Through the Looking Glass

Most of the Lorenth ward was already underwater. Lots of people were missing. Lots of people were gone. Alice Kraft Kearney was trapped there, in her brother's three story house on the high ground. After Katrina, it was basically an island in the darkness. At night it was pitch black except for the fires that Yeah. you could see that lighting up the sky. More than thirty people were stuffed into the house. Family, friends, neighbors they'd saved.

But the eeriest thing was to hear voices of people at night crying. You you heard'em but you couldn't help'em. Alice and her family were relatively lucky. There was no running water, but they had food and a generator. They just waited. We heard the helicopters passing. All the time, but they never stopped for us. Coast Guard and National Guard helicopters were flying low, searching for survivors.

But since they were in a decent shelter already, Alice's family and friends figured they weren't a priority yet. I understood it. My brother's under my brother was military, so he understood it. You have your mission. You have to go where they send you. But we w the the question was when are we gonna get rescued? There was no way to know. Most cell towers were down in the city. At this point, New Orleans was almost a dead zone.

I had to go all the way up to the roof to get that signal. I had a horizon at that time. Can you hear me? I'm gonna give him that shout out. Verizon was the Alice and her family had one other line to the outside. A working TV. Most of New Orleans is underwater tonight. They would get together and watch one channel. Oh totally. Channel four. Good evening. I'm Bob Schiefer. For the people along the Gulf Coast, it is a catastrophe. They tune in and watch the catastrophe unfold on TV.

the catastrophe they were experiencing. Billions in damage and a death toll that cannot yet be carried. They would see reports about all the people who hadn't been saved yet. Touring the flooded streets of New Orleans today will have full coverage throughout the hurricane zone tonight. What FEMA now calls the most significant natural disaster to ever hit the United States. It was surprised. Strictly speaking, some of it wasn't real at all.

Misinformation is common after any disaster. In fact, it's so common it has a name. Disaster Myth. But the myth making after Katrina was extreme. So extreme that in the days after the storm, it was like New Orleans existed in two parallel universes. One was the universe that Alice lived in, stuck in that house in the Lower Ninth Ward. The other was the one she was watching on TV.

In the real universe, people like Alice were doing their best to keep each other alive, with no help from the outside. Now a mere tropical depression over the state of Tennessee. In the media universe. I think. Everything was distorted. But the disaster it left behind grows by the hour, and it is not simply a natural disaster tonight. It is becoming the sort of disaster humans cause. There is looting and lawlessness overwhelming.

In the eyes of the media, it was often the victims themselves who were Bye. Well Aaron, you mentioned the danger from from Mother Nature, from the flooding and like that. There's another danger here in New Orleans tonight and it's from some of the people who are still here. The worst of Mother Nature may have passed, the worst in men. Yeah. Is still a problem. Part 3. Through the Looking Glass.

Katrina happened during a weird technological moment. It was the era of the 24 hour cable news broadcast, but before everybody had smartphones and social media. National audiences expected around the clock coverage about the disaster. But the national media didn't have around the clock information. A major breach and a levee overnight sent more water pouring into an already flooded city. Efforts to fix it have failed, and the water is expected to begin rising rapidly yet again.

The city was mostly blacked out by the storm, and the media relied on partial and often secondhand reports. And they were behind. On Tuesday, the nightly national news broadcast finally caught up to local reporting about the levy breaches, and a particular narrative began to emerge. Chaos. Gangs of thieves who armed themselves from local stores now roam the streets, looting even the hospitals.

It's forced state officials to divert scarce resources to neighborhood patrols, hoping that a show of force will keep the looting in check. Looting became a fixation. Sometimes reporters would make attempts at empathy. Looting continue throughout the downtown area today. It isn't a game for many of these people. It's a matter of survival. Lots of other times they were just snitching. Do you think it's okay to take that? Stole it. You're not supposed to do that.

I know we don't, but if we're barefooted, we're walking in the water, our feast is gonna get Looting is widespread. stop them when they can, but most of it is going undeterred in broad daylight. Reporters seemed especially interested in images of people taking TVs or Jordan. you would see the same reels of the same black people going into the same stores over and over.

I mean first of all is there anything left to loot and and are are people still looting and i is there nothing that can be done about it? Uh the things that I witnessed today, Ted, I I I I I I will never forget. Looting uh uh on a on a scale that was just so staggering, so overwhelming. It was uh it was open season. The city has been ravaged by the hurricane and now it's being ravaged by some of its citizens.

But do you have any sense of um people who are breaking into stores because they have no food, they have no water and they need both, and how many people are stealing guns and beer and sneakers and what have you? I think you have more of that going on than people looking for food. We are There were a lot of reporters trying to make a distinction between good looters and bad looters. But the fixation on looting in the first place was a distraction.

