
and we were one of the last ones to shut down here.
When the levee broke, when it got to its highest point,
it was off the chain. It was off the level up there.
This is 16 feet here. It was much higher,
because it was lapped around the back,
and we could hear it pulling.
People was getting reports
that St. Bernard Parish was underwater,
the Ninth Ward was underwater,
New Orleans East was underwater.
And you could only hear stuff over the radio.
And you can hear the callers calling in, like, "I'm stuck in the attic,"
you know, "me and my kids." And it was kind of like,
we was almost safe inside the Superdome,
but we still felt for the people outside.
And you didn't know what was going on.
You didn't know what happened to your family at that time.
I turned on the news, and the commentator said
that 80% of New Orleans is underwater.
And they hadn't shown any pictures yet.
And I'm still thinking-- when they say
80% of the city's underwater, I'm still thinking,
"Okay, they mean like two feet of water, three feet of water, something like that."
We're used to that. I grew up with that. Water would come right up to the doorsill.
We'd sit there and look at it, make little paper boats and throw in it, you know?
But, man, I looked around
and I saw there was a picture of the Circle Food Store.
And the water was midway to the door.
And I couldn't believe that. And what messed me up about that picture
was the fact that that was more inland.
That wasn't near the lake, it wasn't near the river.
If the water was that high at the Circle Food Store,
I knew we had a problem in the city.
(playing "St. James Infirmary")
What you looking at? What you looking at?
This is the barge. When it came,
and we thought we were going to die--
and I remember the number-- ING 4727.
If they would have took that away, I would have remembered the number,
because I wrote it down, and I put it in my pocketbook.
And the couple that lived there,
they couldn't get a boat to get out either.
They're still in there, if they're still there.
They had a man that lived in here.
He tied hisself to beer kegs. They may still be in the yard.
And he floated in the water just-- for three days.
And I just kept talking to him
and telling him, "God's going to make a way. God's going to make a way.
You going to make it."
And he would say, "I'm so tired." I said, "I know you're tired."
And I wanted to feed him what I had, but I couldn't get to him
'cause I didn't know how to swim.
♪ Well, I went down to St. James Infirmary ♪
♪ I saw my baby there ♪
♪ Well, she was stretched out on a long white table ♪
♪ So cold, so sweet, so fair ♪
♪ Oh, let her go, let her go, God bless her ♪
♪ Wherever she may be ♪
♪ Why, she could look this whole wide world over ♪
♪ She ain't never gonna find another sweet, sweet man ♪
♪ Like me ♪
♪ When I die, Lord, I want you to bury me ♪
♪ In a box-back coat and my Stetson hat ♪
♪ Put a $20 gold piece in my pocket ♪
♪ So the boys will know I died standing pat. ♪
Yep.
"St. James Infirmary."
We were vacationing in Italy at the time.
It was on a Monday morning. And the driver picked us up
from our hotel on the Amalfi coast
and said, "Would you like to go see the ruins of Pompeii?"
And we got in the limousine. They took us over to right up outside of Naples.
You know, it's right across from the Bay of Naples?
And Mt. Vesuvius was in the background.
And that morning, we went in to visit the ruins of Pompeii
and didn't know anything at all about the flood strike in New Orleans.
We saw dead people lined up back in 66 A.D.
We learned about 6,000 people being
smothered to death with the ashes of Mt. Vesuvius.
We saw all the things that were preserved.
Walked out of the ruins of Pompeii-- and it's most ironic--
we sat down, having a little lunch in the little square,
the little town there. And they turned on CNN,
and I could see the flood in New Orleans.
And I think the mayor said possibility of 10,000 people drowning.
And, you know, it's quite ironic to be in a place like this
where the greatest tragedy ever happened in Europe
and see your own city being flooded.
We slept that night, and then we decided
to make a move the next morning to the Superdome.
We walked through Tonti Street, which is my mother's street,
to Esplanade Avenue, to Claiborne,
where the Circle Food Store is.
There's my mom, which is 85,
my daddy, which is 84,
Miss Emma-- Miss Emma's got to be in her 70s.
We had... one guy--
I can't think of his name right now--
he had a colostomy bag that needed to be changed.
So we had all these people with us going to the Superdome.
Originally, the day after the hurricane,
I went walking around throughout Metairie and Kenner area.
I went around,
swam through water-- some of it was eight feet.
Some of it, you couldn't touch the bottom.
You'd see the levels at the malls that you knew were more than 20 feet high,
and the water was higher than that.
And I waded through to see if there was anybody around,
anybody anywhere, and there was nothing.
Right now, what we're showing you is Memorial Hospital here,
west of Downtown New Orleans.
We'll show you the parking lot of the hospital
and give you an idea of how deep the water is.
We have some concerned employees
that want to check on two locations.
Okay. What are you looking for? Okay. The first one is
the Lakefront area. I think there's very little doubt.
Lakefront got a lot of water. Yeah. And especially out there
in that area by Lakefront Airport... Help! Help us, someone!
in the New Orleans East part of the Lakefront.
From what we've been hearing, a lot of New Orleans East has been inundated.
The Heights in Avondale?
Avondale did fairly well as far as the water.
I think the winds had just died down to a reasonable level
where it was pretty safe to be out.
And I walked over the bridge
and there was 10, 15, 20 feet of water everywhere.
And you could start to hear the people screaming
from the balconies and rooftops.
And we could actually physically see some of them.
A helicopter came by.
He came in the middle of the complex.
I mean, I'm standing there with a mop stick,
with a towel that I found somewhere, a white towel,
with "S.O.S." and on the back of it, "Help me please."
And I'm waving this thing like I'm going crazy,
and he looks at me and he does this,
like "Get up and go." And they left us!
Oh, yeah, they passed. They were going to the white neighborhood.
They didn't care about me. They were going somewhere else.
I kept trying to flag them down with-- man, we had lights, everything to try and stop them.
Them people did not come. They came here the fourth day...
and gave me some water. I was in a boat--
I went to hollering.
They dropped the water so hard, they tried to sink my boat.
I asked for some water. They gave it to me--
bet y'all I won't ask for no more.
I will say, though, in the backdrop of it all,
and I want to say this, is that I think that there's one agency
that we should single out for a job well done,
and that's the United States Coast Guard.
They moved in very quickly. They were in there on Tuesday.
They did numerous,
very difficult helicopter
and boat rescue operations.
Because the Coast Guard threw out the books.
The head of the Coast Guard said, "There are no rules here, guys.
This is all improvisation now. Let's go."
For example, pilots were only supposed
to be able to fly eight hours a day legally,
because you have flight fatigue.
They said, "Screw it.
Go--go 16 hours." People were going 16 hours,
so the Coast Guard, both with their helicopters
and then with boats, could not have done more for their resources.
I started noticing that I've got neighbors
all over the place on their roof.
Because I'm on a second story, I can see.
I can see three or four in front of me.
I can hear people yelling and screaming at any given direction you want to go to.
And it was hot. It was so hot.
It was like, 95, 100 degrees
in the shade. The wind never blew.
And they say that New Orleans
has humidity down there which kind of cools us off.
That's bullshit. It was un-- It was death heat.
Inside of the Convention Center was so stifling hot, people tried to stay outside.
Hot as hell, 100-something degrees.
It's hot. It was very, very hot at that time.
It was 97, 98 degrees. It was hot.
The heat radiating off the highway
at night was intensely hot.
It's hot as hell. That was the worst summer.
I mean, that-that was-- that heat was ridiculous.
Hot as heck in here. It was beyond Africa heat.
If Africa heat was anything like that,
like I said before and I'll say it again,
they keep saying, "Go back to Africa"? Hell no.
For a minute, when I seen the water, I knew we had to get out.
And she said, "Well, why we have to go?" And I explained it to her
that the water was coming up, rising up.
Because she said we didn't have to leave for Hurricane Betsy.
I said, "No, we didn't, but we got to leave now."
So I had to get a guy that lived in the neighborhood to get someone with a canoe,
a little boat, and I took her and put her in the boat
in her wheelchair. And I had to get her
from the house all the way till St. Charles Avenue
where the water had subsided a little bit.
I ain't seen this many boats in the project, bro.
It was like cars, man. I'm telling you,
everybody in the project had a boat.
It was like cars, bro.
And we was just going, get the stuff, helping the people out.
And day by day, we was bringing people to the bridge.
We found some refrigerators,
opened the tops of them, put the kids--
we had an elderly lady back there
and Nicholas, my nephew, and another two kids-- I think it was three kids altogether.
