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Issue Date: August 20, 2006
Katrina's Wake
Film director Spike Lee and historian Douglas Brinkley, both exploring the storm's aftermath in their recent works, talk about the lingering effects of last year's catastrophic hurricane.
By Jamie Malanowski
A year ago, when Hurricane Katrina struck southeast Louisiana on the morning of Aug. 29, it already had slipped in strength from a Category 5 storm to Category 3. But even in that downgraded condition, Katrina precipitated an enormous catastrophe. The storm, along with the subsequent piercing of the levees in New Orleans, claimed the lives of more than 1,300 people and caused an estimated $125 billion in damage. It left thousands homeless months afterward and is considered the most destructive natural disaster in U.S. history. To discuss the storm on its first anniversary, we brought together two men who have spent considerable time immersed in Katrina. Douglas Brinkley, an author and historian at Tulane University, wrote a scrupulously researched account of the storm and how people responded to it. "The Great Deluge" was a best seller earlier this year. Spike Lee, the director whose films frequently have a topical edge, is following up the biggest commercial hit of his career, "Inside Man," with "When the Levees Broke," a four-act documentary about Katrina that HBO will air Aug. 21 and 22.
Who bears the most responsibility for the failures in Katrina?
Brinkley: Government officials at every level. They constitute the perfect confluence of absurdity and idiocy. I deal hardest with Michael Chertoff, the secretary of Homeland Security.
Lee: Yeah, [then-FEMA Director] Michael Brown took a lot of bullets, but Chertoff has gotten off scot-free.
Brinkley: Chertoff basically kept telling the president, "Don't worry, I've got everything under control. Everybody's exaggerating what's going on." Then he went to Atlanta for a conference on avian flu while we had the biggest disaster in American history at his doorstep. And then he became arrogant, cold-hearted, callous. During those crucial days after the storm struck, the whole federal government was ensnared in a bureaucratic tangle to see who would be responsible for what.
Lee: That's the same thing [New Orleans Mayor] Ray Nagin did when he postponed the call to evacuate. Instead of issuing a mandatory order [in enough time to get people out], he said he had to consult the lawyers. Forget that, man! Lives are at stake. Later, he was pleased that 80% of the population got out. You might think that, but this isn't baseball. That 20% who got stuck is somebody's mother, somebody's sister, somebody's child.
What's the most important thing people should know about Katrina?
Lee: That the story isn't over. It's going to take 15 or 20 years before we understand the full impact of this storm. Or more. People survived the storm, but now they're becoming depressed and committing suicide, or just dying of broken hearts. And no one knows the effect this is going to have on the children, if a kid's going to be able to function normally after watching his mother or his father drown.
Brinkley: I was struck by the degradation of FEMA. After it was placed in the Department of Homeland Security, it became the bottom basket of the organization.
Lee: The bald-headed stepchild! But one of the things that came across is that this event was a revelation to a lot of people that there are poor people in America. America has done a great job of hiding its poor. If you don't want to see them, then you don't have to. And so a lot of people were shocked.
Where were you when the storm struck?
Brinkley: I was in New Orleans, where I have lived since 1993, where my wife is from, and where I teach at Tulane.
Lee: I was at the Venice Film Festival, in another great city that happens to be underwater. Usually when I'm at a film festival, I'm seeing a lot of movies. This time, I was holed up in a hotel room, flipping between CNN and the BBC, watching Americans, mostly African Americans, and seeing the situation they were in and wondering how this could happen in what's supposedly the richest, most powerful country that civilization has ever seen.
Brinkley: The moment that the storm arrived, I was in a high-rise. I could see the river surging and roaring backward. And I thought, "My God, I never thought I'd see the Mississippi River, white-capped, going the opposite way." After the storm passed, I went out, and my first impression was that we weren't hit that hard. But then I came to where the flooding was, and I saw police officers huddled together, with looks of sheer terror on their faces. "Get the hell out of town!" they yelled. "The levees have been breached!" I hadn't planned on writing a book; I thought I'd do oral histories from the survivors. But once I learned that, in emergency situations, you have 72 hours to rescue people and to get them food, shelter and medication, and if you don't, they start dying unnecessarily, and once I understood how the federal government shirked its responsibility in maintaining those Lego levees, I decided to write a book.
Is it possible to isolate one story as somehow the most memorable?
Lee: Not really. Sometimes I feel affected by a story that's not even the most tragic. We have a scene [in Levees] of the Blanchard family returning to their home, and it's heartbreaking. The son opens the door, and inside, there is wreckage. The mother asks, "What is that?" And he says, "The dining cabinet." She says, "The dining cabinet is not supposed to be there. It's supposed to be over there." And then she starts crying.
Brinkley: I've been thinking about a woman named Diane Johnson, a lady with sickle cell anemia and diabetes who escaped the flooding but without medication. She managed to hold on and got herself to the Superdome, which was harrowing, and then she got shipped to the Cajundome in Lafayette, La. She is there with no money, and finally a church group takes her to Orlando, where she dies. She's not considered one of the Katrina-related deaths.
Lee: I spoke to the medical examiner, who told me they're going to make a new category, because so many people actually got through the storm and the flood but later died.
Should New Orleans be rebuilt?
Lee: Absolutely, even though the city is below sea level. We just have to make sure we do it right. Two-thirds of the Netherlands is [at or] below sea level. How is it that they can build such a strong levee system and we can't?
Brinkley: The answer is political leadership. It's going to take strong federal leadership to save New Orleans. The Bush administration's general policy has been to provide patchwork funding for repairs. It's not committed to the future. But if you don't save the great port city on the Mississippi --
Lee: -- The American people see there's value there. We need the oil and gas.
Brinkley: But more than an essential strategic port, there's the art and architecture and cuisine. It's our great ambassador city to the world.
Lee: And for all those people scattered everywhere, it's still home.
Brinkley: If we can't save New Orleans, it tells us a lot about ourselves.
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