The Great Deluge — Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans
and the Gulf Coast
By Douglas Brinkley
New York: William Morrow/Harper Collins, 2006
716 pp., $29.95.
Breach of Faith — Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death
of a Great American City
By Jed Horne
New York: Random House, 2006
412 pp. $25.95.
The Storm — What Went Wrong and Why During Hurricane Katrina — The Inside Story from One Louisiana Scientist
By Ivor van Heerden and Mike Bryan
New York: Viking, 2006
308 pp. $25.95.
As the summer winds down, 2006 appears to be a less severe hurricane season than 2005 when the National Weather Service ran out of alphabetical names for these monster storms and then had to resort to Greek letters. Nevertheless, weather forecasters believe the United States has entered a period of increased hurricane activity and severity, even though there is strong disagreement as to whether such an increase is a result of a cyclical phenomenon or is a consequence of global warming.
Three Hurricane Katrina books recently hit bookstores, and they provide very different perspectives — not about what happened, but on why and who was responsible for the catastrophic effects of Katrina. All of them, in one way or another, derive lessons as to what should be done to prevent future hurricane disasters.
Douglas Brinkley’s The Great Deluge is the longest of the three books and was the first to appear, although it covers only the seven-day period between Saturday, Aug. 27, two days before Katrina hit, through Saturday, Sept. 3 when the worst of the immediate tragedy had been stabilized. Brinkley is not only an able historian, nominated by his mentor, Stephen Ambrose, as “the best historian of his generation,” but is also a local and a professor of history at Tulane University. He focuses on the devastation of the 90,000 square mile region of the Gulf Coast from New Orleans eastward along Mississippi’s entire shredded coastline. Relying on over 300 interviews, he tells the stories of the heroes, fools and knaves of Katrina’s wrath — including state and national political leaders and FEMA officials, singly out those who rose to the occasion from those who did not.
You are never in doubt about what Brinkley thinks of any of the cast of his characters — his deft prose instructs you about how you should think of each of the major actors in this riveting drama — as if you were a student in his class. Brinkley’s heroes are mostly the little people who stepped into the breach left by the hesitations, missteps and incompetence of many of the people who were the designated leaders. Thus, Brinkley canonizes the bravery and skill of Jimmy Duckworth, who ran the Coast Guard boat and helicopter rescue operations, “Mama D,” an activist who rescued, fed and housed hundreds of inner city residents from New Orleans’ Seventh Ward (“I’ve been livin’ in the swamp for 61 years; we do hurricanes”) and Sara Roberts of Lake Charles who helped launch the Cajun Navy, a flotilla of volunteers who trailered well-outfitted boats into the city and ultimately rescued close to 4,000 people after realizing that FEMA and the National Guard were not going to show up.
Brinkley turns his wrath not just on the Micheals Brown and Chertoff, very easy targets, but also upon New Orleans mayor, Ray Nagin. Every description of Nagin drips with contempt. Nagin is portrayed as being more concerned with his safety and personal grooming than the plight of the helpless citizenry in the Superdome. Meanwhile, Brinkley gives high marks to Lieutenant Governor, Mitch Landrieu, who was running for Mayor against Nagin while Brinkley was writing. Landrieu lost. One of the problems of instant history is that history needs, in the end, to be reflective to give the reader confidence in the narrative. Brinkley aims for history but produces journalism. Although his book is a good read, the author’s credibility is undermined by taking such an obvious side in a political contest. And, history, we should remember, is written by the winners.
Jed Horne’s book, Breach of Faith, does the reverse — it aspires to be good journalism, but will be read and remembered as history. Horne is the longtime, Pulitzer-prize winning City Editor of New Orleans’ Times Picayune (and my college roommate). Like Brinkley, Horne also interviews over 300 people, including many of the same official actors and like Brinkley finds heroes among the knaves. Interestingly Nagin is treated in a more nuanced fashion by Horne, certainly not as a hero who rose to the occasion, but not the disinterested, self-interested and feckless creature portrayed by Brinkley.