This is the centre of one of the great cities of America, New Orleans. Here we have a virtual refugee camp with thousands of people waiting for some sort of help, medical, food, water, you name it. And then over there, the police, scores of police officers, all concerned about one looter who's in that supermarket. It was like all the suffering was invisible to some people. All they could see was cry. The looting. Is it a fight for survival?

One tourist inside the city who snapped pictures of looting in the French quarter called the scene insane. That tourist likened it to downtown Baghdad. Team Fox continues now to Baghdad really? A lot of the reporting was like this. Dramatic to the point of absurdity. They'd pick up on a scary sounding detail.

We've just gotten a very disturbing report from inside the city of New Orleans from our own correspondent in there, Jeff Goldblatt, who says he's just witnessed citizens of New Orleans walking around with AK-47. Yeah. Gracias. And then that detail will get warped and sensationalized. Two guys he told me that AK forty sevens just shooting at police officers. No one was hurt. The guys fled into the French corner. They got

We do know that some folks did carry assault rifles. Lots of them were themselves police officers or security. But these reports made it seem like the city was being taken over by murderers. There was a rumor that the Superdome was a hot spot for killings, that a National Guardsman had found dozens of dead bodies in a freezer, including a seven year old with her throat cut. It wasn't true. Reporting like this had real life consequences.

If you think you're in a war zone, then every person looks like a combatant. We're told someone opened fire on a military chopper here to help out with rescue efforts. Yeah. Ambulances halted their evacuation of people from the Superdome this morning when gunshots were fired. Rescue helicopters have come under fire, too. The largest ambulance service says it will have to severely cut back its rescue efforts if security doesn't improve.

Yeah. In the final telling, there were no helicopters with bullet holes. No ambulances either. But that didn't matter. The rumors slowed down the response anyway. Police in the city of New Orleans, 1,500 of them, have now been called off their search and rescue work to simply deal with the lawlessness in the city. One state senator summed up the danger. You can't rescue people when you're being shot at. Right now the plan is to restore order.

Um Because you can't even get the emergency response personnel into the city for the evacuation. The Pentagon was considering an armed military response. A FEMA official said that some doctors were required to get armed escorts just to walk across the street. The hysteria got so bad that the southeastern Louisiana chapter of the Red Cross waited a month to get to New Orleans. The CEO said they had to wait until the city was safe. The criminal element.

Interesting, no one around the burglarize and loot. It is a war zone. An absolute war zone. People are getting killed and raped. Women left alone. And Looters left to roam free. There were lots of reports to aid workers about sexual assaults in shelters, especially after evacuation. But many of the most sensational stories that circulated on TV that week were never substantiated. stories of rapes of children, and murders of rape victims. The police chief even repeated a lot of them.

Groups of young men have been a Sitting, shooting at people. It's a men who Sergeant, when you hear the you're hearing the same stuff we're hearing coming out of New Orleans and you hear about this state of anarchy, you hear about people getting killed, people getting shot at, helicopters getting shot at. What do you make of all this? We actually know what people made of all this.

In a Gallup poll released weeks after Katrina, most Americans said they thought the residents of New Orleans handled things poorly right after the storm. A quarter of all Americans blamed the residents themselves for the disaster. Almost half said the looters they saw on TV were quote unquote criminals. The vast majority of people in the poll thought the media was pretty much on the level. That they acted responsibly. Nothing to see here.

But people who were actually there, better yet, the people like Alice, who were actually there and were watching the whole mess on TV, they saw things differently. It was it was the way Everything was framed. It was like, if it's a certain group of people, they're commandeering. Where if it's another group of people, they're looting. We're we're sh we're trying to survive. We're trying to do the very same thing in a bad situation. But it was the way that everything was framed with us.

It's painful to think about. The house in Holy Cross was hot. There was no running water. Alice was both bored and afraid. She saw her own people become targets, and she was furious. But she would be the first to tell you she was lucky in all this. She watched the worst of it from afar. Up close for the people on the crosshairs, it wasn't just infuriating. It was dangerous.

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The Ernest Moreau Convention Center is a landmark. It's absolutely huge. Takes up about ten city blocks in downtown New Orleans. If you're driving towards the river, you can see it on the horizon. Like a stadium or an airport. It's one of those places that you think is going to be around forever. That's why, even though it was never an official shelter during Katrina, you can understand why people decided to go there.

Leanne Williams and her family had heard horror stories about the violence and conditions in the Superdome. The rumors got to them too. so they decided to head for the convention center instead. We um got off on the Chapatula exit and we were sitting under the bridge. And me and my cousins, Ariel, Oshadika, Jesse, and Jessica, we was playing piti peck. And of course it was worn down because they been through water and everything in my backpack. The kids entertain themselves playing cards.

