This Isn’t Trump’s Katrina (Except When It Is)

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Hey, this is Kevin, the producer.

I'm sitting in an empty studio in an empty office here at the Watergate.

Precautions around the coronavirus have kept everyone at home, including the host of the ticket, Isaac Dover.

But I have Isaac on the line from his place in D.C.

Hey, Isaac.

Hi, Kevin.

Yeah, I got the jump on everyone else from working from home because I flew out to Detroit on Monday to cover a Joe Biden rally that turned out, it seems, to be the last rally that we will be seeing for a while.

I was in Cleveland by Tuesday expecting to go to a Bernie Sanders and a Joe Biden rally at separate rallies, and they got canceled.

And so

our

podcast was bringing you a lot of reports from the road, but it looks like we're not going to have much to report about from the road for a couple of weeks and maybe longer than that.

But I'm glad that I rushed out to those last couple of events because it looked like that was probably the Democratic race wrapping up.

And sure enough, because of what happened in the results on Tuesday and with the response to this pandemic, that may be where we are.

Wow.

It's incredible.

I mean, we've been covering the Democratic nomination race for months.

I mean, you've been out there for the better part of a year now.

More than a year.

Yeah.

And it was basically settled on Tuesday, but it is far from everyone's mind this week.

Yeah, this is a week that would have otherwise been consumed politically by does Bernie Sanders drop out now?

What does a possible deal look like between Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden?

How does Joe Biden begin pivoting to the general election?

All those sorts of things.

But it is so far from anybody's minds for very good reason that it's hard to even conceive of the fact that this was a major week in the Democratic primary race, but it was.

Yeah.

So, in the midst of everything being canceled and everyone staying at home, we're going to try and figure out how to do the show each week.

We've done a lot of episodes in offices in Congress or alongside candidates.

Like Isaac said, that's obviously going to be much more difficult.

But we're still going to try and do the same kinds of interviews.

We just might have to use the phone a little bit more.

Yeah, and we're going to ask everybody to bear with us a little bit.

We are going to practice social distancing via podcast here and keep things safe, make sure that we are still getting into all these important issues, whether it is the Democratic primary race, what it looks like into the general election, what the coronavirus response is.

And so we're going to be figuring this out as we go.

You and I are going to be figuring it out, Kevin.

Listeners, we hope that you will stay with us and figure it out with us as we go into what is truly unprecedented territory for the country and for the world at this point.

Yeah.

So that brings us to today's episode.

This week, the Atlantic actually launched another podcast that I've been helping produce.

And as it happens, that show is about the federal government inadequately responding to a disaster and that failure coming to define a presidency.

I'm talking, of course, about Hurricane Katrina.

The podcast is called Floodlines, and it's hosted by Atlantic staff writer Van Newkirk.

And Van, besides hosting this podcast, is a reporter who's done just great work on politics and public health for years.

And he, for much of the last year, has dug in on Katrina, which is a topic that he could not have thought last year when he started would have so much relevance as we think about the role of government and crisis and how government connects to crisis as it does now.

But here we are.

So through the magic of radio, I'm going to connect Isaac and Van in their respective homes in D.C.

where they're hunkered down.

And then right after that short conversation, we'll play the first episode of Floodlines.

So yes, everybody, look for Floodlines in your podcast player, and you'll be able to find the other seven episodes.

All of them are out now.

And again, let me just say thanks for sticking through it with us as we figure out how best to make the show through this crisis.

It's a scary moment.

It's a strange moment.

And we are going to do our best to try to unpack it for you.

But in the meantime, here's my conversation with Van, and then you'll hear the new episode of Floodlines.

Van, thanks for taking a few minutes to introduce this podcast series to us.

Thank you.

So Katrina was in 2005.

It's 2020.

It's 15 years.

What is it that got you digging into this story now?

Well,

when I was reporting actually in Puerto Rico, right after Hurricane Maria in 2017,

I started thinking about all the lessons I had learned and I was writing about that we were taking away from this, about the slow government response, about who was likely to be long-term affected by the storm in its aftermath.

