Exodus

Terima kasih. A lot of you on the phones trying to help me out here to help the people out there. We're your lighthouse gang in this moment of darkness. Thank you.

Radio host Garland Robinette was on the air more or less constantly after Katrina, broadcasting from a studio the size of a broom closet in Baton Rouge. Being on the air so much meant Garland got more than his fair share of call-ins, calls from victims of the flood, from evacuees looking for family members, even the occasional foreigner hoping for updates. It was all pretty bizarre for an evening talk show. And then on Thursday, a few days after the storm,

My answer to that today is BS. Where is the B? Garland got a call from the mayor, Gray Negg. goddamn ships that are coming, I don't see'em. What did you say to the President of the United States and what did he say to you? I I basically told him we had an incredible uh crisis here and that his flying over in Air Force One does not do it just The call was all over the place. Sometimes Negan seemed furious.

And they don't have a clue what's going on down here. They flew down here one time two days after the doggone event was over with T V cameras, AP reporters, all kind of goddamn, excuse my French, everybody in America, but I am pissed. At other points in the call, he was on the brink of tears. I have no idea what they're doing, but uh I will tell you this.

You know, God is looking down on all this, and if they are not doing everything in their power to save people, they are going to pay the price. Negan was under a lot of pressure. He hadn't slept. He also hadn't come down much from the twenty-seventh floor of the Hyatt. The police department was crumbling. The police chief and media were spreading stories of depravity. Even the mayor believes some truly wild shit.

People don't want to talk about this, but I'm gonna talk about it. You had drug addicts. that are now walking around this city looking for a fix. And that's the reason why they were breaking in hospitals and drug stores. The picture Negan painted was grim. And they found they probably found guns. It almost didn't matter what was true or not.

drug addicts that are wreaking havoc and we don't have the manpower to adequately deal with. We can only target certain sections of the city and and form a perimeter around them and hope to God that we're not over Alright. The mayor and other officials were desperate for somebody to take charge, somebody to get the chaos under control, the hero to save the day. And on Thursday, Negan finally got what he asked for.

Now I will tell you this, and I give the president some credit on this. He sent one John Wayne dude down here that can get some stuff done. And his name is General Honore. And he came off the doggone chopper and he started cussing and people start moving. For a week the city was described as under siege. Baghdad in America, more or less. Thank you. Officials were calling for a military response. They got one. Just not quite the one they expected.

I love fucking problems like this. I thrive on shit like this. Part 5. There's a really tempting superhero origin way to start the story of Lieutenant General Russell Honore. He was raised on a farm in Lakeland, Louisiana. He grew up near the levees on the mighty Mississippi River. And as fate would have it, he was born just before hurricane. I don't think that had got jacked to do with nothing, but I grew up listening to my grandfather and old men sitting on the porch.

before we had TV telling stories. And they would get emotional about stories about the flood of nineteen twelve. In nineteen twenty seven and nineteen thirty six. Because our people were treated very bad during those floods. The history of floods in Louisiana is a history of the honores. they'd been through the Great Mississippi flood in nineteen twenty seven. During that one, water rose all up and down the river. A lot of black farmers were flooded off their land.

In New Orleans, the business community worried that the French Quarter was gonna flood. So they agreed on a plan to divert the water. just downriver from the city, they blew up a levee. They flooded thousands of poor folks out of their homes. The French quarter stayed high and dry. The Onorees lost their land too. The government took it to create a spillway to stop future floods. So we went from landowners to renters. And we did not survive Jim Crowwell not being landowners, but we survived.

Honore went to segregated schools. He raised cows for segregated 4-8 shows. His church, that was segregated too. The first time he experienced any kind of real racial integration in his life was when he joined the ROTC. It really appeared that people didn't matter. What color you were? Is can you run as fast as and long as the army wanted you to? Could you shoot? Could you participate as a part of a team? Were you appreciative of other people's contributions?

