Original subtitles

How you doing, man? I had to leave out of my house, man.

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

heard, it's not.

So you haven't heard about that water coming over that levee from the lake?

Check it out. Because the water started rising so high on my two -story

apartment, I had to get out, man. Where's that at?

Right across the North Robinson overpass.

Okay, I'm going to go down and check it out, though.

Any word on the levee? Do you know anything about the levee? Is it gone? Is

good?

Some dude just came up to me and said, like, water's up to his apartment in the

second story.

I'm going to go check it out.

You're trying to get on the table and can't.

Ha!

Ha!

We're like under nine feet of water here. We're trying to get out. We have a

baby. We're very frightened.

Pray for me, huh?

Oh, yeah, I will pray. I'm going to have to pray for everybody, even myself.

That morning, after Katrina, everything changed

that day.

My house was in the 8th Ward, almost the beginning of the 9th Ward.

We were right on the railroad tracks across from the canal.

And we're like right on the levee.

My place was on the second floor.

My daughter, my niece.

My uncle, his wife, their two -year -old daughter, that we affectionately call

Bump Bump, they all stayed with me.

We had rain, and we had thunder, and we had all the things that make up a storm.

But we heard something that sounded like an explosion.

I guess that was the levee breaking at that time.

That's when the water went from the tire of the car, and I mean the bottom of

the tire of the car,

to the second floor

within like 20 minutes.

The water was steady rising and rising.

I look outside and notice that it was flooding. Well, you know, we know the

drainage system is bad down here.

So I started getting worried.

The water started coming in different. The water started changing colors.

Actually, we even saw fish in the water when it first started coming. But the

water got higher and higher.

The water started rising faster and faster.

We went back in the command post and said, this thing is a lot worse than we

thought.

And at the time when this was happening, we didn't really know the cause.

Three minutes, it went from the ground to the roof.

I said, where is water coming from?

We realized it's not a normal hurricane aftermath.

Something's wrong.

Something's wrong.

It came in like a tidal wave.

Car lights started popping on as the water got higher.

We were wondering when it was going to stop.

When I looked out the window and I saw the cars starting to be swallowed, I

said, oh, well, I've lost everything.

Once the water came into the house, there was nothing else that could be

The water was just inching up higher and higher and higher.

It reached a good six feet inside of the house.

It's a disaster. The houses down here are destroyed.

I've never seen that like this before. My mother's 83 years old. I don't know

how well she made out. The call started

coming in. It was almost at one birth.

And you could hear the emergency because all of the phones started going off at

the same time.

Folks from St. Bernard Parish and Plaquemines Parish.

And then we started getting the calls from folks in the Lower Ninth Ward.

There were so many people with the same issues trapped.

And the lines were seriously busy.

Please, please, I'm begging you, we can't do this.

I can't breathe.

We were asking folks what their addresses were. And in finding out, it

matter what your address was because the force of the water had moved homes off

of their foundation.

It was so much water.

You know, it was like opening a faucet and just pouring in.

And the house was knocked off of its foundation.

So the house was teetering.

So we're all signaling to each other, you know, wait, wait, wait, don't move.

Don't move.

You stay on this side.

You stay right there. We're level right now.

Then as the water would move the house, we had to adjust.

We were like, okay, you go by the front door.

You go there. You stay here.

Everybody had their own portion of something to this recipe of survival.

And then we start hearing barrels from off the railroad track or wherever they

came from.

And you're hitting the stairs.

And we thought the neighbors were dead or dying downstairs.

The water, it's moving at such a fast rate.

I could see the water running in through the baseboards, under the door.

You're looking at your life, the life that your parents provided for you, your

belongings being ruined, your mother's furniture that she prided

is being thrown against the wall, your icebox or refrigerator is floating.

You move things to a higher level. You get as much in the attic as you possibly

can.

But when you go towards the front of the house and you realize that that water

is at least that high in the street or higher, then you're worried about an

exit plan.

You got to get out.

No, it's safe to say that house is history.

It's going to burn down to the wall line. If I have a hard time picking it

the camera, okay, I see it behind the tree.

We were at the Lake Marina Tower just right on the other side of 17th Street

Canal.

