Original subtitles

It's in the footage of the hood.

Come on.

What's up? People getting ready for the hurricane. I'm a photographer.

I don't have to be on.

The hurricane is coming right here. And Louisa Anna.

If you never get to see me again, that's how I look.

I'm the one that's shooting the video, okay?

Currently in our area, 88 degrees.

Me and my husband trying to get ourselves together.

See, we're going to barbecue stuff so we can barbecue.

Got our food.

Look, look, ice.

No meat, just ice.

How y 'all doing?

Say hey to the camera.

I'm showing the before and after pictures, you know.

Before the storm is how we looked at it. Then we're going to see how we look

afterwards. Huh?

I'm about to go ride my bike around.

I ain't going nowhere.

So be it.

It's true. They say, no, this is a big storm.

We're taking it very serious.

Taking it as serious as I can.

Lord, help me, Lord.

Help me to make it true.

The first casualty of Katrina and the floods was normal.

And since then, we have been living with the new normal.

What's up, member?

Oh, baby.

Man.

Happy Mardi Gras, baby. Happy Mardi Gras to you, too. You're done.

Yes, sir.

I'm a fourth generation New Orleanian, born and raised uptown in the 13th

Ward here in New Orleans and Louisiana.

I'm uptown baby, UPT for life.

And to grow up here was a blessing.

There was a joy of life here.

that you don't find anywhere else.

The 9th Ward, to the 17th, across the river, downtown,

and uptown in the 13th Ward.

New Orleanians stuck together.

Yes, baby, this is the foster New Orleans right here.

This is the heartbeat of New Orleans.

Now my daughter's the age I was when Katrina happened.

All the time I'd say, girl, you would never know what it was like for me

up.

My great -great -grandmother stood in this house right here.

My grandmother stood here through this alley right here. Behind my auntie, we

could walk out the back door into her house, and she would drink right there.

And my little cousins and Trombone Shorty would come running out the alley

they would mess with her and tease her. And she would say, I'm going to walk y

'all behind.

Y 'all better get from around here.

We was all about the culture of New Orleans.

You know, being around your family and jazz music.

I used to sit in Jackson Square and watch my dad, Tuba Fett, and Trombone

play Miss Doreen.

It was just amazing.

It all ended with Katrina.

That summer, 2005, I was 14 years old.

Katrina is now over the Gulf of Mexico, where it is expected to strengthen.

Right now it's a Category 1, and probably will be a Category 3 or higher.

remember we had to track the storm for a science project, so that's when I

started to really know what a storm was and how serious it was.

Katrina is storming the beaches of Florida.

The trouble in the tropics is just the beginning. It's heading into the Gulf of

Mexico, getting strength, getting stronger, and moving on up toward, well,

now it will be.

the western Florida Panhandle.

It is amazing to think that they have to turn around again and hit them again.

And some of those pathways behind you really, you know, essentially just turns

right on itself. Yeah, look at this one, right through Tampa. I don't believe

it, really. When you get this many clustered together, that's probably what

you're thinking somewhere in the middle of all those, but it can change.

As we were approaching Katrina, we didn't have a car at the time, so I was

riding my bike to work, reporting around town.

You know, kicking it with Kidmer.

I didn't know about the storm, actually.

I wasn't watching the news because we was working so much at the time.

And enjoying ourselves.

And, of course, Katie got pregnant.

Three days before the storm, the doctor said, you're dilated.

And we're hearing there's a storm in the Gulf. I hadn't even heard it yet.

He said, so maybe think twice about evacuating. You might have this baby in

car.

I thought, are you kidding me?

So I remember going into the restaurant across the street and watched on the TV.

This is breaking information.

Just in the last 15 minutes of a significant change in the forecast

of those models are now much, much farther to the west.

We still don't know exactly where it's going to go. So if you live in

anywhere across the Northeastern Gulf, you need to be paying close attention.

I remember when Katrina didn't go the direction they had predicted, but

looked like it was going to make a hit New Orleans head on.

Today and tomorrow will be your last days to get ready for any potential hit.

And again, we're not trying to frighten people, but this is one that we are,

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

I had flown down a Saturday morning to attend the funeral.

The church was filled with the leadership of the city.