And uh that was a true learning experience and it made me reflect on, yeah, I I wanna definitely be in the army. He did join the army and He rose up the ranks for thirty five years. I was a lieutenant general, uh three star general promoted to that position to command first United States Army, and I was a thirty third commander of uh first army in Atlanta when Katrina hit.

The Tuesday after Katrina, Honore and his staff had to drive to Camp Shelby, Mississippi to start relief efforts. His predecessor, the thirty second commander of First Army, used to ride around in a green Dodge van, but Honore had upgraded the fleet to Chevy Suburbans, stretch models. They were packed with TVs and satellite radios. In the vent some shit happen, I'm not gonna show up in a soccer mom car. Yeah. You know I'm not riding that shit.

Optics are kind of a big thing for Honore. He thinks an army general should look the part. And he still does. He still wears his Army baseball caps and chugs black coffee. He smoked like four whole cigars in one interview alone, and he still drives a giant issue. Jack ass, did you ever see Robert E. Lee on a on a pissed looking horse or a Long Street uh you know what I mean? Or George Patton on a pissed looking horse? Riding in that shit. You you gotta somehow look the part.

So after Katrina, he and his team drove those manly SUVs right into the path of devastation. Light to out. No light. We drove from Birmingham to Jackson, no light. We found one gas station as we were going in Birmingham and we stopped fill up with fuel. Rumor rule in the army. Fill up every time you can. Don't go below a half a tank.

Shortly after he got to Camp Shelby, he got word from a superior The White House had created Joint Task Force Katrina and put him in charge of units in Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, and Louisiana. New Orleans was his responsibility now. He got in a helicopter and flew to the Superdome from Mississippi. And we do a whip around the Superdome. And I've never come in on such a a fast landing, but they're trained to land on ship.

In small spaces. And as they brought that black hawk down, I mean they dropped that sound, bitch. There was a lot of work to do. Many people were still stranded in flooded buildings across the city. Thousands of people had been in the Superdome for days. Thousands were in the convention center with no help. Buses FEMA had promised to evacuate people hadn't arrived. Elderly and sick people needed airlifts to hospitals.

And when I asked the mayor, what's the priority? He said, General, we gotta evacuate the city. So we had that meeting, I said, okay, we need buses. FEMA guy wears a bus. We don't know. We've we've they own contract. We think they own the way. But the people in New Orleans could not talk to people in Baton River, seventy two miles away. So I gave the mayor a satellite phone. So wait, they they didn't have sat phones until you got there?

No. He didn't have one. There was one at the Superdown. But I think there were a lot of people around there that didn't even know that was there. After checking in with the mayor, Honore loaded into his helicopter and whipped out to Baton Rouge. The governor was there. And so was Michael Brown, the FEMA director. So Michael Brown had found out I was there and he sent word for me to Come over and see him. So I walked in, he said, This is your desk right next to me.

I said, uh Sir, you will never see me sitting at fucking desk. He said, No, I need you right next to me so we can coordinate this. I said, Yeah, but the people in the water in New Orleans, I'm headed back to New Orleans.

As a National Guard general put it today, the cavalry has arrived. It is the federal assistance that New Orleans has literally been begging for. National Guard troops move. When he got back to New Orleans, he had his hands full with logistics. Making sure food and water got delivered, finding buses, finding fuel for airplanes. Andy had another big problem, the chief of police, Eddie Compis. I get a call.

It's right before dark. The police chief had gone on television and said there were snipers. The White House chief of staff called my phone number, said, Hey. The boss wanna know there's snipers in New Orleans because If snipers are there, we're gonna send federal troops in tonight. Honore realized he had to get in front of them. He had a little talk with Compass. I say that's a significant word to say snapers you I say Oh by the way did they hit you? Well no. Did they hit the helicopter?

No. Well they probably won fuckin' sniper would he. Honore had a simpler explanation for why people might be shooting off guns. I said in a lot of cases people they've watched too much television and they think if they're shooting there The helicopter here, I may come get'em. I'll mark their position. And out of all the stories and I mean I've had helicopter pilots, you run into'em all over the place. They were shooting at us. We have yet to have one helicopter with a bullet hole in it.

