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

operated another two in Jackson, Mississippi, 180 miles due north of New Orleans.) On Wednesday, with barely more than the clothes on his back, McDonald flew from Atlanta to Baton Rouge. “Fortunately,” he said, “I took four pairs of underwear.”
    Finding a hotel room in Baton Rouge was impossible. For those first few days he was in town, McDonald couch-surfed. Even when providence delivered a house in Baton Rouge to use indefinitely, the well-connected bank president continued to live like a much younger version of himself. This house that in normal times might comfortably have slept five or six more resembled a youth hostel during the summer high season. Several people from the bank, including his son Todd, took up more or less full-time residence there. And what was he supposed to do when someone such as Ronnie Burns, an old family friend who also sat on the Liberty board of directors, called to say he needed to be in Baton Rouge for a few nights? “People were sleeping on floor space wherever they could find it,” Burns reported. “There must’ve been liketwenty people staying there.” At least McDonald usually managed to keep a bedroom for himself.
    EVERYONE CALLED IT THE “Southern branch,” this Liberty outpost in Baton Rouge across the street from Southern University, a historically black college that sits along the banks of the Mississippi. The branch wasn’t much to look at—a tan-brick building with a corrugated-tin roof damaged in one corner. McDonald even had considered tearing it down and rebuilding something nicer. But this functional facility had a set of back offices that would serve as a temporary command center. Long before Katrina, McDonald had thought to install extra T1 lines and store extra phones and other backup equipment on-site. For the foreseeable future, this modest-size branch housing a single ATM machine would serve as headquarters for a bank with $350 million in assets and thirty-five thousand customers.
    McDonald could list a hundred things he needed to do to save Liberty, and then another hundred things after that. But nothing preoccupied his attention like his lack of a centralized computer. Tuesday came and went and still the disaster backup firm had not received a backup tape. No package arrived on Wednesday or Thursday, either. Liberty owned two mainframe computers. Yet one was underwater and the other was useless in a city without electricity. Until the computer tapes showed up in Philadelphia, no interbank networks such as STAR or Plus could monitor how much money a Liberty customer had in his or her account.
    The satellite imagery the cable networks broadcast in the hours before Katrina made landfall showed a giant white pinwheel of angry clouds stretching some five hundred miles across. That was McDonald’s mistake; he had not counted on the storm’s vastness. Airports across the Southwest were affected by Katrina and packages were stacking up in Memphis, where FedEx had its main hub. Both packages McDonald had sent for overnight delivery were being stored somewhere on the grounds of FedEx’s sprawling facility. McDonald spent upwards of $15,000 to charter a plane to ferry someone first to Memphis and then to Philadelphia, once he had located one of the missing tapes.
    Yet that wasn’t enough. On Friday, McDonald’s IT chief broke the bad news: the backup firm needed more from the bank before Liberty could be back on the interbank network. Worse, what was needed was inside the bank’s New Orleans headquarters. McDonald could only laugh over the tens of thousands of dollars he had paid to the recovery company about the years. “It was that or cry,” he said. Did a customer who had temporarily relocated to Tallahassee, Florida, have the money to cover the $300 she was requesting from an ATM? Who could say until the bank was back on the interbank network.
    Russell Labbe didn’t flinch when McDonald asked him to go into New Orleans and pick up what they needed. “I