During the service, my communications director walked to the front of the

and she said, I think we have a problem. We're going to need to get out of here.

When I was sitting right next to Mark Morio, and we had both had a lot of

experience with it, I said, that storm is bigger and badder than we think.

That's going to hurt.

That funeral, it was almost a requiem.

Hurricane Katrina's path is changing and is now predicted to probably make

landfall here in Louisiana.

Right now we're dealing with a Category 4.

We want to pray it down. We want it to be less.

So I'm urging people to also pray.

That is a very powerful thing that can happen. We've seen it happen before.

Those federal, state, and local officials just were completely

something they knew was going to happen.

It doesn't take a genius to understand that if a hurricane hit a major city,

there's going to be a massive, massive problem.

Now, New Orleans is also a low sea level.

Geographically, New Orleans is the most unlucky city in the country when it

comes to weathering a hurricane.

To its north, it's like Pontchartrain, a monster spanning some 630 square miles.

To the south of the city also sits the mighty Mississippi.

New Orleans is a city built much like it's in a bowl, and it's as much as 10

feet below sea level in some places.

And when a hurricane comes ashore, it can push walls of water into low -lying

areas.

Over the years, there have been multiple efforts to create a protection system.

This is New Orleans' best defense against the storm. Its levee system.

essentially all that separates waters of Lake Pontchartrain over here.

with downtown New Orleans over there.

These levees right here keep the water out.

What it also will do is keep the water in. So if water is pushed into the city

of New Orleans, it has to be pumped out.

In the early 1900s, the city built these massive pumping stations.

The man -made canals were designed to take water off the street.

Pumps push it so it empties into lake punch drain.

It worked for a long time, but it was also designed for the risk present in

early 1900s.

Now, the levee system is about 17 1⁄2 feet high. The storm surge from Katrina

could be as high as 20 feet, maybe even higher, which could easily go right over

the top.

You can't just build it and forget about it because the changing climate

intensifies the risk.

I was living in St. Bernard Parish before Hurricane Katrina hit.

Straight A.

There you go. There you go.

It was right next to the levee.

So the last two days before it actually happened, I really locked

in. This is a very dangerous storm.

Like I will be at my place, I'll have the TV on, I'll just be watching the

all day, all night.

And just

kind of like focusing on what Mayor Nagin had to say. We

will be calling for a voluntary evacuation.

Sometime this afternoon or at the latest tomorrow morning.

Now things could change, but as of right now, New Orleans is definitely the

target for this hurricane.

I want to be sure about which direction it's going because it was a little bit

of uncertainty because of Ivan.

Hurricane Ivan is churning in the Gulf of Mexico this morning. This is a very

dangerous storm.

We're still encouraging people to leave the city.

And that's one of those storms that turned off at the very last minute.

So they had a lot of people that spent a lot of money, the hotels, on food, all

of this other stuff, gas, right? It kind of disrupted everybody's thought

process for when Hurricane Katrina did come.

What's your evacuation plan?

I mean, figure, leave the house, take everything with me, board up in the 26th

floor of a hotel and ride it out.

Hey, the city's been here forever.

It's going to stay. I'm going to just ride it out with you all.

Sounds like a good place to be.

Before Katrina hit, we had never really had a storm that directly hit New

Orleans the way that Katrina was going to hit us.

Well, Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landman, you know hurricanes. You grew up in New

Orleans. And this one, for you, what do you think?

Well, I think it's going to be a tough one.

So when the storm was coming, many, many people would not leave.

My parents were one of them.

My father had been the mayor of New Orleans and in the position of telling

people to evacuate.

But when Katrina was coming, they said, we're not leaving.

I said, Mama, listen.

I said, this is your lieutenant governor speaking now.

I really need you to leave.

And she said, hold on a second, honey.

She comes back on the phone and she said, I'll talk to your dad. And she

Mitch, you can tell the lieutenant governor to go to hell.

You got to understand that this wasn't our first rodeo.

It was another hurricane. It's like worrying about snow if you live in

You know what I'm saying? It's part of life.

Kind of made me a little anxious, you know, but we still had jobs to do. We

still had work to do.

I had been in hospitality my entire career.

It's probably our biggest industry.