They'd had a rough couple days. If they were looking for some relief as they entered the convention center, they didn't find it. I just remember it being hot, smelly. Just was a smell like people and take a bath in days and people crammed up in the heat. It was stink. And then the bathrooms were overflowed.

When my little brother cried to use the bathroom and we went in there with my mom, the toilets was filled with urine and poo and it was all in the zinc and on the we he just had to use the bathroom on the floor because He couldn't go into the bathroom store. They had it everywhere. Mayor Nagan had made the Superdome the official refuge of last resort. The government had brought troops, medicine, food and water there. But none of that stuff was at the convention center.

When we made it that my stepdad and jumper jack left to go find food. And I remember them coming back with poke scans. And like three cans of beans. So we just was sitting there, just sitting there, sitting there. Nighttime coming. I remember we went to sleep. We went to sleep on the floor. All us. There wasn't much reporting about what was going on at the convention center. At least not at that point.

But what did come out described the place as a war zone. They were told to come here. Local authorities said it would be a safe place. But there's no electricity, no food, no water. Police say they're Yes, right. We saw Uh dead bodies. Yeah. With a d. Dangerous cocktail of anger, fear, and desperation brewing. Eighty eight police officers were sent to deal with matters there. A mob beat them back, according to the chief of police.

15,000 people in the city's convention center alone. And we should warn you already, some of the scenes we saw there are some of the most gruesome pictures so far in this crisis. There is looting, there is shooting. Uh we saw Chris a report that there are something like a hundred Armed men inside the convention center, uh sort of holding the center, if you will, away from police. Do you know anything about that? Have police told you anything about that? Why can't the police go in there?

This wasn't true. The fact that so many people were willing to take these stories at face value is evidence of how intense the paranoia was. In the end, it turned out that one person total was shot in the convention center. Later, authorities would search all nineteen thousand people there. They found thirteen weapons. But the picture from the mayor and the police chief was of a place that was too dangerous to save.

The only authorities that Leanne encountered were a small detachment of National Guardsmen who were holed up there before the storm. They were there to fix levee breeches. Leanne could see them huddled together when she looked up at the floors above her. And they're just sitting up there like with the rifles on them. And they're not telling us nothing, they just watching us. The National Guardsmen set up their staging ground in an exhibit hall.

But they weren't actually equipped to help the people around them. They were stranded too. Leadership told those guardsmen not to enter the crowd, because it might get out of control. But Leanne didn't know all that. All she saw was military personnel with their guns trained on her. Like not interacting with us, telling us what's going on, just sitting in the ceiling with rifles on. Like in a position ready to shoot.

So I didn't understand why they was doing that instead of men down here helping us or bringing food and water, like why we being treated like dogs. The way I felt I was like, Well damn, they left us here to die. Like they really don't care. Who cares about a poor black fourteen year old girl? Who worried about me? Who wants to come save us? They showing us not nobody. Leanne's aunt heard that somebody was gonna send buses to come pick everyone up.

But at this point, Leanne hadn't seen any authorities willing to help. She'd had to find her own food. Her family had to walk to the convention center on their own. When they got there, the only soldiers they could find pointed their guns at them. If she had any hope that somebody might view her as worthy of rescue, that hope was long gone now. I'm like they lying, we still here, I'm hearing all this, so now I'm starting to see that Nobody's coming for us.

So I told my mom, I say, I just yanked on my mom. I remember she turned to me and I just cried. I said, Mom, just tell me the truth, we're gonna die. And she was like, what? I say nobody's not coming to save us. I say they don't care about us. I say the president, nobody is coming. I say, we still here, no food, no water. I say, I'm not my brother, my sister, I'm older. I understand. Say just tell me the truth.

Let me ask you about images that many Americans are seeing today and hearing about. Uh they are from the Convention Center in New Orleans, uh CNN. There were moments when journalists got things right. When they pushed against government officials and cut through all the bullshit. On Thursday afternoon, MPR's Robert Siegel interviewed Michael Chertoff, the Secretary of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA.

In its coverage, MPR still focused on a lot of stuff like the Superdome and Looting, which was standard reporting at that point. But then Siegel started asking about the convention center. How many days uh before your operation finds these people, brings them at least food, water, medical supplies, if not gets them out of there? Well first let me tell you there have been deliveries of food, water and medical supplies to the Superdome and that's happened uh almost from the very beginning.

