By the time Brian Thevenot, a reporter for the Times-Picayune, arrived at the New Orleans convention center on Monday, Sept. 5, the makeshift emergency shelter had achieved mythic status as a place where unspeakable crimes had been committed. Police Chief Eddie Compass had told the media that people were being raped and beaten inside. The New York Times had reported that evacuees witnessed seven dead bodies lying on the floor, and a 14-year-old girl who had been raped. Fox News, MSNBC, CNN and other television news channels had repeated stories of rape and murder there.
The convention center was empty when Thevenot arrived, except for about 250 members of the Arkansas National Guard and other rescue officials in the immediate area. The last evacuees had been bused out over the weekend. Thevenot interviewed guardsmen, who showed him four bodies that had been deposited inside a food service entrance of the building. “[Mikel] Brooks and several other guardsmen said they had seen between 30 and 40 bodies in the convention center’s freezer,” Thevenot reported in the Times-Picayune the following day, adding that Brooks told him one of the bodies was a “7-year-old girl with her throat cut.”
Lt. Col. John Edwards, the commander of Brooks’ unit, told Salon he first heard of the Times-Picayune story about two weeks later. “This was news to us,” Edwards said of the alleged dozens of bodies in the freezer, which were never found. Only four bodies were discovered inside after the convention center was evacuated, and only one of them was a suspected homicide, according to the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals.
The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina left the American media with its biggest story since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Some reporters, including CNN’s Anderson Cooper, earned praise for challenging equivocating public officials and a slow government response that left thousands stranded in desperate conditions. But the media also displayed shortcomings of its own: Two of the most prominent and disturbing types of stories from the New Orleans disaster zone — violent criminals committing atrocities inside the two main refugee centers downtown, and rogue gunmen firing at rescue helicopters — turned out to be wildly exaggerated, and in many cases plain false.
Even today, questions remain about various incidents, and why the unconfirmed horror stories were treated as fact and gained such wide currency. It is clear, however, that the media was only the last link — if the most influential one — in a chain reaction that led the world to believe gang rape, rampant shootings and infanticide were fast compounding the city’s devastation. Many of the overblown reports trace back through poorly informed public officials, to overworked police officers and national guardsmen, to frightened evacuees themselves. The flooded city of New Orleans, experts say, was hit with a perfect storm of conditions in which fear, despair and wild rumors, like a contagious disease, can thrive. Latent racism, some suggest, further distorted the picture of devastation and chaos presented around the world.
Lt. Col. Edwards says he conducted a review around Sept. 16, interviewing every member of the Guard who was on patrol Sept. 5. Brooks and the other guardsmen claimed that they never told anyone they had actually seen bodies in the freezer, but rather that they’d heard other emergency personnel talking about it in a food line set up for police, guardsmen and other rescue workers outside Harrah’s New Orleans Casino. Edwards invited Thevenot to talk with the guardsmen again, and on Sept. 26, the Times-Picayune published a follow-up report, co-written by Thevenot. It clarified that the paper’s initial report about events at the convention center — picked up by media worldwide — had been wrong, as had been other accounts of unchecked mob violence around the city.
Thevenot was one of the few Picayune staffers who had remained in New Orleans from the time Katrina hit, working in what he describes as “stone-age conditions.” He and other journalists had been working up to 16-hour days without showers or fresh changes of clothes, and had to dictate a number of their stories to editors in Baton Rouge over phone lines that worked only sporadically.
“We worked, as we now know, amid a swirl of misinformation,” Thevenot says. He says he pressed the guardsmen to show him the bodies in the freezer, but that they wouldn’t permit him access. “None of us had access to official, authoritative sources on most subjects we reported until days after the storm. Even some of those official sources proved unreliable, as they worked in the same swirl of rumor as we did.”
Keith Woods, dean of faculty at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, says one reason that stories from New Orleans turned out to be wrong was that reporters were unusually reliant on uncorroborated information from individual sources, whether government officials, soldiers or evacuees. “For the most part the structures that might undergird accurate reporting were often literally underwater,” Woods says.
But in the many cases in which the media repeated accounts of atrocities as fact — without noting that they were unconfirmed — more could have been done to accurately inform audiences. Reporters, editors and anchors, says Woods, should have been more forceful about asking, “How do you know that?” — and at the very least have made sure the public heard the answer to that question.
The tales of mayhem from the Superdome, which had been turned into a massive refugee center, were also erroneous. On Sept. 1, CNN ran a report on its Web site quoting an evacuee there who spoke of “people simply dragging corpses into corners.” “They have quite a few people running around here with guns,” CNN quoted the unidentified man as saying. “You got these young teenage boys running around up here raping these girls.”