We put them in the refrigerator and we floated
to what's called Hayne Boulevard,
which is close to Lake Pontchartrain.
There were citizen... first responders.
There were people in neighborhoods
who were carrying children
and women and older people out
on their backs, on their shoulders, making makeshift rafts.
The sense of sadness and anger that I felt to see...
the people I love so much in my own community suffering
and abandoned is just something that will remain with me...
every day of my life.
I got you, I got you. I got you.
Go out that way. Which way?
That way. Okay.
I remember Captain Timmy Bayard had organized the boats
because there weren't any other boats,
so police officers were using their personal boats
and boats that we had commandeered to start the rescue missions immediately,
because people were out there drowning.
And we had a lot of guys thinking on their feet.
I mean, many people in the police department acted very heroically.
Great to see you. I'm glad you're all right.
What was inspiring is people that stayed.
It was all citizens. I mean, people call it "The Cajun Navy,"
or you call it just the locals stepping to the plate,
but a lot of just everyday people were out there,
from all walks of life, really puttin' their life on the line,
diving in water, bringing out particularly people
with Alzheimer's and dementia.
Pastor Willie Walker, That afternoon with Sean Penn,
we must have pulled out about 30 or 40 people.
And everybody that we pulled out, Sean made a promise--
"If I can just get you out of here, I'll take care of you."
I've never seen anything like it before in my life.
I met Sean Penn on my sixth day out,
went up, boldly talked to him,
and said, "Hey, how you doing? Nice to meet you.
I'm Pastor Walker. How can I help you here?"
He said, "Well, I'm trying to save some people."
He told us that-- and you'd have to check with him
if he was fibbing or not, but it was a good fib,
and I understand why he told it.
He told us there were 40 children stuck in this one place,
so we went to that place. Really, what we were doing is
checking out his area. His neighborhood.
He was concerned about his people in his congregation.
We came together, organized,
and we drove from St. Charles to Napoleon Avenue.
We used that spot as a launch spot
to go out into the middle of the city.
It was only after I took his lead
that I was willing to wade
seven blocks in this stuff, past a cemetery,
to get to these couple-- he was very driven.
And it was, you know,
it just seemed so poetic that his church was called the Noah's Ark Church.
I live in the Ninth Ward, not the Lower Ninth Ward,
but it's still a part of the Ninth Ward.
So the day after the storm, the Ward had been flooded.
Okay, so we had to stay there...
till the rescue boat came.
And when the boat came, they took us to I-10 and Louisa.
And when we got on the bridge on I-10,
everybody was telling us to walk to the Convention Center.
No one knew everyone
would gravitate to the Convention Center.
But as people started dropping people off at the Convention Center,
then it just spread like word of mouth,
and then that area was kind of high and dry,
as it relates to the area around the Superdome.
So it was easy for people to get to the Convention Center.
I saw a guy at Convention Center Boulevard
who retired from our newspaper, disabled guy, walks with a cane,
had diabetes, sitting there in the hot sun for three days.
He was in bad shape.
20,000, 30,000 people just in the streets.
I mean, it was everywhere. People were everywhere.
No food, no water, I mean, the bare necessities.
What do we get? Nothing. They won't even bring water. They won't bring food.
Where's FEMA? Where's the mayor?
My mother is 83 years old. She's in dire need of her heart medication.
There's no medical services here. She's on the floor.
She's dying right now. She needs help to get her out of here.
My mother kept asking me, you know,
where were we, and I told her we was at the Convention Center.
She knew a lot of people was around, but she didn't know how many.
So I told her, I said, "Ooh, it's a lot of people out there."
I said everybody's trying to evacuate for the hurricane.
She said, "What they going to do with all these people?"
I said, "They're supposed to have buses coming,"
I said, "but I don't see any buses," which I didn't.
So with all the noise-- that was kind of getting to her, you know.
So I kept trying to tell the policeman what was going on.
He told me, he said, "Look, I'll tell you what to do--
take all this stuff and we gonna roll her outside way down to the end,"
he said, "'cause that's where the bus is going to be coming.
When the bus comes, she'll be the first to load up."
So I was checking on her and checking on her,
and last time I checked on her, she had asked me was the bus coming yet.
I said, "No, the bus hasn't came yet.
It should be coming any minute now."
So I sit back down. I was sitting on the curb.
She was in the wheelchair. So... after a while,
she hadn't said nothing for about maybe 10 minutes, 15 minutes.
It looked like she was asking me questions--
looked like every five minutes, something like that.
So I said, "Well, let me see," you know,
'cause it looked like she had done fell asleep.
'Cause she was nodding out, you know.
Every so often, she would nod out.
So I seen her with her head down like she was asleep.
So I went to go shake her and she didn't respond.
So I shook her again. She didn't respond.
And then I said, "Oh Lord, it looks like my mom done died out here."
And then, you know, I just waited till when daylight came.
Then another guy was out there, and he told me,
he said, "Man, we got to put something over her," you know.
'Cause I had like a little towel over her.
He said, "Wait a minute. I might have a blanket over here by me."
So he went and found the poncho that we throwed over her.
And after we throwed it over her,
they had someone that was working at the Convention Center,
said that when they was dying like that,
they was pushing them to the side-- 'cause they had another body back there,
by that doorway I had pushed her at, anyway.
Said, "You have to push her there," you know, leave here there.
So I didn't want to really do it,
but I had to push her out the way, do something.
So what I did, I pushed her back there,
and I got a piece of paper, put her name on it,
my name, my telephone number and everything.
You know, letting them know I was her son, to contact me whenever they come.
'Cause I thought they was going to put her in, like,
a freezer or something they had back there.
The guy said that the electric was off, the freezer wasn't working.
That's why they had them outside. The bus never came?
It never came-- came four days later.
There's no place where anyone that was elderly
or sick or handicapped-- that wasn't no place to be.
Really wasn't no place for anyone to be, any human being.
We're asked to go to a house
where there are children without their mother.
We pull the boat to the door. Inside, a daughter explains
her mother couldn't breathe. She needed oxygen to breathe.
She needed oxygen. She ain't had none.
She needed oxygen to breathe, but she didn't have any.
In a back bedroom, we find her mother dead.
There are five children, and a neighbor insists
they can't stay in the house in the heavy heat.
And we agree to take them out in our boat.
See if you can sit closer to the back.
In the days after Katrina,
many, many of us cried. I'm not afraid to say
that I cried because I was sad about what I was seeing.
And I cried because people were losing their lives.
And I cried because there was such chaos.
And I cried because I felt helpless, and I didn't know what I could do.
That's all I have, me and my children. Nothing else matters.
Clothes, all that is materialistic things. I can get that back.
My life-- I'm just glad we got our lives.
That's all that matters to me, getting out in one piece.
When I saw that there were people...
being treated like animals
in my city--
it could have been in any city,
I would have been grief-stricken and heartbroken--
but it hurt even more so
that this was from my hometown, where all of my generations,
my great-grand-- great-great-great-grandparents come from--
and I was so hurt and devastated
to see human beings being treated like cattle.
It was like-- when I grew up,
the nickname of New Orleans that I knew
was not "The Big Easy."
People used to call it "The City That Care Forgot."
And it was like nobody cared.
Look at how hot he is. He's not waking up very easy.
I'm not-- this is not about low-income.
It's not about rich people, poor people, it's about people.
Well, I fully understand people wanting things to have happened yesterday.
I mean, I understand the anxiety
of people on the ground. I can imag-- I just can't imagine
what it's like to be waving a sign that says, "Come and get me now."
So there is frustration. But I want people to know
there's a lot of help coming. I don't think anybody
anticipated the breach of the levees.
My grandmother is a diabetic. She's 76 years old.
She out of her insulin. What is she going to do?
She don't know if she's going to live or die.
We all don't know what we're going to do.
So we just need some help and support.
You have to worry about a country
that can look at...
a vast number of mistakes
that this administration has made
that has directly affected people's lives.
You have to worry about a country that can look at all of that
and still not see this guy for who he is.
I know I'm going to get mail,
I know I'm going to get ostracized,
but you got to say that.
Because I'm worried about the country.
When you look at an organization like FEMA
that was passing the buck about, you know,
how to just bring in normal stuff-- water, man.
Water and food. How hard could that be?
I still haven't heard any answers about that
that-- that convinced me...
that it couldn't have been done differently.
On the fourth day,
I was sitting in my office at the refinery,
and in walks a guy
and shakes my hand, and I shook his hand.
