Father, in the name of Jesus, we come at Your hour, Lord,
saying thank You.
Thank You for being so kind with Your mercy,
Your love, and Your grace.
Father, as we wade through the water,
my mind thought about the song
that my old ancestors used to sing,
what I was raised up on.
Father, as I walked through that water,
all I could say was, "Lord, wading in the water.
"Wading in the water.
God's going to trouble the water."
Father, you troubled that water for our protection,
and I want to thank You, Lord.
I want to thank You for bringing us through that water.
And as we wade, God,
You was there bringing us over to destiny.
And, God, You're so loving, kind, and merciful.
We thank You for it, Master.
In Jesus' name we pray. Amen, amen, and amen.
The Hot 8 Brass Band's
a people's band of New Orleans right now.
Yo. Yo! Yo, yo, yo!
Probably a week after the hurricane, I called Bennie Pete
on the phone just to check on him
and, you know, he said,
"Lee, you know, guys are everywhere.
"We lost our instruments. We're not gigging.
We're trying to get jobs right now."
This is not what these guys should be doing.
These guys should be playing music,
not working in a bakery or a store.
They should be playing music, you know?
♪ Oh, when the sun ♪
♪ Refuse to shine ♪
♪ Oh, when the sun refuse to shine ♪ ♪ To shine ♪
♪ Lord, how I want to be in that number... ♪
I talked to Bennie, and we decided to--
you know, we said we got to get the guys back together.
You're listening to the sounds of the Hot 8 Brass Band.
We come all the way from New Orleans
by way of Katrina.
There's a tradition in New Orleans-- we do have a tip thing over here.
I don't want everybody to get all excited
and rush all at one time and put something in this case.
Please take your time and hurry up.
We're back tonight, and we're in the capital city
of the state of Louisiana, Baton Rouge.
It's become the temporary home
for thousands of refugees
from the Gulf Coast.
We're told 12,000 people are going to Tennessee,
an estimated 20,000 are finding shelter in Arkansas,
and more than 150,000 are now making their home
in the state of Texas.
And most of those brand-new Texans,
as you know, are in Houston.
The Mayor of Houston is now
saying that the number
of New Orleans people
arriving here
could actually reach 200,000
by the time this is over.
When you think about the dispersal
of black Americans across, what now, 49 states--
nearly every state in the Union--
even when they were received with open arms--
think about Houston-- initially, it got kind of thick up in there.
In Houston's toughest neighborhood,
police on patrol,
trying to stem a rising tide of violence
since 150,000 evacuees arrived from New Orleans.
Police here say the vast majority
of hurricane evacuees are honest citizens,
but a small group of violent New Orleans criminals
is now fighting for a share of Houston's streets.
Evacuees are suspects in at least 15 murders here
since September 1st.
18 murder victims had also
relocated from Louisiana.
What amazes me is that people said-- and even among black people--
"Well, these New Orleans folk coming down here..."
Oh, yeah, Houston was a hotbed of civic politeness
before they arrived here.
There was no crime problem.
I guess Scarface and the Geto Boys
were just making
"Never seen a man cry till I seen a man die."
Yeah, I guess that was a cartoon character.
The point is that
there was huge racial tension introduced as a result
of this dispersal that very few people speak about.
I don't think it would be much different if it was,
you know, people from Chicago come down to New Orleans,
or New Orleans evacuees in any other major city.
There's gonna be a conflict.
People are used to things a certain way.
So now they're out there, struggling to survive.
I think it would be tough for anybody.
For me to look at citizens
in this country
who are devastated
by whathappened in Katrina,
thrown to the four corners of this nation,
with no relationships,
with no family,
with no place to go, just be dropped off
and then told to forage for yourself
is an overwhelming experience.
And they got us displaced, dysfunctional.
Families all over.
Can't get in touch with them.
My grandmother and my uncle
are still missing.
We're still trying to find them.
They're from New Orleans East.
These are my stepkids.
I've been raising them since they was in Pampers.
I'm looking for my son Earnel.
I don't know where he at.
Mothers separated from their children...
Mommy!
"Where's my mother? Where's my grandmother?"
There's no way that anybody can get records on all that.
I don't know if you know
what that's like, to go somewhere
and you don't know where your friends are,
you don't know where your family is.
You've lost telephone communication
because the cells are down, the towers are down.
You can't call 'cause the numbers don't work.
And it was like that for months.
How do I feel about a million-plus people
being just thrown out of the place
they've lived their whole lives?
It's indescribable.
I ain't got words for that.
I-- I never thought I'd live in a place
where that could happen.
And it--
it stuns me to this day.
We're just-- "Ship over here, go over there."
And we trying to keep some families strong here.
We're depressed because we didn't start this situation.
That's right. We're stressed
'cause we don't live in these kind of conditions.
You walk around the Baton Rouge Convention Center
or the Houston Astrodome,
and you hear an almost uniform outcry
of "Where's the government? How could they do this to us?"
George Bush doesn't care about black people.
I thought Kanye West was blisteringly brilliant,
even as he stumbled toward... his self-expression.
He was nervous, after all. He's going off-script.
George Bush doesn't care about black people.
Kanye West's comment was wonderful.
I was just like...
you could see, if you really look at it,
he's like, "I'm going to say something.
I'm going to say something."
And I'm sure he was trying
to think of something eloquent and wonderful
and politically astute.
George Bush doesn't care about black people.
When I went up to NBC,
I hadn't planned to make a statement.
I didn't know what I was gonna do.
I read what they wanted me to read,
and I felt like--
you know, at practice, I read the teleprompter,
and I felt like it wasn't heartfelt enough.
So I knew I was gonna speak from my heart.
Don't put me in front of the camera
if you don't want me to say how I feel.
And he said, "George Bush doesn't care about black people."
Now, the amazing thing was to turn to Mike Myers,
who was sitting there like a deer caught in the headlights.
Mr. Mike Myers, "Dr. Evil,"
couldn't even utter a word--
inarticulate, rendered mum and numb.
After I said it,
just everyone in the room was polarized.
And it's kind of like I had to show myself
to the elevator,
and Mike Myers just looked at me and said,
"It is what it is."
And there was a bar...
right across the street from here
where we went to go have drinks right afterwards,
'cause it was one of those ones, you know,
where you do something, you're like, "Oh, shit.
This might be the last drink we ever have."
My reaction was, A, he's talking for a lot of us.
A lot of us felt that Bush didn't like black people.
And I was happy because I'd been very critical
of a lot of the hip-hop artists
who have said nothing relevant--
in many ways, have said a lot of destructive things.
I thought it was a breath of fresh air
that at least somebody said something constructive
and stood up for their people.
Well, when I was up there, I wasn't concerned about record sales.
I wasn't concerned about...
sponsorships,
about losing any sponsorships,
which, I mean, we did.
But I was more concerned about...
you know, if I was in these people's shoes.
I can't even remember what was what, hardly.
There was a hotel right there.
People who follow hurricanes
know that the primary amount of damage from a hurricane
is from the northeast quadrant, and the northeast quadrant
of Hurricane Katrina primarily affected Hancock
and Harrison and Jackson Counties in Mississippi.
There was a ton of devastation along the Mississippi Gulf Coast,
which a lot of times seems to go unnoticed by the media.
This is 2nd Street? Oh, my God.
This is 2nd Street.
Jay had been helping me move
stuff out of my destroyed house,
and I had actually borrowed a rental van.
So we were shooting some video, and we got to the train tracks,
which are literally about 150 feet north of my house,
and the MP's stop us.
So they tell me, "No one can cross here," quote, unquote.
That was their exact words. "You have to turn around."
They told me I had to go this alternate route, 15 minutes out of the way...
Four miles out of the way. ...and then come back to my house.
So they wouldn't let us go down to my house
'cause the vice president's going down there.
Did you see that, that convoy? Yeah.
Dick Cheney was down the street talking to people.
So I was like, "Come on, Jay, let's go down there."
And Jay was like, "Uh..."
This is literally, what, 150 feet from your house?
Yeah, I was thinking of what I was going to say,
because, you know, everything that we had personally been through,
and we'd been hearing reports of what was going on
in New Orleans and everything,
and just how completely incompetent
the response was to this disaster.
No weapons here. All right.
I remember what he had said to Senator Leahy from Vermont
on the floor of the Senate
when he had told him to go fuck himself.
So I thought it would be poetic justice if I quoted
the dick to the dick.
Go fuck yourself, Mr. Cheney! We gotta figure out what to do--
After I said it the first time,
he kind of looked at me, and everybody was like,
"What? What was that? I can't believe I just heard that."
So I was like, "I'd better say it again to make sure they heard it."
Go fuck yourself. Are you getting a lot of that, Mr. Vice President?
It's the first time I've heard it.
And then I saw the guy who had wanded me down,
and I waved at him and told him to have a nice day
and walked back to my house.
Basically, you told the vice president to go fuck himself, man,
in front of about 100 media.
He says it to people in Congress,
and then he wants to come down here
to make a photo op for himself
to try to make himself look cool or whatever.
This is how we feel.
Look at this, house after house--
nothing, decimation.
Where was FEMA
three days after the storm
when everybody was dying in New Orleans?
It's taken him two weeks, but today the president
finally ventured in to the center of New Orleans
for his first close-up look at this abandoned,
devastated city.
People here won't forget
that initially he stayed on holiday
while New Orleans was drowning.
But the floods have already done the damage to New Orleans
and to the president.
Good evening.
I'm speaking to you from the city of New Orleans,
nearly empty,
still partly underwater,
and waiting for life
and hope to return.
Throughout the area hit by the hurricane,
we will do what it takes,
we will stay as long as it takes
to help citizens rebuild their communities
and their lives.
And all who question the future of the Crescent City
need to know there is no way
to imagine America without New Orleans.
And this great city will rise again.
When the president
came here in New Orleans,
I passed my office building
where I practice law--
lit up like a Christmas tree.
I'm like, "Oh, man, this is--
"the power's back on.
"We're going to be back in business.
"We'll be able-- this is all right, man!
"I'm calling my brothers.
The power's back on in our building!"
So, the next morning,
I go to the office fully expecting
to be able to turn on, you know, the light.
The lights are all off. No power.
"What happened? What happened?"
What happened was they needed to create
a media event for the president.
They wanted to make the city look like it was coming back together.
I make that point because that's the game
that's been played with us.
It is the day-to-day struggles
that still consume those living in Ground Zero
of America's worst natural disaster
and kept most from watching President Bush's speech
from Jackson Square.
He did say last night, he...
Took responsibility for it? ...took responsibility for it.
Two, three weeks into the game--
it's a little late to be taking responsibility.
When you're in a ship at sea
and somebody screams, "Man overboard!"
you got to move and go save the man overboard.
The Bush administration was-- "Oh, a lot of people overboard.
"Well, let's check with the lawyers what we should do
"and who's going to foot the bill?
"What-- will FEMA pay for this or will this come out
of the state of Louisiana's budget?"
President Bush can kiss my ass.
United States Government can kiss my ass.
St. Bernard Parish can kiss my ass,
even though there's not much left.
But there's enough to kiss.
The whole way the president and the Congress
and the world is treating us is so frightening
because it-- it truly... could kill the city.
And I guess, if you could kill this city,
you could kill any city.