And it really hit me that we had learned the rough outlines of all those lessons.

in 2005 and Hurricane Katrina.

And since then, I've been kind of almost, I've been almost obsessed with the idea of Katrina as a key for understanding

what disasters in America really say

and what race, class, what the structure of race and class in America is and does.

And well, let's take those two questions separately.

What do disasters in America really mean?

I think disasters in America, number one, they are rarely as natural natural as we would like them to be.

They are rarely completely acts of God.

We haven't had a whole lot of meteors or volcanoes come out of nowhere.

Lots of disasters tend to be floods, hurricanes, things that

are bad in themselves, but often take on another dimension after they reveal something wrong with our infrastructure.

after they flood low-lying areas of the city that are inhabited by poor or people of color.

Disasters tend to get really bad when they expose the underlying, ongoing, long-term violence against people on the margins.

And that was, I think, the main lesson for America, at least, of Katrina.

And race and class obviously is a big part of everything in America.

It was a big part of the story of what happened in New Orleans.

Every single person I talked to mentioned betrayal, and especially for black folks, especially for

poor folks, that betrayal manifested as

for them, it felt like racism.

It felt like classism.

It felt like all the same ways they had been denied things in their lives for all the doors that had been shut in their face before.

The federal government not acknowledging their suffering, not getting there fast enough, felt like the ultimate sort of solidification of a lingering paranoia in the mind.

And maybe they don't care about me.

And then this happens and that becomes confirmation.

They don't.

Yeah, I think to a lot of people, certainly before the storm, New Orleans was Mardi Gras Bides and Café Dumont Beignets, if you'd been there, maybe going on a voodoo tour, and really not understanding what the city was or who the people of New Orleans were.

Right.

Seeing the pride that people had in the lower ninth ward, seeing seeing people talk about the differences in the high schools and the sixth ward and the seventh ward, seeing

people like and Williams, who we followed, who lived in the Lafitte housing projects, seeing all the pride and community that goes so far beyond the gift stores in the French Quarter.

and really gives a sense of a city that is lived in, a city that where up until Katrina, it was the city that had the highest rate of people born there who were living there.

It's a city where roots go deep.

And we wanted to dig up some of those roots and talk to people about them.

You know, it's, of course, impossible for us, given how you and I are talking, given the moment that we are in here in this country now, looking at a

nationwide, a worldwide disaster response, to not

feel some level of connection or or vibration between what happened in Katrina and what's happening now.

Because so much of it is bound up in the government response, I think it's important to not make that comparison, a complete 100% comparison by any stretch of the imagination.

This is not Katrina over again.

But what do you see

as far as the connections?

between what happened in 2005 and what we're seeing unfurl before us now with corona yeah if i had one wish i would ban the punditry phrase of, you know, such and such as Katrina.

But I think you're right.

There are certainly parallels and lessons from this and any disaster, really, to the current moment, to coronavirus.

The thing that always comes to my mind now is

by the time of Katrina, it had been about 40 years since the last major hurricane had hit New Orleans.

Lots of people who were supposed to be vigilant had stopped being so vigilant, vigilant, didn't do some of the things to prepare themselves, to prepare the levies, to make sure the city was in tip-top shape for when the inevitable disaster finally came.

I think we're looking squarely at the same exact kind of scenario now, which is

we had a run where

Ebola wasn't all that bad in the U.S.

where the public health response worked, where swine flu was contained.

And I think we took that as a sign for some reason that we should go into a public health austerity that's where we should we could save money and I wrote an article two years ago that said that

slashing the public health fund slashing the CEQ's budget in the wake of those disasters would inevitably leave us in a situation where we were not prepared for the next big one and you know I think those two situations are directly comparable it's the sense of well you keep telling people not to touch the stove and they touch the stove and it's not burning them.

And so they start to think that it can't burn them.