And me and firefighter Gabe King and Captain Paul Helmers were watching the

winds on the south side of Lake Marina Tower.

I see storage in the air right now.

Well, I brought my camera with me for obvious reason that it's very likely you

will have things that you want to film in a Category 5 hurricane.

Oh, wow, the water's getting pretty deep down there.

I'm going to have to keep an eye on the water and see what it looks like in

another 30 minutes.

When you see water coming up that much, six inches every 15 minutes, that's two

feet an hour.

You're just talking an incredible flow of water.

So, yeah, when I spotted...

The 200 -foot area of water coming through, I was 100 % certain of what I

looking at.

It looks like there's a possible levee breach on the 17th Street Canal, right

the angle behind that burning house. I don't see any levee. It looks like it's

at least three feet higher now, Todd.

You want to see it better, Joe? Let me focus in with this.

I was hesitant to make the report because we didn't have a confirmation.

But Captain Helmers...

He zoomed in on that breach.

My heart just sank.

So I radioed it in. We have a breach in a levee. I think I reported it from 4 to

10 feet wide at the time. I didn't want there to be any confusion on the other

end at all.

Everybody knows the implications of a broken levee.

The entire city flooding.

possibly thousands of people dying.

Could be the end of the city.

It was... It was apocalyptic.

We all knew exactly what we needed to do. We knew that we needed to get boats,

needed to get as many people as we could as fast as we could, and we knew that

there was just a certain amount of time that people had.

I ran into our fire chief, Charles Parent, and he said that he had two or

firemen reporting a very large break in the levee. And

I questioned him and I said, are you sure?

What do you mean a break?

And he said, that's what I said to them.

I was in the communication room in the emergency operations center.

And I heard a report come in that the levee at the 17th Street Canal had

and that heavy flows of water were flowing into the city.

From that moment on, I knew that Katrina was going to be something different.

Levee busting in New Orleans was a worst -case scenario.

So I immediately called back to FEMA headquarters to alert them that there

reports that a levee had broken.

I can't confirm it. That's just what I had heard.

My tone at the time was, I think, real concern.

I know that that information then was passed along to others so that they

know. Now, whether they believed it or not, I had no control over. I could only

tell them what I had heard, but I hadn't seen any of it yet.

The mood was kind of easy in the beginning.

At least we did have some shelter.

But things started deteriorating real fast.

The only light we really had if you went inside the Superdome was

from the four holes in the rooftop.

Of course, they have emergency generators, but no air conditioning. So

going to be, obviously, an interesting situation as the morning progresses.

Started getting more muggy, and it was really, really hot, steamy.

Getting hot in there.

The toilets are overflowing.

All the bathrooms got flooded.

Everybody's got top mats and ashtones ready.

The smell was getting worse.

People was kind of, like, closed in, and it just wasn't good.

So we went on the outside where we could congregate and where people had radios.

Hurricane Katrina hitting the Big Easy very hard today.

And as the day was going on, it was having more and more reports.

Police inquired that there was a breach at the 17th Street Canal.

All you see is water pretty much and the tops of roofs.

A significant part of the city is underwater.

A significant part of the city is damaged.

What you hear are people screaming for help.

They have confirmed reports of bodies floating.

We didn't see water yet, so we just hit all of these horror stories.

And caller after caller, caller after caller, caller after caller, they

get to the people. You just really don't know what's going on.

The water was coming up more, and we had three non -swimmers.

And then we had the swimmers, myself, who's injured, and my daughter and my

niece. They were saying, we'll get help.

I was like, no, we can't separate.

And I can't help you if you go off somewhere.

They stayed. I convinced them to stay.

And my uncle and I went on the porch.

And the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain looked like everything had

merged.

There were trains floating.

My neighbors are gone.

I never felt so isolated to where I just thought the

world has ended and we're the only few people that are left.

So now we got water tower angles on the second floor of an extremely tall house.

So now we have to move to the attic.

Now, mind you, I have a broken neck and a broken back, and I'm in a cast, and I

have a brace on my neck.

So before we went into the attic, my daughter started writing our names and

date of births on the wall.

She's like, I'm writing our names and our date of births, so when they come

inside the house and find us, I say, find us?

