Words Whispered in Water. Sandy Rosenthal
fix the infrastructure, and rebuild the battered business community.” Nagin, in his memoir, would recall that the businessmen in the suite reserved by Reiss were “intent on engineering a very different New Orleans.”58
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The new temporary office in Baton Rouge opened on Wednesday (September 14), due to a gargantuan amount of work on the part of Leslie, Steve, and many others who were working for Strategic Comp, and due to the remarkable generosity of Great American.
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Help and generosity were extended to the Millers as well. Harvey and Renee accepted the Red Cross’s largesse of putting them up in a hotel in Little Rock for two weeks. During that time, they, with the help of their daughter Beth, found an apartment. They moved in on September 19. Despite her recent surgery, Renee fared well, but Beth was worried about Harvey. She noticed that her father wasn’t talking and would answer questions only in monosyllables. When Harvey didn’t improve, she became frightened. Beth called a psychiatrist friend who suggested that Harvey see a trauma counselor. Harvey might be in shock.
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As soon as the Thibodeaux family moved out of the North Roclay home, we could move in. The target date was September 30 because the new house they had bought would not be available until then. Of course we were dismayed, but the housing shortage created this weirdness. For the next twenty days, we continued the odd life in a hotel. Stanford went to school during the day, and Steve spent all day keeping his workers’ compensation business operating from a laptop. At night, I tried to create a normal environment for Stanford to do his homework in our hotel room by rearranging the furniture and placing framed photos under the lamps.
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As we and 100,000 other families struggled, a horrified world was demanding answers. From the start, the Army Corps had told CNN and other big media outlets that the storm surge during the August 2005 hurricane was greater than what the floodwalls were designed to withstand.59 But on September 21, 2005, Michael Grunwald with the Washington Post cited computer models and eyes-on-the-ground evidence from scientists and engineers at LSU Hurricane Center. They concluded that storm surge had not come even close to flowing over the tops of the floodwalls along the 17th Street and London Avenue Canals.60
Former senator J. Bennett Johnston (D-LA), who was influential in pushing the Army Corps to build floodwalls along the London Avenue Canal,61 was surprised: “It shouldn’t have broken.”62
When Johnston provided his comment to Grunwald, he recalled numerous briefings from Army Corps officials about the danger of a hurricane overtopping the New Orleans levees. But he said that he never envisioned wholesale breaching: “This came as a surprise.”63
The implications of this report were dire for the Army Corps. It could mean that improper design caused the failures of these levees. Right after Grunwald’s above-the-fold story in the Washington Post, Governor Blanco arranged a meeting with LSU Hurricane Center experts and with Johnny Bradberry, Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development. The group selected a tousle-haired professor from South Africa, deputy director of LSU Hurricane Center Ivor van Heerden, to lead an investigation of the levee breaks. It was called Team Louisiana, and van Heerden was provided a budget of $130,000.64 The McKnight Foundation also provided $250,000.65
Dr. van Heerden might be the first person to have stated publicly that the Army Corps was not being honest with the public. The outspoken deputy director claimed that, for New Orleans, the 2005 storm was a “decidedly mild” hurricane. “Call it a blame game if you must,” Dr. van Heerden said, “but some of us were determined to find out exactly what happened and to demand justice from the responsible parties.”66
Van Heerden did not support the Army Corps’ statements to the public that the hurricane had been a monster storm that was just too huge to hold back. But his early statements were educated guesses, not investigative conclusions. At this early stage, it was impossible, even for the experts, to wrap their heads around so large a disaster.
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I drank up these news stories at night on my desktop while Steve worked on his laptop, holding his company together, and Stanford studied. I was reading, reading, reading about the 2005 flood. This odd ritual went on for a month. Every day was pretty much the same except for one memorable interruption: Hurricane Rita.
The September storm formed in the Gulf of Mexico only a few weeks after the August storm, making it the first time on record that two hurricanes reached Category 5 status in the Gulf of Mexico in one season. Initially, it was headed toward west Louisiana where we—and thousands of others—had evacuated to. Grandma Rose was moved to safety several days before the storm arrived. But at the Drury Inn, the mood was calm among the evacuees, due perhaps to the realization that, in New Orleans, the most harm done was due to water that flowed through the breached levees. At the Drury Inn, we had the protection of steel-reinforced concrete far from water or levees.
On Wednesday (September 21) in the neighboring State of Texas, the mayor of Houston made an official call to residents to flee, embellishing his pleas by adding, “Don’t follow the example of New Orleans and think someone’s going to come get you.”67 But Houston experienced an evacuation that was rife with gridlock, emergencies, and empty gas stations. A subsequent Houston Chronicle article reported that people would have been better off staying home. The evacuation contributed directly to sixty deaths, twenty-four of which occurred when a bus, carrying nursing home residents, caught fire and exploded on I-45 near Dallas.68
Stanford’s school was closed the day before Rita’s arrival to allow for preparations. We took advantage of the day off to attend to an important milestone in a young man’s life: getting his learner’s permit to drive a car. During the paper shuffling and processing at the Department of Motor Vehicles, all the talk around us was about the impending storm. NOAA had just declared it one of the strongest storms on record for the Atlantic Basin, with peak sustained winds at 175 miles per hour. On the night of September 24, 2005, Rita made landfall on the Texas-Louisiana border as a Category 3 storm with wind speeds of 120 miles per hour.
Hurricane Rita’s worst damage was the southwestern area of Louisiana where storm surge topped agricultural levees and flooded low-lying coastal parishes.69 Rita drowned thousands of cows and dispersed others ten miles inland or more with only brackish water to drink. In New Orleans, the Industrial Canal breached again and flooded the Lower Ninth Ward for the second time in a month.
Our next day in Lafayette was unlike our bewildering days after the New Orleans flood. It was just a day of heavy rain with nothing to do because businesses and restaurants were ordered closed.
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In Washington, DC, on September 28, the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development hosted a hearing associated with the August 2005 flood.70 Members of Congress—who were responsible for how much aid the people of Greater New Orleans would receive—needed accurate information. This may well have been the single most important hearing for the people of New Orleans’ welfare.
Anu Mittal, Director of Natural Resources and Environment, testified on why the levees were still not complete when storm surge arrived. She read from a script, which she later destroyed and which bore little resemblance to the General Accounting Office (GAO) report she had submitted that day. Here is a transcript of a key excerpt:
After the (levee) project was authorized in 1965, the Corps started building the barrier plan…parts of the project faced significant opposition from local sponsors and they did not provide the rights of way that the corps needed to build the project on schedule. But most importantly there were serious concerns relating to environmental impacts of the control barriers that were supposed to be constructed…on the tidal passages to the lake. This ultimately resulted in a legal challenge and in 1977 the courts enjoined the corps from constructing the barrier complexes. [Emphasis added.]71
The effect of the testimony was lethal. The clear takeaway from Ms. Mittal’s verbal testimony was that, in the years leading up to the levee breaks, the Army Corps struggled to complete the flood protection on schedule and were hamstrung by local officials and environmentalists. In fact,