But the folks...

are often underheralded, underpaid, overworked, and everybody

can't leave. They just can't. They don't have the funds. They don't have the

wherewithal.

So they do what most New Orleanians do. They hunker down, hoping that, once

again, she'll fly over us, we sweep up a little glass, and we'd be fine.

So we're having a barbecue. So I need some barbecue sauce, cookies, pie.

So there's a board game and a deck of cards.

So it was pretty much routine.

Until I saw Katrina in the Gulf.

And she was stretching from Florida to Texas.

The entire Gulf was one big stone.

And she was headed right in.

I called my grandmother.

I said, Grandma, I'm going.

Pack your stuff. I'm going to come and get you.

She told me no because she didn't want to be a financial burden to me.

And I was like, Grandma, don't worry about it. If we all have to pile in one

room, you know, we'll make it work.

So she insisted that they would be fine.

My family lived in a Lafitte housing project.

My little brother, Jeffrey, he was three at the time, and my little sister,

Jeffreyelle, she was six at the time.

I could see that my mom and my dad was pretty scared about it, but we didn't

have the transportation to leave.

So we just did the normal for when storms come, we prepared.

My grandmother lived in the St. Bernard Housing Project up until a few years

before Hurricane Katrina.

Growing up, they didn't teach us to be afraid of storms, especially for the

housing project structures. Like, that was a safe place.

You never experience any type of danger in those structures.

And I think they kind of adopted that attitude of just sticking it out in

survival, which is why it wasn't really impressed upon us, the dangers

associated.

They had to stay.

Where'd it come from?

Where'd it come from?

It's a documentary.

So what you got to say to the world?

What you got to say to the world?

Tell them your name first.

My name is Diamond Phil.

Okay. You scared of hurricanes?

No. No? What you going to do?

Nothing. I'm going with my mom.

You're going with your mama?

Well, I'm going to be next door. You leaving me?

You leaving me?

Yeah. Yeah?

That's a shame.

The reason why I'm not leaving is because I can't afford it.

They said on the news that it's, like, aiming toward Mississippi, so we might

get the outskirts of it. Well, guess what? When we got the outskirts of

Bessie, I didn't even touch us.

Shit, so you already know.

Anywho, signing off. All the time, it's me, Cole Medina. See you later.

Authorities here aren't taking any chances. They have begun mandatory

evacuations of low -lying areas outside of the city.

We had to say goodbye to our home and everything we own.

Life goes on.

The governor ordered all the coastal areas to evacuate first.

We're heading to Baton Rouge, me and my sisters and my cousin.

This is all done systematically because you can't tell everyone all at once

to leave.

Parish by parish.

Mandatory evacuation.

Until finally it comes to Arlene's Parish.

No change in the city's stance right now. There is no mandatory notice at

time. We were planning to leave, but I'm just like, what are they doing?

I didn't want to be here.

I was in Betsy and I didn't want to be here.

Betsy's bringing in danger from a totally unexpected quarter.

Her winds are pushing a 16 -foot wall of water out of Lake Bourne in the Gulf,

the greatest tidal surge in Louisiana history.

I've heard about Betsy my entire life.

They all say, you know, they heard a loud boom, rush of water, go through the

attic, get a hold, and they're on the roof.

The theory, conspiracy or not, whatever, to this day is that the libraries were

blown up. It's kind of like a New Orleans legend,

you know, almost.

I was a young kid when we had Betsy.

So to my understanding back then, the leaders of the city decided

that either you flood these houses.

or you flood your central business district so they blew the levees so that

night war flooded to save the CBD.

And the other thing that we can't ever escape is the fact that the lower night

war was all black.

You can't be an American and race don't play a factor.

Like... White people were able to buy houses in places that didn't flood.

But the black people had to buy a house in between the cement company and the

railroad track.

When our parents moved down there, it was swamp.

And they were selling that to black people.

But they built that land up and they made homes down there.

They were proud of their homes.

Before Katrina, we lived in my mother's house in the Lower Ninth Ward.

My kids grew up there, I grew up there.

We had a thriving community that was 99 % Black.

You had mom and pop businesses all around.

Everybody owned their homes.

Yes, we had water to the right, water to the left, the river behind us, but it

wasn't anything that felt like a threat to us.