By Sept. 6, “The Oprah Winfrey Show” aired interviews with New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and police Chief Eddie Compass, who repeated accounts of utter depredation as fact, from which they would later backpedal. The show also featured correspondent Lisa Ling talking to unidentified evacuees who had fled to nearby Metairie, La.; they told Ling there were shootings inside the Superdome and dead bodies on the ground. “There were boys waiting in the bathroom for the children,” one unidentified woman said, “and they’d have — they raped the children, have sex with them. One of the girls they raped, then they killed her.”
But according to members of the Louisiana National Guard who were present at the Superdome throughout the crisis, none of these atrocities was verified to have taken place. The guardsmen checked evacuees into the Superdome starting Sunday, Aug. 28, and patrolled the facility until the last evacuees were bused out on Sept. 4. Though isolated cases of assault or rape could remain difficult to verify, there was no pervasive lawlessness. According to Maj. Ed Bush, a Guard public affairs officer who was there from start to finish, no gang members were running around with guns, and no shots were ever fired, except for one instance in which a guardsman accidentally shot himself during a scuffle in a darkened locker room. Of the six people that died there, according to Maj. Bush and other reports, none were murder victims.
“Trust me, we would have known,” Bush said, regarding the reports of rampant gunfire. The reaction from the crowd, he says, “would have been instantaneous, [triggering] massive panic.”
The rumors swirling around the Superdome forced the guardsmen to expend a good deal of energy dispelling the tales of rape and murder, Bush says. He emphasized that the vast majority of evacuees there were “very well behaved.” People would rush up to him and ask, “Don’t you know there’s people being killed in the bathroom? What are you going to do about it?”
“It’s hard to believe that in one building you could have such a fear of the unknown,” Bush says. “It’s almost like the boogeyman was everywhere.”
The miasma of fear was in fact predictable, says Patricia Turner, a scholar in African-American studies at the University of California at Davis who has researched how rumors proliferate. “The odor, lack of hygiene, the heat — death comes with the same odor that apparently was in the air, just choking people in there,” Turner says. Worse yet, she says, was the lack of information. “I think that human beings are inclined to create stories that satisfy a lack of news and closure to things.” People have a set of norms they associate with worst-case scenarios, she says, including the breakdown of social order and acts of raw brutality. As rumors get passed along in such an atmosphere, people often “validate” what they’ve heard by claiming to have witnessed it themselves.
Lennie Echterling, an expert on crisis intervention and a professor of psychology at James Madison University, calls this phenomenon an “emotional contagion.” In crisis situations, he says, people’s suggestibility goes way up. According to Echterling, neurological studies have shown that when confronted with dangerous or disturbing circumstances, the amygdala, a neural structure in the brain strongly linked with emotions, takes over, and can defeat rational thinking and response. Echertling says a person looking at a poisonous snake at the zoo shows how this works: He or she will typically jump back in fear if the snake strikes, despite knowing that the reptile is safely behind a glass barrier.
But while the tales of mayhem and murder were spread by frightened evacuees, they were further perpetuated by the media itself, in a kind of feedback loop: According to Maj. Bush, those stuck inside the Superdome were also hearing the reports on AM radios they’d brought with them — apparently conflating what was happening at the nearby convention center. After the crisis abated, officials confirmed that armed thugs had been largely in control of the convention center until the Arkansas National Guard arrived on the afternoon of Friday, Sept. 2. Deputy Police Commissioner Randy Winn later confirmed that his SWAT unit went into the convention center about 10 times, responding to reports of gunshots, though they said they heard shots and saw muzzle flashes on only one occasion.
Maj. Bush said news organizations often generalized what was happening in the city. “Did it all probably get lumped together to where it got confused if it was heard over an AM radio?” he asked. “I’m sure it did.”
The coverage of Katrina’s aftermath raised the question for many of whether the fact that the population of stranded evacuees was overwhelmingly black helped unleash the flood of false stories. The editor of the Times-Picayune, Jim Amoss, told the Los Angeles Times on Sept. 27 that “if the dome and convention center had harbored large numbers of middle-class white people, it would not have been a fertile ground for this kind of rumor-mongering.”
Turner says Amoss had a point, though she says the impact of class cannot be overlooked, as the vast majority of people stuck in the downtown centers were poor and had no other option but to land there. “The desperation, the poverty and the race of the evacuees” combined, Turner believes, made the media, and perhaps its audiences, more credulous about the atrocities.
