Katrina: After the Flood Read Online Free PDF Page A

operations center in Baton Rouge when she learned about the bridge closing. The governor was furious. “They had no authority to do what they did,” Blanco said. The Crescent City Connection fell under the jurisdiction of Louisiana’s Department of Transportation. Blocking pedestrian traffic from crossing the bridge would have been her call and a decision she would not have made.
    “Nothing needed to be shut down,” Blanco said. “It was totally unnecessary and a horrible reaction based on fear.”
    Ray Nagin might have been even angrier than Blanco—if he knew what was happening. On Thursday morning, Nagin was angry at Blanco, not anyone in Gretna. The governor had been promising buses for at least two days, yet now he was hearing reports of buses picking up people on the roadways before they even reached the city. Reports came as well of buses skipping past the city to pick up people in the suburbs. In protest, Nagin called for a “freedom march” across the Crescent City Connection. Tap out a press statement on your BlackBerry, he instructed Sally Forman, his communications director. “We said, ‘If you want to walk across the Crescent City Connection, there’s buses coming, you may be able to find some relief,’ ” the mayor wrote in a self-published memoir based on those few weeks when he was the most famous mayor in America. He also instructed his police chief to spread word amongofficers working near the Convention Center: the buses are just on the opposite side of the bridge.
    KEVIN FERNANDEZ, GORDON MCCRAW, and Lawrence Vaughn were the first Gretna officers assigned to the Tchoupitoulas entrance ramp. Their orders had been minimal. “You’re to stop people,” their sergeant, James Price, had told them, “and tell them they weren’t going to be allowed to cross.” On their own, the three decided not to allow through even pedestrians carrying an ID showing they lived on the West Bank. Each carried a department-issued Glock .45 and a pump-action shotgun. Sergeant Price had not instructed his men to use the shotguns, but then, he had not forbidden them from using them, either.
    The police felt for the people they couldn’t let pass. “I would have tried to get out, too,” Kevin Fernandez said. Instead they repeated the same few things. There was no food or water for them on the other side of the bridge. There was also no way out. “We kept explaining,” Officer Fernandez said, “that there were buses going into Orleans Parish to evacuate them, that if they would wait, they’d shortly be evacuated.” Lawrence Vaughn, who was black, suggested that people find a ride across the bridge. People were not permitted to walk to the West Bank, Vaughn said, “but I told them that they were welcome to use any other means of conveyance, a vehicle.”
    The three Gretna cops had been stopping people for around two hours when the mood, Officer Vaughn said, turned “a little more hostile.” Somewhere around eight hundred to a thousand people were gathered by the Tchoupitoulas on-ramp on a hideously hot day that again saw temperatures in the nineties. It fell on him, Vaughn decided, as the only African American, to calm people down.
    Instead, Vaughn’s race gave people a focus for their frustrations. People in the crowd called Vaughn an Uncle Tom. He was a traitor. A black man holding a child around two years old was particularly cruel. Why was he doing the white man’s business, he asked Vaughn, when so many of his own were in need? “Where are we supposed to go?” the man with the small child pleaded. Sit tight, Officer McCraw advised people. Thebuses were on their way. Others in the crowd yelled that they’d heard the opposite from NOPD.
    The heckler handed off his child. As Vaughn told it, “The one doing all the talking says, ‘We’ll bum-rush them two white boys and jump this nigger here—we can get across this bridge.’ ” At that point, Vaughn had worn a badge for more than twenty years,