After Hurricane Betsy, the United States Army Corps of Engineers came in to

upgrade the levee system to stop the storm surge from those marshlands from

entering the Lower Ninth Ward.

And you sort of trusted Army Corps engineering.

The latest information from the National Hurricane Center puts Katrina on a path

headed for New Orleans, where it could be a Category 5 storm.

Mayor Ray Nagin, I understand you just got off the phone with the National

Hurricane Center.

He said the storm surge on this particular hurricane could reach 20 to

He said you do not have a levy system that can handle that. If you can issue a

mandatory evacuation, I would recommend you do. You are the mayor. You've just

heard that. What do you do?

Well, you know, I'm looking at all our legal options as far as a mandatory

evacuation. You know, we talked about mandatory evacuations and full

evacuations. I think the idea was such an extreme.

that it was not foreseeable.

You really don't have a way of enforcing it unless you had an army of personnel

to go house to house.

But I think this may have been a deficit in the planning.

First, just give us your full name. Sure.

My name is Michael Brown. I'm the director of the Federal Emergency

Agency.

I want to thank you all for being here this morning. I talked to President Bush

about an hour ago, and as you know, he'll be giving a statement shortly.

There's a part of me that says if we're very lucky, Mother Nature will wobble

one way or another,

and it won't hit New Orleans directly.

That's the best -case scenario.

FEMA is like a large contracting agency that interface with people to provide

them federal assistance.

About two years ago, I implemented a program where we started doing

disaster planning for exactly this kind of an event.

Now, the proof, as we say in Oklahoma, the proof is in the pudding.

There was a preparedness exercise called Hurricane Pam, where state and local

officials and federal authorities went through the scenario of a major

hitting the city of New Orleans.

For five days.

FEMA, the National Weather Service, and the Army Corps of Engineers all

monitored PAM and forecast devastating consequences if a similar hurricane hit

the city.

Hurricane PAM was only a simulated storm, but it packed 120 -mile -an -hour

winds. We knew the water level was going to get to the top of the levees.

We realized that 120 ,000 people in New Orleans didn't have motor vehicles.

And we'd done a public opinion survey. Most of those people weren't going to

evacuate. They didn't have a way.

We predicted that people would be trapped in their homes and sitting on

enormous fatalities and enormous distress.

What are the biggest obstacles for you to overcome?

Primarily making sure that as many people as possible get out of the way of

storm. Thank you.

So many people were aware.

So I don't know why they were really not organized about getting people out.

This morning I spoke with FEMA Undersecretary Mike Brown, and I urge

citizens to put their own safety and the safety of their families first by

moving to safe ground.

Please listen carefully to instructions provided by state and local officials.

Thank you very much.

Well, he who calls the evacuation is responsible for it.

So you get a White House to say, listen to your local authorities. That's

passing it to the governor. The governor says, come to evacuate.

Listen to your local authorities.

Because he who makes the decision to evacuate owns it. And they're

Do you think New Orleanians will have sufficient time to get out? There's no

doubt. I've had conversations with the state police, and they have assured me

that we will not have any problems getting our residents out of Palms Way.

We were at Sweet Lorraine's getting ready for our annual Black Men of Labor

parade, and we were not paying attention to the news because we were playing

music.

And it was that late evening when we all come out the joint to the sidewalk and

somebody said, have y 'all saw the news?

He says, no.

He says, well, they call it for mandatory evacuation in the morning.

That was Saturday evening.

They wanted everybody to leave Sunday morning.

We were a little hungover from Friday night and working all day Saturday. And

I'm like, oh, hell no. I ain't getting in no.

Call and drive, Noel.

And let's take you to New Orleans now where the press conference is underway

with Mayor Ray Nagin. We'll get the updated information on his city's

preparedness for Hurricane Katrina.

The storm is intensifying and it's still pointed toward New Orleans. As a result

of that, I am this morning declaring that

we will be doing a mandatory evacuation.

When you wait.

to a point where the storm is already here.

You might say it's mandatory, but it's unrealistic to move everybody because

resources aren't in place for that to happen. We're really in kind of a tight

spot, but, you know, there's the Greyhound buses that are running. People

rent cars. They can drive away.

