Original subtitles

If you're still hearing us and you haven't left yet or you haven't made

leaving, please leave.

You know, I hate to say this, but I just don't have enough body bags.

In order to prevent something from happening again, you got to understand

happened in the first place.

Katrina was a wake -up call.

We got you, baby.

But we fell back to sleep.

They are the lucky ones saved from what FEMA now calls the most significant

natural disaster ever to hit the United States.

Yeah, it was a disaster.

We're going to be faced with disaster.

But the tragedy of Katrina was man -made.

Katrina was a hurricane of governmental failure.

And it was a hurricane of mistruth and injustice.

One of the police officers told me, well, there is a war zone out there.

are losing their minds.

My grandma or one of y 'all, if y 'all out there, and y 'all hear you, sir,

let me know y 'all living, you know what I mean?

It didn't have to happen like that.

Not in America. We can't justify this.

Can't justify what happened after Katrina.

Tropical depression number 12 is churning tonight near the Bahamas.

It's going to be moving very slowly for the next two to three days, moving in

the general direction of Florida.

If it does grow in strength and become a tropical storm, it'll be named Katrina.

Katrina was unlike any other hurricane.

Thousands of people in South Florida have their eyes on Katrina as the storm

now just reached hurricane status.

All of a sudden now, it's starting to come towards us.

Katrina is expected to become a very intense hurricane.

That's what's developing with a hurricane now in the warm waters of the

Mexico. As you know, hurricanes feed off of warm water.

In the days before Katrina, everything was going well.

Even the sun was shining. It was like my kids were swimming in a swimming pool.

Let's see our little pool.

She done for the day, huh?

Yeah, so when we first funked out, they had the hurricane coming.

That's all too much for the people in New Orleans, you know?

So many times that...

Hurricanes were supposed to be coming here, and they never came or turned off,

or we might have got some of the water, some of the winds, or, you know, we

might have not got nothing.

I just felt like, you know, if the hurricane did come through, maybe it

just pass through, and then the next day you're not going to go home and

everything good.

Because I still was preparing my suit for my autograph.

In New Orleans, people start preparing months ahead of time.

I still remember my piece that I was working on. I still see it laying on the

table.

Everything that we're looking at indicates this hurricane has the

strengthen even more.

than it already has. We're not trying to frighten people. This is one that we

are, quite frankly, very frightened of. We're concerned.

Obviously, that concerns us a great deal. My siblings who live away from the

city, they were talking about the storm.

And they were like, come on, you got to get mama, y 'all come.

And I'm like, I ain't leaving.

You know, every time it happens, they're trying to make me leave. I said, I'm

not leaving my property.

This spot, it had history.

My grandmother was born two doors from here.

So my family has roots in this bad boy way before the

1800s, all right?

New Orleans is identified by the wards.

If you ask somebody where they're from, they'll say the Lower 9, Upper 9, the 7,

the 8, New Orleans East, the Treme.

What neighborhood you were from basically tells a story about us.

The 7th Ward, that was our whole family.

And in the Lower 9th Ward, there was a lot of poverty here.

However, there was always a lot of community.

where people looked after each other.

The people put their heart and soul into this city to make it grow and to make

it a better city.

That yearning, that culture, that music,

that language that no one else could understand,

that close -knit community.

Everything changed that day.

The way

I remember it, it started moving further west.

Hurricane Katrina continues to move west in the Gulf of Mexico. Look at this

cone of error here.

It basically runs from Pensacola out to south central sections of Louisiana.

Fear started to seep into everybody here in the city, and certainly at the

station that I was working at.

It was like, okay, this is really serious. This could turn out to be the

one. Here's the projected path on Katrina.

What the weathermen were forecasting by Saturday.

was that this hurricane is too big to turn.

It's going to hit us.

At the LSU Hurricane Center, from early on the Saturday morning, we were running

storm surge models as Hurricane Katrina was approaching.

And we knew then, we knew then and there, this was going to be

a catastrophe.

I had obtained a model from Louisiana State University of the potential for

storm surge from that morning's hurricane predictions.

Storm surge is that elevated water that is pushed in advance of the winds of the

storm.

In New Orleans' case, that water comes in either from the Gulf of Mexico or

lakes to the east and to the north.

especially Lake Pochettrine.

Flood walls and levees surround the populated areas to protect them from

flooding.

But it was very clear that Hurricane Katrina's storm surge could overtop

and cause dramatic disaster.