And they're not doing nothing
for the Katrina victims...
not the blacks anyway.
I've been here in New York--
will be two months on the 16th,
and I'm still in a hotel.
FEMA not doing anything for us,
and the Red Cross have pulled out.
Tens of thousands of hurricane evacuees
will be forced to move once again
now that FEMA says it will no longer foot the bill
for their hotel rooms after this month.
Many of them say they cannot pay for the rooms on their own.
FEMA, in the wee, wee hours of the night...
put 900 people out of the hotel.
I don't know if two weeks, I'm going to be homeless
or what I'm gonna do. Where is the money?
It's just horrible. It's horrible.
The aftermath, to me,
is worth-- worse
than the actual levees breaking
because at least, you know,
you've survived with your life.
But... getting back on track,
it's almost like you're stuck.
Thanksgiving was a gut-wrenching,
heart-wrenching situation.
They-- they-- most of them have had
Thanksgiving dinner with their families
for many, many, many, many years.
They have never been away from home.
And it just broke my heart to listen to them
talking about how tough it is.
Everybody crying, everybody saying,
"I want to go home, but I have no home to go to."
They wanted to really be in New Orleans.
They wanted their family members.
It's Christmas holidays now.
It's the day after Thanksgiving--
Black Friday, as they call it.
It's black for me because that's all I see right now.
It's black 'cause everybody's Christmas shopping but us.
Everybody's having family dinners but us.
I couldn't even eat yesterday because my mom's in Texas,
my sister's in New York.
My family's completely, completely gone.
I have my husband. I'm glad for that.
But it's not the same.
And I'm not leaving New Orleans, Louisiana,
because I was born here in 1963
on December 24th,
and this is where the fuck I'm going to die at.
Whether you try to drown me or I die naturally,
I'm going to stay here until the end.
People of New Orleans stay here.
Culturally, we stay here.
We don't venture further than the city.
It's always hard to get people to leave.
I want to go back home because that's where I was born,
and I wanted to stay there all my life.
And I still want to visit other places,
but that's my main place-- New Orleans.
There's a lot of people from New Orleans--
we're so sick, we don't even know what to do.
We don't-- we don't even know where to go.
We're so used to New Orleans. We were born and raised here.
Where are we gonna go? You know?
I mean, we-- we-- I mean, we're like, you know--
they had the nerve to call us refugees.
Tens of thousands of refugees... Refugees...
Where an untold number of refugees...
The refugees...
Refugees... The Astrodome
is refugee-ready.
It's a very strange thing
to see people that look like people you know
or see people that look like people in your family
on television,
and they're being talked about as if they're refugees
or-- or homeless people,
and that was hard to take.
When I heard they called us refugees, I couldn't do nothing but drop my head,
because I say, "I'm a United States citizen of America."
Calling me a refugee?
What kind of shit is that, man? "Refugees"?
They were referring to us when this thing first happened--
people leaving New Orleans-- "You are refugees."
Damn, when the storm came in, that blew away our citizenship, too?
What, we forgot-- we weren't American citizens anymore?
What kind of shit is that?
In the media and people on the street-- refugees.
I thought that was folks that didn't have a country, man,
that didn't have anywhere. You know, it's--
We are calling on the media
to stop calling them refugees.
These are American citizens
that in most cases
were very viable taxpayers.
And the con-- the-- the inference,
the connotation of refugees
is like they are some others
from somewhere lost, needing charity.
I think the most shocking display
of insensitivity that I saw
was when Barbara Bush, the former First Lady,
the president's mama-- let's put it straight up--
is touring the Houston Astrodome
with her husband, former President Bush,
and former President Clinton.
And in the height of insensitivity
if not just outright bias,
she says, "Well, these people are living better than they ever did.
"Some of them-- it ended up good for them.
They ended up making out all right."
I mean-- and Clinton says nothing, Bush says nothing.
We have had black leaders denounced
by the US Senate for less.
This woman acted like this was
some kind of social upward mobility.
My phone number is 504-919-8699.
Tell her, call me and say that shit.
Who's better off and why? How?
As you say, I were poor.
Everything I got...
I got it honest.
You are rich.
How did you get there?
504-- and I ain't Mike Jones. I'm Phyllis Montana LeBlanc.
Call me. 504-919-8699.
New Orleans area code. My phone works now.
She's the present mama of America,
and that's what she thinks
of the citizens of New Orleans.
So you wonder why he was slow to responding?
Well, if he talks to his mother,
he was doing us a favor.
This is such a rich country.
It always has the money to do what it thinks is very important.
If we want to put a man on the moon,
if we want to go to Mars, we find the money.
We want to fight a war in Iraq,
which costs billions of dollars every month,
we do it.
It's really a question of priorities
and what we think is important.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "Don't flip a coin to me
"as a beggar and expect that to do.
That's generosity. That's charity."
King said, "When you're on the Jericho road,
"don't just help the brother on the Jericho road.
That's good, but that's charity."
He said, "
"ask why it is on the Jericho road
"the guy still keeps getting mugged--
not only him, but other people."
He said, "Pretty soon, you've got to transform the Jericho road."
That's what we've got to do in America.
So this dispersal of black people only highlights the degree
to which we failed to transform the Jericho road.
Oh, my-- oh, this is beautiful.
Kathy Phipps signed a lease on a house that means a lease on a new life.
Bless your soul.
She's moving into a community
that's embracing her with open arms.
When we first met Kathy, she was a hurricane evacuee,
surprised to find herself in Utah.
Utah? She learned her kids
made it to a shelter in Texas.
Mama's right here. I'm safe, and I'm alive.
I'm not dead.
I'm coming to get you.
And Kathy was reunited
with her eight-year-old daughter...
and her 11-year-old son.
Oh, we got you, boy.
Kathy had made a huge decision. We got 'em.
She'd take her kids with her to the state that embraced her.
The mountains of Utah are a long way
from the bayous of Louisiana.
Look like I done went through this hurricane and came to heaven.
Heaven is a four-bedroom house on a pristine cul-de-sac
in the aptly named community Pleasant Grove.
Oh, this is a new beginning for me.
And this is what I've really been dreaming of
for my kids, you know.
I think people have made a lot of money
from keeping an underclass in New Orleans.
And now those people who were in that underclass
are now in Atlanta and Houston and Dallas
and starting to say, "I got better opportunities here
and the schools are a lot better here."
My sister Katherine is relocated
to Houston, Texas.
It's Katherine, my mother,
and my nephew Nicholas.
Nicholas is nine years old.
He's autistic, nonverbal.
So they can't stay here, because there's no hospitals
in the local New Orleans East area.
He's absolutely doing wonderful out there with the schooling.
He's getting close to starting
to actually say words now, like "mama" or whatever.
But when I talk to her every day--
'cause I talk to her and my mom every single day,
seven days a week, at least five to 10 times a day--
um, you can hear the want-- they want to come back,
but there's no-- there's nothing
to help them to survive here.
So my family is in Texas.
I'm not sure where New Orleans is gonna go from here.
You know, it was bad.
We're-- we're starting at negative 12,
and I don't know how we're gonna get to three.
I really don't know what's gonna happen.
I honestly think that-- I'm hoping
that people who had the mind to work
and were trying to just give themselves a better opportunity
and a better situation in life,
I hope that they don't come back.
My Uncle James is still in Utah.
He said they're giving him everything--
free rent, an apartment, a new TV.
My roots are tied firmly into this place.
My parents and grandparents are buried here.
So this is really my home.
But it's hard to stay in a place that you feel
that don't really want you to be here.
I don't want to even be under their jurisdiction.
I don't want to be under the-- the leadership
of no one in New Orleans,
Louisiana, nothing.
I don't think I'll ever come back.
There's nothing here for me.
They don't care about us here,
so I got to do the next best thing
for me and my family, which is move on.
If they wanted us in New Orleans,
they wouldn't have tried to drown us and kill us.
So I'm not going back so they can finish it off.
Post-Katrina, I think we're doing
a horrible job with respect to getting people home.
It's very attractive for them to stay in those places
like Houston and Atlanta and Memphis,
but there comes a time where folks are like,
"Wait a minute, we were just doing this
"out of the goodness of our hearts,
"as Americans who care about Americans.
"When are you gonna take care of your people?
"And what are you doing, Louisiana, New Orleans,
to bring your people home?"
People have been dispersed
to 44 different states
around the United States
with one-way tickets.
And there's no clear discussion and debate,
other than myself having with Washington,
about how we get folk back.
The question I've asked FEMA over and over again,
my husband has asked FEMA over and over again--
"Why don't you give them a ticket back home?"
It could be a voucher.
They can't cash it for anything else,
but at least give them the option of coming back.
Pre-Katrina, the murder rate
was approaching 200,
with African-American males killing each other over this city
day in and day out.
Four or five people getting killed
sometimes a night in the same house.
The school system was one of the worst in the nation.
Our poverty rate was double that
of every major city in the country.
The wages for the common man
was below the national average.
The wages for professionals
was even below national average.
New Orleans is different only in that
67% to 70% of people there
are African-Americans
and that a very large proportion of African-Americans
are living in a situation which is-- which violates--
in my terms, really violates human rights
in a wealthy country like the United States.
A lot of people are speculating about the crime
returning in New Orleans,
and I don't think that we have-- there's more crime,
and people are pointing towards the proportion of the population--
but what we're seeing is it's about the same as it was.
I think some people had that brief two-three weeks where it was calm,
and they figured the bad-- the trash is out of the city,
the storm came and swept the trash out of the city.
But what they fail to realize-- I'm trying to figure out,
why they ever imagined this new New Orleans.
Early Saturday, five teens were murdered
in a storm of automatic weapons fire
on a city street just blocks
from the Central Business District.
Among the dead-- Mona Lisa Hunter's two sons.
I don't care what they say-- drugs, retaliation.
They didn't deserve this. That's right.
We've had enough. So today, an angry Mayor of New Orleans
asked for and got several hundred National Guard soldiers
and additional state police officers
to try and stem the rising tide of violence.
This is our line in the sand. That's right.
We are saying, "We're not going any further." That's right.
In a city still pleading for residents
to come home, the sell gets tougher
when crime seems to be returning faster than people.
The African-American crime on African-Americans,
particularly young black men,
is a direct result
of the educational system, in my opinion.
If you don't give young brothers the opportunity
to better themselves individually
and then also tend to their families,
then it's gonna be-- continue to be a vicious cycle.
This educational system
was just killing the city.
Young brothers were dropping out
at the ages of 14, 15, and 16.
At a very early age,
they were just checking out.
And then they would get into, you know, the activity
that we all wish they-- they never would.
the National Guard
is called into New Orleans.
No, not because of Katrina,
not because of national disaster,
because of the crime rate.
It's hard for me to imagine,
after everyone surviving Katrina,
now the city is being brought down by criminals?
And it's so bad, you have to call in
the National Guard, for Pete's sake?
"Whether grime or crime, I'm going to get mine," as Tupac said.
In the city of New Orleans, no.
When you have a 60% dropout rate, 55% dropout rate in a city,
in a public school system,
90 of 116 schools have been deemed failures,
I mean, what options do you have?
We were in a system of decline
because the state revenue was so low,
we were not able to support our schools sufficiently
to ensure that every child got a quality education.
We didn't support our teachers.