They can take the Amtrak and take a train out of the city. There's lots of

to get out of the city. Of course, Mr. Mayor, you know you've got so many poor

people here and elderly and sick.

140 ,000 people by one estimate don't even have cars, wouldn't have the means

buy a train ticket or a bus ticket.

What are you going to do for them? What I am going to be doing is encouraging

all the churches in the community.

Get your congregation members, as they're thinking about leaving, to buddy

It's going to have to be all New Orleanians coming together to make this

When we got the mandatory evacuation from Raynagan, you got 50 million,

exaggeration, you got 50 million people to gridlock.

The traffic is backed up on Airline Highway all the way to Tulane and

Carrollton, and nobody is moving. People are out of their cars, they're

commiserating, a couple of them are walking their dogs, and it's not moving.

If they're going to set up an evacuation route, I think the city should have

done it better than this.

It was bumper to bumper for so long.

There were people who obviously had visited here, but they might miss their

flights and were rolling their suitcases up the interstate.

And people on bicycles.

I think it took us 19 hours to get to Texas.

We are now 100 miles inland, and this is the first place we've seen open for

gas. And this is the way to get it. We're told it's about a two - to three

-long line.

This is fresh as gas, huh?

I'm cool, calm, and collected. This is nothing. This doesn't bother me. I'll

always pee on my pants.

This shit is supposed

to hit Monday. We may still be in traffic on a highway.

when Katrina comes through.

So we said, we're going to just stay and ride this shit out like we always do.

We're going to be all right.

But I didn't find out how bad it was until Sunday when I got dressed to go to

church. And I was wondering why the church band didn't come pick me up.

So I called the church band, man. I said, Brother Joe, I'm dressed to go to

church where you at?

And he used to call me round.

He said, round, get to higher ground.

Well, I ain't going to say what I said to Charles Word, but I said... No,

you say? I said, how the fuck am I going to get to higher ground? How fucking

high can I go?

Hurricane Katrina, now a Category 5 storm. Only three Category 5 hurricanes

made landfall in the United States since records were first kept.

I'm on the news. Now I'm getting scared.

Now I'm getting scared.

They built the levee system now to withstand a Category...

Three. Three. That's the thing. We're looking at a category five.

Exactly.

So I'm calling everybody where y 'all at.

Because I wasn't driving. I still don't drive to this day.

Can't swim?

No, I can't swim either. And that was too much water for me to swim for

So my oldest son, he was working at the Hilton Hotel.

They put us on the sixth floor. It was a gym room.

But they turned it to a rescue room for us.

We used to do a thing in New Orleans called vertical evacuation.

Because we had tall buildings.

Vertical evacuation.

Hotels in New Orleans are full.

A lot of people were following a very specific strategy, trying to find a

room that was going to be high enough above the floodwaters, but not so high

that they would be affected by the wind.

Let's see if we can see.

We are afraid because I've experienced it back in 1965, Hurricane Betsy.

We were right there where the levee broke.

We evacuated to higher ground.

And this area is the central business district.

So the politicians here, they'll do everything to keep this area safe.

I was the director of safety and loss prevention at the Hyatt Regency Hotel.

My question was always, what are we going to do with all these people if we

power? But the guys in Seals were like, small concern, let's sell out the house.

And they were right.

Until they weren't.

I had 5 ,000 people in my hotel when the storm hit under my watch.

You think it's going to happen? I think this is the one to really worry about.

U .S. Army trucks and stuff.

You hear what I mean?

And here come the motherfucking police.

You know, they always got to have the fucking police.

They going to still get their snaps and chips, too.

All right, big brother, y 'all getting out of here, huh?

For sure.

Ain't nothing wrong with that. If I had wheels, I'd be gone, too.

All of them gone.

Already, right?

I ain't never left for a second.

All of them gone. My daughter, she in the hotel up there. She scared?

Well, she work in the hotel.

She got the hook.

Y 'all staying or y 'all going?

We going.

Y 'all going or y 'all going?

I'm going to do the storm.

You staying where I am? Yes. You staying too?

I'm out.

Before you go out and swoop down?

The Superdome would be opened up as a refuge of last resort, where we would

start to take citizens that cannot evacuate.