For years, I tried... to warn about something like Katrina, that we were

on a ticking time bomb.

Storms in the Gulf, you typically had three, four days to watch them.

But on Saturday, Katrina took a swivel toward us, and that meant we

were in full throttle mode.

This is not a test.

This is the real deal.

Board your windows with plywood if you can.

Make sure your car has enough gas in it.

Do all the things that you normally do to prepare for a hurricane, but treat

this one differently because it is pointed toward new honors.

We are advising people to evacuate probably at daybreak on tomorrow.

St. Bernard.

It's not looking good for us down here in St.

Bernard.

I don't think I can go anywhere.

First of all, I really don't have the money.

The reason I had a video camera, I've been performing slam poetry.

So anywhere I would have went at that point in time, I was still in the mode

recording myself.

This storm look like it's definitely coming, man. I mean, like, straight

us. So it's a bad situation to be in. But I know God is going to keep us from

the storm. He said he's going to protect us.

Me being a Marine, you know, I'm a pretty good swimmer. Like, survival

if the water came, like, I know I could survive it. But I didn't want my mom to

be here.

You can see my mom, she's kind of tired. She went cooking. I actually told my

mom, I said, Mom, if I have to crack you over the head with a pot, knock you

out, put you on my shoulder, you're going to leave.

She finally got out of there.

But for myself, I didn't want to leave because I didn't know what we was going

to be coming back to.

We had three houses in that property, including a home that I was starting to

remodel, like on my crib.

It's coming along, so I stayed behind, and I just was praying.

Saturday night, I received a Blackberry ping from the mayor that said,

SOS, Hurricane Katrina was now projecting

to become a Category 5, and that meant a tale of destruction.

That major hurricane barreling toward the Gulf Coast of the United States,

Hurricane Katrina, is now a Category 5 hurricane.

Category 5, which are the strongest hurricanes we know of, only three times

before in U .S. history have Category 5 storms hit the U .S. mainland.

This thing is a very strong Category 5, 170 -mile -an -hour wind.

People don't realize how big Katrina was.

It covered the entire Gulf of Mexico.

As perfect a hurricane as you've ever seen, if you can call a hurricane like

this perfect.

She ain't turning. She coming now.

Y 'all pulling out, huh?

Yeah.

They done been around and seen so many, but they ain't never seen this kind.

It's a five, man, a full five.

And five, it is not a good situation.

It's a cold red.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. We're here for our update on Hurricane

Katrina. I am this morning declaring that

we will be doing a mandatory evacuation.

Every person is hereby ordered to immediately evacuate the city of New

This is very serious, and it's of the highest nature, and that's why we're

taking this unprecedented move.

When the mayor announced the mandatory evacuation, it was Sunday.

It's kind of late because the storm was coming in that night.

Never before in the history of New Orleans had a mandatory evacuation taken

place.

So we needed to do some legal work to ensure the city was not liable in the

term and that we were keeping the people we needed to keep in the city of New

Orleans and at the same time ensuring everyone else left.

So when the mayor of Mexico to evacuate the city, we were more concerned from a

police standpoint with the evacuation process, giving people a warning.

What the mayor did was he sent the police force into the area using their

system, telling people to evacuate. And if they were unable to evacuate, that

buses would be stationed throughout each neighborhood to take them to the

Superdome, which is a sports arena in New Orleans, as a refuge of last resort.

The Superdome would be opened up as a refuge, a last resort.

But let me emphasize, the first choice for every citizen is to figure out a way

to leave the city.

If the mayor is saying, hey, you need to leave, yes, they do. It makes our job a

lot easier.

But how can they do that if they can't afford to?

Within New Orleans, you have a high poverty rate.

If you're going to tell poor people to leave, where are they going?

Katrina hit at the worst time to be poor in America.

By the end of the month,

you ain't got no money.

We didn't get hit with a big one for a long, long time, but this one felt

different.

I really don't want to stay here, but... For this one, I had this strange

feeling. This vision in my head, like, foreshadowing.

What's going to happen, man?

I've seen water.

But I do know the water's going to come.

The time to go is right now. Get on the road.

Because if you don't, the window's going to close on you pretty soon.

On Sunday...

We all went down by my mother's house. Then the seven was to go and check on

her.

It was like five of us.

We had the twins. The twins was like three and a half months.

And then there was my brother and my niece, Precious.

At the time, she had lupus.

But she was in good health.

By the time we got to my mother's house, the clouds and stuff started coming in.