She said, yeah, you know, because you know, Mom, we're probably not going to

make it through this, you know, too much.

So I erased it off the wall. I was like, girl, we're going to live.

We're going to make it through this.

I felt hopeless during that time when she was writing that on the wall, but

something inside me told me this isn't it.

You got to convince them that this isn't it because they're giving up.

We'll keep our heads together. We're going to live.

We're going to be okay.

It's almost one o 'clock.

PM now.

Storm's dying down pretty good.

It's going to go up pretty soon and try to get a boat.

One thing about firemen, firemen are going to find a way to do what they need

do.

It's obvious that our job at that moment is to help people who are stuck in the

floodwaters and possibly drowning.

There's not a lot of water in that big boat.

We were looking around for boats and we did spot two on the street.

We swam to that building, and we got that boat.

We had some other guys.

They could hotwire boats.

There was a parking garage, so we went and actually siphoned a lot of gas out

those cars.

And as soon as the wind died down at 2 o 'clock, we launched operations.

When we started, we probably had four or five boats that we had commandeered.

I told the guys, I said, go find whatever boat you can find. Let's get to

Once comms went down, it was chaotic.

You know, once communications went down, you know, you just went to work.

You know, you got to have direction.

Who's going to do what? Who's going to be responsible for this? Who's going to

be responsible for that? We never had any of that. Never had access to any of

that.

We expected FEMA to come in quickly and that it would be something that would

allow the local officials the reprieve needed for that type of catastrophe.

It was obvious that we were dealing with something bigger than our capabilities.

You're on your own.

But we figured it out.

We went and did what we had to do.

to get to the neighborhoods that we had to get into to try to save people's

lives.

We set up quadrants.

You were a sergeant, you had one quadrant. You took your men, put one

every boat, you assigned that quad.

And that's how we broke it down.

I'm learning about saving people's lives.

That's my job, and that's what they help my friends. That's what we did.

That's what we did.

Now, you know, you're hearing things on the radio.

But until you see it, you just can't imagine it.

It was kind of like a moment that you, not in shock, but you're

almost like, oh my God, I did not realize.

Even though you're hearing things on the radio, you don't realize it's that bad.

It was hot as hell. And you could only imagine how awful it would be if you're

stuck on a roof.

If you're not in superior physical condition, you probably wouldn't survive

that. So, yeah, it was really important to get people off of roofs as quickly as

possible.

The attack team started doing their methodical search and pulling out as

people as we could.

To us, it was get there, get the people on a boat.

If they want to go, you take them. If they don't want to go, they're going to

stay there because we're not going to fight with them and flip a boat.

How many people y 'all got?

You know, you get in a hasty mood, so you're just out there trying to pick up

many people as you can, wherever you can, until you're able to get some solid

intelligence. Some areas, water was 15, maybe 16 feet deep.

We would shut off the motor and holler, and someone hollers back, and obviously

if someone sees you, we would go very slowly, so, you know, people would have

chance. They'd hear our motor.

There was a family on a roof, and we went to go rescue, and they said, no,

us, the house right there. We can hear a man screaming.

Turns out that he was standing on his tub, and the water was up to his neck,

he just, he didn't have much longer.

The water was halfway up the bathroom window, one of those small bathroom

windows, and they broke out the whole window, and they were able to drag him

the window.

And so, yeah, they got him out of that house just in time.

You know the dire position that these people are in.

You got elderly, you got young kids, you got women with children, pregnant women

up there.

The numbers didn't even come to my mind because I knew people were in trouble.

Some people just feel bad because you know they never had the means to get

And if they got out of their houses, got in their car, tried to run, the water

was going to take them away. There was no way in the world they were going to

survive that. It was absolutely horrific.

Well, we were walking around. We went up the street a couple of blocks. And I

would say there's nothing like the flooding that we might have anticipated.

was clearly a horrific storm.

Clearly, it is going to be a mess to clean up. But whilst they were expecting

Armageddon here, Armageddon, it wasn't.