And that's where it seems like we are now.

Yeah, I think that's where we are.

People, it seemed to be the last couple of days have finally

realized this is serious.

It may be too late to do some of the containment actions that we should have been doing.

I think you see lots of people now grappling with the reality that this is a serious situation and it's one

where

we're going to have to relearn a lot of lessons.

We're going to have to rebuild a lot of capacities that we should have already had.

And that's where we are.

Yeah, from a major American city going through this not really that long ago, 15 years is not that long for some of those lessons to have been learned, or if they were learned, forgotten by a lot of people.

It's hard to

think about what happened with Katrina and what's happening now without thinking about the role of the media.

You're a journalist.

I'm a journalist.

We're reporters.

We are members of the media.

And

this does help define what's going on.

When Katrina happened, it was pre-Twitter.

It was in a different kind of news cycle environment.

It was not,

even though it was really not that long ago, the situation has just changed so much about how things are reported, the speed with which they're reported.

What do you think the difference is that that makes here?

If there had been Twitter during Katrina, what would that have meant, do you think?

On the one hand, I'm tempted to say that lots of the places where the media was so

bad during Katrina, they were filling in gaps of information they just didn't have.

There were major problems in some stories in verification of certain events, in doing some follow-up reporting, and just double-checking sources.

And this is, you know, there's a paucity of good sources, of good information.

You make do with what you have.

So on the one hand, stuff like verifying whether the levies had breached, which took a long time for some media folks to do.

I don't think it would have taken so long in today's landscape.

However, I'm split on the other side of this, which is one of the main problems in the media during Katrina was misinformation.

It was amplifying bad stories that tended to make people, black people, look like violent, savage

people.

I don't know if that would be much better or if it could even be worse in today's landscape.

You know, I think we

see that

we have the same problem with amplifying misinformation that seems to only be accelerated in some cases by Twitter.

We see it happening now with coronavirus.

We see regularly stories and notions about the virus that are completely false now get purchased with the power of social media.

So I don't know.

I would like to

say we are better in the moment, that the technology is better for us, but I can't call it.

Well, we'll end it there, I guess, and let people try to make some of their own judgments based on the reporting that you have in this great podcast series.

We're going to play the first episode of Floodlines.

Van,

if there's one character that you think we should be watching out for as we listen, who would you say that is?

We talked about her a little bit, but I think it's Leigh-Anne Williams.

She was almost 14 when Katrina hit.

She was living in the Lafitte Project.

And she,

number one, is the most phenomenal storyteller you'll hear a lot of her story as you go through this and she begins talking about how on

her first day of school in this nice new high school getting new Jordans and getting their hair done and

she wasn't able to go back after two days because Katrina came

It's one of many stories that you will hear over the course of these episodes.

You should listen to them all, but start start with this one, episode one of Floodlines.

Finn, thanks for helping us get the sense of what is ahead in these really phenomenal episodes.

Thank you for doing what you do.

I've spent a lot of time recently thinking about a man I don't know much about.

I don't know what he looked like.

I don't know how old he was.

I don't know where he was born or where he died.

What I do know is his name,

Richard.

He was enslaved, and he was on Last Island in 1856.

Last Island, Île d'Anière.

Back then they spoke French in southern Louisiana, and that island was about as far south as it got.

Last Island was a resort, a place where everybody who was anybody went for the cool salt breeze.

The wealthy of America's slaveocracy would go there in the summer to have balls, parade down the promenade, relax.

But behind their leisure was a hand of slave power that ran everything.

I know a little bit more about the man who owned Richard.

Thomas Mill was a Frenchman.

He ran a sugar plantation out in the bayou.

Mill took his family to their mansion on Last Island that summer.

On August 9th, a Saturday night, they danced in a grand ball in the local hotel.

But on Sunday, they looked out into the waves and felt the bracing winds approach.

A storm was coming.

That night, The winds grew stronger.

The scions of Last Island panicked and packed themselves into a hotel.