But this is the convention center. These are people who are not allowed inside the superdome. But you know it was there have we brought this to the Churtoff just ignores the question. Siegel tries again. We are hear we are hearing from from our reporter and he's on another line right now thousands of people at the convention center in New Orleans with no food. Right zero. As I say, I'm telling you that we are getting food and water to areas where people are staying.

And um you know it's the one thing about an episode like this is if you if you talk to someone and you get a rumor or you get someone's anecdotal version of something, I think it's dangerous to extrapolate it or uh uh all over This is a week where stories about all kinds of violence were taken seriously. A week where snipers were believed to be shooting helicopters.

But somehow the eminently verifiable fact of thousands of people sitting in a giant building in the middle of town was too much rumor for FEMA. So But but sec m second, when you say that there we don't we shouldn't listen to rumors, these are things coming from reporters who have not only covered many, many other hurricanes, they've covered wars and refugee camps. I mean these aren't rumors, they're seeing thousands of people there.

But w well I I I I would be I say I I have not heard a report of thousands of people in the convention center who don't have food and water. The director of FEMA, Michael Brown, also said in multiple interviews that he just found out about the situation at the convention center that day. In the next segment, MPR interviewed reporter John Burnett, who was at the convention center and saw everything.

Let me clarify for the Secretary and for everyone else what uh myself and Peter Ann Hawk uh just drove away from uh three blocks from here in the Ernest Montreal Convention Center. There are um I estimate two thousand people living like animals inside the city convention center and around it. They've been there since uh the hurricane. There's no food, there's absolutely no water.

There's no medical treatment. There's no police and no security and they're Just after that, Churtoff's folks called back. Secretary Chertoff spokeswoman called to say that after our interview with the Secretary of Homeland Security, he received a report confirming the situation at the convention center and he says the department is working tirelessly to get food and supplies to those in need and also to save lives. For his part, the president still hadn't been to New Orleans. But he came close.

People still in New Orleans, if they look to the skies this morning, saw Air Force One, the president flying over for a personal look at the devastation. You know, it's kind of an absurd moment when you think about it. The president had cut his vacation in Texas short to respond.

He had to do something, and the White House settled on flying Air Force One really low over the Gulf Coast, taking a couple of photos of him looking pensive out the window, and then putting on a press conference back in DC. As we flew here today, I also uh Asked the pilot to fly over the Gulf Coast region so I could see firsthand the scope and magnitude of the devastation. Bush's flyover wasn't exactly good PR. And then it got worse.

On Friday, Bush flew to Mobile, Alabama, and this time he got out of the plane. He held a press conference on the state of response. And he turned to the guy standing next to him, FEMA chief Michael Brown. Uh again I I wanna thank you all for and Brownie you're doing a heck of the job. That was bad. And all this together, the slow government response, the media coverage, Bush's seeming indifference, it all added up. Alice Kraft Kearney will put it like this.

I'll put it like this. As a person of color, you always have it in the back of your mind that the government really doesn't care about you. Katrina validated that. It cemented it for me. I felt like you you talk a good game about, oh, we love our people. You we don't treat you any different. But I don't think that anybody would have wanted to trade places with me that day to say, oh, we don't treat anybody any different. Yes you do.

And we saw it loud and clear. It was played out that day. Um It's some days I d I you know, I I don't like to think about it because I just get choked up.

The flyover. The rumors. The stereotypes about black folks. For people who knew the history of being treated like second-class citizens, it was easy to find patterns. I hate the way They portray us in the media. We see a black family. It says they're looting. See a white family. It says they're looking for food. And you know it's been five days because most of the people are black. And even for me too. Yeah. Kanye West.

The old Kanye. TV because an NBC benefit telethon for Katrina held on Friday night. A frightened looking Mike Myers is standing next to him as Kanye is clearly going off script. The end of this quote is a meme now, but really, if you listen to how he's describing what he's seen, It's chilly. with the setup, the way America is set up to help the um uh the poor, the the black people, the uh

the less well off as slow as possible. I mean this is Red Cross is doing everything they can. We we already realize a lot of the people that could help are at war right now, fighting another way and they they they've given them permission to go down and shoot us. It all might sound conspiratorial. But it was logical for lots of New Orleans like Alice, lots of black Americans. folks who had seen Jim Crow or heard the stories. Tuskegee, Tulsa, Wilmington, If you know all that.

If you've seen all that. Maybe a conspiracy is the most logical conclusion. of the spirit of the people of Southern Louisiana and Mississippi may end up being the most tragic loss of all. George Bush doesn't care about black people. In the end, a lot of what Kanye said would be vindicated. Even as he was speaking, all the rumor and fear had started turning victims into targets. The parallel universe had become real.

It would manifest in a series of violent tragedies and a race to bury them under the flood waters.