Katrina: After the Flood Read Online Free PDF

including a stint in the military police in the US Army. “There was too many of them against the three of us,” he said. Scared, he pointed his shotgun over the water “and fired off a round to get their attention.”
    “You Uncle Tom,” the man who had been doing most of the talking said.
    “Yessir.”
    “You stupid fucking nigger.”
    “Yessir.”
    “I’m going to whup your fool ass.”
    “Yessir. But you’re still not crossing the bridge.”
    “THE THING THAT DISAPPOINTED us a great deal were the canceled flights,” Kathleen Blanco told CNN a few days after Katrina. Continental Airlines had heroically continued to fly people out of New Orleans through 3:30 p.m. on Sunday, but Delta discontinued its passenger air service out of New Orleans at just after midnight on Saturday. “A lot of people got stranded like that,” Blanco said. It fell to the city’s hotels to care for those who couldn’t get out of New Orleans ahead of the storm.
    Plenty of lodgings booted lingering guests on Monday or Tuesday, pointing the way to the Superdome or the Convention Center before shuttering their doors. The staff of the Hotel Monteleone, in contrast, acted valiantly in those first days after the storm. This stately building in the heart of the French Quarter housed and fed around five hundred people—a group that included a mix of tourists and locals seeking refuge. By Thursday, though, the hotel was running out of water and food and also the fuel needed to operate its generator. Here are some maps, management told people. Go to the Convention Center. There’ll be buses for you there.
    Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky of San Francisco wereamong those who had gotten stuck at the Monteleone. They were in New Orleans for a conference of EMS (emergency medical services) workers, of all things, and were among those unable to catch a flight out of town ahead of Katrina. Now they were part of a group of around two hundred, the majority tourists, on the streets of New Orleans, left to fend for themselves.
    The group ran into National Guardsmen a few streets from the Monteleone. They were no longer letting people inside the Convention Center, the soldiers told them, but didn’t have an answer when people asked where they should go. “The guards told us that this was our problem—and, no, they didn’t have extra water to give us,” Bradshaw and Slonsky wrote in an article about their experience published in the Socialist Worker eleven days after Katrina. A few blocks later, they came across the impromptu command center the New Orleans police had set up in front of Harrah’s. No one there could tell them where they were supposed to go, so as a group, they decided they would camp out across the street from Harrah’s. By that time, their group numbered around three hundred. Maybe their size would make them impossible to ignore.
    Their gambit worked—after a fashion. A police commander crossed the street to talk with them. Walk across the bridge, he advised. “I swear to you that the buses are there,” he supposedly told them.
    With “great excitement and hope,” Bradshaw and Slonsky wrote, they headed toward the bridge. They passed by the Convention Center, where their determination to find a way out of New Orleans must have been infectious. “Quickly our numbers doubled and doubled again,” the couple wrote. “Babies in strollers now joined us, as did people using crutches, elderly clasping walkers, and other people in wheelchairs.” A torrential downpour drenched the lot of them, but the group, now a majority black, kept walking.
    Their group made it onto the highway but were stopped before they reached the bridge by a barricade of police cruisers and “armed sheriffs,” according to Bradshaw and Slonsky. The deputies “began firing their weapons over our heads.” Most of their group ran, but Bradshaw and Slonsky, among others, tried talking to the deputies. “They responded that the West Bank was not