But Richard was worried.

He tried to convince the master and his family to leave their mansion and take shelter in a stable, but they refused.

The storm's eye approached.

Waves got higher and higher.

The surge of water the storm pushed ahead of it raced to the island.

It hit like a tidal wave.

Through it all, Richard braved the storm in the stable.

His only companion that night was an old horse.

The next morning, the only building still standing on Last Island was that stable.

Richard and the old horse had made it.

Many other folks weren't so lucky.

About half of the people known to be there died.

Richard found his master's 18-year-old daughter bleeding from a head wound and delivered her to safety.

She was the only member of her family on Last Island to survive.

As far as we know, Richard was the only person they enslaved who survived.

Everything we know about Richard comes from a newspaper interview with the daughter he saved.

The story of Last Island became a sensation across America.

It was sensational in part because of who died.

In the 1850s, southern Louisiana had the highest concentration of millionaires in the country.

The Last Island hurricane had killed a lot of them.

The idea of doomed grand balls and final pageants of the plantation aristocracy, it was also tragic and romantic.

But I don't really care about that part.

I just can't stop thinking about Richard.

The Last Island Hurricane was a category 4 storm when it hit.

It's been called the first great storm in the recorded history of Louisiana.

It seems like every generation has one: 1893, 1915, 1947,

each with their stories and their myths, each with their richards.

The last big storm in New Orleans was Hurricane Betsy, 1965,

and then for 40 years,

it was quiet.

From the Atlantic, I'm Van Newkirk,

and this is Floodlines.

Part 1

Antediluvian

The summer of 2005 was like any other summer.

People all over the city of New Orleans were doing what they do.

Working, going to church, sitting on porches.

Kids were out of school and having fun.

And maybe nobody was having more fun than Leanne Williams.

Oh my God.

I was a daredevil.

A toneboy.

Leanne was 14 that summer.

She spent her days playing with her cousins on Dumaine Street in Tremay, the black neighborhood known for jazz and second lines.

They'll let us run in the street and play freely.

But every time a car come, I remember we'll say, car time, car time.

That means get out the way.

I'll call coming.

You can't play football, freeze egg, nothing.

You got to get out the way.

Second lines and parades were such a big part of life around Dumaine that it was how Leanne and her cousins played pretend.

We'll have the trumpet player, the trombone player, the snap drum player, the bass drum player.

And the tuba players will have sticks blowing.

And

My cousin's friend, he'll have a big wheel on his neck and he'll have it throwed over his shoulder because you know a tuba is heavy.

So that was pretty heavy for him to carry at that age.

And we'll sing and march on down the the street

leanne was also playing basketball that summer she was the only girl on the team and she was known for her lockdown defense they used to be mad get it off the team make her go sit out she all on me i'm like that's what you're supposed to do take the ball away from you

they used to be mad

leanne was a basketball fanatic But those days she had a little extra motivation.

I had this crusher on this boy named Fonzu Jones.

And Fonzo was the point guard.

Lord, I had the biggest crush on him.

That summer, Fonzo asked her out.

They were an item.

He'll walk me home every day.

We'll cut through Du Main Street and we get to the Clip On Bridge and the Clipon Bridge leads to the project, my house.

I stood on the corner in the front.

And he will walk me home every day.

Leanne lived in the Lafitte Projects, just around the way from the Tremay Community Center.

Her mom worked on Tulane's campus and her stepdad was a star musician in a city full of star musicians.

They had plans for Leanne.

The last school year she had worked hard to get good grades and she had just gotten into a fancy high school.

She was going to be starting in August.

My dad took me school shopping and I had my jordans that I wanted.

I had my hair in some long braids.

We call them Booty braids in New Orleans because it's so long.

I thought I was the stuff.

The first day of school was Thursday, August 25th, 2005.

Couldn't wait for my first day.

I was up at five o'clock, clothes laid out, trying to close on the day before in the mirror, looking, trying to see how I look for my first day of school.