The guy said, "Can we help you?"
I said, "Certainly. Where are you from?"
"Well," he said, "I'm Canadian Mounted Police.
We're from Vancouver, Canada."
I said, "How the hell did you get here?"
He said, "I come across the ferry." Where was the federal government?
One of the things that came to my attention very early on
was how many nations had extended their... offers
to step in and make a difference, who had resources
and capacities to lend assistance immediately to the citizens of the region.
One of those places was Venezuela.
And as a consequence, I went with 15 of my colleagues
down to Venezuela to have a meeting with Chavez,
which we had to discuss particularly
what he would be able to do
to help specifically the people of the region of Katrina.
And while we were at it, to take a look and see
if there were anything else he could do
for a host of needy black people and Latino
and people of color and poor people in general
in the United States of America
who were being wholly underattended
by the United States government
and particularly by Bush's will and mandate.
This is the center of one
of the great cities of America-- New Orleans.
Here we have a virtual refugee camp
with thousands of people waiting for some sort of help--
medical, food, water, you name it.
And then, over there, the police.
Scores of police officers all concerned
about one looter who's in that supermarket.
You did have people breaking into stores,
some for survival and some for some felonious deeds.
There seemed to be in general two classes of looters.
There were the looters who were taking things
that I would think are very understandable--
food, water, clothes,
socks, T-shirts, whatever, what have you.
And then there were people who had, like,
assembly-line operations coming out of the electronics department.
You had one guy who also told me they took a 60-inch TV and they threw it in the water.
They thought it would float and it sunk to the bottom,
which was crazy. You know, one of those flat-screen TVs?
They're not really heavy, and I guess he thought he could float away on it.
I mean, it was crazy. So we get off on Tchoupitoulas,
and Terri Troncale, our editorial page editor,
says, "We can go to my house." She lives uptown. I know where she lives.
"Let's go there and set up a base and we'll report from there."
I head up Tchoupitoulas. Before we even get to her house,
I drive right into the Walmart looting.
There was basically traffic jams at the doors,
with looters trying to get out with their loot
and other looters trying to get in.
So we go in, and we report the story,
and a couple of my reporters, Mike Perlstein and Brian Thevenot,
had the guts to walk right up to these cops and say, "What are you doing?"
I'm doing my job.
Our photographer John McCusker
took a picture of a cop coming out with an armload of DVDs,
which didn't strike us
as necessary equipment for the hurricane.
No doubt there was looting going on in town,
but that is by far the number one crime that occurred.
But just as true is that
the vast, vast majority of people
needed help.
Ed, if you could explain,
at what point was it obvious
that the conditions in the Superdome were deteriorating
to the point that everybody was going to have to eventually leave?
The running water stopped,
and then-- and then no sewer,
and then with all that humidity and heat--
body heat-- that's creating all that internal humidity in there.
So think of all those things together.
It's crazy, man. I've seen some strange shit up in here.
All the bathrooms got shit flooding everywhere to the top, man.
It's nasty already.
You know, it's been real crazy up in here, man.
It was like being in a sewer. It truly was like being in a live sewer.
Because there was nowhere else to go. Everything was backed up.
Things were overflowing. People were hot.
They were agitated. They were irritated.
Special needs people were very, very sick.
As time went on, of course, people who came in died.
It was a horrific time.
It was something truly that you never would think would happen in America.
There was no way for you to take a bath.
There was no way for you to brush your teeth.
There was nowhere to change clothes.
No food.
So over at the arena they had those little...
food that come in the box for the military.
It was days that we didn't eat.
No ice.
No nothing.
It was deplorable at that--
that Dome.
They had this brother named Radio,
a kind of big brother, you know,
he was a spiritual brother too.
And he started clapping it up, like for basketball games,
when the people just clapping up and warming it up.
It just was a spirit, it was a big, big, big spirit,
and this was one of the proud moments for us.
Because as he started clapping it up,
people just started shouting out praises.
It was like, "We have to do something."
♪ I'm gonna let it shine ♪
♪ Oh, everywhere I go ♪
♪ I'm gonna let it shine... ♪
We went around the Dome and we started singing
"This Little Light of Mine, I'm Going to Let It Shine."
And to explain it-- it was powerful because it was a sad time
and you didn't know what was going to happen, but you only had faith in God.
And we gave Him the glory, and we marched around the Dome
and the people was coming from the inside of the Dome
and they was joining in. And after we marched around one time,
we go on the outside. At that time,
I felt the movement,
like the Civil Rights Movement. It was real powerful.
It was, like, powerful when you watch a movement like that.
After that march, things kind of settled a little bit.
♪ I'm gonna let it shine ♪
♪ Let it shine, let it shine ♪
♪ Let it shine. ♪
By Wednesday, we realized that the floodwaters
weren't going to be going down anytime soon.
Meanwhile, my across-the-street neighbor, the cab driver--
well, he'd run out of food and water
'cause all his kitchen stuff was downstairs,
so he had, like, a half a thing.
He couldn't make it anymore,
so he came busting out of his house and he swam across.
And he just about didn't make it,
and I kind of had to jump in a little bit
and grab him and pull him out.
Got him hydrated
with the little bit of ice I had left,
made a cold drink, got him outside,
and we were just talking about how crazy this all is
and what are we going to do?
Also, on the radio they were having reports
that they were rescuing people, but they were bringing them
to the Superdome or the Convention Center
or they were sticking them on some expressway ramp somewhere.
I never did find out where that was.
But they were just saying it was god-awful.
There were thousands of people, they have no food and water.
There's no police or no military presence
or something to help and all that.
These people are stranded.
I heard advertising on--
I think it was Q93.
They were advertising that they were doing pickup points
at various points on I-10 and 210.
So I got my lantern, a few supplies that I needed,
and I started swimming through the water
and wading through the water to get out to the pickup point.
I got to the pickup point
where the I-10/210 split was,
and they had already had some commotions going on
with people a little fidgety from waiting.
There had been people that had been waiting there
since the day after the hurricane.
I ended up waiting about six and a half hours
before they finally got the buses running
to take people to Southern University.
Let me tell y'all something--
you know, we've been on this bridge about five fucking days.
Most of them are black and poor--
America's underclass,
the real victims of what has become a human storm.
Three whole days...
During the event or right after the event,
we were rescuing lots of people
using lots of different resources,
and they would leave people on the interstates
to go complete the rescue missions and get other folk.
And for the most part,
individuals were left on those interstates
for several days with little water, little food.
We started to get a sense
from people at the Convention Center
and on those interstates
that they were getting tired of just sitting.
So they wanted to walk across
the Crescent City Connection--
which is the Mississippi River Bridge--
to meet the buses that were supposedly coming.
So we started walking up the highway,
and we passed all these people
and got up towards the bridge.
And when we were in shouting distance of the bridge,
all of a sudden there was a line of guns across the bridge.
We yelled back at them that they told us
we could walk out of town.
And they said, "Turn around."
So we're like, "Okay, men with guns.
We turn around now." Yeah.
It's interesting how things kind of broke down,
because the President of Jefferson Parish--
we've got parishes here instead of counties--
declared Jefferson Parish "Jeffersonia"
and blatantly said on the radio
that they were not going to allow anybody
from Orleans Parish to cross the parish line to get out.
They were going to put armed police there
and they were going to turn you back at gunpoint.
This was Jefferson Parish Police
lined up with shotguns,
would not let us cross that bridge, made us go back.
A guy told me that Harry Lee said that
that wasn't his police officer.
If that wasn't his police officer, I'd like to know who it was.
People were walking. There were elderly people walking.
There were people who were injured.
There were people who had driven through--
who had been carjacked on the way,
just seeking refuge, who could not get through
and who were told by their own government
that they were not allowed in.
The Convention Center
was completely accessible the whole time.
Come over the bridge and it's right there.
It's like the Manhattan Bridge in New York.
It's as if people were at MetroTech in Brooklyn
and people were in Manhattan saying,
"Can't we just cross the bridge and help those people?"
And they said, "No, you can't," while people are going out.
Then when the people took the initiative themselves
to walk out, they were met by
these redneck cops in Gretna saying, "Turn back."
I can give you a take on the Gretna Bridge thing.
It wasn't an isolated incident.
I'm going to tell you that during that storm,
the national media reported rampant rumors
that have now turned out not to be true.
They were flying all over the place and nobody could verify them.
One of the rumors was there was a hostage crisis at Children's Hospital.