Steve Rendall, senior analyst at media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, said excessive focus on black looters in the immediate wake of the storm — especially by Fox News — served to equate African-Americans with crime and set the tone for later coverage. That made the stories of widespread violence at the convention center and Superdome “more believable and thus reportable for journalists,” Rendall says.
As for the evacuees’ role in the rumors, both Turner and Rendall point to African-Americans’ long history in the South of experiencing racism and victimization — including the Tuskegee experiments and the deliberate flooding of some of New Orleans’ poorer parishes in 1927. The latter buoyed anti-black conspiracy theories after Hurricane Betsy submerged poor neighborhoods in 1965 — areas like the Ninth Ward, which were also devastated by the fallout from Katrina this year.
At the height of the crisis in New Orleans — from Wednesday, Aug. 31, to Friday, Sept. 2 — newspapers, radio stations and TV channels were also filled with reports of rogue gunmen firing on rescue helicopters.
A Fox News report from Sept. 2 quoted an unidentified ambulance official who said a shot was fired at a military helicopter at the Superdome. “There are people just taking potshots at police and at helicopters,” Lt. Cmdr. Cheri Ben-Iesan, a spokeswoman for the Coast Guard, told Fox. Additionally, the Associated Press, CBS News, NBC News, MSNBC, CNN and the Los Angeles Times all reported as fact on at least one occasion that shots were being fired on helicopters, while a Washington Post article stated that “angry crowds have repeatedly shot at rescue crews.”
According to Officer Austin Banks of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, a 20-year-old resident of the Algiers district in the West Bank area of New Orleans was arrested on Sept. 5, after neighbors said they witnessed him firing at a helicopter. Federal authorities found two revolvers and a box of ammunition in his apartment, and the suspect has been charged with shooting at a military aircraft by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Baton Rouge.
But according to military and Coast Guard officials, no other reports of helicopter shootings have been corroborated. Maj. Bush of the Louisiana Guard says that Task Force Eagle, the military command in charge of all the planes and helicopters that entered the New Orleans area, had no confirmed reports of people firing at aircraft. A civilian had told a guardsman that he’d witnessed a helicopter taking fire while approaching the Superdome, but the report turned out to be false. Likewise, Lt. Col. Edwards of the Arkansas Guard, which operated around the more volatile convention center, knew of no such incidents.
Capt. Bob Mueller, who was in charge of the Coast Guard’s relief efforts in New Orleans, provided Salon with a similar account, saying there were no verified reports of anybody firing upon Coast Guard helicopters. And as Knight Ridder reported on Oct. 3, representatives from the Air Force and the Department of Homeland Security have also been unable to confirm a single incident of gunfire at helicopters.
Woods, of the Poynter Institute, says that because information in post-Katrina New Orleans was so difficult to verify, that made it all the more critical for reporters to press their interview subjects about the information they were providing. He credits the Times-Picayune staff, which managed to operate under extreme conditions, for continuing to report out stories of the aftermath — including the ones they got wrong initially.
Thevenot says he was grateful for the opportunity to go back and correct the record. “Among the Picayune New Orleans team, we all heard far more outrageous tales of violence and death than we actually reported,” he said. “Most of it stayed in our notebooks, unconfirmed and unpublished.”
This story has been corrected since it was originally published.
When I saw the date of Charlotte’s wedding, I felt like I’d been hit on the head. What were the chances? Of all the days to get married – of all the cities to get married in – my friend had chosen the exact date that I met Nick, in the city that I met Nick.
I suspect most couples don’t know the exact date of their first encounter. But then most couples probably don’t have a police report.
It took me a few days to decide to contact Nick. I’d been wrestling with that urge for five years now. My inbox was a shame trail of gushy letters typed after midnight, impulsive notes dashed off in the afternoon. All of them had cutesy subject lines, like the titles of Raymond Carver stories, but they should have been labeled the same thing: “Do you love me again? Have you changed your mind yet?”
But one evening in March, I sent Nick an email. My hands were trembling as I typed. It was subject lined “things you may or may not remember,” and this is what it said:
“My friend Charlotte is getting married in New Orleans on May 13, and I will be going. May 13 also happens to be the day I met you, six years ago on Royal Street with a lump on my head the size of a lime. (Life is WEIRD, right?) I’d like to see you. Is that possible?”