I was just so happy.

Around the time Leanne got up, the 11th name tropical storm of the season was heading toward the coast of Florida.

It was small then, but strengthening.

I remember my science teacher, Mr.

Smith,

telling us to track the storm.

So I only was able to track it that Thursday and Friday because I didn't go to school after that.

We had to get prepared for Katrina.

News anchors and meteorologists first started calling the storm Katrina on August 24th.

A Wednesday.

That's when it gained the 39 mile an hour winds needed to become a tropical storm.

It came up from the south and east of Florida.

You are looking at Tropical Storm Katrina, and residents in South Florida are keeping a very close eye on the system.

It could become a hurricane before it moves in late tomorrow or early.

It became a weak hurricane for a couple hours.

Then it made landfall just north of Miami.

The hurricane came ashore with winds of 80 miles an hour.

It crossed over the southern tip of Florida Thursday night and Friday morning.

It's now a Category 2 hurricane making its way across the Gulf.

It weakened over land, but entered the warm Gulf of Mexico Mexico intact and Katrina is getting stronger storms gaining even more strength with winds of up to 115 miles per hour it was due to strengthen on Saturday New Orleans you are in the very big realm of possibility this is the big one as the mayor put it we're showing you now pictures the big one always has been a category five hurricane that would put so much water over the coast that it would overtop the levees.

That's Mark Schlefstein, an environmental reporter in New Orleans.

I'm known in the office as Darth Schlestein.

Why is that?

Because I'm always reporting on, you know, what kind of disaster can occur.

Mark was worried.

And Mark is a guy who covered the worst disasters for years.

He's not the type to get worried easy.

He was worried because of a prediction he'd made three years before.

In 2002, He and his reporting partner John McQuaid had written a series about the big one hitting New Orleans, following the same path as Katrina.

The stuff they predicted was alarming.

A hurricane would hit the city.

It would send record-breaking storm surges through the lake and the river.

Without wetlands to stop the surge, it would grow higher and higher.

All of the drainage and shipping channels around New Orleans would funnel that surge directly into the center of the city.

The levees would simply be too low to stop the water.

Mark and John predicted a city uninhabitable for at least four months, with up to 100,000 people dead.

But even their editors were kind of skeptical about the reporting.

One of my editors

actually said, well, this is just Morris Schlesteen's disaster porn.

And I said, well, you know,

Like real pornography, disaster porn is in the eye of the beholder, and there's 100,000 people who live in New Orleans who don't know that there are no plans to get them out in advance of a major hurricane.

Did you ever feel like you were...

I guess the phrase shouting to a hurricane is not a good one here, but...

A Cassandra.

Yeah, yeah.

I did.

When Mark first saw the projections for Katrina, All those visions of the city being destroyed came back to him.

He was in touch with Max Mayfield, the director of the National Hurricane Center.

Mark was trying to tell his editors how serious the storm was going to be, but it seemed like they just saw more of his disaster porn.

So it's four o'clock on Saturday in the newsroom and I'm at my desk and the editor and publisher are standing behind me while I am attempting to explain why it is important that we run a copy of a storm surge modeling map on the front page.

And some of those same things were coming up.

Well, you know, is this really going to happen?

I mean, you know, you're talking about the death of the city, blah, blah, blah, blah, and the phone rings.

And I pick it up and it's Max Mayfield.

And before I had a chance to say anything, he says, Mark, how high is your building?

What kind of winds can it withstand?

And I said, Max, what are you telling me?

He said, what do you think I'm telling you?

This is the big one.

It's coming right at you.

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New Orleans was built by levees and pumps, by holding and moving water to create dry land.

If you drive long enough in just about any direction, you'll wind up in water.

There's Lake Pontatrain to the north.

The Mississippi River curves from west to east around the bottom of the city like a smile.

The water is such a part of the geography of the city that people use it like directions.

Lake bound, riverbound, upriver, downriver.

And just downriver from Tremay is the 7th Ward.