That wasn't true.
One of the rumors was that there was a jailbreak, right?
And that all the guns
from all the gun stores had been looted, right?
So people were terrified.
African-Americans and whites were terrified on the street.
So in my-- in my estimation,
that Gretna thing was a way overreaction
to rampant rumors that were being pushed
in the mainstream media.
They were calling the people who were trying to cross in--
they were calling them "thugs."
And in today's language, we know that when people
are referred to as "thugs" and "looters,"
that they are talking-- they were clearly talking about
the African-American citizens of New Orleans
who were trying to escape.
It was a race thing.
I don't know how anyone could see it
as anything but that.
I thought that I lived in America
until shortly after Katrina
and the Crescent City Connection was blocked off
from people being able to walk freely
on United States soil.
Very disheartening, unacceptable.
I hope that the lawsuit is successful
for all of those involved.
There is no question
that the officials there were wrong,
absolutely wrong,
and they need to be reprimanded accordingly.
It was unjust.
It was inhumane and unacceptable.
Late afternoon in the sky over New Orleans,
and a moment of life and death is unfolding.
Here, a helicopter rescue brings relief.
A child is plucked from the wreckage--
one little life saved.
Today's evacuees have survived
for three days without food or water.
Some just stare into space.
Everything they knew is gone.
This is now the biggest domestic relief operation
by the military in America's history.
Thousands are making it out of the city.
Many who couldn't get out in the initial rush
have been crowding onto buses.
We wound up underneath that overpass
with a handful
of not niggers, but animals.
They were dead set on a handful of people leaving.
They jammed us up against the fences and everything else
to keep us from being evacuated.
I really thought I was going to die under there.
I thought that I was going to die.
I thought I was going to be killed or something else.
There was fighting. There was drugs. There was alcohol.
There was everything going on there,
and there was not enough people to take care of the people.
The first time I came back to New Orleans
was the Thursday after Katrina.
And, like everyone, we were--
we were not sure what to expect,
so we were sort of loaded--
.9mm, shotguns, the whole thing.
How many guns do you have?
I had a .9mm and two shotguns.
But all I had to do was get to the house and I had a couple more.
And-- Yo, were you looking for bin Laden?
No, I wasn't,
but I wasn't sure what I was going to find here.
I mean, it was like I drove into shootin' and lootin'
and carrying on and the buildings were burning.
I could see the Dome, and the Dome--
the roof was ripped off of it.
The hotels and businesses, the high-rises
all had the curtains blowing out and the windows weren't there.
There was a Church's Chicken down the corner.
It looked like it was on fire.
I kind of stopped
in the middle of the neutral ground.
You take that in, because you're just not ready for that.
You're just not ready to think, you know,
"It's all screwed up."
And while I was there,
they had some kids coming over,
and they managed to grab the car door,
and they were opening it up.
I didn't see it because I was too busy looking there,
but my dog saw it, and he jumps over me,
and he's just flipping out--
complaining and barking and growling.
I think it scared him, because I turned around and I looked
and it was like four, five kids,
and they had pipes and everything else.
I think they were getting in on all that crazy.
We were walking down the street,
which is in Algiers,
and I'm talking to my cousin.
I had a bottle of water in my hand.
I'm talking to him,
and we're talking about different things,
and before you know it, I heard a boom, a blast.
My body lifted up in the air
and I hit the ground.
My cousin, he was standing over me,
he was hollering--
he was hollering my name and asking me if I was okay.
He was just-- he was hysterical at this time.
He looking at the blood
on my shirt and my arms.
I looked up and I saw a white guy with a white T-shirt
with a shotgun in his hand, coming toward me.
So I managed to get up-- like I said,
by the grace of God, I managed to get up,
and they had some debris in the street.
So when I turned away from the guy,
he coming toward me with the shotgun.
Looked like he was trying to reload.
So as I turned away from him, I jumped over the debris
and I heard another bang.
Yeah, some of the buckshots
caught me in my back and I hit the ground again.
And, uh, this is, uh--
this is the buckshots from the shotgun.
And this is the incision from the surgery,
from the buckshots that penetrated my neck
and hit my jugular vein.
Usually, disasters like this
bring out the best in everybody,
and that's what we expected to see.
Now we've got people that it's bringing out the worst in,
and we're going to restore law and order.
We are not going to put up
with the kinds of things that we have heard.
These troops know how to shoot and kill,
and they are more than willing to do so if necessary.
And I expect they will.
We never could find clear evidence
that the city was totally out of control.
We know there was some looting going on.
We knew that there was a little bit of that activity.
I kept trying to get information--
solid information through the state police.
That's the law enforcement agency that I depend on.
They were here.
They were working with the city police,
and they could not verify those reports.
We've got food and water on the way.
Trust me. I wouldn't lie to you.
I've got this food and water here for you.
We've got medical attention on the way.
We're gonna do everything we can to get you out of here safe.
What I'm trying to do right now is save people's lives.
I'm trying to get these people out of this Convention Center.
I don't get involved with the bureaucracy because I'm a police chief.
I am someone who tries to protect and serve
the citizens of this city.
I need somebody to get me a cruise boat or some type of boat,
a cruise ship or some kind of ship,
so I can put my people in some comfort, so I can help the people--
we have people in here who have lost their families
and they have not gotten out of this fight.
I didn't know where my daughter was at for two days, and we endured.
I'm so tired of this, but it's finally almost over.
That's it. I don't want to talk no more.
I'll tell you about Eddie Compass.
This dude is from the Lafitte Housing Projects. He's a street cop.
And he's a very emotional type of dude,
and when you talk to him, he gets amped up.
I think his emotions--
I think he was just emotional under the circumstances.
This is his city. His wife was eight and a half months pregnant.
He got caught up in the whirlwind,
and I guess he lost some of his composure.
What Eddie was trying to do was tell the truth
because there had been-- nobody trusted police.
His view was, "I'll tell you everything you want to hear."
Unfortunately, he was spreading rumors
and started becoming a celebrity and media star.
And he couldn't-- loved to be on
with Dr. Phil and Oprah Winfrey,
and on those programs he would exaggerate the problems,
such as hundreds of helicopters being shot at by looters
and babies being raped in the Superdome.
And that's the scene they keep showing-- "They're raping babies!"
That just didn't happen.
Now, I don't know why he was doing that.
Maybe it was to draw attention
to how much the city needed help,
but it had a very negative impact on our city.
I've got family all over the place,
and they're contacting me via e-mail.
They think, like, this is just the end of civilization down there.
There was reports of rapes and children being raped.
And I even got a report at the Ritz-Carlton
where my daughter was a concierge
that my daughter was raped, and it tore me up.
What happened was some individuals
tried to break into the Hyatt Regency--
I'm sorry, to the Ritz-Carlton,
but the police were there and they fought them back,
and so my daughter wasn't harmed.
But by the time the word got back to me,
you tell one person who tells one person who tells one person--
and the person that relayed the information to me,
they were so distraught when they told me,
I just thought they were telling the truth.
It was really difficult. And I guess in hindsight--
I guess I heightened people's fears
by me being the Superintendent of Police
reporting these things that were reported to me,
but there was really no way for me to check definitively.
So instead of erring on the side of caution and saying nothing,
I didn't want people to think that we were trying to cover anything up,
so I reported these things without them being substantiated
and it caused a lot of problems.
I'm not looking forward to this trip.
I got a feel for it when I flew over before.
For those who have not-- can't poss--
trying to conceive what we're talking about,
it's as if the entire Gulf Coast were obliterated
by the worst kind of weapon you can imagine.
You had to have your heart broken
if you love this country and watched the slow federal response to Katrina.
You had the specter
of the President of the United States seeming--
first off, he was totally not curious.
He goes to San Diego and gives a speech on Iraq
and comparing it to Japan after World War II,
and barely mentions Katrina,
and then starts doing a giddy air guitar skit on the stage there.
Which is almost like pouring salt in the wound.
And then when he finally addressed it,
he said that he had not been informed.
First of all, the government did know--
had been amply warned by... agencies,
by people who are meteorologists,
people who study weather patterns,
that this catastrophe
was headed towards the Gulf region
and that it had the capacity to be bigger
than anything else the region had ever experienced.
Everyone, let's go ahead and get started. It's noon.
We have a lot of business to cover today.
If the really strong winds
clip Lake Pontchartrain, that's going to pile
some of that water from Lake Pontchartrain
over on the south side of the lake.