Our schools weren't air-conditioned.
Our bathrooms were unsanitary.
It was dysfunctional in every single way
that you could imagine it being dysfunctional.
They hadn't been able to produce
an accuratefinancial statement
for more than five years.
They had FBI agents actually stationed
at the school system headquarters,
which is quite the rarity.
But the superintendent had decided that it was so out of control
that he was just going to open the doors and let them in,
let them have anything they wanted.
We've lost children. We can't-- in Orleans Parish,
we've gone down to 1/6th of the previous population,
so we can't fund education here at a time
when it's so critical in the redevelopment of the community
until we get children.
And children don't come until they have a place to live
and parents have a place to work,
and sometimes it's like the dog wagging its tail.
More African-Americans got dispersed than whites.
how you bring everybody back home,
give them an opportunity to get back but to be safe...
to-- to really fix a neighborhood
so that it's safe and it's sustainable,
so that the schools work.
And this is not gonna be easy, and it's gonna take a long time.
We have to get...
the black people who lived here before--
we had to get 'em back.
We gotta get 'em back,
and we're not gonna get 'em all back.
But we ha-- have to at least
offer them a chance to get back.
And by that I mean something to come back to.
The roots run deep here--
that there's music and food...
that are unlike
any other place in the world--
very, very special.
You don't walk away from that.
Without black people, New Orleans would be
a bad version of even Disneyland.
I mean, the history and culture of New Orleans
comes out of the suffering,
the creativity of-- of black people.
And to have a New Orleans without black people
would-- would be to have nothing.
We had social and pleasure clubs
that dress out in streamers and nice suits,
gator shoes, with fans and Dobbs hats
and things like that.
And it ain't gonna be the same.
New Orleans is a cultural gem,
a unique place
where you can say "Only in New Orleans,"
from the cuisine, the music,
the Mardi Gras Indians, the people,
just the way we talk to each other.
We have a patois that you don't see anywhere else.
It's a very strange place.
There's great segregation and ignorance and prejudice,
but there's great integration, 'cause we're Creoles.
And the kind of Creole, light-skinned blacks,
they're always trying to fit in somewhere.
They weren't trying to be white.
A lot of times people don't know--
Creoles, they only like Creoles.
This is a city with roots,
families, deep, way deep.
First, it starts with the whole form of slavery that we had.
You know how the French people are-- they enslave people,
but they marry them, too.
The mouth of the Mississippi, man, the curve.
The Big Easy, you know, Crescent City.
It's a hell of a thing to be known for--
as the number one place where you can buy a nigger.
It was like the Paris of-- of the South.
It was always the center of vice, gambling, and all different types of ignorance,
and that always draws a lot of people
who's not that interested in being prejudiced.
'Cause when you get far enough down on the bottom, we're all down here, brother.
Tourists come to New Orleans, they go to quaint places
like Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop.
Well, Lafitte was a slave pirate.
At one point, the French, they had to let
all the slaves go, 'cause they were starving.
They was like, "Man, you all go and figure out
what you gonna do, 'cause we're not gonna make it here."
And the slaves, they all went out and stayed with the Native Americans,
but they came back.
Now, if you look at the tradition of the Mardi Gras Indians,
they play the bamboula beat.
The bass rhythm is...
♪ Shallow water, oh, Mama ♪
♪ Mighty, mighty cooty fiyo ♪
♪ Indian Red, Indian Red ♪
♪ Mighty, mighty cooty fiyo ♪
♪ Indian Red, Indian Red ♪
♪ Oh, I am the Big Chief ♪
♪ The Big Chief, the Indian from the Nation ♪
♪ The whole wild creation ♪
♪ Oh, I won't bow down, not on the ground ♪
♪ Because I love to hear you call my Indian Red ♪
♪ Mighty, mighty cooty fiyo ♪
♪ Indian Red, Indian Red. ♪
It's such a direct correlation
to your ancestry
and culturally significant, because--
you know, I could take you to the very spot
where jazz was born-- Congo Square.
Grandfathers, grandmothers,
mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters.
Grandfathers, grandmothers,
mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters.
Congo Square was a plains,
a green area outside of New Orleans.
And today it's Armstrong Park.
And it was the only place in North America
where slaves could play the drums
in the African tradition.
Masters, in their infinite wisdom,
or their own hypocrisy, however you want to look at it,
they decided to let enslaved Africans have Sundays off
because it went in line with no work
on the Sabbath for anybody.
They would dance the bamboula,
you know, the oom-bah-bah, oom-bah-bah, oom-bah-bah.
Turned into oom bah, oom bah-bah, oom-uh...
And I mean, it's right there.
If you look at our-- our culture,
music becomes a part of everyday life.
It's not a small thing.
People eat when they play music.
They got songs we eat.
People get on the street, the music is connected to the dance.
So there you have it.
You got a great church tradition, sanctified church.
♪ Every day, my Lord ♪
♪ He's calling me... ♪
Then you got the French people.
Man, they love music. They got the French opera.
You could be a slave, and you could go to Congo Square,
and you could go to the opera.
Where else you going to do that in the rest of the United States
of America? You couldn't do that in Boston.
We place a great importance on culture,
and that's something that you see in how we celebrate life
and how we even deal with death.
A jazz funeral is a ceremony.
You bring the body out to the grave and you play slow hymns and dirges,
traditional dirges like "Nearer My God to Thee,"
"Free as a Bird."
And that's the mourning part.
You give into your grief and you know that you won't see 'em again,
but you just were happy to know who they were
and be a part of their life.
And then they say some words over the deceased
out at the burial site,
and then you start to play the up-tempo, happy songs.
You play a parade from there.
And that's the celebratory part.
It's the whole yin and the yang of the beginning and the end.
Because, yeah, I'm sad you're gone,
but, damn, it sure was nice to know you.
Second line is the dancers that follow the parade.
And the dance that they do is called "second line."
The beautiful thing about second line
is everybody has their own style.
Some people just walk. Some people really get down.
Some people get on the ground. So you can do what you want to.
It's personal expression. There's a certain freedom in it.
It's one of our-- one of our great ceremonies.
It has a lot of meanings.
And the Christian tradition--
how it ties in with the African tradition
is that the afterlife is rich and full,
and the life on earth is one of travail.
So this person is dead,
but they're going on to riches, and that's why we celebrate.
It's also-- it's given us the type of way
to not hush over death.
Driving around the city-- man, it-- it was rough,
'cause this was the first time I been back.
And I talked to, you know,
a good friend of mine, Wade, and he was telling me,
he says, "Man, you got to prepare yourself."
He says, "You know"-- he says, "We can talk about it
and you can see it on the news," he says,
"but cameras can't really tell you
the level of devastation that you're going to see."
So I was trying to prepare myself,
but it still was hard, man,
because... I'm looking at a place that I grew up.
I'm looking at homes that I used to frequent,
you know, hang out with my boys,
you know, and there's nothing here.
It's like a ghost town.
When I came back into the city, I saw complete devastation.
I didn't think I would ever see anything like that in my life.
It looked like someone had dropped a nuclear bomb
on every part possible in the city.
It was as if I had walked through a time warp,
and I was in Europe following a bombing
in World War II.
Everything was gray.
There was no green, no flowers, no birds,
no dogs, no people, no children.
When we first crossed the bridge and we saw
a lot of damage, we were taking pictures
and going, "Wow, this is-- oh, my God."
And as we came over closer to where the north side
where the breach happened, we stopped taking pictures.
When I saw the Lower Nine, I saw my neighborhood,
it was like looking at a friend who had been disfigured.
You know who you're talking to.
You just don't recognize 'em.
We are destroyed.
I've seen Beirut. I've seen Calcutta.
I've seen downtown Jakarta.
I've seen Aceh. They have nothing on us.
Look at this one. Man.
I'm telling you, nothing but destruction everywhere you look.
Look at over here. Look at the car.
Mmm-mmm-mmm.
All of these houses are empty.
Oh, sure. Mmm.
How do you feel? Uptight...
just to see all of the devastation get into the house.
Look at-- this is all boarded up here.
Yeah. This is so strange.
Yesterday, coming in New Orleans,
I just got so full, because I knew I was going to see my house
for the first time. Yeah.
And not knowing what I'm going to see...
I'm just at a loss.
Yeah. All right, step down.
This arthritis is doing me so bad.
Okay. Leave that in there.
Yeah. Okay.
Take your-- Take your time.
It's all right.
Come on, come on. Come on.
- But you're okay. - Okay. I'll be okay.
You're okay. This is all stuff that can be rebuilt.
What is all of this?
I-- I'll get it.
Wait, wait, wait.
Look, look, look.
This thing's way over here.
What is that? That's the thing you gave me. It was over here.
What is that over there? What is what?
That. That's a--
That looks-- looks like your china closet.
The china closet don't have any business being over here.
It's in the den. I know.
Oh, Lord, the pictures I had in there.
So, is this picture still up on the wall?
There's nothing on the wall. Lord, have mercy.
You can rebuild this stuff, though.
Yeah, that's easier said than done.
Hey, huh-uh, huh-uh.
Let's move.
Oh, Lord, have mercy.
I knew it was devastation,
but I didn't think it was this bad.
It's unbelievable.
I didn't know how bad it was.
Today, you know, when we went into the house,
that was really hard, because, you know...
it's like I can't go home.
You know what I mean? It's-- it...
I'm sorry.
The house in which I grew up,
the only home I've really ever known
has now been gutted.
It's a shell of what it was.
3511 Cecil Street
still has a brick exterior,
but the interior,
which contained not just the furniture
and the clothing, but all of the pictures,
the family Bible...
all of those things that really remind us
of what our lives have been about,
reminds us of where we came from--
all of that has been washed away in the flood.
It pisses you off, 'cause it didn't have to happen.
And, uh...
I look at-- one of the things that made me angry last night
is that you drive around the neighborhood
and you see all of these homes
where people have tried to clean out their homes,
and all of the debris is on the sidewalk.
So you can see people have
a desire to come home...
and a desire to rebuild their lives,
and they can't do it.
They can't come home.
You know, they can't get their lives back on track.
And you have to ask yourself why.
I came back to nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
No help, no home, nothing.
I'm 59 years old.
My husband is 67 years old.
We've worked hard. We're well-educated.
He's got a master's from UCLA,
undergrad from Berkeley.
I have a law degree, an MBA, and I had nothing.
I had nothing.
I don't know how to make you understand the despair,
the depression, the anxiety.
It's like somebody violated your mama.
You don't know what it's gonna feel like,
'cause you might always prize yourself for not having the type
of dramatic emotion, or "Hey, man, you know,
death is a part of life," a kind of spiritual overview,
or whatever you want to call it.
But it rattled me in a way that I could not--
I guess it's kind of what people say when one of your parents dies--
you think you know how you'll deal with it,
but when it happens to you,
it's not what you think it's gonna be.
My population right now, what I'm seeing
is that the children are losing weight
or gaining weight in huge proportions.
They are not sleeping at all.
They're acting out.
All the children that had ADHD,
attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,
they're all being bumped up on all the medicines they're on,
because this is a post-traumatic stress disorder situation.
I've been on six different medications.
Name 'em.
Seroquel, Geodon.
Let's see...
Zoloft,
and... that's the only ones I can remember right now,
but those are the ones I'm on right now.