That's where Fred Johnson was that weekend.

He was getting ready for a parade.

And I was oblivious because I was running around picking up different items.

And I was not in tune to the weather.

And every time I'm in and out the car, I'm listening to music I'm not listening to the news Fred's one of those smokey Robinson types smooth ageless wears lots of gold bracelets and earrings has no fear of the patterned shirt Fred Johnson is a lot of things

but most of all

Fred Johnson is a seventh ward booster you had the collectiveness of a village once you get them started on the old days we had all African-American teachers barrooms and grocery stores on the corner Who's was right across the street?

It'll just keep going.

They had authority and consent to bust my ass and send me home.

We standing on the corner and we smoking a cigarette.

And you know, we just blowing smoke, talking crap.

And I look up and I see Miss Melville.

Oh, shit.

I took off running.

Fred co-founded a group in the city called the Black Men of Labor, a social aid and pleasure club.

They raise money for good causes, mentor black youth, and they throw parades like you wouldn't believe.

Their second lives are famous.

So late that evening, when we said, okay, that's all we can do for the day, when we come out, the guy says, hey, man, we got to evacuate.

I'm saying, what you talking about?

They said, yeah, man, they got a storm coming and they calling for an evacuation.

And I'm like, oh shit, I'm not evacuating.

I'm tired.

I'm not getting on the road.

Fred wasn't listening to the news, but the people who were listening had heard nothing but confusion.

Mayor Ray Nagan dragged his feet on evacuation orders and then finally made the call just a day before the storm came.

Authorities failed to get buses to people.

leaving lots of poor people stranded.

Nagan declared the Superdome the shelter of last resort.

Hospitals and nursing homes couldn't get patients out.

Even with that, about 80% of the population managed to evacuate, which has never happened before.

But still, about 100,000 people were left in the city.

So what I did was I stayed.

I had worked, I guess, like 12 hours.

I was so tired, I was seeing double.

Alice Kraft Kearney was working as a nurse at Charity Hospital on Saturday.

She worked the night shift and didn't get off until Sunday morning.

Lots of hospital employees had already evacuated, so they were understaffed.

I was just literally exhausted because so many people had called off.

They said, I'm not coming to work.

I'm not going to work.

So, you know, so we had more patients.

And I mean, I was, I never stopped running.

Charity served lots of poor folks without insurance.

Alice had worked there for almost 20 years.

I just fell in love with it because the people looked like me who I served, and they had so many needs.

Now, there are a lot of things that Alice will not say directly, but she has a tell when she wants to say something that might be a little controversial.

She'll tell you what she will say.

Now, what I will say is

when I was there, my mission was to make sure they treated my people well.

Okay?

I made sure that when the doctors seemed seemed like they were a little callous, I said, look,

this person needs this, this, and this.

And I was their advocate, but I had great nurses before me who taught me.

After her Saturday night shift, the idea of evacuating at the last minute just didn't look great.

And so as I was driving here, the lines to get out of the city were crazy.

So

I went to my brother's home in the lower ninth ward.

His house was elevated.

He has a three-story historic home in the lower ninth ward.

So that's where I went.

The lower ninth ward is on the east side of the industrial canal, separated from the main area of New Orleans.

Way back in the day, the neighborhood was swampland.

There's old stories of escaped enslaved folks hiding out there.

But by the time Alice's folks were looking for a place, it was a thriving neighborhood.

The lower ninth ward was like,

I guess you could say, Mayberry for for me.

Her mother, Miss Hattie, still owned the pink house where she'd raised Alice and her six siblings.

Growing up, all of Alice's friends used to stop by for Miss Hattie's cooking.

They would come and they say, Miss Hattie, what you frying?

And so she said, oh, I'm just frying some cornbread.

You want some?

So they would have cornbread and syrup and you'd just see them lined up.

The pink house had flooded before during Hurricane Betsy, back when Alice was a kid.

Alice's own house was out in the east, which often flooded.