I don't think anyone can tell you with any confidence right now
whether the levees will be topped or not,
but that's obviously a very, very grave concern.
I do want to thank the good folks in the offices
of Louisiana and Alabama and Mississippi
for listening to these warnings
and preparing your citizens for
this, uh--
this, uh, huge storm.
So there was information.
Why the government of the United States
and particularly Bush decided not to respond
and not to pay attention to that,
I think, was based upon a host of reasons.
First of all, the arrogance of power.
Huge arrogance on the part of the government.
It didn't mean that much to other things
that were capturing his attention
and that he thought was far more important.
And when it did finally happen,
he just felt that the people
who were caught in this terrible tragedy
were, first of all, socially of no importance
and certainly racially of no importance as well.
There's going to be plenty of opportunities to help later on.
But right now the immediate concern is to save lives
and get food and medicine to people,
so we can stabilize the situation.
Again, I want to thank you all for--
and, Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job.
I'll never forget turning on the television
and seeing interviews
when George Bush was saying,
"Good job, Brownie,"
and then they flipped to the screen
with George Bush flying over, looking out of the airplane
at the devastation below.
He needed to have put his boot heels on the ground,
to have touched the floodwaters,
to have smelled the death.
Lyndon Johnson in 1965
came down to the Ninth Ward,
and in the pitch-blackness of night
in his awkward Texas way,
had a big old flashlight with him.
He went out there and put a flashlight on and said,
"This is your president. I am here."
In some ways, that's a funny LBJ story,
but what Johnson was saying is, "We care.
"I represent the American people.
"You may have lost your home,
"you may have lost all your heirlooms, but we care.
You mean something to us."
How could it be that in a country
that's supposedly the richest country in the world,
where the 82nd Airborne are prepared to be
anywhere in the world in a day and a half,
where we were in the region of Sri Lanka
where the tsunami hit in less than two days,
here we are-- day four, day five--
and the federal government still had not made it to New Orleans?
You were unaware of the situation
at the Convention Center till yesterday.
When yesterday did you become aware?
I think it was yesterday morning
when we first found out about it.
We were just as surprised as everybody else.
We didn't know that the city had used that as a staging area.
That shows how difficult communications are.
FEMA has been on the ground for four days going into the fifth day.
Why no massive airdrop of food and water?
In Banda Aceh in Indonesia, they got a food drop
two days after the tsunami struck.
We're feeding those people in the Convention Center.
We have fed over 150,000 people
as of last night. That is happening.
The point is as of last night-- You're witnessing--
Forgive me, I have to stop you here.
What we're hearing is that-- we're hearing people's frustration.
There are people that are beginning to manifest themselves
out of the community that we didn't know that were there.
Why are you discovering this now?
It's five days that FEMA's been on the ground.
The head of police says it's been five days
that FEMA's been there.
The mayor, the former mayor,
putting out SOS's on Tuesday morning,
crying on national television,
saying, "Please send in some troops."
So the idea that-- yes, I understand
that you're feeding people
and trying to get in there now,
but it's Friday. It's Friday.
It was baffling to me how you could have
what was at that point a sort of official estimate
of 50,000 people at the Convention Center
and not know about it and have no idea.
The other thing that was surprising to me
was that he seemed to have no intelligence.
At one point I said,
"How can we have better intel than you have?
"Because I have a research file
"prepared by my 23-year-old research assistant,
"a production assistant,
"and I'm getting better intelligence than you're getting?
How is that possible?" It was really baffling.
It was really one of the more baffling interviews...
because they seemed so out of touch
with the reality that I think a lot of people
had been watching day after day after day.
Michael Brown is kind of a valet for the oil lobby.
His specialty was doing junkets for the oil crowd.
He'd get them a hunting lodge up in Wyoming
where they could have two perfect weeks to get away.
And so he slowly worked his way up the ladder in that way.
He was given FEMA, which is like giving somebody
the ambassadorship to Luxembourg
or something as a patronage.
Who knew that Bush had appointed the head
of the Arabian Horse Association to run FEMA?
New Orleans was on the hit list
of three worst disaster zones--
a terrorist attack in New York,
earthquake-- San Francisco,
breached levees in New Orleans.
Instead, FEMA and Homeland Security
treated the hurricane
as if the levees never breached.
They never understood
the complexities of a city 80% underwater,
which is what happened to New Orleans by the end of that first week.
Michael Brown,
and I never thought I'd live to see this day--
to defend Michael Brown-- but he was scapegoated,
because Michael Brown was not the main problem.
It was Michael Chertoff, who was the head
of the Department of Homeland Security.
Chertoff had the responsibility
to name this an incident of national significance.
Once he did that, that was the golden key
to unlock federal resources to make sure
that the federal government would respond to a disaster.
Since he didn't do that, Michael Brown's hands were tied.
In the Bush administration,
if you go through each one of them
and say, "Where were you when the golden hour came?"
Dick Cheney-- fly-fishing.
Karl Rove-- nowhere around.
You have Chertoff going to Atlanta
on a disease prevention kick.
You see Condoleezza Rice shopping.
What was Dr. Condoleezza Rice doing
that looked very poorly?
She was at Ferragamo's buying shoes.
I think a white patron came up to her--
maybe a white woman-- and said,
"How dare you! While people are down there drowning!"
It was like the Sandman hook. Whoop!
She got pulled off, brother.
That was a mini-Apollo stage,
and she wasn't hitting it.
So they pulled her offstage.
Then she goes to "Spamalot" that night.
And when the cameras frame her familiar figure
once the lights come on
and they see it's Dr. Condoleezza Rice,
"Boo!" They began to boo her.
And then the next day, she's hitting tennis balls
with Monica Seles at a club.
So Blahniks, Broadway, and balls
are more important than black people who look like her
for this woman from Birmingham.
I am an African-American. I'm from Alabama.
I can tell you that this response
is not a response about color.
This is a response about Americans helping Americans.
No American wants to see another American suffer.
What do we want? We want help!
What do we want?
We want help! We want help!
When you consider the situation--
okay, if you wasn't rich, if you wasn't middle-class,
if you didn't have an Explorer, if you didn't have a car--
right now, I don't know what plan was put in place
for those people to get out.
And, really, that's the real question.
If it was a mandatory evacuation,
and there was a mandatory evacuation,
then that means that everyone had to leave.
And those people
who could not otherwise do for themselves
supposedly the government was supposed to do for them.
That's the responsibility and role of the government--
to do for those otherwise who cannot do for themselves.
Nobody chose to go through what they did.
If anybody would have known,
God knows everyone would have left.
But, again, some people don't have the means.
You can't keep evacuating. People don't have the funds.
They don't have the places to go. They don't have vehicles.
And they say that this was all
available to people. That's crap.
The whole deal was a bad experience, man.
But I think it could have been done much better, okay?
And just to me, you know,
the city on the whole didn't do what they were supposed to do,
and you've got to... fault the mayor.
We want help! All these people you see here dying?
It's your fault. No more. We want help!
Yo, where the policemen at?
Where are the National Guard that can control all this?
I think we probably have evacuated
75% to 80% of the citizens out of this city.
And normally, people would say
if you can get 60% of the people out,
you're doing a great job.
Ray Nagin was warned on Saturday night
that this was the worst storm ever.
The head of the National Weather Service said,
"You have got to get these people out of there."
Ray Nagin consulted first with the business community.
I found that remarkable.
His first instinct was not to protect his own citizens,
but to go out and protect the business community, because he felt
that if he faced the reprisals of the business community,
he would lose his economic base.
Understandable, but still lamentable.
He is supposed to be that first line of defense
and organize the police department, the fire department,
and all other emergency response folks.
And if he didn't-- there was a plan in place,
but I'm not sure if he knew what was in the plan, to be quite honest.
I'm not sure if he'd ever read it before.
I... Ray Nagin.
...Clarence R. Nagin, Jr.,
otherwise known as "C. Ray Nagin..."
...do solemnly swear...
...that I will support the Constitution and laws of the United States.
...that I will support the Constitution and laws...
Ray Nagin done what he could do.
Ray Nagin's only a mayor. He's not no governor.
He's not no vice president.
He's not no president.
He only have so much power.
You know, I voted for Nagin,
and I think he was just confounded
by the tremendous import of the problem here.
The thing got on him, and he should have gotten his people out of the city faster,
but what else he was going to do
but put them in the Superdome and the Convention Center?
The pictures of these poor people
with nothing to eat
and without their clothes and people looting the city,
I don't think you can attribute all that--
it's easy in hindsight to say what you would have done
under the same or similar circumstances.