We had nowhere else to put all the people that didn't evacuate in time, so

opened up the Superdome.

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

to leave the city.

We were going to Nashville, but my mother was so sick, she could have died

the road trip.

So we went to the Superdome.

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

suitcases, bottled water and food in hand, others with nothing but the

on their back.

There seemed to be a real misunderstanding of what people would

Thousands are standing in line right now. Around 10 ,000 have lined up. 20

to 30 ,000 people to come inside the Superdome and ride out Katrina.

For many, it's their only option.

They were absolutely shocked that 20 -some thousand people showed up at the

Superdome.

There were 20 ,000 people in front of us. The line stretched for two miles

to get in.

And my mother could barely sit up.

So I asked the police officer, where could I get my mother in?

And she said, go around the back of the Superdome.

There was a section called Special Needs to take people who were, you know,

sickly like she was.

It wasn't set up.

So they asked us to go back home, come back later.

And for us, later didn't happen.

What it's like right now, we're category five about to come through.

Winds 175 miles per hour.

Gust and winds maybe up to 200 miles per hour.

We two, me and Kutcher, two of the last people probably left on the block.

We got one neighbor that's staying and a few more that's scary, man.

I was thinking about Stan. I'm going to go and ask my auntie if she want to

leave.

I hope she do, man, because if she don't, 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, you know, but look around, man.

don't think we're going to see any of this anymore.

Want to come with me?

She went with Bob. They're going to Mississippi somewhere.

You know what I'm saying? You want to go?

Yeah, this is getting bad.

But if my husband and I leave and my auntie, it's a tough call to make, man.

We don't want to stay here, but it just seems like

this is what's going to happen, man.

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

I hope it may.

The wind is blowing, and it's blowing a little hard.

But if it later on, we're going to read the full effect.

And then, ooh, shoot it.

Before the storm came, me and my cousin Ariel, we ride our bikes through the

Treme area.

It never crossed my mind that would be my last bike ride in my community.

If you have not evacuated yet, It is to the point where it's probably best for

you to stay put and hunker down and find a friend with a generator.

Just got to get the band rolling, pal.

This place is empty, man.

People gone, man.

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. And I think that trend is going to continue.

And as we lose the sunlight later on this evening, I hope that most of you

want to be out of the area are, in fact, out of the area.

We're driving, and the traffic not moving for like a few hours.

I don't want the storm wiping me out this way.

They said, Superdome, shout to the last resort. Let's go there. And at the time,

my cousin Kussy was with me.

You have this big old Superdome, and they decided to put us all

at the lower level.

And they made us all sit one by one.

I think of, like, the slave ships, like, the way they stacked us up.

Okay, y 'all got two of y 'all? Y 'all two sit right here. Y 'all got three?

Okay, y 'all three sit next to those two.

But I don't think nobody really slept good, but eventually you got tired

that you had to lay down.

Tonight, I think, as we're waiting for this storm, people are really praying.

And, you know, they're relying on their faith tonight to carry them through.

Kept calling, sis, get ready, get ready.

I said, girl, stop calling me every hour telling me get ready. It's coming. Call

me when it get close.

So she was like, sis, it's 2 o 'clock. They saying y 'all going to get hit.

They hit the wind.

Well, I remember we watched the news, and I believe it was Bob on the news.

You had no plan to leave.

You've got to have now a plan to survive.

You could just see the fear in his eyes.

It was like, I prayed for everybody.

You know, God bless New Orleans, and the power just went out after that.

You couldn't even see outside.

You can hear the wind howling, and howling, and the doors jacking and

and jacking.

So now the rain is coming down on the 6th floor in the Hilton Hotel.

Yeah, things just got a little bit less comfortable in here.

Power burned out, windows didn't blow it up.

So they gather all of us and say, come on, y 'all, we all got to be back and

we're downstairs to the first floor.

The Hyatt used to have a

sculpture that hung from the ceiling. The entire sculpture was doing this,

literally moving the ceiling.

And all I could think about was the circular restaurant that we had on top

the hotel.

It's going to fall on the ballroom where we evacuated all the people.

I'm freaking the fuck out. My husband is so even -keeled, I don't know if he has

a natural tranquilizer in his blood.