So that Sunday before Katrina, her brother's three-story house seemed like the safest place.

The highest part of New Orleans is near the river.

My brother lives near the river.

He lives in an area called Holy Cross.

So he has

some of the highest land

as far as elevation in the city.

One fascinating thing about New Orleans is that the Mississippi builds its own levees.

All the dirt piles up beside the river over time.

That means it's actually safest right beside the river because much of the rest of town actually sits below the water.

People call all that high ground the sliver by the river.

Sliver by the river.

That is the region of the city that's six feet or more above sea level, at least six feet above sea level.

Sandy Rosenthal moved to New Orleans 40 years ago.

I am originally from the Boston area of Massachusetts.

I still know how to park the car.

Sandy married a local.

They lived upriver from the French Quarter in a neighborhood that's wealthier and wider than the rest of the city, Uptown.

I taught fitness because I enjoyed it, not because I needed the money.

I played a lot of tennis.

I was

seeing girlfriends a lot for lunch.

I would say that's the typical uptown housewife girl that I was.

In New Orleans, you're always dealing with nuisance floods, water up to your car tires kind of stuff.

But Sandy wasn't too worried about flooding uptown.

There had not been a major hurricane in 40 years.

We knew we had levees.

Most people paid absolutely no attention to them.

If anything, the levees were hills that were sometimes fun to roll on.

We just assumed they would work.

When Sandy and her family heard Katrina was coming, they moved all their stuff upstairs to the second floor of the house and joined the long line of cars driving north.

The plan was to get out of the city for a little bit and wait in a hotel somewhere for it to blow over.

It'd be like a vacation.

We didn't have any transportation, so my mom was pretty scared, but we didn't have a car or anything to leave.

So, and she didn't want us to go to the super dome that was out.

Leanne Williams and her family didn't really have a way out of the city.

So they decided to do what they thought was the next best thing.

Take shelter in her mom's apartment in the Lafeet projects.

We in the project, the Bricks not gonna move.

They not moving for a hurricane.

So they all came by us.

Sunday afternoon, Leanne and her cousin Arielle were making the most of their time before the storm started.

They rode around the neighborhood on bikes and stopped by the wing spot on the corner.

They was giving out free chicken, just frying chicken and giving out free chicken.

And we went and got us some free chicken.

My mama, free chicken, and everything.

I guess they were trying to get rid of the food, you know, before the power goes out.

We rode up Dumain, we rode up Villa, we rode up Tremend, and the rain was coming down on us.

And we were getting soaking wet.

We were laughing, having fun.

Teenage girls having fun, riding the bikes.

It's United Radio Broadcasters of New Orleans, a service of WWL AM.

While everyone in the city waited for Katrina to pass, a lot of them tuned into the local radio station, WWL.

Keep your radio locked for continuously updated official information.

On the AM dial, the big 870 WWL.

If they were tuned in that weekend, they would have heard the voice of Garland Robinette.

Garland had been on the air for decades in New Orleans, mostly as an anchor on TV news.

He'd retired, though, years before.

But that Saturday before Katrina hit, he was filling in for a sick friend.

From the beginning, he had a bad feeling about the storm.

I came out of a coffee shop, and there was a big palm tree, and in the middle of it was...

green parrots.

Somebody had let a pet out and it had propagated like there are hundreds of them.

And every time you'd come out of the coffee shop, it'd be like you couldn't hear yourself think.

I walked out.

I looked up.

No parrots.

Walked to the end of the street, looked around.

No dogs, no cats, no birds.

On the radio, he found that the callers were just as nervous as he was.

And people start calling in, you know.

We're on the way out.

Don't see any birds.

Don't see anything.

On Sunday night, Katrina got closer and closer to New Orleans.

Garland and his team were broadcasting from a high-rise building not too far from the Superdome.

I think we were on the 8th or 9th floor.

with a gigantic window behind me overlooking the Superdome.