You can see how the skies is moving.

That's what it's like right now.

We're category five about to come through.

Man, I'm like ready to go.

I'm going to try to get to Baton Rouge, man, with a half a tank of gas.

Hopefully we don't get too trapped in traffic.

One of my mama relative's cousin, he just walked through the cut and was

was like, man, where you going now?

Man, my pussy got enough gas.

Just enough to get us down. I don't know if we can get back, but if we can get

some shots, we'll be all right.

So I was able to get him, and we was able to move forward, I would say.

We wasn't completely out the woods, but just moving forward.

Now we about to see fall, man. We about to meet, because we headed to Baton

Rouge.

But I don't think a 175 -mile pile of winds, we can handle down here.

During the time of Katrina, there was an evacuation order.

And what frightened me was the number of people that were still

in the city.

Obviously, firemen need to be ready to rescue people.

And if you're in a fire station that's not well located, you're not going to be

able to rescue people. So for our area of last refuge, we were going to Lake

Marina Tower.

That's the building we're going to be in, right up there.

Lake Marina Tower is at the northernmost part of the Lakeview area.

That was higher ground than most of the surrounding area.

As the city was emptying out, I was on Interstate 10.

These thousands of cars going past me and my photographer all going one

direction, which was out of town.

Then we got back on the eastbound lane and went into the city.

We went to the Hyatt downtown.

We stayed there because the mayor was staying there and the police chief was

staying within as well.

The Hyatt Regency had areas where we could hunker down and actually spend the

night. So we brought our families over to the Hyatt Regency.

And at the time, my wife was eight months pregnant and I had a three -year

So I was happy that we had somewhere where they could be safe and I could do

job.

Already hundreds of people have made their way to the Superdome, driving

walking, taking buses, getting here by any means they can.

There's at least 2 ,000 people here, and buses are continuing to pull up as we

are here bringing more people.

I get a phone call pretty last minute letting me know that they had made a

decision to open up the Superdome as a shelter of last resort and that the

National Guard had gotten the mission initially to screen, making sure that

anyone who came into the dome wasn't bringing things that were potentially

hazardous.

You're thinking in terms of hopefully the dome turns out to be a safe place

all of us to be in.

Be prepared to maybe stay there for a day or so until it's safe for people

to go back to their homes.

The circumstances changed when I got to airline highway. The traffic was so

jammed up.

We sitting there, we sitting there, and I've noticed the gas meter only going

down a little.

And that's when it started to rain.

They are experiencing some rain right now.

The effects of this hurricane just starting to be felt here.

If you can still get out, get out.

It is time to run.

And so things are going to continue to go downhill.

And I think to the surprise of some of you in traffic right now, It's going

downhill very quickly.

The worst place actually that you could possibly be would be in an automobile.

That thought was just running through my head like, man, what are we going to

do? We're going to run out of gas.

I'm stuck on side the highway.

My cousin, he couldn't swim.

What are we going to do?

Take a look at the twin spans in terms of rain. We've got some heavy sails

around, especially over Lake Pontchartrain. A couple have just passed

spans. They continue to rotate out over the lake. Once you get toward eastern

sections of the wall... I heard on the news that the Superdome would be a

shelter of last resort. The city has opened up several shelters, the biggest

being the Superdome.

So I was like, well, let me just turn around. I mean, how could we go wrong?

The Superdome is huge.

They have parking, you know, all around the place.

We were some of the last to actually get in that particular night.

Here we are amongst the general population.

When I

first got down, I started gazing at the crowd.

I looked around, and I seen some whites here and there.

But they did stick out like a sore thumb.

It was mostly, like, black people.

So I was like, oh, man, we all in here together.

We're here at the Louisiana Superdome.

Inside right now, an estimated 12 ,000 people are going to ride out the storm.

Sunday night, as the storm's coming in, we hunkered down at the hotel.

Most of the team was like on the 23rd or 27th floor.

We were just going to ride it out there. That was the initial plan.

The calmness before a storm is

one of the...

most peaceful, scariest things that a person can experience.

That quiet calmness, it was like

deafening.

It was the eerie feeling that you knew, oh, this is going to be bad.

looks like one of the biggest, baddest storms ever recorded in U .S. history.

You know, because we have so many people that aren't able to leave the city, I

cannot think of a worse case scenario than what's panning out.

What a tragedy this looks like it's going to be.

It would make a disaster, a tragedy.

A tragedy is when we fail to do what we

should be doing.