Horne is at his finest, however, in uncovering the perfidy of the White House machinations aimed at the Governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Blanco, a Democrat, as the catastrophic failure of the federal response began to become appallingly clear to the nation. In an uncharacteristic lapse of judgment that will haunt the White House for the rest of President Bush’s term, Karl Rove allowed photographers into Bush’s private cabin aboard Air Force One, as they circled over New Orleans on Aug. 31, two days after Katrina. The photo op was meant to show a concerned president, but instead the image of Bush in the public mind epitomized the federal response — the president seated at the window of his plane in serene Olympian isolation, disconnected from the reality of what was happening on the ground. When Rove understood the dimensions of the national reaction, the White House media machine immediately went to work. They released statements saying it was not the time to “play the blame game,” but then gave background interviews from unnamed White House sources pinning responsibility for the slow response on Blanco for failing to “federalize” the Louisiana National Guard. Although Blanco was savaged by the media at the time for resisting the White House offer, Horne views her as shrewdly sensing a trap, which had she swallowed the bait, would lay the blame for the failed federal response at her doorstep without producing any more troops or additional help at ground zero.
Another hero of Horne’s is a highly opinionated, outspoken scientist, Ivor van Heerdon, of Louisiana State University’s Hurricane Center. Horne traces the public relations battle between van Heerden and the Army Corps of Engineers in the flood’s aftermath as three different official commissions began studying how the flood occurred. Van Heerden is a wetland ecologist who had, for over a decade, predicted with eerie precision the dimensions of the catastrophe that played out throughout the city. When van Heerden then tried to unravel the precise reasons for the flooding — overtopping vs. breaching in the levees, he was censured as offering engineering opinions beyond his area of expertise. Horne’s description of how the scientific investigations were politicized, such as when van Heerden is told by his LSU superiors that he is not authorized to speak publicly about his understanding of events so as not to jeopardize federal funding for the university, are discouraging until the truth finally outlasts the political spinning. Horne’s account of the confrontation between van Heerden and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers made me want to know more, so I got van Heerden’s book (actually, Amazon.com told me that people who bought Horne’s book also bought van Heerden’s and I hit the button).
Ivor van Heerden’s book, The Storm, is the most depressing of the three Katrina books to read. Unlike the other two, there are no plucky American can-do heroes who rise above the muck and floodwater of the Gulf Coast to save lives. Instead, we learn of just how long van Heerden and his scientific colleagues in Louisiana have been predicting this tragedy — decades and decades of repeated warnings, failed initiatives, and winks and nods between politicians and the oil and gas companies that allowed thousands of square miles of flood-buffering wetlands to be drained to make exploration and extraction easier and cheaper. To add insult to injury, in the late 1960s, the Army Corps cut the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO or `Mister Go’) channel through fresh water swamps to save barges 60 miles of river navigation before entering the Gulf of Mexico. As van Heerden and his computer modeling experts at LSU predicted, the Army Corps had actually built a storm surge delivery channel for any major hurricane off the Gulf that was aimed directly at the heart of the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. The Army Corps compounds this huge mistake by design flaws in its levee construction and oversight in order to save a few tens of millions of dollars. The combination of these errors caused catastrophic failures and the immense loss of life and billions of dollars of property that will never be replaced or mitigated.
A year after Katrina, a few more conclusions are beginning to come into focus. New Orleans is not being rebuilt in any way that will resemble its former size, shape or style in our lifetimes, if ever. New Orleans’ moment to pluck at the nation’s heart and purse strings has come and gone. This is surely a tragedy for thousands of New Orleanians, but we have, alas, moved on. Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, hold more fear and hope than the devastated neighborhoods of Treme, Gentilly and the Lower Ninth Ward.
The beginning of the end of this story, as described in both Horne’s and van Heerden’s narratives, may well have been in November 2005 when the Louisiana congressional delegation under the leadership of Mary Landrieu compiled their rebuilding budget and sent it to Washington with great fanfare. They asked for $250 billion; Mississippi, under the more shrewd and well connected Haley Barbour asked for $29 billion. At that moment, the federal heart hardened as the easy corruptions of the Big Easy seemed too deep ever to fill the breach. Their moment was lost. The diaspora that had become a new way of life, perhaps even a better way of life, for hundreds of thousands of the displaced, had become their new reality.