But he was just chill, like, just watching me go crazy and spin out until

the bubbles in the wall, until the water started bubbling.

We didn't know that the roof had come off the third floor. I'm like, we need

find out what's happening.

I open the door.

A two -by -four of a building flew right past. If I had stepped out two seconds

before that, my ass would not be sitting here talking.

Look at it. I mean, it's a steady flow.

If you go out there, you'll almost get your freaking head chopped off.

To this day, the sound of a storm fucks me up.

This is what it's like in downtown New Orleans right now.

Stuff is flying down the street.

All right, that's it, guys. I'm going to come back in.

This is a live picture. You can barely see the Superdome, but anywhere from 12

,000 to 20 ,000 people are inside this thing.

That's a big ol' hole, bud.

That's a big ol' hole, man.

Apparently the Superdome is leaking,

has sprung a leak.

Now we got to sit in the hallway trying to take cover from the rain

inside the Superdome.

Hector was born the Sunday morning before Katrina.

I'm sore. I'm in a bed.

They're pushing our hospital beds into the hallway because the hurricane was so

powerful that the glass would break. And, you know, the hurricane -proof

in the hospitals.

We were new parents. We could barely change a diaper without lights.

And I was trying to nurse.

Merv was trying to hold the cell phone light.

And we heard screaming.

She was saying, my mom was on the roof.

We were like, what's happening, right?

And she's saying that there was a lot of water.

And then the phone went dead. And it just became clear that we were in a

situation.

I was in my apartment, and I woke up, and I peeped out the door, and I seen it

was all the lights, the street lights was out, but it was wind, and the wind

gusts were strong.

I lived across the street from my friend Michael.

So I said, let me make it across the street to Michael.

As I stepped out, the wind took me to him against the gate.

So I crawled over to Michael. Then we heard boom, boom.

Then the next thing I know, I heard Michael say, Freddy, get ready. Here it

come. We saw the water coming up the street.

Look at my house. This is water.

Everything is water, water.

Water leak into the basement.

Michael's sister stood next door to us, all right? By the time we knocked on the

door and got her out there, the water was at least about two feet.

It didn't matter how many. The water was way high.

I see a grill.

I see somebody's living room set. I see somebody's big screen TV.

Our next step is our roof. We can't go nowhere, man.

Listen, wherever, you can put a hole anywhere.

You have to put a hole in the ceiling.

This ain't better than drowning.

And I'm a child in the attic.

You hear people hollering and screaming, the next minute you don't hear nothing.

That's how fast the water had to have gotten in the attic.

Hey, last seconds of me right quick.

Hey, now you have seen, for the whole five, what Katrina has done to us. She's

stuck us in the attic. We got a couple of items of food you can see over there,

ain't much.

But I'm running out of juice, too.

So I'm going to show y 'all a little more footage of me. Catch everybody up

here, then I'm going to show y 'all from outside.

Y 'all have anything to say to the world while we're up here? Come on, use your

chance.

The most we expected was maybe some shingles blown off the roof,

maybe a tree falling on the house, but not 25 feet of water.

We were trapped in the attic.

So my brother kicked a hole into the roof.

He pulled up my mother, my granddaughters, a 2 -year -old, a 3

4 -year -old. And my cousin Hyman was mentally challenged.

And once we got on the roof, well, we figured, well, we'll be all right.

But then the house lifted off its foundation, started floating up the

like it was a boat.

We managed to go from 1826 Tennessee Street to 1617 Tennessee Street

on the roof of the house.

Then the house gets a debris pile, throws everybody into the water, and

clinging for our lives.

I put my first granddaughter on the roof of the house that we landed by, turned

around to get her two sisters, and she fell into the water and disappeared.

My granddaughter, Shania, who was four years old at the time, jumped in the

water to save her sister.

I'm yelling at my brother, the wind is 150 miles an hour, there's debris flying

all over the place.

But all of a sudden you hear a voice at the distance.

Pa, pa, pa, pa.

We're talking about a baby that didn't know how to swim, but taught herself how

to move in water in her mother's tub.

She literally swam out of the side of the house onto a big U -Haul truck.

The truck moved sideways close enough to the house for us to step onto it.