The worst case scenario was that we would be floating atop 25 feet of a

toxic soup here in downtown New Orleans. That's not the case. What they were

predicting for New Orleans was 175 mile an hour winds and a direct hit from

Hurricane Katrina. They didn't get that. The folks in New Orleans are certainly

lucky.

The city of New Orleans is filling up with water, but all the media was down

the French Quarter.

There's no water in the French Quarter.

That is Bienville down the street. So they're reporting it's not as bad as it

seemed. Maybe New Orleans dodged a bullet.

New Orleans indeed dodged what they expected would be a very strong direct

But they didn't know.

They didn't know any more than what was in the neighborhood that they were

standing in.

There was no water in the French Quarter because anything that is close to the

river is at the highest point in the city of New Orleans.

So therefore, there's no water.

We're in a bowl.

We've got the Mississippi River levee over here and the Lake levee over here.

The city's in the middle.

So we are surrounded by water. We're six to eight feet below sea level.

And we have some battles with the water staying out.

So during the storm... There are sewage and waterboard pumping stations

throughout the city that propel the water into the outfall canals.

It's a very good system when it works.

All of us who worked in an emergency operations center became the lifeline

for people who were calling for assistance.

And our resources were stretched beyond measure.

There was no playbook written for a disaster and a catastrophe of that

By Monday afternoon, there were several reports that levees had busted.

That straight ahead is the London Outfall Canal, if I'm not mistaken. Over

is the greatest break of the levee.

Now, there's a huge chunk of concrete you can't even see, but you can see that

diagonal piece of concrete.

So I called back to FEMA headquarters.

I certainly wasn't informed about any actions that were taking place, and I

I was the only one from FEMA in New Orleans.

And that was the moment where I felt that they couldn't grasp the severity.

Nobody ever believes a worst -case scenario.

I knew at the time that lives were being lost left and right. There were

thousands of people on rooftops.

My mindset at the time was I got to get on a helicopter.

I got a little pushback when I talked to the Coast Guard saying, I don't know

that we're going to be able to get you on a helicopter.

I informed them that the White House was really counting on me to give them

some situational awareness.

Not completely truthful, but I just needed to find a way to get on that

helicopter because I really needed to put eyes on what was happening.

Anybody not believing what I was saying was just going to delay any kind of

response.

I got on, and the pilot said to me, where do you want to go?

And I said, I need to see how bad this is.

We flew out towards Slidell and could tell that the bridge was all damaged and

impassable.

The airport underwater, that there was no access into the

city.

We flew all over the city of New Orleans.

It was unlike anything I'd ever seen before.

I saw that the actual levees had breached in New Orleans.

So when we flew to the 17th Street Canal, and you could see just this

gap in the levee. It wasn't overtopping. It wasn't minor water

going over. The levee was gone.

I said at the time, 80 % of the city looked like it was underwater.

It was a guess.

It was a pretty good guess.

This is it.

This is the worst case scenario.

We talked about it.

It's here.

In the morning.

I gathered everybody into the conference room at the Emergency Operations

Center, and I asked them to lay out a map.

And I then proceeded to tell them everything that I had just seen, where

floodwaters were.

I remember looking at Mayor Nagin and seeing a face of disbelief and almost

of, what do we do now?

I don't know how to raise you.

I told the mayor, you need to make a list of all of the priorities that you

think you're going to need in this environment where everything is damaged.

It was things like shelters, knowing that there were people that needed

Rescues, how are we going to rescue people from rooftops?

to what every department needed in order to run the city in this new, very

strange dynamic that was occurring.

We were a different city. The old city was gone.

When that list of our needs was handed over to Marty Bahamandi and FEMA,

maybe naively, but we expected immediate results, that wasn't actually the

case.

FEMA's not really a first responder.

Local officials are first responders. The state with the National Guard are

first responders.

And FEMA wasn't designed to be a first responder.

Back then, at that time, we put a lot more emphasis on state and local

governments to handle the initial response and preparation for disasters.

And only when they couldn't handle it...

where we actually then designed to come in on the back end and provide that

support.

We knew just from putting all the puzzle pieces together that catastrophic

failure was beginning to occur around the city, beyond our capacity, way

our capacity.

One set of power lines there. Clear down there.

Roger. Basket's coming up. Roger.

Basket's coming up.