He tried to tell Compass that these rumors could set off a dangerous chain of events. Snipers firing at American troops on American soil, that could give the government the pretext to treat New Orleans like a war zone. You know, we're going to snipers, now we're going to a case of civil unrest. And the president can assume control of all of this area now because we've lost civil control. Governor Blanco was saying the National Guard would shoot to kill.

The White House was offering special ops troops to provide orders. Bush was considering invoking the Insurrection Act, which would federalize the response entirely. No president had done that since his father did, during the LA riots in 1992. The mayor was asking for martial law, and some officers thought it was actually in place. We were pretty dangerously close to a situation where armed forces units would shoot civilians for the first time since the Kent State Massacre in 1970.

And all that talk about snipers, it almost did the job. Where you get this shit snipers from, Chief? Or said just maybe I used the wrong word. I asked Compis about this when I talked to him. He said that's exactly how it happened. He was upset though'cause he said sniper upsets people. I it it it makes people Worry, you know, and I guess I shouldn't have used that word. I said, no shit you use her on. Yeah. I'm sorry, I mean I can't take it back.

So I called back down to the governor's office and said, hey, hey, tell the governor, don't tell the troops to shoot to kill. that don't ever tell law enforcement to shoot to kill your own people.

In the days after he first landed at the Superdome, the rumors and misinformation had done their work. Troops pointed their weapons at flood survivors. The NOPD had shot at least ten people in the week after Katrina. They ambushed two families on the Danziger Bridge. Gretna police had blocked the bridge to stop evacuees coming from the convention center. Honore saw rumors as one of his biggest obstacles.

This thing you've been building about looting and about the cities out of control of the bullshit. You had a bunch of reporters still pissing New York beer. Just showing up to eat corroborating shit. Somebody's walk down the street and said, Hey, what happened to you last night? Well I saw five people get raped at the convention center.

They don't go ask the police if they know anybody. They don't go ask and see anybody by name. Then somebody's gone straight to national television. There were five people. We gotta talk to Charles here. And Charles say five people got it Charles you got it No, I ain't got nothing that's say. Well that's not a corroboration of a story. There was another rumor going around that week.

Lots of people who rescued were convinced that the levees in the lower ninth ward had been blown up on purpose. They said they heard the explosion. The uh first day I had rumors on Thursday that they were blowing the levees. Honori had grown up in Lakeland, Louisiana, listening to old men telling stories about floods. He figured he knew where that idea came from. Somebody grandfather told them notes about back in twenty seven when it blew the levy.

to save New Orleans. And they're gonna blow the levees where the black people live. Well, you know what? That's what happened in the Ninth War. But a barge hit a damn concrete wall there and that's how it started. A barge did hit the industrial canal levee. It was huge. Came right over the wall and into the Lord Ninth Ward. Maybe that's what people heard. So you go on and on that there's nobody out there blowing levees. I'm dealing with that. This is Romans.

In some ways, Honore really was a John Wayne dude people were looking for. He's loud. He chews people out and curses a lot. He blew past all the red tape and just steamrolled past anything in his way. He took over, but not really in the way some people thought he would. All of these National Guard troops are armed. They all have weapons.

But General Honore is going through and telling all of them to put their weapons point down. He very specifically has said literally he does not want this to look like a rat. Instead of shooting looters, he told soldiers to put their guns down. Instead of freaking out about snipers and gangs, he held daily press conferences to dispel rumors. Instead of responding to Katrina like it was a war zone, he responded like it was a humanitarian crisis.