And the first tragedy of Katrina was not

being prepared, not having, in this city,

Our exit strategy for the 100 ,000 people that

we knew didn't have no means of escape.

Evacuation is a difficult task at best out of New Orleans, so we've studied it

very closely. We've studied it very closely. We've studied it very closely,

this is one of our nightmare scenarios.

Hurricane Pam, a federally funded exercise to plan for a catastrophic

in southeast Louisiana.

Hurricane Pam was an exercise that we had done the year before, bringing

together state agencies, federal agencies, local officials, trying to

what a catastrophic event would look like in New Orleans.

One of the discussions during the Hurricane Pam exercise was how to deal

evacuees.

And the first glaring fact was that there was going to be many tens of

thousands who couldn't get out, at least 120 ,000.

And within that were many disabled, elderly, and people who didn't own motor

vehicles.

So there was a lot of knowledge beforehand of the consequences of the

A massive storm surge, 20 feet of water in the city, and hundreds of thousands

stranded.

I have seen destruction from hurricanes, and I

didn't want to be in it, but I just really didn't have a choice.

My mother was in a wheelchair, so wherever we went, she went.

I decided to go by my brother's house in the Lower Ninth Ward to stay with him

and some other family members.

It was my moms, my sisters, my family.

We were going to ride out the storm at my little brother's house.

My brother had one of those historic homes.

It was lifted up on piers, and he had very high ceilings.

And so it was high ground.

I would have had to have left by ambulance, being that I just had

There were no ambulances coming in the neighborhood and picking up people that

were recently out of the hospital.

So we stayed.

For whatever reason that you're forced to stay, you stay and you endure it.

The poor, the sick, and older people, you know, the elderly people, you know,

those people should have been the first ones out.

There was a plan called the Hurricane Pam Plan, which involved getting

different bus systems to move people to safety north of the city.

What happened, however, was that the mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin,

punted because of financial reasons.

Were we concerned that this would be something that would bear down on us?

At the category level that it did, not at all.

So we did not execute a plan per se for the buses to

bring people out of the city.

We did not have a plan for our buses to be used in that manner.

Most hotels are sold out. For others, rooms are unaffordable and leaving

impossible.

I can't get out. How am I going to get out?

you knew all of this was going to happen.

Or you sort of know.

The main outer core is approaching right now.

Get ready.

12 .38 right now, and all it's doing is raining.

That night, about 12 or 12 .30, it started raining hard. The wind was

Oh, the wind is picking up kind of big, baby.

Time to go back in the house.

Going into midnight, I think everybody was just trying to rest a little bit.

I probably dozed off a time or two because I still wasn't too worried at

time.

In the middle of the night, beginning to be the early morning hours, I was in a

regular room in the Hyatt, sleeping, when all of a sudden we heard the wind

Hurricane Katrina.

Oh, man, I'd never seen a blow like that ever.

It was like somebody opened up the flaps on a wind machine.

Hurricane Ford's wind should extend as much as 100 miles radius beyond that eye

of Katrina.

And then that wind starts, and the destruction starts at that point.

You can hear the sound of glass breaking and metal twisting as the eyewall moves

ashore.

We have Team Transformer.

Blue flashes out on the horizon, and that's an indication that the powers are

going out in many areas.

Just like that, the middle of our story, the streetlights went out.

Of course, the electricity goes off.

And for many people, there's no more TV, no more radio.

It was just total darkness.

We felt isolated.

It was so scary.

Around 5 in the morning, Katrina started to move ashore.

The storm wasn't a Category 5 when it made landfall. If you're just tuning in

here in Louisiana, we're waking up to a Category 4 hurricane, but it is just

below Category 5.

When it made landfall, the storm goes on the east side, the eye of the storm,

missed New Orleans by 35 miles.

But it went directly through St. Bernard Parish.

I was in a valley canal, St. Bernard.

My boat's up against the levee, and that's where the hurricane hit us.

It was something you'll never forget.

From my boat, what I see is a surge.

It's coming in with full force.

And the waves hit them levees every seven seconds.

The height of a levee is just as big as a wave in a hurricane.

There was no way that was going to hold.

The water started to come in over the levees.

even though the eye of Katrina didn't even hit New Orleans.

In the back of my mind was the waves

from the Gulf of Mexico hitting the wetlands of coastal

Louisiana.