If I had to grade Mayor Nagin, I would say this--
I would say there has not been a man in America
that has been challenged the way he's challenged.
Many people want to talk about Giuliani,
but 9/11 was 16 square acres.
This is 90,000 square miles.
Giuliani went home every night.
Giuliani had his police, his firemen. He had communication.
That's right, Rudy would have tramped out there
in the midst of the storm and walked on water like Jesus.
The reality is is that the entire city of New Orleans was flooded,
so to his credit, Mr. Nagin attempted in the aftermath
to get resources available for his city.
I'm not trying to be Rudy.
I don't think I can be Rudy.
I don't get the Giuliani pass
for a lot of different reasons, some good and some bad.
The 9/11 situation was a very contained event.
♪ ♪ This event in New Orleans was totally different.
You've never had a city totally devastated.
You've never had a city with 80% of it underwater.
You've never had a city with communications gone,
with electricity gone,
with the media for the most part gone
because of fears of what was happening in the city.
Well, as I was dealing with the crisis right after the storm,
there were-- there was two major flood events.
The first one happened right after the storm
with the Florida Avenue.
And then, right close thereafter,
we had breaches at the 17th Street
and the London Avenue,
and we were in crisis.
Everything that we did was basically
to try and get as many people out
and then to put people in shelters of last resort,
to basically allow them to spend a couple of days,
and then we always thought the cavalry would come--
the state police,
National Guard, the feds.
And then after two or three days, they didn't show up.
They've been making promises to us
that they were going to move us, move us, and move us,
and we've been believing in it, and people just really been
getting frustrated at this point.
No Red Cross or nothing.
This is terrorism American-style. Help us!
To try to figure out why there was
a slow federal response is still a puzzle to me.
I look at that time, and it was so desperate.
And as governor,
I had thrown every asset that we had
against the fury of the storm
and the aftermath of the storm.
We had 400 boats
from Wildlife and Fisheries ready to deploy--
in fact, deploying while the winds
were still blowing 30 and 40 miles an hour.
That's not real safe. If you're a boater, you know that.
But they were doing that because we understood
there was going to be a big lifesaving mission.
We understood, though, as events unfolded,
that that was not enough, and we continued to ask
in every way possible to get more help.
What do you need right now
to get control of this situation?
I need reinforcements. I need troops, man.
I need 500 buses, man. We ain't talking about--
you know, one of the briefings we had, they were talking about
getting public school bus drivers
to come down here and bus people out of here.
I'm like, "You've got to be kidding me!
This is a national disaster.
Get every doggone Greyhound bus line in the country
and get their asses moving to New Orleans!"
The interview with Mayor Nagin has some historic proportions,
but primarily, it was an accident.
I had broadcast through the hurricane...
into the couple of days after the hurricane
and then taken a couple of days off to go find my family.
And when I came back, I hadn't been listening to the news,
and I just figured the president was here, the army was here,
things were starting to turn around.
And on my drive in, I listened to
all of these public officials--
the governor...
parish officials-- in hysteria.
And when I got into the studio, I said,
"What the hell's going on?"
And they said, "We don't know."
And the mayor called in.
You know the reason why the looters got out of control?
Because we had most of our resources saving people,
thousands of people
that were stuck in attics, man-- old ladies.
When you pull off the doggone ventilator vents
and you look down there-- and they're standing in there
in water up to their frickin' neck.
And they don't have a clue what's going on down here.
They flew down here one time
two days after the doggone event was over
with TV cameras, AP reporters,
all kind of goddamn-- excuse my French,
everybody in America, but I am pissed.
That was the moment I think we started getting help.
Everybody else was being politically correct,
racially correct,
economically correct, class correct,
and nobody had the balls
to-- to say what was happening.
And until he did, nothing did happen.
This is the thing that people have to understand--
that America can no longer--
I'm sorry.
It's been a long few months.
I'm sorry, um...
It's, uh...
I kind of went off, man. After I did it...
I said to myself-- I was really emotional.
I said, "Man, I have really screwed up.
"This is the end of my business career,
"my political career,
"and maybe the CIA is going to swoop in here
"and inject me with something I don't know about
where in two months I'm going to be history."
And I really believed that.
And then, after I kind of got over it, man,
it kind of started the ball rolling.
You know, Air Force One was
something that was pretty amazing.
I've never been on...
what I'm calling a pimpmobile, man.
This thing is incredible.
It's like-- it's like nothing you've ever seen.
It's a penthouse in the sky.
They called me and said,
"Look, the president would like to meet with you."
I said, "Look, I haven't taken a bath.
I've been doing this military bathing thing. I haven't shaved."
They said, "No problem. We're going to set you up."
I go on Air Force One.
This brother from New York takes care of everything.
He said, "Look, man, we're going to hook you up."
Sent me to the back in the president's quarters,
and I get in the shower,
and he knocks on the door and says,
"Mr. Mayor, five minutes. They need you."
And I'm like, to myself, "There's no way I'm getting
"out of this warm shower in five minutes.
They're going to wait on me."
So he comes back and knocks on the door again
and basically says, "They need you.
The president is waiting for you."
So I took another five minutes and eventually got out.
We have lunch on the plane
with the president, senators, and congressmen.
Chertoff is there,
Brown was there, the governor was there.
Mayor Nagin was still very upset about
everything going on, very justly.
We were all upset. I mean, you know, let's be frank about it--
none of us were happy and content.
Everybody's going around the room
and they kind of get to me, and I cut to the chase.
I said, "Mr. President, with all due respect,
"if you and the governor don't get on the same page,
"this thing is going to continue to degrade into something
that's going to further embarrass the nation."
So he and the governor went in another room.
They had a meeting for about 15 minutes.
Somebody came and got me and said, "The president would like to see you."
So I go in this room, this little private room, the governor's coming out.
He said, "Mr. Mayor, the governor and I talked.
"I took your advice.
"I offered her somebody who could run this thing
"and have ultimate authority.
"And she did not want to go in that direction,
so I gave her two options."
And he basically said, "I'm sad to say
that she said she needed some time to think about it."
I didn't say, "Give me 24 hours
to decide if I want your help."
I have said-- I had said from day one,
"Mr. President, I need your help."
Well, you know, from my perspective,
the big problem in this catastrophe
was who ultimately had the authority
to make the final calls.
And the feds,
the federal government, in my opinion,
was dancing around this whole issue of state rights.
And the state had to call the feds in
for the resources that they needed.
And the state was kind of hesitant in doing that,
because the governor wanted to look like
she was in charge and in control.
And that's what I'm talking about when I say
there was this dance about final authority.
And people were suffering. It was frustrating me.
Governor Blanco, I think,
was in many ways angry at Nagin,
because Nagin, as a Democrat,
backed the Republican Bobby Jindal
when she ran for governor.
He didn't think she had a chance to win,
and he did in politics, which is one of those unthinkable things--
he broke out and said, "I don't want the Democratic candidate.
I'm going to vote for a Republican,"
who is a great friend of the Bush administration,
so Nagin backed Bobby Jindal.
Well, Blanco won, and she's harbored
a great deal of animosity towards Nagin ever since.
I don't care what the political relationship is
between a governor or a mayor.
When there's a crisis, like a hurricane crisis
or a weather crisis,
all political BS
has to go to the side.
"Ray Nagin, what-- what happened?
You dropped the ball."
Then I would say the same thing to the governor.
"Ms. Blanco, what were you thinking about?
What the hell was going on?"
Then I would ask Bush,
"You're out of touch, and you don't have a clue."
You know, he's the type of person
that gives "C" students all over the world a bad name.
And here he was in Biloxi,
feeling the pain of some of the survivors.
He's very good at this, but many feel he should have done it much earlier.
Then the question that may well come to haunt him in his second term--
the war in Iraq and Hurricane Katrina--
the perfect storm.
What do you say to the people who say
there's too much money being spent on Iraq and it's time to bring it home?
I-I-I just completely disagree.
We've got a job to defend this country in the war on terror,
and we've got a job to bring aid and comfort
to people of the Gulf Coast, and we'll do both.
I'll never forget it.
I went to one of the shelters in Shreveport, Louisiana,
and I met a man named Daniel Webster.
I will never forget him.
And he was sitting there, and he said to me,
"You know, Reverend,
"my wife was wheelchair-bound.
"When I heard the storm coming, I ran to the door.
"I knew I was in trouble because I took my finger
"and tapped the doorknob, and I tasted the water.
