Meanwhile, Nagin was still being an asshole, and Blanco was definitely a lightweight. She had approved a plan to use school buses and other buses to move people out of the area, but had refused to sign an order allowing non-livery or non-commercial licensed drivers to drive them! John had overridden that immediately, and sent out the word. If you can drive heavy equipment, load up with refugees and head north. They would sort them out when they got somewhere. Some guys were even loading people onto flatbed trucks and taking them north. The roads were clogged and traffic was moving at a snail's pace, but it was moving, and the farther they got, the safer they would be.
Sunday is normally a quiet day at the White House, just like it is everywhere else. Aside from my morning Daily Presidential Brief, I am able to mostly relax, watch some television, read a book, or spend a few hours in my personal study just reviewing things. Marilyn can head out to church, maybe with the kids if they are around (I almost never go, since I'm not Catholic, and when I show up, I have to show up with the entire zoo. Incredibly disruptive!) Otherwise, we just get to do the normal things. Not so Sunday the 28th.
Sunday morning, I woke up to find that our worst fears were coming true. I knew what was coming, but for the life of me couldn't remember just how bad it was going to get. Overnight the storm had strengthened dramatically, and was now up to a Category Five. The news was full of dire warnings and predictions, and the Weather Channel was giving minute by minute updates. The mandatory evacuation order I had issued and the other precautionary measures were major topics on the Sunday news shows. Opinion seemed evenly split, with half the pundits thinking I wasn't doing enough, and the other half replying that I had gone off the deep end and this thing would be a fizzle. I don't recall any of them, however, volunteering to head south and report from the front lines.
I gave John and Mike and General Myers carte blanche to do what needed to be done. It was obvious now that any strategy to simply ride it out would be hopeless. Ray Nagin was finally figuring out there was a problem, and was screaming for immediate assistance. He wanted fleets of helicopters to lift everybody out. We ignored him.
Even at this late a date, with disaster quite literally looming over the horizon, some small town mayors and tourist boards wanted people to stick around. They would lose money from vacation cancellations and contracts would be broken, that sort of thing. They couldn't quite grasp the concept that a reservation is no good when the motel is under water!
There was nothing more I could do at this point. I had already rushed as much aid to the area as I could scrape up. I was as much a spectator as anybody else. I just watched the news and tried, failingly, to relax. It was out of my hands. By every schedule, Monday was going to be the big day.
Monday was the big day, all right! The storm made landfall before I even woke up, but since New Orleans is actually up the river about a hundred miles, it didn't hit there until about breakfast time. I called down to the Shreveport Command Center about 8:30 and got Mike Brown on the line. He sounded tired but functional. "Mike, what's up?"
"The storm has made landfall south of New Orleans. It dropped down to a Category Three before it landed, thank God! We expect it to hit New Orleans around lunchtime. Everybody is lying low right now. Rescue and evacuation operations are shut down. If you haven't gotten out yet, you won't."
"How bad is that going to be?"
"Sir, I just don't know. Ray Nagin was sending thousands of people to his refugee centers, and we got most of them onto buses and trucks, but that's done now. They ran into the night, but it's just too dangerous now. There's probably still five thousand people at the Superdome, and I don't know how many others in the city. We had soldiers breaking down doors and hauling people out and throwing them on buses, and they still wanted to ride it out."
"Jesus!", I replied.
"It's worse than that, sir. In one case some soldiers knocked on the door of a house and were shot at from inside. They backed up, but a minute later the house exploded. It turned out to be a meth lab. Elsewhere, there has been some looting. The local cops are even robbing places."
"Oh, hell! Where's John?"
"He's sacked out on a cot in another room. He and I have been running in shifts."
It sounded like they knew what they were doing, and they were on the scene. "There's probably not much we can do now until this thing blows over. Have John call me when he wakes up, but leave it at that. You get some rest, too."
"Yes, sir."
I hung up. I was still the President of the entire country, not just the Gulf Coast, so I couldn't simply sit around and listen to the news. I had two budget meetings, a Pentagon briefing, a Congressional lunch, and three photo ops. I followed the events as best I could. Shortly after lunch, Frank stuck his head into a budget meeting and whispered to me, "The levees have begun to fail."
I wasn't surprised, not at all. "Frank, remember that Army Corps of Engineers fellow who swore up and down the levees wouldn't fail."
"Yes, sir."
"Do me a favor. Give him a call and ask him why his letter of resignation isn't on my desk yet, and then ask who his number two is over there. Heads are going to roll, and we might as well start now."
"Yes, sir." Frank nodded in understanding. He knew by now I had remarkably short shrift with that sort of thing, and he also knew that as Chief of Staff he had to be my hammer at times. I expected accountability. I would back you to the hilt, but the job damn well better be done.
Throughout the day the reports of widespread and massive destruction poured in, from official reports and from the television news. Katrina was going into the history books. Had I done enough? I doubted it. I suspected bodies were going to be piled up like cordwood by the time everything was finished. The damage? Beyond anything this nation had ever seen! I told Frank we would be flying down as soon as the weather allowed.
All day Tuesday the extent of the destruction became known. The southern half of three states was thoroughly trashed. We had about 5,000 refugees and soldiers trapped at the Superdome, and another 5,000 spread around the other shelters. The levees had been breached at dozens of different spots, and most of New Orleans was under water. All the surrounding parishes and counties were destroyed. There was no power, no phones, no television, no running water, no sewer systems, no roads – no nothing! I told Marilyn that if it was us, we'd be sitting on the roof of our house and sharpening our knives, wondering who was going to take the first bite out of whom.
The weather finally allowed us to go down early Wednesday morning. Amusingly, my regular airplane, a 747 variant, was too big to land at Shreveport's airport. John's regular ride as Air Force Two was a 757, and it was sufficiently smaller that it could land there. I could either maintain my august dignity and take the 747 to a different airport and fly something smaller to Shreveport, or take a backup 757 direct. Then I was told that Barksdale Air Force Base was across the river from Shreveport, and any runway capable of handling a B-52 could handle Air Force One, so we took my regular 747 there and hop a chopper to Shreveport. We left long before the sun was up, and got into Shreveport at 6:00 AM local time. John and Mike met me at the airport, and we went first to the disaster headquarters, where we met the professionals - FEMA and the military - and the politicians. Governor Blanco and her entourage were there, overwhelmed but trying, and Nagin, with his own entourage, complaining that we weren't running fleets of helicopters into the city and bitching at full volume about how it was everybody's fault but his. Also present were a bunch of reporters, there to capture this as a photo op.