But while we were doing that, my mother was pulled under the water.

And now I say I've lost two.

So I made a conscious decision to worry about the ones who were in front of us.

We made a human chain of our bodies.

We could stay on the roof of the house, and we were there 6 .30 in the morning

until 1 o 'clock in the afternoon.

I had no idea.

if we were going to survive.

I had no idea if anybody would survive.

After the storm actually came and passed, you know, it was just a still

quietness.

You know, I stepped outside, and then I started seeing other people, you know,

come outside.

Trees are spinning all over the Christian church, but Jesus is still up

Let's just thank God for that.

I was like, okay, yeah, it came and passed, right?

There was a fence on Monday morning.

We got passed.

In the heart of the French Quarter, the crowds have just begun to come out.

Behind me is a store to open and sell, at long last, beer.

And New Orleanians have made their way.

The media.

We sort of were focused on the French Quarter because they feel like, well,

is what people are going to know.

Bourbon Street took winds in excess of 105 miles an hour.

Shutters were blown off and many windows were crashed in the middle of the

night. It's also the center of, like, where the money is.

The Hyatt Hotel had 100 windows blown out in a matter of a minute.

But historic Bourbon Street still stands. In fact, the water has dried up

much of this region.

And I think people just didn't even think to care about the low -lying

neighborhoods.

I mean, you look back, it sounds so ridiculous now, right? Because you knew

Lower Ninth Ward would likely flood in a major hurricane. It had done so before.

Katrina has knocked out telecommunications hubs all along the

means... We're as blind as you are, and we apologize for that. But late word is

the levees did hold.

In the words of one, the fact that the damage wasn't worse was pure New Orleans

luck.

So we didn't know that the Lower Ninth Ward had flooded.

We didn't know that people were drowned in their homes.

Where we are, we were good.

I'm like, shit, the sun is shining?

You know, we're good.

The next thing I know, somebody yells from across the way and says, water's

coming in the city, water's coming in the city. What do you mean, water's

in the city?

And I'm looking at the ground, and I'm seeing water.

Again,

we've got a lot of rumors flying around of levees being breached and topped.

Now, what the damages are, we don't know. We're trying to get the

There was a rumor that the levees broke, and everybody went, no, no, no, no, no.

We're taking a foot and a half water outside our window now. Actually rising

foot and a half an hour?

Rising, it's rising. But it wasn't much later that someone walked into the

governor's office and said, we just got word that the levees broke.

And that is like a nuclear bomb being dropped on the city of New Orleans.

The water started getting higher and higher, probably around

seven feet.

Now we stopped.

And shortly after that, I started seeing helicopters,

which you would call military helicopters, flying over

the neighborhood.

These levees were built by the United States government.

You would think that a break would be a remote, remote, remote possibility.

And then you had multiple breaks.

At 6 .30 a .m. during the hurricane, the Lower Ninth Ward was first in that

sequence.

The first levee broke during the storm.

Because of the lack of communication, nobody could really get that word to

anybody else.

We're hearing people saying...

There's a levee breach in the Ninth Ward, and all of this water's coming

way.

But I'm like, the Ninth Ward is way over there.

But then on my side, where we are, there's a 17th Street Canal, which my

helped build.

This bitch has a breach in it.

We turn on the news, and we see this water.

There's part of the levee. Here's your break. And as we go along, this entire

area is just water flowing right into the city.

This can't be happening.

And we have an important message to pass along from Mayor Ray Nagin.

A pumping house is being disabled by floodwaters at the 17th Street Canal.

as a result, the floodwaters are going to rise to the point of 12 to 15 feet of

flooding. She'll tell you, like, I kind of like... Blast it.

And then in the next three hours, the London Canal breached as well.

We survived Katrina.

When the levees broke, that's what fucking did us in.

We now have a new problem in this city. The water is rising. This is the worst

-case scenario.

The government's levees failed, and they left us.

To say that clear, they left us.

Thousands of homes across the city of New Orleans up to their roofs in water.

The casualty count is growing. Reports of bodies floating in the water. No EMS.

And that's just what we can see to assess. It's hard for me to comprehend

many people might be out there and how many people's lives are in jeopardy.

That was the beginning of the nightmare.