Since the storm, I do not sleep without a sleeping aid--
Tylenol PM, Benadryl,
if it got acetaminophen in it or whatever,
or dypho-whatever-it-is that is like a mild sedative or whatever,
I have to take it every night.
I'd never been on anxiety pills
or any prescriptions for bad nerves
or anything before this.
I mean, I've had high stress level, but not like this.
Before I got on the medication,
when I first got up here, I got into an incident
where I hemmed a guy up and picked him up off the ground
about three feet with one hand.
The guy weighed about 220.
And that's when I decided
I really needed to get some help.
People lost everything.
And people are really still struggling with that.
And I think emotional needs-- emotionally, you know,
it's something that's hard to deal with,
especially people that might not have
the resources to go-- to be able to go
to a mental health professional,
sit down and talk, or are too stubborn to.
Again, we're talking about people who were too stubborn
to leave in the face of a Category Five storm,
so imagine going to talk to a doctor
about why you're a little more agitated,
or why you're in bed all day, and why you're depressed.
We are seeing post-traumatic stress disorders now.
I think we're going to see this
permeate generation to generation.
Can you imagine being a child on a rooftop
and watching your mama washed away and drowned?
Can you imagine being a mama and seeing that?
People holding you back and not letting you jump in?
By definition, you're not gonna forget that.
You're gonna play that over in your mind,
you're gonna have intrusive thoughts.
There are things that are gonna remind you of that
10, 15 years from now, because there's no closure.
And it does, it catches up with you.
And I find there's a lot of us
who live here who--
you know, we find ourselves weeping
or we just find ourselves...
at inappropriate moments
just kind of going into these very dark holes
and very dark places where the things we've seen catch us.
And they catch us unawares, and it's hard to deal with.
So I'm sitting there thinking, "You know what, Phyllis?
"If you kill yourself, then you won't have to deal with this shit anymore.
"If you just disappear from the face of the fucking earth,
"the pain stops, the tears stop,
"and everything else that's gonna bother you
for the rest of your life, which is life's issues, is gonna stop."
And I'm thinking different ways of how I could kill myself
without it even looking like it's suicide, like, say, accidental.
So that way nobody says, "Oh, my God, she punked out,
and the system got to her,"
or big brother or whatever the hell they call 'em nowadays.
I had a lady from Texas call me and says,
"I want you to know I want my brother listed as a hurricane victim.
"He was evacuated out,
"he had no medications, and he shot himself
in the head in our hotel room."
And you know what? She's right.
That's a hurricane-related victim.
Dr. Minyard and I met and tried to come to some agreement
as to what a hurricane-related death was,
because, again, nothing like this has ever happened.
We certainly looked at some CDC criteria--
Center for Disease Control criteria,
but there were no criteria for something like this.
In post-Katrina, there's a number of people that are dying
that's related to Katrina, but did not actually die
within the hurricane.
Five weeks ago, March 28, my father passed away,
63 years old.
Six days before that, his wife passed away,
which was 20 years his junior. She was 43.
Two weeks before Katrina,
my dad was diagnosed with lung cancer.
This was a man who started a business
right here in New Orleans, Mackie Roofing--
one of the largest roofing companies in the city,
in the state, for the longest time.
Employed over 100 African-American males in the community.
So, to get sick during the middle of Katrina
was actually even more sickening.
We evacuated. It took us five weeks
to get him back into the system.
Once we got him back into the system, they didn't know who his doctors were.
They didn't have any records, 'cause everything had been flooded.
So it was six weeks before he could start his treatment again.
His wife was taking care of him.
Sometime in January, we noticed that she began to lose weight.
She had been diagnosed with cancer, like, six years ago--
breast cancer-- and her cancer had come back with a vengeance
and spread all over her body.
There's no doubt in our minds that the stress and strain
and the pain of Katrina aided to their sickness
and the recurring of her cancer.
A lot of people are losing hope.
The number of obituaries in the paper supposedly now
is running at a rate of 30% higher pre-Katrina.
People are coming back, looking at this despair and dying.
And that was the pain when I had to bury my dad.
Because everything that he built was destroyed
because of the failure of the United States
Army Corps of Engineers, this government--
not the mayor, not the governor,
but this government.
My name is Kimberly Polk.
I am Serena Polk's mother.
Serena was here in New Orleans
across the Lower Ninth Ward
on Tennessee Street with her father,
his girlfriend, and his two kids.
And she and her father and his family did not evacuate.
She came to me in a dream.
I woke up sweating out of my sleep.
She came to me in a dream, and she was saying,
"Mama, I'm falling, I'm falling.
Mama, I'm falling."
And all I could see was water that she was falling into.
I think it was, like, April,
they called me and let me know--
first I'd seen it on the news,
where I'd seen a little girl
between the ages of six and 10 years old
that they found in the Lower Ninth Ward
that had a backpack on her back.
And Serena was known to everyone, my whole family,
everybody that knew her,
to have always a backpack on her back.
The coroner is trying to identify a child
found buried in debris in the Lower Ninth Ward.
This is the ninth body the fire department has found this month.
This child could have come from anywhere.
I mean, she could have floated from miles away.
This is my daughter, Serena,
who drowned during...
Hurricane Katrina.
She was five years old...
and I never got a chance...
to say goodbye.
And I miss her...
so much.
I didn't want to have the service in New Orleans
because I blame New Orleans for her death--
the way they-- they went about doing things.
I think if it would have been done a little bit different,
I would feel different,
but it's-- it's just not-- I don't think
New Orleans is fit for me to live in.
Father, here I am again down on my knees
before Thee and the holy throngs of angels.
Yes, Lord. Preach, sir.
Father, I bow down here because I feel so righteous.
Father, I bow because I feel so holy.
Oh, a long time ago, my Heavenly Father.
♪ Soon and very soon ♪
♪ We are going to see the King ♪
♪ Hallelujah, hallelujah ♪
♪ We are going to see the King ♪
♪ No more dying there ♪
♪ We are going to see the King ♪
♪ No more dying... ♪
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,
and our inspiring privilege
to commend her soul
to our maker, father, and redeemer
in the confidence of hope
for the coming again
of our lord and savior Jesus Christ,
the resurrection of the body
from the grave
and a joyful life deserved
in Jesus' name. In Jesus' name.
Amen. Amen.
Dinerral "Dick" This is what's left.
You know, your whole history is just...
somewhere under a pile of rubble.
It's really nothing.
It's like you got things on your mind
to remember where it was at, but when you come down here,
there's no landmarks or nothing
to make you remember even where you're at.
You might go up a street that you've been
going up all your life and get lost
'cause you don't know-- know where you're at.
You don't know nothing.
It's sad, man. I mean, the church
you went to all your life, the school you went to--
a lot of the old men used to always hang out
right here on the corner, drinking their beer.
I mean, this is... a good neighborhood that's--
it's gone, man. I mean gone.
♪ Up on a hill ♪
♪ Far away ♪
♪ Stood an old ♪
♪ Rugged cross ♪
♪ The emblem ♪
♪ Of suffering ♪
♪ Oh, and pain ♪
♪ And I'll cherish ♪
♪ The old cross ♪
♪ Where the flood, yeah ♪
♪ Lies the state ♪
♪ For we're ♪
♪ Of suffering ♪
♪ Oh, and pain. ♪
It's just unbelievable.
There's no way possible that you can even say
you checked these houses to find people.
I mean, people coming home, going to their houses,
and they're still finding dead people in these houses, man.
Just the other day,
there were five people found in the attic of a house.
Who knows? Somebody might be in there right now, lying in the rubble.
I mean, who is-- who is we to know that?
But the military say they checked every house.
This house here has iron bars on it.
But they have numbers on the window as if it'd been checked.
I mean, come on, you got to keep it real, man.
I mean, they didn't go in none of these houses.
Hey!
You know, a lot of people around the country,
when they heard that New Orleans was going to do Mardi Gras again,
they was like, "Well, why you all doing Mardi Gras?
"You all got to rebuild the city.
You all got stuff that's bad," this, that, and the other.
But you got to understand, baby.
We need Mardi Gras for our city.
This is our healing. This is how we do.
It ain't for the rest of the world.
If you don't understand, that's all right.
We just invite you to come down here, have a good time,
do like we do, you understand?
And we just want you to come and have some fun.
Today is my grandfather's last day as grand marshal.
He's right up front.
He's been the grand marshal, unopposed, for about 35 years.
I come from New York to come here every year
to parade with him.
I am so happy that we had this celebration,
because it brought us all back.
I saw so many people who were in California,
they're in Houston, they're in Atlanta,
they're in Memphis, Nashville.
It was the best thing that happened to us,
because it let us know that New Orleans is still here
and home is still here.
We are waiting for insurance,
and look what FEMA did to my baby.
Is this a shame or what?
Nine years old-- six months.
Look at him-- old man. We're still waiting for FEMA.
If they don't come, we're not going to have another Mardi Gras.
I know people questioned whether we should have it or not.
But for those people that actually came
and saw it and felt it and touched it,
you found out something really serious about this city,
which is the city's going to live.
It's got a heartbeat. It's got a soul to it
that's so vibrant that you can't kill it.
♪ Me got fire, can't put it out ♪
♪ Heap fire water, gonna make me shout ♪
♪ I'm goin' down and a-get my squaw ♪
♪ Me might buy a great big car ♪
♪ I'm gonna do everything I could ♪
♪ Me Big Chief, I'm feelin' good ♪
♪ Me Big Chief, I got 'em tribe ♪
♪ Got my squaw right by my side ♪
♪ My Flagboy, he just went by ♪
♪ My Spyboy, he's full of fire ♪
♪ Me whole tribe is havin' fun ♪
♪ We gonna dance till morning come. ♪
Hail Zulu!
Yeah!
Hail Zulu! Hail Zulu!
After you leave the areas where Mardi Gras is,
you're looking around and you leave Mardi Gras
in a different way.
I was actually looking at the trash.
You know there's a huge buildup of trash after a parade or something,
which they clean up immediately.
And I felt the weirdest feeling.
I was like, "Okay, when you leave this trash,
you're usually going to a clean area."
But you leave that trash and you go to an area that looks the same.
It turns out the Corps of Engineers for some reason
is in charge of debris removal.
And it took the Corps
probably four months before they even showed up
with their contractors here to start moving debris out.
When you really look around, if you were to arrive today,
you would think that the hurricane might have hit yesterday.
But as of February 1st, we had removed
debris equivalent to 25 World Trade Center disasters,
and we were not at 70% yet.
The city is still struggling.
Outside the city limits, people are still unsure
if they can ever come back.
We still haven't seen that big rally.
We haven't seen the three-mile-long
caravan of trash trucks coming to clean up the city.
I find it insulting that the streets
are not even cleaned up.
I'm not expecting to come back and see
New Orleans as I knew it before, but...
I expected to see a little more progress than this.
Right now we had several dogs
confirm that there still is
the scent of human remains
in those structures.
We've searched that house as extensively as we can
without bringing danger to ourself,
and we didn't find anything.
And that's what they're doing right now.
We've got guys on lookout as the excavator
peels the construction debris away,
looking for human remains.
The first slash of the X
signifies that a team has entered the building.
Once the team exits the building,
they complete the X with another slash.