Since the 1930s, we've lost over a million acres of our coastal wetlands.

that's our outer line of defense for storm surge. That's what really used to

knock the stuffing out of the storm surge. And as a result, every year the

potential surges get worse and worse and worse. So this storm, a Category 4,

Category 5, is our worst nightmare.

In the Lower Ninth Ward, there was rain, but it wasn't a torrential rain.

When it comes to flooding, the Lower Ninth Ward usually did pretty good.

In the Lower Ninth Ward, we didn't really flood. We got flood water in the

streets.

But the swamp kind of protected us because the water would drain into the

The swamp was located on the other side of the railroad tracks on Florida

Avenue.

It was our wonderland.

You see cypress trees with moss hanging on them.

I couldn't tell you the exact year.

One day, you know, you walk back there and you notice that the trees were

The cypress trees.

And the cypress trees were the trees that kept the swamp alive.

When I initially arrived in the 70s to do my graduate studies, south and

east and west of New Orleans were huge cypress swamps.

And for thousands of years, the best protection from hurricanes.

that we've had were these coastal wetlands.

Here's the wetland.

Here's the lake or bay.

The storm surge comes along and then it hits the wetland.

The trees form like a maze.

The water's got to go around this tree, then go around that tree, then go around

that tree.

And so the storm surge gets rapidly reduced.

But it didn't take me long to realize that Louisiana is losing its

wetlands at a hell of a rate, including the wetlands

around the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard.

Within my lifetime, all down here where we're at was all oak trees and woods.

And within my lifetime, it all disappeared.

Now we have no trees that break the water.

We have nothing to slow it down anymore.

Nothing at all.

Between 60 and 80 percent of the wetland loss is the consequence of the oil and

gas industry and their activities in coastal Louisiana.

It's the oil industry.

They're the ones who caused this.

But each one of y 'all came up in here in a car.

All of y 'all buying their products.

You can't throw blame at them without accepting your blame.

That's what makes it a tragedy.

Because we are so drunk on prosperity.

We undestroyed that first natural line of defense.

At like six in the morning, you're going to see people starting to peel the

covers off of their heads because they heard the same thing that I heard.

I'm like,

what is that?

And boom, you hear it just rumbling.

Yeah. And that's when we first seen the water.

Oh, man, they got water coming?

We have rain inside the Superdome. I repeat, rain inside the dome.

Now, the thought process is, if we getting wet on the inside of the

than what's going on on the outside.

It was a complete mess for a while there, you know.

Well, my boat's up against the levee, and I had to go out there up on the

rigging and secure the lines a little better.

So I got swiped off the rigging, wound up hanging on a rope.

The wind sprang me out, came back on the boat and came in the cabin, drank

another cup of coffee and a shot of whiskey.

Then for a moment, when the eye of the storm came in, everything calmed down.

But then all of a sudden, all hell broke loose when she broke out the west.

Second half of the hurricane worked in the first half.

The winds have really picked up here.

It feels to me that this may be for us the worst part of the storm.

So at the Lake Marina Tower, the nine of us firefighters woke up at the crack of

dawn, and the wind was howling outside.

The windows were allegedly rated for 150 miles an hour.

As you can see, our situation is deteriorated.

But they blew out in the front and immediately vented out the back.

In those early morning hours, when Katrina hit, I was in the Hyatt Hotel

with the rest of the executive staff of the mayor.

But then, all of a sudden,

We heard windows begin to break.

We had someone come over the PA system, and they said, we need everyone to

evacuate to the third floor of the hotel.

They made the right call in telling us to evacuate to the atrium because

back at it, I mean, it was absolutely shredded.

The storm had passed.

We were all relieved.

We had survived.

Having seen what we did in the last couple of hours, this is looking

calm.

I have seen a few cars out and about, a few police cars that seem to be making

the rounds.

But one of the things that's most interesting to me is the water level and

street underneath it.

It looks definitely as though it has dropped to some considerable degree.

After the storm hit, it was like four inches of water on the street, and there

wasn't a flood or anything.

Right where we were was maybe about seven, eight inches in the streets,

wasn't a problem.

But it was weird because...

We see more water coming up in the street than we normally do.

We realized it's not a normal hurricane aftermath

because all of a sudden the water started rising very

quickly.

And I said, where this water coming from?

I had to leave out of my house, man.

I don't know whether that water's coming over that levee or what.

We were 19 stories up in Lake Marina Tower.

So we had quite a view of the entire city.

As you can see from here, it's pretty much complete devastation across the

It was... It was apocalyptic.

And I realized that the situation was going to get far, far worse.