We're issuing water for bottles and individual packets of food. And uh if you ever had twenty thousand people come to supper, you know what I'm talking about. Honore understood that his job wasn't about establishing control over the victims of Katrina. It was about establishing control over officials and media, controlling the narrative. It all came into view on Friday when he first went to the convention center. The police told Honore that it was dangerous. Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE

We drove down there and the people said, Hey, that's a general. And uh one said, That guy's name is Honore. I know some honorees. Right here in New Orleans. So they were yelling, Hey bruh, you here together? I said, Got it. When I saw the National Guard that arrived today, I felt like once again I was a part of America. Because I really felt like my country had deserted me until then. Honore's visit would help kickstart efforts to bring food and water to people at the convention center.

They began evacuating on Saturday and were all out by Sunday. Their week of hell was over. Honore stayed behind to rescue stragglers and help get the city up and running again. It takes a little time to do difficult shit. It takes a little longer to do fucking impossible. But we're gonna do this shit. And we did D D, we did Iwo Jima. This is a fucking army. We know how to do tough shit, but you gotta get the logistics set to get it done. You with me?

In the superhero version of this story, this is the end. The guy born on the eve of a hurricane had rescued the city. New Orleans had its savior. The black John Wayne dude had come off the chopper, started cussing, and got shit done. People ask me, so what do you think about being compared to black John Wayne? But I say, well, John Wayne was an actor. He could reshoot his fucking scenes. D this is real. You know what I mean? Honore's job, as well as he'd done it, was essentially damage control.

He'd gotten there days after the storm. The rumors and misinformation that he fought had already claimed lives. People died waiting for help. Some people lost faith in the government. He helped get folks loaded up on airplanes, but he couldn't do much to help them after that. They were joining what was probably the largest migration of people in the U.S. since the Great Depression. It would change New Orleans. And it would change the country.

Thank you. Thousands and thousands of New Orleans streaming westward. Three thousand. People a day heading to Texas. Arkansas will take twenty thousand. They are quickly filling up. I don't want to go back Even the city of Philadelphia has put aside a million dollars to take in one thousand. They now join one of America's greatest population shifts since the Great Depression.

Alice Kraft Kearney and her family joined that great migration a week after the levees broke. They finally got picked up from her brother's three-story house in the Lord Ninth Ward. We had to board this airplane. When we asked the question, Where are we going? We were told, we don't know. Which I found was strange because I'm not a pilot, but I know you have to file a flight plan. And so they would not tell us where we've been being taken to.

It wasn't until the plane landed that they realized that they were over a thousand miles away. In Albuquerque, New Mexico Governor Richardson was right there to greet us. The um mayor from Albuquerque was there to greet us when the plane landed. Red Cross volunteers gave Alice's family a voucher for a hotel. After spending a long time without running water and in the dark, they had air conditioning, hot showers, and electricity.

But still. When Alice watched TV, she couldn't help but feel like Katrina was still with her. Evacuation. These are, remember, refugees. Modern day Nomad. In the United States of America, think of it. It's a word you'll be hearing, I bet, for years. We've just gotten a very I could not believe that we were being referred to as refugees in our own country.

Lots of evacuees said they were never going back to New Orleans. Either they were fed up or they just wanted to escape Katrina. Not Alice. Absolutely. I was coming back. I had something to come back to. I had a home and I and I I definitely wanted to get back to my home. Evacuees are starting to pop up all over the country. The stolen city bus had taken Lee Ann Williams and her family a couple hours away to Lafayette, Louisiana.

They'd stayed there for a few days, along with thousands of other evacuees. But one of Leanne's aunts lived over in a town called McGee, Mississippi, The middle of nowhere. You have to cut off into the woods to get to her house. Not a street, a road. McGee, Mississippi is something like the exact opposite of New Orleans. It's a town on the highway between Jackson and Hattiesburg.

One of those places with hotels, fast food spots, and a piggly wiggly, and not a whole lot more. Leanne was fourteen. She'd never lived outside New Orleans in her life. It had only been a couple weeks since she was buying new uniforms and Jordans to start a new fancy high school, She even still had her hair done up for the first day. My mom registered me at McGee High. People thought I talked funny'cause of my accent. I thought they talked funny.

