Katrina: After the Flood Read Online Free Page A

Napoleon Avenue facility. With no way to secure the wheelchairs on the flatbed, a pair of RTA employees gripped the legs of the chair with all their might, including Charlie Veal, the sixty-five-year-old assistant director for rail operations. “Nobody off!” the police yelled at them when they arrived in Gretna. “Nobody gets off this truck.”Rather than risk another confrontation, the driver was told to drop everybody off at the RTA’s park ’n’ ride in Algiers, which had been their original destination.
    After a couple of hours of forced detention for the RTA contingent, several RTA coaches—between three and five, depending on who is telling the story—pulled up at the Gretna bus depot. They stopped by the park ’n’ ride to pick up anyone who had ended up there. Their caravan then headed to Baton Rouge. A few, including Sharon Paul, would be dropped off at a hospital, but most were brought to an evacuation center. There they were reunited with many of those rescued from the Canal Street barn by the boats Bill Deville and his people had scavenged up. The group of them slept on canvas cots that week in a huge auditorium crowded with hundreds of other evacuees. But they also had access to a bathroom when they needed it. Their shelter had electricity and plenty of food and water. They were among the lucky ones.
    WEDNESDAY
    The Gretna police brass split their force into two. Those on the early shift began work at 7:00 a.m. Those on the late shift took over at 7:00 p.m. An ex-marine named Scott Vinson, a sergeant on the late shift, was responsible for patrolling that first exit ramp people would reach on the West Bank side of the bridge. For anyone in the vicinity of the New Orleans central business district, the Crescent City Connection—a pair of steel bridges stretching across the Mississippi, the fifth-longest bridges of their type in the world—pointed the way toward freedom. Vinson’s job was to see that people didn’t walk aimlessly through Gretna in search of an escape route.
    Tuesday night had been quiet at the bottom of the exit. But all Wednesday evening and into the night, a steady procession of people in clusters of twos and threes and fives walked down the ramp. Vinson stationed two patrolmen at the bottom of the highway. They lined people up and kept order while he used his radio to scrounge up buses—anything to transport people to an evacuation point. He did the same shortly after daybreak on Thursday, when a “second wave” of evacuees, Vinson said, came trudging over the bridge.
    Vinson worked past the end of his shift and into the early afternoon, “till that last person was loaded on a bus.” A tired Vinson arrived at the Gretna police station, where he bunked that week, exhausted but feeling good about what he and his people had accomplished. “The three of us were able to help in excess of a thousand people. Closer to fifteen hundred,” Vinson said.
    THURSDAY
    It was past 1:00 a.m. when Raymond Blanco—the husband of Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco—showed in Gretna. He arrived with a state legislator and a Louisiana trooper. “We was just killing time, really,” Blanco said. They were in the area to deliver medical supplies and waiting for a boat that would bring them to a flooded area south of the city. With nothing else to do, Blanco, who liked to call himself the First Guy, paid a courtesy call on Gretna’s mayor, Ronnie Harris, whom Blanco had known since Harris was a teenager.
    It was easy to find Harris. The police station was about the only building in town with lights. “By all appearances, they were in control of their situation,” Blanco said. He remembered their giving him something to eat and recalled talk of all the people walking across the bridge. He told them FEMA was promising buses and that his wife, the governor, was trying to secure others from around the state. None of them, Blanco said—not the mayor, the police chief, or anyone else in the Gretna