It was salt water, so I knew that the waters from the river was coming."
He said, "But before I could run back
"to where my wife was,
"I looked outside and saw my car floating.
"And before I could reach my wife,
the door came off the hinges and water was everywhere."
He said, "I finally grabbed her chair
"and pushed her up to the roof of the house,
"and I held her as long as I could.
"And I couldn't hold no longer,
"and I watched my wife's wheelchair just go with the flow
"and watched her drown
as a tree branch held me for 12 hours."
He said, "The only thing I don't know is why God didn't just let me die.
I have nothing to live for."
These are the kinds of things we had to listen to
and then turn on the news that night
and George Bush and Michael Brown
are talking politics.
They didn't have information.
They were waiting on reports.
They could have done what we did--
go right there and talk to the people.
Activate the National Guard, activate the military.
Oh. I forgot. They were in Iraq
making democracy free for those abroad
while those at home had nothing.
I'm her daughter. How old is your mother?
86. She have a heart condition.
The feeling that residents had about the National Guard
and the state police and the visiting police,
that they were in an armed, occupied city.
I can't help but believe
that that's the same way they treated people
in any city that we go in and invade, you know, or...
Kosovo or wherever. I don't know.
I guess maybe that's the way the Iraqis feel sometimes.
Good morning.
Yesterday was a good day.
We made much progress in building our capability
in the area of operation, in Mississippi
as well as in Louisiana.
The next thing that happened was I get this call.
I need to meet this general,
and he's at the heliport.
So I walk in and I'm waiting,
and his-- his aircraft was a little late.
And I'll never forget this as long as I live.
This brother walks in the room-- walks in the room
and he's got all these military guys around,
and he takes-- he's got his little tammy on,
and he takes his dark shades on
and gets his little pad and his pen.
He says, "All right.
What are we going to do? What's going on?"
Weapons down! Weapons down, damn it!
They started giving him a bunch of BS,
and he started cussing, and things started happening.
And that's when things changed.
Put those damn weapons down!
I'm not going to tell you again, God damn it.
Get those goddamn weapons down.
The black John Wayne dude--
General Honore, that's a bad man.
He was the guy that did it.
He wasn't stuck on stuck.
I want that on the ground, so the trucks can go get another load.
Yes, sir. You can make that happen?
I can make it happen, sir. You the man. I'm depending on you.
I'm gonna make it happen. I got something for you at the end of this.
All right, sir. Thank you.
The next 24 hours will be critical to us
as we are trying to evacuate
the 25,000 people at the Convention Center.
This will be tough work,
but we have the conditions set,
and we will get that done.
We'll continue to flow forces in and capability
so we can sustain this operation
and continue the enormous search and rescue mission
that runs from I-20 to the Gulf Coast of Mississippi
and in and around the Greater New Orleans area.
So we will do our best and continue to do that
over the next 24 hours. Over.
Right now we're being told
that this is a convoy of food,
possible food and supplies coming in--
maybe we can slow it down a little bit here--
into the area of the Convention Center.
Relief is finally arriving here
on large National Guard or Army vehicles
around the Superdome.
In the lines for the people
to evacuate the Superdome,
they had no direction
or no clue of what was going on.
You couldn't hear anything,
because there was no sound system.
When you did get
something that somebody was telling you--
the men in one line,
the women in one line,
the family in another line,
the elderly in another line.
It was just so chaotic
trying to get out of that Dome,
because no one had any clue
or direction how-- how we were
to get out the Dome at the time.
Grab her-- grab her legs.
The hotel-- the Hyatt is located right next to the Superdome.
We were actually called the Hyatt Regency New Orleans
at Louisiana Superdome.
We were right in the vicinity,
but it was like being miles away,
because there was water and everything else
separating us from the folks at the Dome.
They evacuated all the folks from the Dome,
probably about 40,000 people, through the Hyatt,
and... we had no idea what to expect.
The day that the folks were going to be
evacuated from the Dome through the hotel...
I found out about it,
and I was told that I would have
National Guard, state and local police to do the security.
Because...
Gralen was afraid that the guys
who were in there doing what they weren't supposed to do
would fan out into the hotel, and it could be a problem.
So we were on our way
to go and speak to this major-- state police,
when I saw this brother in a uniform--
just a brother in a uniform happened to be walking by.
I said, "Excuse me, sir.
Are you with the National Guard?"
He said, "Yes, I am." I said, "Listen, this is what I need, man.
I got a problem, because the state troopers--"
And I just started going off, right?
And the brother said, "Wait a second.
"Stop. Take a deep breath.
"Tell me what it is you want me to do.
Tell me what I can do for you."
Well, in the meantime, the crew I'm with,
we looking at each other like,
"Okay, let's get these people out of the Dome,"
'cause Gralen done cut the deal, him and the other folk,
they done cut the deal.
And the military created a line
from the entrance of the Hyatt--
from the entrance of the New Orleans Center
all the way through the Hyatt,
all the way down to the Loyola Street door.
And I mean a physical line, like a chute.
He said, "Mr. Banks," he said, "will this do?"
So I dapped him off--
dapped the brother off, give him a hug,
and I had to call my mom
because I saw the significance.
I never told you his name. You know what his name was?
Captain Christian.
His name was Captain Christian.
And as they came through, the military was good and bad.
Because I guess as a trained soldier,
you have to see things and act like you don't see it.
You're oblivious to it.
And for much pain-- I mean, people were carrying people
and dragging-- and dragging bags of clothes,
and crippled people and people bleeding.
I mean, it was just horrific conditions.
Horrific conditions--
women, periods was down on them,
they had shit on them, piss on them.
Children were by themselves.
You would have thought we were in the middle of a war
and everybody took out running and hiding,
and all of a sudden they were able to flee.
And I saw that,
and all I could do was cry
and stand up there and feel helpless
until I looked on the sidewalk and saw
all of this water that the military had stacked up.
And I began to bust the cases on the water
and put a bottle of water in everybody's hand
just to give it some humanistic side.
Not a lot, but something.
I mean, we had to do something.
If he sees this, Captain Christian, I owe you one.
Thank you, brother. Thank you.
He looked out, man, and it was just the idea--
when I told my mom, she said the same thing.
She said, "Lord have mercy. God is good."
My mother died September the 1st,
and she had to stay out there in the heat for four days.
Because I left on the 4th,
she was still there.
I wanted to go and be with her.
The National Guard told me I had to get on the bus.
And they all had AK-47's.
He told me he was doing his job.
I said, "Let me just go back there just to see her before I leave."
He said, "No, you're not going to do anything.
You're going to get on this bus and stay on this bus."
Just like that, so I had to make a decision
whether to go against authority and get myself in trouble
or to just leave it alone
and I can handle it a little better later on.
So I prayed to myself,
and the voice within me told me
just to get on the bus, don't do anything.
Just stand still and watch my salvation.
Here we are in what's really the oldest part
of the airport terminal, built in 1959.
And today it's doing its normal function,
which is being a quiet waiting area
before you go through security and go to your plane.
A few shops are open, and it looks pretty normal.
But at the height of the evacuation,
this was an entirely different facility.
It was filled with people, people hoping to get out,
hoping to get away from the disaster that was Katrina.
When we got here, we had blisters on our feet.
So on top of the blisters, we stood for 15 hours.
I counted them.
There was a group called "The ICE Unit."
They weren't here when we got here. They were brought in.
And this was to keep "order,"
because we were getting out of order.
Because people were yelling, "My child is dying," "My mother is dying,"
we were getting out of order.
By day, the ticket lobby was filled with evacuees waiting,
standing in line patiently,
hoping to make that next flight.
But as the day would come to an end, each night again,
all of the folks in this lobby--
we estimate in these two lobbies at peak 8,000 people--
would have to find someplace to bed down for the night.
Right now, no firm numbers
on the number of people
inside of this main terminal.
About 4,000 is what
they areguesstimating at this point.
The first week, we actually were in the studio.
When the hurricane hit, we reported on it.
We were on the air as it was making landfall,
and then we went to New Orleans right after that.
And then we got into the airport, and that was the real shocker.
It was just full and full of people.
Every hallway in this part of the airport, full of people.
And then upstairs was the sort of hospital triage area.
So what you had was a lot of really old people
either on gurneys or in wheelchairs
or with canes, hooked to IVs.
The stench was unbelievable. It was just filthy.
And-- and so many people.
It just went on and on and on.
They had to...
basically corral us in an area
where there were children fainting.
