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

knew this had to happen or we had no bank,” Labbe said. Discretion dictated they wait for the authorities to empty New Orleans of most of those trapped there. On Saturday, Labbe decided he would head into the city early Sunday morning. He would bring a gun, he said, because “you’d be crazy to go into that scene without one. When you have a hurricane like this, they’ll steal your boat. They’ll steal your truck. People will shoot you.”
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    I. The Inner Harbor Navigation Canal, as the Industrial Canal is formally known, was built in the 1920s as a shortcut between Lake Pontchartrain, the enormous body of water lying just north of New Orleans, and the Mississippi River.

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    AIR FORCE ONE
    Sally Forman was asleep when her BlackBerry rang for the first time in several days. It was 5:30 a.m. on the Friday after Katrina. Forman, who was Mayor Ray Nagin’s communications director, was lying on a mattress on the floor of the Hyatt, across the street from City Hall. She had been dreaming that she was drowning when the ringing phone woke her up. Her husband, Ron, who would in a few months announce he was running for mayor against her boss, was lying next to her and still asleep. “Sally?” It was a woman’s voice. “This is Maggie Grant from the White House.”
    Instinctively, Forman jumped to turn on a light. Then she remembered the hotel had no electricity. “You’re the first call to come through on my BlackBerry,” she told the caller, her tongue thick and her mind fuzzy. She asked Grant to repeat her name and had the presence of mind to ask her title. Grant identified herself as director of intergovernmental affairs.
    “We understand that the mayor has not been saying very favorable things about the president for the last twenty-four hours,” Grant said.
    Of course. Forman’s boss’s rant was on the radio the day before. “It’s not personal. It’s been terrible.”
    “That’s exactly why I’m calling. The president realizes he may nothave gotten accurate information this week and wants to hear directly from the mayor.” On the fifth day of the still-unfolding disaster, George W. Bush was coming to New Orleans to see the devastation for himself. Could the mayor meet the president at the airport that afternoon?
    GEORGE BUSH WAS IN Crawford, Texas, nearing the end of a monthlong stay at his ranch, when Katrina slammed the Gulf Coast. The vice president, Dick Cheney, was fly-fishing and the president’s chief of staff, Andrew Card, was on vacation with his family in Maine. Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, had ordered every FEMA employee must be on the job, whether or not he or she had a planned vacation, but that sense of urgency was apparently not shared by his bosses.
    On Sunday—when the highways out of New Orleans were thick with people trying to escape the storm—Bush logged on to the daily videoconference FEMA initiates when preparing for a potential disaster. Normally, only state and local emergency response officials listen in, but this time the guest list included, in addition to the president, Michael Brown and also Brown’s boss, Michael Chertoff, head of the Department of Homeland Security. “I don’t have any good news,” Dr. Max Mayfield, the director of the National Hurricane Center, began. He compared Katrina to Hurricane Andrew, the 1992 colossus that destroyed or damaged more than 125,000 homes in southern Florida and killed at least twenty-six people. “Right now, this is a Category Five hurricane,” Mayfield said of Katrina, “very similar to Hurricane Andrew in the maximum intensity.” But the ominous difference, he added, was that “this hurricane is much larger than Andrew ever was.” The president spoke near the end of the call: “I want to assure the folks at the state level that we are fully prepared to not only help you during the storm, but we will move in whatever resources and assets we have at our disposal after the storm to