The Coast Guard was able to assist immediately

because we're not like the National Guard that needs permission or like a

request from the governor.

We didn't need to be asked by anybody.

My crew had a game plan that

we were going to fly and...

Just pick a location that had a lot of people.

It didn't take us long.

We found a huge three -story apartment complex with people everywhere.

We trained to get people off of, you know, cruise ships, sailboats.

We had never trained to get people off of rooftops or off of... balcony with

urban hazards.

We picked this balcony with

women and children, elderly people, and when a mother is so desperate

to get her baby out of danger that she hangs him over a two -story balcony,

that's alarming.

She didn't even bat an eyelash.

It was like, I don't know you.

You're connected to a giant, loud helicopter with hurricane -force winds

us around.

But here's my baby. Get him out of here.

And, you know, I just snatched him. And he's so small.

We don't have rescue equipment for babies.

So to carry a baby in your bare arms...

with nothing keeping him from falling except for me, is very nerve -wracking.

My first day, I rescued 48

people.

We just didn't stop.

We were picking up as many people as we could as fast as we could around the

clock for days and days.

And honestly, kind of waiting for the cavalry to come, but...

It was all about life -saving.

That's it.

And basket is clear of the rooftop.

And you are clear to move back and left.

As we move people out of the Superdome... people begin to move in.

So people are coming out of either parishes where they've been in their

and not out on the streets.

They're continuing to come out of homes where maybe they were on the second

floor, and now they can get out and start moving around.

And there is just simply no way we can estimate the numbers of people that are

out there like that.

When the levees broke, everything changed.

Our population doubled.

And that was really our first indication that Okay, something worse has now

happened, and there's a stage two.

They just had so, so many people just coming in.

It doubled real fast.

It just kept going nonstop, nonstop.

It also made you more aware that if people getting rescued like this, and

flying this many people in, now it's starting to grow with numbers.

So whatever so -called plan they had for food or drinks or whatever the case may

be, Now they wasn't going to be ready.

The population coming in pre -landfall is dramatically different than post

-landfall.

Pre -landfall, it was by and large people who chose to come to the

They were nervous but optimistic, and we were kind of all in it together.

And then things rapidly and dramatically changed when we became aware of a

second wave of people who were now presenting at the Superdome.

Those people had, in many cases, had ridden out one of the worst nights of

life.

Every rescue boat that goes out comes back heavy with human cargo, and they

be at it for days to come.

The police aren't coming, and that is a reality when you have a disaster.

There aren't enough police to respond.

There were too many people, and you can only help so many people. You can only

do what you can do.

A small group of firemen can't help everybody. It's just not physically

possible.

What's your first name? Shirley. Shirley.

We were watching the news.

We were seeing people on the roofs waving towels and flags.

We seen people floating in the water.

Felt hopeless.

When I saw the images of the Lower Ninth Ward, I was just so sad to see it

because I know how hard the folks worked to get there home.

And now they were going to have to start all over again.

I'm 62 years old. I've never been involved in nothing like this in my

And I've got to ask you, what did you leave behind?

Today?

Everything.

Quite a few of the folks that lived there were seniors.

How were they going to do that?

My family was also.

caught in Hurricane Betsy back in 1965.

Betsy is here.

Gusts now topping 100 miles per hour. Tides three feet above normal. And

routes will be cut off shortly.

The storm was coming into New Orleans.

And suddenly we heard the explosion, but we thought it was from the storm, and

then we saw all this water dripping, coming to us from the levee.

Hurricane Betsy was a storm more powerful than Katrina.

It was on a worse track for New Orleans, and as a consequence, levees flooded.

We'll rebuild.

We'll rebuild. Oh, yeah.

You don't think it'll knock you out? No, indeed. We're going to build a levee

higher and have a prettier community.

After Hurricane Betsy, we ended up with a significant funding program to build

hurricane levees.

They are computer models that were available to the Corps of Engineers

they started building these levees in the late 1960s that they didn't use.

They didn't get the science right on the hike that they needed to build it.

They didn't get the geotechnical engineering right in deciding whether

was suitable.

And lastly, they did designs that we knew would fail. They had done their own

research on some of these and had found that the failures would occur.

