Katrina: After the Flood Read Online Free PDF Page B

going to become New Orleans, and there would be no Superdomes in their city,” the couple wrote.
    Bradshaw, Slonsky, and a small band of others set up camp on the roadway, not far from where they had been turned away. An elevated highway seemed safer than the streets. From their perch they watched others attempt to cross the bridge. Sometimes the police deterred would-be crossers with shouts. Other times they used gunfire to turn people around. Either way, no one was walking across that bridge.
    OLIVER THOMAS, PRESIDENT OF the New Orleans City Council, noticed the blockade after a long day in and out of the water on a rescue boat. (“I had sores on my feet for two months,” he said.) “Let’s talk basic human rights,” Thomas said. “You’ve got these people on the governor’s bridge—stopping Louisiana citizens from crossing the bridge? Old people, children, people peacefully walking through a route literally that’s the only way out of a city covered by water. By whose authority? And let’s talk jurisdictional issues. This is an outside force telling our people they can’t walk across the bridge? By what right?”

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    THE BANKER
    The plan was to evacuate vertically. That’s what the Uptown blue bloods did when a hurricane took aim at New Orleans, and so, too, would Alden J. McDonald Jr., president of the city’s largest black-owned bank. With Katrina bearing down on the region, McDonald had his assistant book a block of rooms at the Hyatt in the city’s central business district. That’s where the mayor would ride out the hurricane and where Entergy, the local electric and gas utility, was setting up its emergency center. The Hyatt, a thirty-two-story fortress made from steel and cement, was wrapped in fortified glass. Rising high above its next-door neighbor, the Superdome, just off Poydras Street, the hotel had its own generator and would be stocked with extra provisions. Theoretically, it promised its guests a safe berth above the chaos.
    McDonald woke up early in his home on that last Sunday in August 2005. He had slept maybe three or four hours. The National Hurricane Center categorizes every storm based mainly on the strength of its winds. When McDonald and his wife, Rhesa, had gone to bed on Saturday night, the center had rated Katrina a powerful Category 3. By early the next morning, the storm had been upgraded to Category 5. There is no Category 6.
    The sixty-one-year-old bank president drank his coffee and readied himself for his day while a radio blared dire warnings. A lifelong New Orleanian, McDonald knew hurricanes could be fickle brutes. They shift in direction without warning. Their winds pick up speed or deflate in strength depending on the warmth of the waters over which they pass, among other factors. But as of Sunday morning, the radio was reporting that Katrina was a Category 5 storm expected to hit the New Orleans region within the next twelve to twenty-four hours. Scientists warned its winds could top 175 miles per hour. The storm surge—a giant tidal wave, essentially—might reach twenty-five feet. This storm looked like the Big One that experts had been warning about for years.
    Home for McDonald was “out in the East”—more formally, New Orleans East, swampland that had decades earlier been drained and converted into a series of subdivisions housing a large portion of the city’s African-American middle class, along with a large share of its black elites. McDonald was the son of a waiter whose annual wages had never topped $15,000. McDonald now lived on a quarter acre in Lake Forest Estates, one of the pricier enclaves in this sprawling appendage to New Orleans whose ninety-six-thousand-plus residents represented around one-fifth of New Orleans’s population. His bank, Liberty Bank and Trust, had financed a sizable share of the homes and businesses in the East. Its headquarters were located in New Orleans East, as was its computer center and storage facility. The majority