Just around the corner at the Hyatt Hotel, Fred Johnson and a bunch of his friends had decided to wait out the storm too.

It's something people always did in the city when hurricanes came.

If you couldn't get out, you went up.

So we end up, we on some 10th, 12th floor, whatever the case is.

They having a hurricane party.

I mean, they're drinking their asses off.

I'm like,

No, no, give me your dues.

The rain picked up late Sunday and never stopped.

And then those high-rise buildings in downtown New Orleans, the wind started getting dangerous.

The wind started hitting and it started howling a little bit.

That giant window behind Garland started rattling.

It sounded like...

It exploded.

And

engineers came in, caught me out real quick, took me down a hallway.

The station on each side was just destroyed.

Glass everywhere, furniture all, and they took me down to a closet.

I broadcast all night from the closet.

About 10 o'clock that night, they made a call on the PA system because now they realize

that the windows would not withstand the velocity of the wind.

And if the wind pushed the window in,

you could get sucked out.

So they said, take your bed spread and bring your toiletries and come down to the third floor ballroom.

So when I get to the third floor ballroom, there is people all over the place.

So

I made a pallet on the floor.

And I had on a khaki shirt and a khaki pants and a pair of little summer shoes.

And I think I had on a little khaki kango cap and I just pulled the cap over my eyes because

the level of fear that was in the room I was trying to not visualize it

I could just remember this loud whistling sound

Katrina had a peck on her I'm telling you

She did

Katrina moved in slowly.

The rain and winds got stronger and stronger all night.

Across the city, all the defiance in the face of the storm settled into a kind of tension.

Nean and her family kept an eye on the TV news, watching things go from bad to worse.

Finally, there was one weatherman who broke.

He had fear in his face.

You could tell he was scared.

And he was like, May God be with you.

And when he said that, the power went groove.

It went out.

That was the last thing of them, any kind of communication, the outside.

That was it.

From ABC News, this is World News tonight.

Reporting from ABC News headquarters, Charles Gibson.

Good evening.

Katrina was bad.

Very bad.

But Katrina did jog slightly east just before hitting land.

And that spared New Orleans, a city actually below sea level, the kind of direct hit that residents have worried about and feared for years.

Still the city of the world.

Katrina, it turned out,

wasn't the big one, at least not New Orleans.

Around 10 p.m.

on Sunday night, forecasters knew the storm had weakened.

It made a turn to the east.

But as it hit the Gulf Coast, the hurricane did massive damage and caused hundreds of deaths in parts of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama.

So in the area around Gulfboard and Biloxi, it is a very dire situation tonight.

In New Orleans, though,

compared to the doomsday scenario, it was a little less extreme.

Houses were flooded.

Roofs had been blown off.

Windows were shattered.

It was bad, but not apocalyptic bad.

The people who evacuated could come back soon.

And the people who stayed had hopes things would get right back to normal.

Leanne and her cousin Arielle were in a quiet, pitch-black New Orleans for the first time in their lives.

They went outside to take it all in.

I just couldn't believe how many stars was in the sky.

And we just sit and talk about us.

And when we get back to school, we can't wait till it's over with, and they train a water out the city.

I can't wait to go back to Trimmy's Center.

So Finzo walked me home.

The city was black.

No streetlights, no night.

You were able to see the sky.

It was.

It was beautiful.

Leanne couldn't have known it then, but the city was already on borrowed time.

Levees across New Orleans had already been breached, and at that very moment, millions of gallons of water were pouring into the city.

That water would not stop for days until nearly the entire city had been filled.

The country would watch while the city's people were betrayed.

Everything was about to change.

Because in New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina was not the disaster.

The disaster was what happened after.

That's this week's episode of the ticket, Politics from the Atlantic.

To hear the rest of Floodlines, just search for it in whatever podcast player you're listening to right now.

Thanks to Kevin Downsend for producing and editing this episode, and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

Our theme music is by Breakmaster Selder.

Thanks for listening.

Catch you next week.

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