To add insult to injury, as Hurricane Katrina was approaching, the levees

weren't finished.

So the net result was catastrophic structural failure.

It's really been a double disaster.

We had the hurricane, and on top of that, we had a flood.

But both of these things, with all due respect, sir, were predicted. They knew

it was a Category 3 hurricane hitting the area 48 hours before it struck.

People have been writing about the potential disastrous conditions of the

system for a really long time, years and years and years.

There is a sense.

that everyone knew a disaster could happen, and no one was really prepared.

This is a natural disaster, the likes of which our country may have never seen

before. The president, he says he doesn't think anyone anticipated the

the levees. Now, I don't know how he can say that, given the fact that everybody

anticipated the breach of the levees.

We knew immediately that the levees had breached once. It just continued to rise

and rise and rise, and as I said, from past experience.

We knew that the levees had breached. People were passing with boats, rescuing

people. When I seen the water, and the way that the water was coming, I said,

they did it again.

Witnessing these things is what led us to use the term catastrophic structural

failure.

It wasn't the storm.

It was shoddy design and construction by the U .S. Army Corps of Engineers.

We had water all the way up to Mama Doe's step.

And so we started getting kind of worried then.

The only thing we could do is just try to get to some kind of shelter.

We just, you know, we didn't want to stay there. And the water was steady

and rising and rising. And, you know, we didn't have no way out.

So we took off walking.

But where we was at, it was like, what are we going to do with the little

children? Because the water is almost four feet.

Well, they had this dough floating in the water, so we grabbed the dough, put

the children on top, and pushed the dough so it could glide through the

In my neighborhood, we were lucky because my property sits three feet nine

inches above sea level.

I would not have left my house except for the fact that the militia,

guys that were in flatboats with AKs, came and knocked on our door

and told me I had to leave my house.

I didn't have water in my house, so it was not a necessity for me to leave.

And since many buildings are built at least three feet off the ground, a lot

the people around here, felt the same way.

So we were forced to leave the house and walk

an eighth of a mile from the residence to what was supposed to be a safe haven.

They sent us in a direction where the water was deeper.

So my sister and I were carrying kids and helping these seniors who were with

us.

Man, I don't think I was more frightened about anything than walking in that

water.

You couldn't see under that, so you just really walking on faith.

And my brother...

He kicked a stop sign because he didn't see it under the water, so the pressure

that he was applying to be able to walk through the water, and he kicked a big

gash in his leg almost two inches deep.

There wasn't nothing he can do, so he walked in the water with an open wound.

The first thing I thought about was we're in this dirty water, and then the

germs from the water.

That scared me more than anything.

We were just trying to find refuge on higher ground.

The safest thing to do is take that raft to the interstate. And one of the

highest points in this area was up on the interstate 10.

So that's where we headed.

All you could see is all the people just coming towards the bridge, you know,

because the bridge was really like the safest place.

You know, my main focus was to get the kids to safety.

You know, anywhere where they had shelter, where they can rest.

From where we was at on the bridge, you can kind of see the Superdome.

And the Superdome was swamped with people. They just kept bringing more and

people to the Superdome.

You see high -water vehicles with...

A hundred people stacked into it, bringing people to the Superdome and

them off. And people were walking in the water, coming to the Superdome as if

that was the savior place.

This was a population who were coming to the Superdome or being brought to the

Superdome because there was nowhere else for them to go.

Many times, I would say unwilling. They certainly didn't want to come to the

Superdome, but it was desperation.

We didn't know where we was going. The military was running people away from

their houses. Like, you had to go. It didn't matter where you went or

Like, you had to go.

We seen tens of thousands of people on a bridge.

Eventually, they also got to the Superdome.

Now, we're three, four times the number now.

Peter, we don't have nowhere to go.

My house is underwater. I don't even have another house.

I don't even know where I'm cheering at.

Seeing people coming in rescued, it was like, man, something really bad is going

on on the outside.

Because all you're hearing is helicopters, you're seeing people

off.

At least they was out of one bad situation.

They were coming back for you.

But they didn't know they was coming to another hell.

It's really, we live like dogs and pigs up in here. We need help.