At the 12:00 position is the date that the building was searched.
At the 3:00 position is the number of hazards found.
At the 6:00 position is the number of victims found.
And in this case, the team found none.
At the 9:00 position is the team that did the search--
in this case, the Florida Task Force 1 team, which is a FEMA team.
You can see the markings on the houses,
and the markings mean nothing.
People are coming back home and finding corpses
and mummified bodies in their houses.
So it seems like people are just walking
down the street and looked at the house,
said, "Oh, it doesn't seem like anyone is in there."
It's so weird to go through my neighborhood
no bodies, no bodies.
And then all of the sudden, when you see that number
on the shell of a house-- you know, two--
you know, like, "Wow, man."
Right around the corner
two people died in this home, you know.
And it's just so deafeningly quiet.
My mother decided to stay in New Orleans
and I left.
First time I came back
was October 4th and 5th,
and it was a few days after they opened up the city.
I found out a few days earlier
from getting in contact with people in the search and rescue teams
that they had gone to the house
and they wrote a zero for--
meaning no body was found in there.
So I was thinking, "Okay, at least she made it out.
She may be sick, but she's not-- she made it out."
When I went to the house, all three of the doors were locked,
so there was no way for them to go into the house
to search the house.
I had to bust through the doors.
There were a few lines where you can tell the water
was at-- between seven and eight feet.
I just searched as best I could,
but I didn't find her in there.
After the floodwaters let down, they were saying
that people were finding their relatives and loved ones in their house
and that their house had not been searched.
So I called 9-1-1
and within a few minutes,
some police officers showed up
and they searched the house and they had, in fact,
found my mother's body in the house.
I...
It was a...
The initial flood certainly caused a lot of deaths,
but people were dying long before that.
They were dying because the electricity was out.
There was no respirator.
They were in their homes, dependent on oxygen.
No more oxygen, no way to get out,
essentially smothered to death.
People died of heat stroke,
dehydration, lack of medication.
People drowned.
People went up into attics and drowned there
as the water rose and they couldn't get out.
I can just tell you,
I've been up in those attics recovering those people,
and you can tell that they took their clothes off
because they were either delirious
or that the heat was getting so high.
They would look into the area they came up, and it was just water.
So there you had this toxic sludge there
at the entrance into the attic
and you had nowhere to go when the heat's getting terrifically high--
110, 120 degrees, whatever it gets.
The people would try to go by the vents,
and you could see the people were trying to have their faces by vents
and ultimately fell back and died.
She was in the kitchen
under the refrigerator.
I think it's horrible
for a family member to go home and find a body.
That's horrible,
because it was either missed in the search
or overlooked, or the house wasn't searched,
or the search criteria was so stringent that they couldn't search it.
The bottom line is when you're talking
to that family member, none of that matters.
There's so many houses here, they really haven't
checked yet to see what exactly's in them.
This woman came down the other day
and they were just gonna go out and check out her daughter's house.
They had no idea-- I think the woman thought that her daughter had evacuated
and just hadn't been able to get in touch with her.
But they went into the house, they started looking around,
and they found her in there.
And that-- that was yesterday.
In two or three days is the six-month anniversary of the storm,
if you can call it an anniversary.
When the police came out and found my mother,
they took a police report and said it'd take about two weeks or so.
They said it wouldn't take as long,
because they knew who she was
and that it wasn't just somebody that they found
and that I was the only other person living there with her.
But it turned out to take much longer than that.
"You found that body in that house. It must be my mom."
Well, unfortunately, that's not true.
And that's not true for several reasons.
There was a lot of drift and a lot of flood,
and people did drift in and out.
Some people ran to other houses.
Perhaps if you were in a one-story, you ran to a two-story house.
Houses were moved everywhere which way.
I also had people that-- there were no street signs left.
So people couldn't really tell me exactly what house they came out of.
The only way that they were releasing bodies at that time
was with fingerprints,
dental X-rays, or DNA samples.
DNA testing didn't start until December.
I can tell you that in September
when this mission was given to me,
the first thing we did was have a meeting with Louisiana State Police,
because our crime lab has the DNA resource.
At that point in time, we knew we needed DNA,
but we did not get funding
and the ability to move forward on DNA until December.
You asked for it in September?
We needed it in September. We were several months behind--
and right now we're several months behind.
From November 11th, it took till January 10th
to get my mother released.
This is a picture of me and my mother,
Mary Johnell Morant.
According to the medical log, she did drown...
in her own home.
I tell people all the time--
Katrina didn't do in New Orleans.
The Corps of Engineers did in New Orleans.
If they had built those levees
really to Category Three...
all of the residents of New Orleans would still be here.
As a child, I grew up at the lakefront,
and we watched the levees go up and up.
They raised them every year.
And every time a hurricane would come,
we'd go out to the levee and watch the waters
lap up against the top, and it was fun to see
how close to the top the waves were going to get.
We never, ever thought that there would ever be a levee break.
We arrived here in late September,
a group of about 20 engineers,
in an attempt to understand what happened here.
The first major area that we visited
was out on the 17th Street Canal.
It was obvious something had happened that shouldn't have happened.
And since that time, we have been working
to fill in the pieces of the puzzle
to understand what about the hurricane
and what about the levees and the soils
that had backgrounded what is, in fact,
the most tragic failure of a civil-engineered system
in the history of the United States.
This is the failed sheet pile and I-wall
that failed during the hurricane itself.
And then you can see right here behind me
what's left standing is the existing sheet pile from the hurricane.
So it's about 20 foot.
And you can imagine-- this is 17 feet
into the ground below sea level.
The force of this water pushing against this levee,
against this sheet pile, it forced this sheet pile over.
And when the wall collapsed, it let the storm surge--
Lake Pontchartrain-- into the city itself.
It was very important to us that we knew
and we find out exactly why did this happen.
This is one of three failures we had in and around New Orleans.
The other two were on the Orleans Avenue Canal and the London Avenue Canal.
One of the breaks was
the London Avenue Canal.
We went there and they had some people there from the Corps of Engineers.
They were saying how the water went under the levee.
They were only 10 feet deep.
They should have been 17 feet deep.
The way we actually build the flood walls here
along the outfall canals is we have sheet pile
driven 17 feet below sea level,
and then they are actually integrated into an earthen levee.
That didn't happen,
so the levees just fell down like dominoes.
The only things that were holding
these 13-feet-by-25-foot slabs
was a piece of plastic.
I call them rubber bands.
And that was in the dirt--
in the levee part--
which had been washed away.
And you realize that that was the only security
to holding those panels together.
I wouldn't build a fence for my dog... like that.
We didn't know why these things failed.
you can have water go over,
you can have water go under, or you can have water go through a flood wall.
There were so many breaches throughout New Orleans.
And ultimately, we found out
there was 170 miles' worth of damages.
The hurricane protection system
did not perform as we would have liked.
The Army Corps of Engineers is under heavy fire
for a report it released today.
6,000 pages long,
it says, in part, that the work was bad.
The work of humans and not an act of God
was what led to this awful destruction here.
We will begin here tonight with my colleague Martin Savidge
of our New Orleans Bureau, who is with us here this evening.
- Martin, good evening. - Good evening, Brian.
This turnabout on the part of the Army Corps of Engineers--
this report is a huge about-face.
What the Corps is saying is that the flood protection system
for the city of New Orleans and Southeast Louisiana
was a system in name only.
This is the first time that the Corps of Engineers
has had to stand up and say,
"We had a catastrophic failure of one of our projects."
The $19.7 million review
pointed out details of engineering
and design failures that led to Katrina's storm surge
overwhelming the city's levees and flood walls.
According to the report, the walls failed
when the water pushed the walls enough to create a crack
between them and levee soils,
allowing the water to seep below the walls and push them aside.
You know, somebody needs to go to jail.
Somebody needs to go to jail
because those levees were never really maintained
the way they should have been, and now it's too late.
This is the greatest engineering firm in the world.
You designed a wall
which is supposed to hold back water
that you know will fall over
if the water goes over the top.
Now, as a lawyer, I'm sitting there thinking,
"Are we gonna have to sue the Corps of Engineers?"
And we find, "Oh, man, wait a minute.
They're immune,"
meaning you can't sue the Corps of Engineers.
The statute says, "The United States of America
is not liable for damage from floods."
The next sentence says, "Provided that
"where there is insufficient land to build a levee,
"you have to expropriate the land
or you have to buy the flood rights."
So why is there an I-wall and no levee?
Well, an I-wall is something you can build
on a tiny piece of ground, so here we go again.
They didn't want to spend the money
to buy the land to put up a levee,
so they put up this chinky I-wall.
And by the way, what's a levee?
A levee is this earthen piece of work--
four feet wide for every one foot of height.
That's what holds back the water.
The levee...
it's the same thing, man.
I mean...
they been knew that this could happen.
You know what I'm saying?
They knew it-- before-- when I was a child,
they knew if a hurricane came through
or a large mass like that, that it could happen.
And I'm wondering, damn, I mean...
why nobody never fixed it or nobody never--
not only fixed it or made an attempt--
just if they didn't have the money or whatever,
make some noise about, "Hey, this could happen."
I ain't hear nothing about this
from the government or anyone from our town--
the mayor or anyone ever say something like,
"We need money because hurricanes always come
and they're always a threat and we need help to fix this."
So it's like, to me, if they knew it could have happened,
it's almost like they let it happen.
♪ ♪
To understand the situation New Orleans is in,
you've got to understand the power of the Mississippi River.
As the river deposits sediment in the delta,
this creates, often, sandbars that block shipping channels.
To get through these sandbars,
the engineers built jetties
that go two miles out into the Gulf of Mexico
and drop all the sediment into deep water
so it is no longer building up land.
The main reason that New Orleans
has become vulnerable to hurricanes
is because the wetlands have been eroding.
Those wetlands are responsible
for reducing storm surges when a hurricane comes along.
To expand oil and gas infrastructure,
we've dredged thousands of miles of canals
for pipelines, for drilling, and for navigation purposes.
If you imagine, in the old days,
we had all these distributory channels
that were kind of like the arteries in your hand.
Man came along and cut off that supply.
So over the last 70 years,
we've starved our wetlands to death,
like putting a rubber band around your hand.
On top of that,
we have global warming, which is a very big issue.
It's causing sea level to rise.
It's basically making
these coastal cities
more vulnerable to the storm surge
and the eventual flooding when these storms come.
Today the government will release
its national hurricane forecast.
And so far, it's not looking good.
The next hurricane season is bearing down,
and forecasters said today it could be a bad one.
Worse than usual again--
that's the prediction from every respected forecaster out there.
After 24 hurricanes...
and 11 making landfall in the United States
in the past two years...
today's prediction for this year's Atlantic hurricane season
13-16 named storms,
eight to 10 becoming hurricanes,
four to six becoming major hurricanes
with winds of 111 miles per hour or higher.
The research meteorologists are telling us
that we're in this very active period
for major hurricanes that may last
at least another 10 to 20 years.
That's not good news,
we need to be prepared.
With global warming,
you're now making a New York climate
more like a North Carolina climate,
and we know how often they get hit
and how warm the waters are there.
So the prospect of a severe storm
hitting the DC to Boston metroplex corridor
is very high in the ensuing decades.