I had to keep coming in the cool area,
because I kept getting what I'm thinking were panic attacks,
anxiety attacks, because there was no air.
People were packed in here from this wall to over here.
And when I say "wall-to-wall"--
four, five times over wall-to-wall.
The line was, like, 20 people wide,
and it was just snaking through the entire airport--
from the downstairs through the upstairs through the security.
Thankfully, despite the vast crowds,
despite the uncertainty, despite all the pressure
on all of these folks that all of them were feeling,
we did not have any significant crime,
any significant violence.
It was an orderly process
to, I think, everyone's amazement, and thankfully so.
And then it's like--
at these checkout points, you get a little sandwich
and something to drink.
There's a cardboard box,
and the guards go, "Throw your guns there.
No questions asked." Yeah, guns, knives, whatever.
"Just get rid of them."
And all the way, there was maybe
seven or eight that kind of points, and there were actually--
Yeah, they kept just yelling out the different things
you couldn't take on the airplane.
It was a great list, because it covered everything.
We finally got able to go to the door.
Hour 15-- we walked through the door.
And I'm walking through it like, "Okay, we're finally through this shit."
Metal detector for what? We have nothing.
What metal detector?
"Do you have any drugs on you? Do you have--"
If I did, I'd smoke 'em. Fuck.
But at any rate, we get through the door--
so I'm just-- I'm just trying to get through the shit.
She's standing there looking at me.
What they call-- I learned this in DC-- "gritting" on me.
Like she wanted to fight, which is not a good thing.
I mean, already, I don't know who I am,
so when I whip your ass, I'm not going to know who you are either.
So I'm like, "What the fuck are you looking at me like that for?" Right?
So she's like, "Um, do we have a problem?"
"Not fucking yet, but come here and let me whisper something in your ear.
"You know what? You're on your job, and I'm not on my job.
Let's take this fucking shit outside."
You whisper something where nobody else can hear,
because I'm that angry where I just want to take you where nobody else can see you,
fuck you up and go on about my business. You know what I'm saying?
Because you're standing here in air-conditioning with a goddamn uniform on,
never mind how much they pay you, but the stupid-ass attitude behind it.
We're out here suffering-- and not just because your skin is black like mine,
but some fucking sympathy, some compassion, empathy, anything.
They told us they thought it was going to San Antonio.
So then we got on the plane-- We called everyone.
We're trying to get-- Trying to get picked up from San Antonio.
"Does anybody have a friend in San Antonio?"
We wind up getting off
on the Dallas-Louisiana- Shreveport Welcome Station,
where we got off the bus because we was too scared to go further.
Told my bus driver, said, "Where are we going?"
He said, "They didn't tell us where we're going."
They had 56 buses that convoyed us to...
Muskogee, Oklahoma.
Then I realized they were trying to ship us off to Utah in an airplane.
And I was like, "No, no, I don't want to go to Utah. I want to go to Baton Rouge."
We got on a plane and we didn't know where we were going.
They didn't tell us where we were going until we actually got there
and figured out-- we saw a sign that said "Texas," okay?
And San Antonio at that.
So they took us up to Oklahoma.
Oklahoma? Oklahoma.
How long was the bus ride? 30 hours. 30 hours.
Some of my family is in Utah.
Some of my family is in Colorado.
First place I headed, I made it to Tennessee,
slept there for a night.
And then I went to some relatives
of my girlfriend in Evergreen.
Then I went--
Where's that? Evergreen, Alabama.
We've been to Lafayette,
Gonzales, Baton Rouge,
South Carolina, Orlando.
And some went to Eugene, some went to Baton Rouge,
some went to Atlanta.
My mom was in Houston.
My sister Phyllis was in San Antonio, Texas.
And then I went to Pensacola, Florida.
And then I went back to Evergreen.
Then I made it to Atlanta.
Some of 'em is in Houston, Texas.
Some of 'em is in Fort Worth, Texas.
My Uncle James was on an Army base in Utah.
My niece Alicia and her mother Carla,
they were in Lafayette, Louisiana.
Jahiya and I were in New York.
They went to Lafayette, they went to Hammond.
And the worst part about that--
they were sending you where they want to send you.
They'd tell you, "I've got relatives in Atlanta.
It'd be great if I can get to Atlanta."
Knowing what I knew, knowing that if they waited for the Atlanta plane,
they might be there two or three more days.
And whether they got to Dallas or Oklahoma City or wherever,
they were at least getting back to civilization.
With the evacuation
scattering my family
all over the United States,
I felt like it was an ancient memory,
as if we had been up on the auction block.
Some people suggested that this was akin to slavery.
"Oh, no, you're being hyperbolic.
"You're just engaging in all forms
"of racial inflammatory rhetoric.
Calm down."
Well, the fact is, they were treating them
like slaves in the ship.
Families were being separated.
Children were being taken from their mothers and fathers.
Those who were more weary
and those who were more likely to be vulnerable
were separated from those who were stronger.
Babies literally ripped out of the arms of their mothers and fathers.
The separation of the evacuation where people lost sight
and lost sound and lost sense of their loved ones.
A lot of people have been asking us, "What's it like now?"
And it's essentially a ghost town.
Choppers fly overhead as well, and it's relatively quiet.
We wanted, though, to take a tour of a center
that many people heard about-- the Convention Center--
to show you what it looks like right now.
The first thing you notice-- the smell.
It smells like-- ooh! It smells like dead bodies.
It smells like urine.
It smells like people who've waded through sewage.
The moment I knew how bad it was
was when I was covering the Convention Center.
I was doing a story there. We walked through.
And it's weird. There was just nobody there.
It's empty, and everything's open and just filthy.
All the garbage was still there.
As we walked back across the street from the Convention Center--
which is a huge convention center.
It goes on for blocks and blocks and blocks-- a dead guy.
Under this comforter--
someone has covered up-- it's a dead body.
And at some point they'll figure it out and move it off.
Two days later, I come back to do a stand-up--
same backdrop-- dead guy still there.
And that to me was a sign of just how chaotic--
I mean, that a dead man in the middle of the street in New Orleans,
which is a major city, didn't merit being cleaned up
and picked up because there were so many other priorities.
People stopped us because they knew--
we had "Times-Picayune" written on our truck.
They just wanted help. They were pointing out stuff--
"There's dead bodies up on top of the interstate.
Is anyone going to come and get them?"
I saw them with my own eyes. There were dead people.
People-- family members had taken them up on the interstate
because they didn't want to leave them in these houses,
and they were laying there, covered with blankets
up on I-10, and no one's coming to pick them up.
It's a mess, man.
I've seen a lot of dead people floating.
My buddy was over the gate, round the corner.
He swolled up this big, man. His name was Eddie.
Blessed are the ones who sacrificed
their lives to save us-- you truly are dedicated.
And blessed are the ones who cried-- your tears will not be wasted.
And blessed are the ones who were lost and displaced
and whose houses were knocked off its foundation by winds and tidal waves.
Cemeteries turned into mazes.
Caskets coming out of their graves like they was in Texas,
and they was sitting sideways.
Days for days, I'm seeing skeletal remains,
remains scattered and unclaimed, that's a shame.
Bush said he accepted the blame, so tell me why they playing games
with the money, trying to give us the change?
Our neighborhoods are being reconfigured to be rearranged.
Everything is strange. I know you can, because I...
♪ Know I've been changed ♪
♪ The angels in heaven done... ♪
...they done signed my name, I proclaim, and Jesus done led me
through the fire in the storm, the hurricane, and the rain.
Broke off the chains. Loosen up their hands, then kicked in the frame.
You don't even have to remember my name.
I told you I would be here,
with some partners that I came.
I'm leaving, but I'll be back again.
Will you be there?
♪ This time I'm walkin' to New Orleans ♪
♪ I'm walkin' to New Orleans ♪
♪ I'm gonna need two pair of shoes ♪
♪ When I get through walkin' these blues ♪
♪ When I get back to New Orleans ♪
♪ I've got my suitcase in my hand ♪
♪ Now ain't that a shame? ♪
♪ I'm leavin' here today ♪
♪ Yes, I'm goin' back home to stay ♪
♪ Yes, I'm walkin' to New Orleans ♪
♪ I've got no time for talkin' ♪
♪ I've got to keep a-walkin' ♪
♪ New Orleans is my home ♪
♪ That's the reason why I'm goin' ♪
♪ Yes, I'm walkin' to New Orleans ♪
♪ I'm walkin' to New Orleans ♪