Katrina: After the Flood by Gary Rivlin Read Free Book Online

excess rain and dump it into Lake Pontchartrain via one of three major canals that the Corps of Engineers had rebuilt in the 1970s. There were major breaches in two of these three canals, the Seventeenth Street and London AvenueCanals, and more flooding because a section of a levee along the third, the Orleans Avenue Canal, had never been completed. The brackish waters of Lake Pontchartrain, the country’s second-largest saltwater lake, flowed into Lakeview, a prosperous white enclave on one side of City Park, and Gentilly, a mostly black middle- and working-class community on the other. There were dozens more breaches in the New Orleans flood-protection system. That proved fatal in a city that geographically resembled nothing so much as a giant bowl that sits 50 percent below sea level. By the time the lake and the city reached equilibrium, 80 percent of the city was covered in water.
    Television couldn’t get enough of the images of devastation and despair once its producers learned of the flooding late Monday or early Tuesday morning. Sitting in Atlanta, Alden McDonald remembers seeing those first images out of New Orleans—of people stranded on rooftops and on elevated highways and on small strips of high ground, of entire neighborhoods underwater. No one was talking about New Orleans East, but the longer McDonald watched, the more certain he felt he was doomed. He had loaned tens of millions of dollars out to homeowners and entrepreneurs in the East, and now their properties were probably lying under four to six feet of water, unless it was under eight to ten feet. “The only thing I could think of is, All of these people lost their real estate, which I had as collateral,” McDonald said. He began tallying up what else had probably been destroyed, starting with the bank’s paper files. Most of the bank’s most essential documents—the deeds for houses, the titles for cars—were still at the old headquarters and would be underwater. Sitting in his friend’s home, he wondered if his bank’s days as an independent institution were over. “I’m wiped out,” McDonald told himself.
    McDonald could have called a hundred people to commiserate. On his BlackBerry he had the private numbers of fellow bank presidents and a long list of elected officials. He had close friends he had known since childhood. Yet he kept redialing Russell Labbe, a Liberty employee whose tenure dated back to when McDonald’s office was a small room with cheap paneling in a trailer. Labbe, who grew up on the edge of a bayou, had been piloting boats since he was a child. He had also worked as a general contractor prior to taking a job as a kind of Mr.Fixit, jack-of-all-trades, at Liberty in the 1970s. Labbe had celebrated his seventieth birthday shortly before Katrina, but he was a sturdy man who stood six feet two inches tall.
    “He was calling me every hour,” Labbe said of McDonald. In McDonald’s memory “it was probably more like every half hour.” Sometimes McDonald was phoning to talk through strategies for getting into the city. Other times it was to ask Labbe what he might have heard about specific neighborhoods since they had last spoken. Mainly it felt good, McDonald acknowledged, to talk solutions rather than to stare helplessly at the television. They spoke countless more times over the coming weeks, especially while water still covered much of the city. “I must have taken fifteen boat trips in,” Labbe said. “It was always something. Something that had to be done right away. Because that’s Alden—if he needs it, he needs it now.”
    McDonald was eager to get back to New Orleans. If not the city itself, then at least Baton Rouge, which was seventy miles to the northwest and a lot closer than Atlanta to his drowned-out life. If anything were to happen to their New Orleans operations, the bank’s doomsday plan called for key bank personnel to rendezvous in Baton Rouge, where the bank operated three branches. (They