When you have a storm surge from Katrina,
say, of 20 feet above sea level,
it's not going to help things when you have global warming
throwing in an extra 12 inches on top of that.
25% of all the natural gas
produced in the United States
is actually produced offshore of Louisiana.
20% of all the oil produced domestically in the United States
is produced off the coast of Louisiana.
And it's ironic...
because one of the few things in the country
that environmentalists and the oil industry agree on
is that you have to rebuild the wetlands
around New Orleans
not only to protect New Orleans,
but even if New Orleans didn't exist,
you would need to rebuild those wetlands
to protect the production of energy.
I understand, in a way,
why they're going to abandon us--
no political power, very little money, black city.
We can't influence much.
And then I thought, "But how stupid
"does a president and a Congress have to be
"to say, 'Oh, wait a minute.
"They control 30% of our oil and gas.
"If it doesn't come to us,
"our security is threatened
and $6-a-gallon gasoline is there overnight'?"
Nobody can argue that.
Do you know that...
because these offshore oil companies
go more than three miles off the coast...
we don't get a dime in this state?
The federal government takes it all.
Do you know that if Louisiana seceded from the United States
and started collecting all the royalties
from these oil and gas companies, we'd be like Saudi Arabia?
We'd all be riding around in Bentleys.
We wouldn't need anything from the United States.
So we're pumping all this money into the government.
We're not asking for a handout.
We're asking for a little return on what we're handing out.
The state of Louisiana has long been used
as almost a colony or a place to extract resources
by the rest of the United States, particularly Texas.
It's extremely oil-rich, has natural gas,
and if you can deal with the ragged boot heel of Louisiana,
you have the seafood coming in.
It's where the oil platforms are.
But the money doesn't stay in Louisiana.
The money goes out of state.
It goes to anywhere else in the so-called "New South" but Louisiana.
I mean, cities like Memphis now
have Federal Express and they're booming,
and the Carolinas have all this banking going on.
Atlanta's got Home Depot and Delta Airlines.
Texas has Halliburton and other construction and oil companies.
There's nothing left here.
Up the Mississippi in St. Paul and Minneapolis,
you have at any given time
about 18 Fortune-500 companies.
We had one pre-Katrina-- Entergy.
And now that company's bankrupt.
If they'd give us our percentage...
of oil and gas like Texas gets,
New Mexico gets, Wyoming gets, Colorado gets,
Alaska gets-- if they'd give us that,
we can build our own wetlands, rebuild them.
We can build our Category-Five levees.
We can, instead of having to cut out
the neighborhoods that are our culture
because we no longer can afford 'em,
we could bring those neighborhoods back, too.
Give us our goddamn money.
Give us our oil and gas money.
We'll help ourselves, and you can kiss our ass.
Governor Blanco is making good
on a promise to play hardball with the federal government.
Today the state filed a lawsuit to prevent
offshore oil and gas lease sales in the western Gulf of Mexico.
Blanco says the sale would damage
Louisiana's coastal environment.
The state hopes the lawsuit forces the federal government
to share profits from the sale to protect wetlands.
It's about our federal government
sharing the royalty revenue stream
from-- from the exploration
and the production that occurs
in our coastal waters.
If we don't get significant help,
Louisiana people are in danger for a very long time.
I want to come home.
I was born here,
and I always said I wanted to die here,
but things been so rough.
I almost had two heart attacks.
Had to go to a hospital. But you know what?
God is good, He's able, and I'm going to keep my faith.
I've never seen such a time when the US Government
turned its back on people in need to this degree.
To have a people in such dire need
getting such little help from the federal government
while they're screaming for help, I think it's unprecedented.
We need lights, water, and houses.
I got a little daughter, she asks me every day,
"Dad, when can we go back to New Orleans?"
Which section of the city do you live in? East New Orleans.
Let's get rid of all the bureaucracy. I don't understand.
If the government can go to Iraq
and help people in Iraq...
...and we can't take care of New Orleans, then we have a problem.
I need somewhere where they can put
and place me and my grandkids at,
'cause I'm living here in a shelter.
Parking, $14 a day, we can't afford.
We got to survive on food.
You got to eat out, 'cause there's nowhere for you--
no icebox, no stove, no nothing.
So you're bringing the kids out
and you're eating every day, that's $60.
So I need some kind of closure. That's all I'm asking for.
This was my home prior to Katrina.
It was a two-story home.
I've only been living in it for two years.
Just recently finished remodeling it.
This, all over here, along here,
this wall here was bookshelves, my TV,
my couch and everything.
Over here was my refrigerator,
my stove, my sink.
Up the stairs-- you went up the stairs here.
You go up-- you went up this way.
Duck your head. - Duck your head.
It had a low beam, yeah. And then it went up here.
Probably the biggest challenge
we have right now is housing.
There's hundreds of millions
of dollars that have been raised,
and we still have people out around the country
still haven't gotten their first FEMA check,
nor can they get a travel trailer on their home.
We're still homeless. We still have nowhere to live.
The lady called me again. She said, "We have a trailer."
I said, "Okay, I'll take it."
"Okay, give me an address to put it."
"Anywhere. Just put it somewhere so I can go live in it."
"I'm sorry, we're gonna have to put that on hold and list you as 'still pending.'"
Of course, I've been pending since August 29th, bitch.
I mean, I have nowhere to live.
62-year-old Florence Jackson
has been waiting for help from FEMA.
Where is my government?
I'm so disappointed.
She has called FEMA day and night
and is told her application is still pending.
And I wantsomebody to know...
that I'm suffering.
Our idea was, man, after the storm,
they would have trailers on every lawn, and you'd get up in the morning,
wave at your neighbor coming out their trailer, and you'd just hear
a cacophony of, like, hammers and nails all day long.
We still don't have any trailers.
When you fly in to New Orleans,
you look across the street
in the extended parking lots--
nothing but trailers just sitting there empty.
Sitting there empty.
In mid-January, both New Orleans and Mississippi
had asked for about 40,000 trailers from FEMA.
In mid-January, Mississippi had 33,000,
Louisiana had 3,000.
Now, some of that is because of some internal politics
in the city of New Orleans itself.
But most of that is because of FEMA.
You can call FEMA five times
and ask them the same question
and get five different answers.
You're constantly going back and forth.
"Come back tomorrow. The computers are broke."
"Oh, we lost your application." FEMA's a disaster.
"We tried to get in touch with you on your cell phone,"
which three-quarters of the time our cell phones don't work.
FEMA's a joke. "We called you, you didn't respond.
So that means you no longer need any help."
Blah blah blah blah blah. You'd call them
every couple of weeks and try and be nice.
You don't want to scream at them.
"Your trailer's being ordered," and all that.
And I finally found an apartment...
and just called them up and told them I didn't need the trailer.
And I'll be damned if the trailer didn't show up the next day.
FEMA's a dirty word. It's just a four-letter word.
I just say FEMA now instead of the other nasty words.
And now, still, here it is, six months after the storm
and there's still no help.
Now I've lost all my-- every bit of information
that could have proved that I owned this home,
that I've ever lived here.
I had to-- I had to put--
I had to get duplicate copies of utility bills
stating that I had utilities here, that I lived here.
I had to go to the Clerk of Courts office
and get whatever information they had to say I owned this.
Then I had to go to an attorney
who actually did the sale, and he had to swear--
I had to swear in an affidavit that I owned this.
Who the hell goes through that?
Who goes through that crap?
I mean, my God, this is-- would I come here and say I owned this if I didn't?
You know, we need help. Look.
See these little pink flags, these little orange flags here?
I have been marked for a FEMA trailer.
I'm still waiting for a FEMA trailer.
Six months. Six months.
People got trailers over on that side.
Give us a trailer. Look how big this yard is.
Give us a little raggedy trailer, you know.
Well, we'll need a few of them
for the whole crew.
The yard big enough. You got the sewer right there.
It's big enough for, like, about four good trailers.
That way, the people in the block,
I can call them, they can come home.
That is my FEMA trailer right there.
I still have no power.
I do have water, and I do have sewage
and I have a toilet that I can sit on
rather than a five-gallon bucket.
When is the power coming?
Um... whenever I decide
to give somebody a blowjob, I guess.
Why you say that?
Because that's the way I look at it.
When you get a FEMA trailer--
which I'm fortunate to have one
and most people in this neighborhood that have one--
I would say 1% of them are usable.
They don't have electricity connected to them.
And-- and I've called city councilmen,
my senators, Jay Blossman.
I left a message with the Pope, even.
And I'm thinking that may-- may be the answer.
We're here in my FEMA condo trailer.
It took us...
We put in for it in December,
and we got it, I think-- one, two, three--
about four months later, which is really not a long time to wait,
'cause, I mean, there were people that waited longer than that.
So four months really wasn't that long, but it was long enough.
We've been in here two months.
It's not bad, but we had a couple
of mild thunderstorms last weekend
and it's not too stable.
I mean, it's sitting on bricks,
so light winds or mild to strong winds
are kind of like run-for-your-life shit.
But we do have a house in the back of us in case we need to run out of here
and run into a solid foundation.
Me and my father
have been living here since about December.
Come on, I'll take--
take you on a tour of the FEMA trailer.
It's so well-made.
There you go.
Luxurious, spacious cabinets.
One of the doors to separate the room, you know.
It used to stick up here, but now we just have it
held on with safety pins and twine.
This is the dining room table.
It's not very well-built.
It just comes-- comes apart.
You know, this is the bed area.
It's where I sleep. It's-- you know.
I'll show you the view.
Look!
Another FEMA trailer.
It's straight bullshit.
These people have been sitting out here for nine months.
I think these politicians forget who they work for.
They work for the people.
They think it's about themselves.
There's no reason in the world we should have this.
Louisiana is still ass-backwards
and we still have people who are scattered to the wind
and don't understand what's next
or what's coming next or where to even find it at.
So it's a lot of bullshit, man.
It's a lot of bullshit, and it's time
for the politicians to quit the bullshit
and understand who they work for.
I don't care who you are. I don't care what color you are.
You could be orange.
You've gotta remember who you work for
and you're working on the backs of poor people
who work every day, pay their taxes.
Ain't everybody here looking for welfare.
People are working, and working two and three jobs.
And these fools running around here-- they don't know their head.
They don't know four dogs got four assholes.
Can we move onto something else?
'Cause this-- this is not working for me.
Fuck.
I think that this is a great moment in American history...
because I feel that in this moment
we see a lot of what's wrong with us.
It's a signature moment. It's like, sometimes you walk past a mirror
and you see yourself in a position you don't like.
"Damn. Man, I know I was--
I thought I was 10 pounds overweight. I'm 50."
This is like you stayed in front of the mirror
and you couldn't turn away from it.
You stayed in that pose.
And everything in that pose shows us what's wrong with us.
I'm here today because Louisiana needs your help.
Most homeowners' policies will not pay flood losses.
We have an estimated $20 to $30 billion
in uninsured losses.
If Congress fails to help,
our people will have no money to rebuild.
The first lawsuit we filed was the insurance lawsuit.
And that was born out of the idea
that most of the insurance companies, we knew in advance,
were not going to want to pay the claims.
And as an aside,
20 years ago, there weren't many exclusions.
As time goes by, after the big Cold War,
they started putting in "We're not going to pay for nuclear war."
Then they said they weren't going to pay for asbestos.
