Katrina: After the Flood Read Online Free Page B

police station that night—brought up the idea of a bridge blockade.
    The boat that was supposed to give Blanco and his entourage a ride never materialized. A frustrated First Guy slumped in the backseat of the car that took him home to Baton Rouge that morning. On either side of the interstate were parked dozens of buses, all of them idle. The drivers, he would learn when he got back to the state capital, had been scared off by reports of gunfire and looting out of New Orleans. “With all the drama in the media, the bus drivers said, ‘Here are the keys, you can use the bus, but I’m not going in there,’ ” Kathleen Blanco said. Between the Superdome, Convention Center, and people stuck up on the highway, tens of thousands of people needed to be rescued. Raymond Blanco didn’t give his visit to Gretna another thought until he heardthat this small town of eighteen thousand had shut down a state-run bridge—the main escape route out of New Orleans.
    CHARLES WHITMER, GRETNA’S DEPUTY police chief, expected to see mobs when he drove up on the bridge at 8:30 a.m. on Thursday. Instead he saw smaller groups of “one, two, three, here and there, with two or three behind them. Sporadic.” But he also told his boss, Chief Arthur Lawson, that he could see people “just continuously as far as I can see into New Orleans.” That was enough for Lawson. He ordered his number two to track down the chief of the bridge police. “Tell him we need to talk about the pedestrian situation on the bridge,” Chief Lawson instructed.
    Chief Lawson and several of his people were at the meeting on Thursday morning where they decided to shut down the Crescent City Connection. The head of the bridge police was there; the meeting was in his office, inside the small administrative building located on the West Bank side of the bridge. That was technically Orleans Parish, yet no one on their side of the bridge even tried to contact their counterparts in New Orleans. “The radios were out,” Whitmer explained. “The phones were out.” Yet somehow their group included a deputy representing the Jefferson Parish sheriff’s office. NOPD had set up an impromptu headquarters at the foot of Canal Street, just on the other side of the bridge, under the entrance to the Harrah’s casino—as anyone listening to a police scanner or even CNN would know. Including New Orleans in their multijurisdictional decision would have required just a ten-minute drive across the river to extend an invitation.
    The chief of the bridge police, Michael Helmstetter, when asked to explain his rationale for voting to shut down the Crescent City Connection, said, “I guess to protect the pedestrians that were crossing.” Chief Lawson cited any number of explanations for his decision. He needed to think about his men, he said, who were on their fourth or fifth day working twelve-hour shifts. The city had ample food and drink, but not if they had to share it with every person who crossed its city limits. “We aided as long as we could,” Lawson said.
    No notes were taken during the meeting, but by all accounts therewasn’t much dissension. Mainly the talk was about the logistics of shutting down the bridge. The bridge police would block anyone already on the interstate from walking toward Gretna. Jefferson Parish posted several deputies at a ramp near the Superdome, while Gretna took responsibility for blocking the entrance ramp at Tchoupitoulas (pronounced “chop-a-two-liss”) Street, also on the New Orleans side of the bridge and a short walk from the Convention Center. At around 10:30 a.m. on Thursday, September 1, 2005, with the thermometer near ninety degrees on a day that promised to be as hot and humid as the one before, the first three Gretna patrol officers took their post at the top of the Tchoupitoulas ramp. The Crescent City Connection was now closed to any pedestrian seeking a way out of New Orleans.
    KATHLEEN BLANCO WAS AT the state’s emergency