They made fun of my braids because we that's how we were here in New Orleans, but that's not how they were in here in Mississippi. She went to class with one of her cousins. She tried to fit in, like any normal schoolgirl. But things just weren't normal. A teacher asked him to talk about the disaster.

She was like, do you wanna just stand in front of class and tell us about yourself? Because we heard about what happened and my cousin stood in front of the class and she told about herself. I broke down crying. They brought me to the counselor. So to the counselor the next period, the same thing I cried and I cried. And my cousin talked, she was like, Leanne, it's gonna be okay. You just gotta stop crying. I just kept crying. Why do you think you were quiet?

Because I wanted to go home. I didn't want to be there. And then we watch the news out here. It would take New Orleans about five to ten years to be back what it was and The water's still in the city and it's taking a long time to pump it out and I'm hearing my mom and them discuss this and I'm just saying I'm never gonna be back home. Five to ten years I'll be a adult. I don't wanna go home five, ten years. I'm gonna go home now.

But I was like, Where are we gonna go? How are we gonna go home? You can't get in the city. They're not letting us in a city. You can't go to your house no more. There is no home no more. Her family did their best to find somewhere to make a new life. A couple months after they got to McGee, Leanne's parents took her to Scottsdale, Arizona. A church there was helping families get back on their feet.

Leanne actually liked it in Scottsdale. The food was good, her family had a pool. She even made some new friends. But she was still determined to go back home. Some volunteers at the church offered to buy her new clothes, and she decided she wanted a winter jacket. And it was like, I don't think you're gonna need that out here'cause it don't get that cool out here. And I just was persistent, I wanted that cool.

And it was like, Oh well, you can just wear it. It's like sixty degrees in the morning but in the um evening it's hot. You're not gonna need it. But I'm thinking I'm gonna need it for where I'm going'cause I'm going back home. So I'm just gonna get this jacket. I'ma need it sooner or later'cause we just gonna be here just temporarily anyway, so I got the jacket. And did you wear it?

Yeah, I wore that jacket to schoolboy. It was cold when I got up. See, when I got out of my last period, I was burning. Oh. It was like she'd left her life on pause back in New Orleans. Maybe if she could just get back, things would pick up right where they left off. Maybe she could get back to her high school, play basketball, hang out with her crush Fonzo. But reality began to set in one day when she was finally able to track Fonzo down. He had made his way back to New Orleans.

I just called the house phone and it rung and somebody answered it. And I asked to speak to him and his mom holler for him to get the phone. But as soon as she started talking, she could hear a lot of people in the background. Fondo seemed distracted, like he was busy. And he just didn't want to talk. That hurting my feelings. It really did. And the phone went And I never spoke with him again.

You mentioned New Orleans anywhere around the world, everybody's eyes light up. Back in that week after Katrina, Mayor Ray Nagan was on the radio with Garland Robinett. They talked about General Honore and the slow government response and Negan defended the city that he loved. Now get off your asses and let's do something and let's fix the biggest goddamn crisis in the history of this country. And I'll say it right now, you're the only politician that's called and called for arms like this.

The two men weren't just angry or overwhelmed or frustrated. With unknown numbers of dead and so many people evacuating, they were also grieving. Garland, I am just I'm at the point now where it don't matter. People are dying. They don't have homes. They don't have jobs. The city of New Orleans will never be the same. And it's time. He was right.

The city of New Orleans would never be the same. The lives that had been lost couldn't just be restored. The lives like Leanne's that had been broken and changed couldn't just be fixed. And as the weeks became months, as McGee became Scottsdale, became Houston, there were new questions hanging over the city of New Orleans. How would the city be rebuilt? Who was to blame? And who would get to come back? Who wouldn't?

People will look for answers in investigations, in hearings and trials, council meetings, and conspiracy theories. They would work to find meaning in the disaster. They would work to figure out what to say. I gotta go. Okay. Keep us keep in touch. Keep in touch. Can we take a break? Roseanne James.