Then they said they're not going to pay for lead.
Then they said they're not going to pay for pollution.
Now they have something called they're not going to pay for "water damage."
In Mississippi today, the opening moves
in a landmark lawsuit that pits victims
of Hurricane Katrina against their insurance companies.
As you may know, this is a hot issue in the storm zone.
The question at the heart of this
is whether water damage from Katrina
is classified as hurricane damage or flood damage.
The stakes here are huge.
$75 billion in flood and storm-surge damage
was reported in 1.7 million claims.
I was told by my agent that I had a policy
that would protect me for hurricanes,
'cause I asked specifically for that.
But Nationwide Mutual concluded
that most of the damage was caused by flooding,
and because Leonard did not have
a separate flood insurance policy,
denied most of his claims.
We think the facts clearly show
that the coverage that the Leonards purchased
did not cover flood, but the damage was primarily flood.
This groundbreaking trial over wind-versus-water damage
and which policy covers what
could affect thousands of other families along the Gulf Coast
who were denied their insurance claims
and have also filed suit.
Insurance companies are another joke.
I mean, you pay your premiums,
don't ever be late paying the insurance premium,
and then you say, "Well, I'm covered.
"I've got flood insurance. I've got wind insurance.
I've got loss of use. I've got loss of income."
Oh, insurance companies.
Insurance companies has...
been playing hell with me the whole fricking time.
The argument could be made--
which came first, the chicken or the egg?
I think it rained before the levees broke.
So it's quite possible that your house was flooded if you had no roof
before the levees broke on Monday evening.
And the insurance carriers are not honoring
their promise to cover you.
Those "good hands" people and the "good neighbor" people,
I don't believe anything they say because they're the worst offenders.
My street...
it's like a ghost town.
Nobody's here.
It's hard to see a neighborhood so full of life
without any life in it anymore.
My father-- I knew it was going to be hardest for him.
He came back from World War II,
took his $10 to hold that contract,
took all 30 years to pay that $13,000 for that house.
And he had broken his leg, so he was shuffling around the car.
Then he turned and he saw the house
and he just broke down.
And he said, "My whole life."
And that's the moment that... I'll always remember,
because...
to see...
to see my father, you know,
in his 80th year of life...
go through...
his darkest hour was hard.
This is it.
This is my childhood home.
Totally wiped out by Katrina.
I could care less about the house, almost.
It's just the fact that,
you know, I saw this young man,
young black man come back from World War II,
take his last $10--
he always talked about the day he bought the house.
He came back to my mother and said,
"I bought a house today.
For $10, they'll hold the contract."
So for him, he said, "I've-- I have--
I had all my sons in this house here."
Jesus.
The insurance companies are--
there's a special, special circle in hell for them, man.
Dante would-- would promote them
to a very special place in hell,
because...
you know, you sit there and you see everything damaged
and they just come up with any way to say,
"I'm not gonna pay you."
So, luckily, we had flood insurance,
but the way they sell it is, "You have homeowner's insurance,
"so get a little flood insurance.
Between the two, you'll be made whole."
But when it came to it, it was just flood insurance.
Thankfully, we had a little bit,
but it was like maybe 40, 50% of the value of the house.
Then they said, "Well, we'll give you wind
on your homeowner's insurance above the waterline."
Then they came back and said, "Everything above the waterline
"was damaged from the flood anyway.
We're not going to cover that."
I said, "Well, we had $12,000 insurance
on the shed in the backyard."
I said, "There's a tree fallen on it,
totally destroyed."
They came back and said, "It's repairable,
"so we're only going to give you 25% of that.
"And then we're going to take the deductible
"of the full value of the house,
"and your check for $670 is in the mail
along with the check for $400 for the time you were out."
You know, it was 10 days, $40 a day, so it's in the mail.
So thank you very much.
My father's hard of hearing, so...
the adjuster was there,
and as he was leaving, he goes, "Hey, man"--
my father-- "I-I can't hear,
"but I just want you to be fair.
Be fair with me." You know?
The guy had already told us,
"I'm not paying you anything."
So the guy turns beet red.
And he goes, "Just be fair. Thank you."
So we drive 70 miles to Baton Rouge.
I said, "Wait until we get to Baton Rouge to tell Daddy."
So we said, "Listen."
I said, "Really, we got to explain to you
"the insurance company's not going to pay you anything.
"You are not 'in good hands with Allstate.'
You're done."
My father said, "What? No, man.
I've been paying them people for 50 years. No."
I said, "No, Daddy, they're not giving you--" He said, "What?"
He said, "Man, don't tell me that, man.
"I-- why you didn't tell me in New Orleans?
I would have killed that man."
I said, "That's why I didn't tell you."
The master plan for New Orleans
is to bulldoze down the Ninth Ward.
The Ninth Ward is a place
of predominantly black people,
and you got these land-grabbers down there,
the Trump land-grabbers,
who want to go down there and buy up all the land.
And you know, regentrification,
you know how that goes, and urban renewal--
in the name of those things, take this place and change it.
People basically are being told
what you have is of no value.
You won't have an opportunity
for the intergenerational transfer of wealth,
of property, of assets
from one generation to the next.
And this is particularly affecting
African-American communities in New Orleans.
As soon as the planning process is done--
which I say to you should have been done by now.
Other communities that have been devastated along the coast
have already done that so that people can make
their own individual property decisions based on fact.
This is 2310 Delery Street,
and these are the three lots
that my grandparents bought in the late--
like, in 1949 to build their dream house.
When we came down, my sister and I snuck in
and we were looking left, looking for the house.
We were like, "Do you see it? Did it move?
Did it crush? What happened?"
We didn't see the house, and that's odd because the house was really big.
I want you
the persons who live in the Lower Nine,
they were homeowners.
I was a homeowner.
35 years I worked
to pay for the property that I own, plus my rentals.
Not only that, I paid my tax bill.
I got the tax bill in December,
and I paid it January-- before January 31st.
And on the back of that, it said, "Police and school,"
and now I can't even get a school open
in the Lower Nine.
This is what's left of the house.
The house actually lifted
and floated across the street over here.
We were like, "Oh, my God."
I don't know how I'm going to break this to my grandmother
that that house that she loves so much,
that my grandfather built, is like--
at this point, it's not going to make it.
What really bothered me was this risk--
"Building at my own risk."
Do you know--
I just want to call this to your attention--
the geography?
New Orleans is surrounded by water.
If you go north, it's the Pontchartrain Lake.
If you go west,
it's the Bonnet Carré Spillway.
If you go south, it's the Mississippi River.
And if you go east, you've got Lake Borgne
and all of the little tributaries
in the wetlands out there.
So who's at risk?
I pulled my grandmother to the side and I said,
"Nee, listen, sit down.
We have to tell you what's going on."
And she says, "What's going on?"
I said, "Well... the house is gone.
It moved."
And she said, "What do you mean the house moved?"
I said, "The house, it floated across the street."
And, you know-- and I said, "I don't think--"
I said, "It was kind of tilted,
so I don't think that it's going to make it.
I don't think it's going to stand."
And she said, "Where is it?" I said, "I don't know.
I think it's in Mr. Johnny's yard."
I couldn't see from where I was.
And Mr. Johnny's yard is down there.
I thought it was in his yard, but I really couldn't tell.
I said, "Well, I think it's in Mr. Johnny's yard."
And my grandmother just paused for a second
and she sits down.
And she looks up at me and she says,
"Well, Johnny can't never say
I ain't gave him nothing. I gave him a whole house."
And I thought, "Oh, G--"
I mean, we're standing there nervous and laughing
'cause we're relieved that she didn't fall to pieces.
New Orleanians and Louisianians are a resilient people,
and so they're going to find a way to come back home.
I'm telling everybody, "Hold tight.
Don't give up your property for anything.
We fought too long to get our property,
so even if you don't do anything with it, gut it and sit on it."
Everybody knew the property value in the Ninth Ward was going up.
And when this disaster happened,
they went, "Here's our opportunity."
So developers are now getting in bed
with politicians to come with all-- to come up
with all these schemes to take people's land.
Nine months after Katrina, and the Lower Nine
still looks like a bomb hit it.
I think that it's meant to discourage
the neighbors from coming back.
I mean, most people have lived in the Lower Ninth Ward
with a solid...
thought in the back of their minds
that straight up, we're not wanted here
in some way, shape, form, or fashion,
that this area could be used for industrial purposes.
We live on a waterway.
There are a lot of companies who could use this area
for industrial purposes-- warehousing and things like that.
And so a lot of people have always felt like
that's been the goal for a long time.
But most of the Lower Niners I talk to are like, "Hell, no.
"You're not going to take anything from me.
"You're not going to run us off like that.
You're not going to just shoo us away."
The people try to buy us out.
I'm not going nowhere. I'm keeping my little raggedy house.
I'm going to stay right there and get me some Sheetrock and I'm going to be there.
Now, they can come visit me if they want,
but I'll be right there on that front porch,
waving at people when they pass like I always do. "How you all doing?"
We're probably going to end up a small city,
gentrified, primarily white,
primarily well-to-do.
And I think the rest of the United States thinks that's just fine.
I have publicly said, and I will continue to say,
we plan to rebuild every area of this city,
including the Ninth Ward.
And we're going to do it regardless of if there's a small group of people
that may have other plans and other agendas.
New Orleans is not New Orleans
without the mix of people that were here before.
And it would not be the kind of city
that I think most people would treasure.
But it's all predicated upon what the Corps of Engineers
is going to do as it relates to levee protection.
June 1 is a very significant date to the people of New Orleans.
It's the beginning of the next hurricane season.
And Task Force Guardian, the Corps of Engineers--
we are trying to make these repairs
to provide a level of protection that existed prior to Katrina
before the hurricane season starts.
The Army Corps of Engineers
has been promising the people
they would have the levees back
to pre-Katrina conditions prior to the first of June.
When we heard that, a cold chill ran down our back
because we knew pre-Katrina conditions were not okay.
New Orleans, as we begin the hurricane season '06, has Lego levees.
I mean, these things will crumble with a strong wind.
Our obligation to the public is to base our conclusions on science,
on facts, on engineering, and tell the truth.
Do I trust them? No.
They knew those levees had issues 10, 15 years ago.
The Corps of Engineers knew it...
the federal government knew it, the state government knew it,
the city government knew it, and they turned their head.
We've been honest with the public,
and we have to tell them, "Look at what we're building.
It's stronger than what you had before."
I want to caution all residents
that after much probing and questioning,
the Army Corps of Engineers has warned me
that some of our lowest-lying areas of New Orleans East
and the Lower Ninth Ward will have some flooding
from levees overtopping
if another hurricane travels along
the same path as Katrina.
The fact of the matter is that
no one really takes it very seriously.
All right? They just--
they just-- it's--
"We're going to put a little paste on it.
We'll put a little Band-Aid and we're going to deal with it that way."
And the reason why they're doing that is because our president
sees us as not quite much of a threat, you know?
"Louisiana, I'm going to get them anyway,
"because they buying my bullshit.
"So why should I spend billions of dollars
"fixing these levees
given the political environment that we're in?"
We need a different government.
We need somebody in there
that actually really and truly cares
about the people, about their property,
about their homes.
You know? Somebody who really and truly cares.
But who's it going to be?
After Katrina, I had the opportunity
to go to the Netherlands to look at their defense system.
And I was actually embarrassed
to talk about ours when you look at their system.
Number one, they've built substantial levees and they armor them.
They protect them from waves and overtopping
and all the problems we saw at Katrina.
But more importantly, this is a very small country.
It's 14 million people.
65% of the Netherlands is below sea level,
but they have the will to go out
and build high enough and strong enough to withstand
a one-in-10,000-year storm-surge event.
We can do the kinds of things the Dutch engineers have done,
and, in fact, we should learn from them,
but we haven't mobilized the will.
The Army Corps of Engineers had 40 years to build
a protective system around the city of New Orleans.
The hurricane hits August 29th.
It takes them approximately eight weeks to two months to drain the water out.
So you mean to tell me they're going to repair--
what they couldn't build in 40 years,
they're going to repair it in eight months
or 10 months to be up to a point
where people should feel secure?
I would caution people
to not be deluded,
to go forward in a way
that they understand,
not to buy promises that could be false promises,
because it could mean that they could lose their lives and their homes again.
With the tropics heating up, the work
at the 17th Street Canal can't move quickly enough.
The gates are in place, but the pumps still aren't operational.
New delays make old deadlines dicey.
Unfortunately, to a large degree,
our fate is in the Corps' hands.
The Corps is now blaming rain and not enough working space,
and they say residents need to keep their guard up.
I do believe that they should be concerned, because...
we don't know what kind of hurricane event
we could see in-in-- in this year.
With the temporary pumps on the bridge,
the Corps can pump less than 15% of the canal's capacity
if it needs to close the gates.
The Corps says it's getting little sleep, too,
having put in place $1 billion worth
of flood protection since Katrina, a work still in progress.
What's going to happen when hurricane season comes?
We're screwed.
They don't have to tell me 19 hours anymore,
'cause if it's predicted on Monday, I'm leaving Friday.
I'll admit, I'm scared.
You don't know what's going to happen.
Be prepared to run and have your place to run to.
If someone came to you,
has a house that's near the lake
or a levee or a flood wall
and says, "Is it safe for me to move back in?"
Is it safe?
Remember "The Marathon Man"?
Oh, I remember. With Sir Laurence Olivier?
Yep. Is it safe?
The answer is no, it's not safe.
"Not just the levees broke, the spirit broke,
"my spirit broke.
"The families broke apart.
"I want my mama back,
"I want my sister back, I want my nephew back.
"The auction block broke
"from so many African-American bodies.
"The sense of direction was broken
"because of the darkness.
"There was light from time to time,
"but they broke away and left us.
"My being together broke
"when I fell apart.
"The smell broke away from my skin
"when I came out of the waters.
"The waters that came and stood,
"still with the bodies of my people...
"the dogs, shit, piss,
"rats, snakes, and 'herd of' alligators...
"The broken smiles, the broken minds,
"the broken lives.
"And you know something?
"Out of all of this brokenness,
"I have begun to mend.
"With God...
"and my deep, deep commitment
"to infinite strength,
"to never give up, I am mending.
"I am coming back,
"God willing, for a long, long time.
"So when you see the waters,
"when you see the levees breaking,
know what they really broke along with them."
♪ Oh, one glad morning ♪
♪ When this life is over ♪
♪ I'll fly away ♪
♪ Oh, when I die ♪
♪ Hallelujah, by and by ♪
♪ Oh, I'll fly away... ♪
♪ Oh, I'll fly away ♪
♪ I'll fly away ♪
♪ Oh, when I die ♪
♪ Hallelujah, by and by ♪
♪ I'll fly away... ♪
When you were born in this
and your first breath when the doctor slaps you
is tinted with magnolia blossoms
and you drink Mississippi River tap water in your first formula,
it's a thing that you won't find anywhere else.
And folks who had to evacuate
know you might go somewhere
and you might have a good time,
but it's nothing like home.
And when you can call New Orleans, Louisiana, home,
baby, you know what it means
to miss New Orleans, trust me.
♪ Fly away ♪
♪ Oh, when I die, hallelujah ♪
♪ Well, I'll fly away ♪
♪ Fly away ♪
♪ Said fly away ♪
♪ When I die, hallelujah, by and by ♪
♪ New Orleans will never go away. ♪
♪ ♪
Darleen Asevedo, born in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Jay Asevedo, born in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Shelton "Shakespear" Alexander,
Saint Bernard Parish, Violet, Louisiana.
Lee Arnold, tour manager
for New Orleans' own Hot 8 Brass Band.
My name is Gralen Bryant Banks,
born and raised in New Orleans, Uptown in the 13th Ward.
I'm the Director of Safety and Loss Prevention
at the Hyatt Regency, New Orleans,
at Louisiana Superdome.
John Barry, author of "
The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America."
I'm Professor Robert Bea,
University of California, Berkeley,
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Actor-activist Harry Belafonte.
I'm Wilhelmina Blanchard. I'm Terence's mother.
And I'm Terence Blanchard, and we're both born and raised here in New Orleans, Louisiana.
I'm Kathleen Babineaux Blanco,
governor of the state of Louisiana.
Douglas Brinkley, American historian.
Joseph Bruno, I live in a section of the city called Carrollton,
and I'm a trial lawyer.
State Representative Karen Carter,
District 93, New Orleans.
I'm Dr. Louis Cataldie. I'm the state medical examiner from the state of Louisiana.
Judith Morgan, Yscloskey,
Saint Bernard, Louisiana.
Cheryl Livaudais, Yscloskey,
Saint Bernard, Louisiana.
Will Chittenden, born and raised in New Orleans,
Lower Ninth, Saint Bernard Parish.
Eddie Compass, former superintendent
of New Orleans Police Department.
How you doing? I'm Harry "Swamp Thing" Cook,
and I'm the bass drummer for the Hot 8 Brass Band.
Sarah Dean, Saint Roch, New Orleans.
Petri Laurimaa, Saint Roch, New Orleans.
Emil Dumesnil from the Lower Ninth Ward,
New Orleans, Louisiana.
Michael Eric Dyson, author of "
Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster,"
professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
My name is Felton Earls. I am the Professor
of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School
and Professor of Human Behavior and Development
at the Harvard School of Public Health.
I'm Paris Ervin. I'm a resident of New Orleans.
My name's Sylvester Francis.
I was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana.
My name is Herbert J. Freeman, Jr.
I was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, in the Garden District.
Dale Girard, Gentilly, New Orleans, Louisiana.
My name is Louella Givens,
and I'm a lawyer in Orleans Parish.
Vanita Gupta, Assistant Counsel
at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
My name is Glenn Hall,
I am 10 years old, and I play the trumpet.
I'm Tanya Harris from the Lower Ninth Ward.
I'm Josephine Butler from Lower Ninth Ward.
Donald Harrison, jazz musician from Uptown, New Orleans.
Darnnell Herrington,
born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Dr. Corey Hebert, pediatrician, New Orleans, Louisiana.
Damon Hewitt, Assistant Counsel,
NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund,
and a native of New Orleans.
Freddy Hicks, New Orleans, Louisiana.
I'm Justin Hite, Berkeley, California,
Common Ground in the Lower Ninth Ward.
Fred Johnson, born in New Orleans, Louisiana.
I'm Michael Katz,
Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History
at the University of Pennsylvania.
Michael Knight, Lower Ninth Ward.
Mitch Landrieu, Lieutenant Governor, state of Louisiana.
My name is Mrs. Phyllis Montana LeBlanc,
born and raised in New Orleans.
Trymaine Lee, staff writer,
New Orleans "Times-Picayune," from South Jefferson.
Brendan Loy, blogger and hurricane buff. IrishTrojan.com.
Dr. Calvin Mackie, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Tulane University,
member of the Louisiana Recovery Authority,
born in the Seventh Ward in New Orleans, Louisiana.
I'm Dr. Ben Marble. I am an emergency room physician
along the Mississippi Gulf Coast,
and I live in Long Beach, Mississippi.
Wynton Marsalis, Pigeon Town, New Orleans, Louisiana.
Kevin A. Martin, Pumping and Power Plant Operator,
Melpomene Pumping Station Number 1, New Orleans, Louisiana.
My name is Hassan Mashriqui. I'm an Assistant Professor
at Louisiana State University Hurricane Center.
I'm Mother Audrey Mason, from New Orleans,
born and raised 63 years.
Betty McHale... And Charles McHale,
3 Park Island, City of New Orleans.
I'm David Meeks, city editor
of the "Times-Picayune" in New Orleans.
Yes, my name is Joseph Melancon, from New Orleans, Louisiana.
I'm from the Third Ward,
which is called the Magnolia Project.
Gina Montana, Mid-City,
New Orleans, Louisiana.
Henry Morgan, Saint Bernard, Louisiana.
I'm Marc Morial, former mayor of New Orleans, a son of New Orleans,
and now the president of the National Urban League.
My name is Cynthia Hedge-Morrell,
I'm the newly-elected councilperson from District D,
New Orleans, Louisiana, born and raised.
I am Arthur Morrell, State Representative,
from District 97 in New Orleans, Louisiana.
My name is Joycelyn Moses.
My name is Anthony Dunn.
And we both are residents of New Orleans,
been here all our life.
Ray Nagin, mayor of the city of New Orleans.
My name is Linda Novak, and I live in Holy Cross, Lower Ninth Ward.
Soledad O'Brien, co-anchor, CNN, "American Morning."
Sean Penn.
My name is Bennie Pete, and I'm a tuba player
for the Hot 8 Brass Band.
Wendell Pierce, born in Pontchartrain Park, New Orleans.
Kimberly Polk, I lived in the Bywater community
of New Orleans, Louisiana.
Pastor James Pullings, Jr., of the Leviticus Church
of God in Christ, Queens, New York.
Garland Robinette, WWL Radio, New Orleans, Louisiana.
Robert Rocque, born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Junior Rodriguez, Saint Bernard Parish President.
Daina Saulny, born and raised New Orleans, Louisiana. Seventh Ward.
Michael Scott Schlacter,
I am the founder and chief meteorologist
of Weather 2000 in New York City.
Jeffrey David Schultz, Chief Climatologist at Weather 2000.
Jay Scully, Long Beach, Mississippi.
Mike Seelig, Uptown, New Orleans.
I'm Colonel Lewis Setliff, Commander, Task Force Guardian,
US Army Corps of Engineers, here in New Orleans, Louisiana.
I'm Reverend Al Sharpton, president of National Action Network.
Brian Thevenot, staff writer at the "Times-Picayune."
I live in Uptown, New Orleans, Louisiana.
Charlie Varley, photojournalist,
citizen of the world, New Orleans, Louisiana.
Ivor van Heerden, Deputy Director
of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center.
My name is Elder William Walker, Jr.,
pastor of the Noah's Ark Missionary Baptist Church,
located in Central City, New Orleans, Louisiana.
Rhonda Washington, registered nurse,
- high-risk OB/ - GYN, University Hospital.
Kanye West, artist.
Roy Williams, Director, Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport.
♪ 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 ♪
♪ You used to be my honey ♪
♪ Till you spent all my money ♪
♪ No use for you to cry ♪
♪ I'll see you by and by ♪
♪ 'Cause 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 ♪
♪ I'm walkin' ♪