I hadn’t seen Nick since he came to New York City in the spring of 2007. The morning he left, we woke early and watched an episode of “The Wire,” and then he walked me to the subway in my Brooklyn neighborhood. As I descended the steps he remained at the top, peering down and smiling. He did this whenever we parted, a habit that unnerved and delighted me at once. I’d wave him away while I stood in the security line at the airport – you can go now, I’m OK – but he would just stand there. Not going anywhere, he seemed to be saying, although that was clearly a lie. A few weeks after the New York trip, he called one Friday night and ended our relationship.
“You deserve someone who can be there for you,” he said.
I responded in the most articulate way I could muster under the circumstances. “Oh, fuck off.”
—–
The story of how I met Nick is one I have told many times. I have told it at parties, and in essays (even in this publication), and so I might as well tell you now.
It begins six years ago, when I was in New Orleans for a different wedding. I was walking along a quiet stretch of the French Quarter with two friends around 1 a.m. when a kid yanked my purse and, when I didn’t let go, clocked me above the left eyebrow with a pistol. Nick was the detective on the case.
“That’s so romantic,” people sometimes say, although I can assure you it was not. It was violent and horrible, and flirting was the furthest thing from both our minds that night as I rattled off a description of the kid while holding an ice pack to the side of my head. (OK, it was not the furthest thing from my mind. I did look for a wedding ring. He had one.)
It never occurred to me that anything would come of that case. This was a year after Katrina. Bodies were still being found in abandoned attics. But eight months later, I received a photo lineup in the mail, and I was surprised to discover that even after so much time had passed, I knew exactly who the kid was, knew it in my bones. Four months after that I was flown to New Orleans to testify at a pre-motion trial. I mean, life is WEIRD, right?
When I came back to New York, I was seized by a feeling that I should send a present to the recently separated detective who sat with me after the trial while I tried to shake off a grief I could not articulate. (I sent him the first season of “The Wire.”) That gift sparked a correspondence that lasted for six months. A few weeks after the kid pleaded guilty and got 15 years, I returned to New Orleans to see Nick.
“It doesn’t seem fair,” I told him once, sitting on his puffy leather couch in the nondescript one-bedroom where he’d moved after the split from his wife. “That kid gets a prison sentence, and we get each other.”
“That’s cute,” he said, threading his fingers through my hair.
“That I care about that kid?”
“That you think life is fair.”
Around the time we began corresponding, Nick moved to the homicide department. It was grueling, thankless work. Little romance in that, either, though I romanticized it anyway, besotted as I was by true crime and mafioso grandeur and David Simon. At the time, I wrote a blog about pop culture for a sex site. Of course I wanted to hear about guns and blood spatter. Nick, meanwhile, was happy to hear about pop culture and sex. We were the perfect escapes for each other, and we had both been searching for open hatches.
When people write about falling in love, I tend to cringe for them, because love requires a delusion that is deeply personal and impossible to explain to the world. So I’ll just say that I have doubted every relationship I’ve ever had, until that one. I was absolutely certain that Nick and I were meant to be together, and I was right. I just failed to specify how long.
When Nick broke up with me, I was devastated. Stunned. Nothing he said that night made sense to me, because it ran so contrary to the 500 conversations we’d had about how the other one was stitched into our DNA.
“The way I felt about you changed,” he said. “I don’t know why.”
If a duck calls you up one night, and tells you he’s an elephant, what do you say? How do you respond?
I responded the best way I knew how. “Oh, fuck off.”
In the five years that have elapsed since that conversation, we have spoken only a handful of times. We have tried to be friends – he missed me, I knew that – but then our conversations would lead me down the same sorrowful path, crying in my Stella Artois, and I’d grow incensed when he didn’t return an email or call me back.
I dated other men. Kind men, whom I quite liked. But in that eye-rolling way that is native to sensitive types, and writers, and alcoholics, and hoarders of memory and other people’s affection – of which I am batting a thousand – I held on to Nick, to the idea of Nick, to the hope represented by Nick through five years of recession woes, drinking problems and personal catastrophe. I did crazy things, which I can only admit now because I don’t do them anymore: I slept in his police shirt. I got insanely drunk one Sunday afternoon and called a dozen friends, begging them to convince me not to call him. Oh, the drama. Oh, the sturm und drang. Self-pity that could rattle the cupboards.
While I bled openly in public, he remained behind a fortress of stoicism. He is as much a cop as I am a drama queen. I don’t mean to say he is callous, because Nick is a tender person. His favorite movie is “Casablanca.” I have found this to be true of other cops, who manage to wall off some soft patch of sentiment behind the barbed wire fence. One night we were at the bar when I saw him talking with great passion to another detective. I figured they were discussing a case. Turns out, they were talking about their love for “The Notebook.”
But the few conversations Nick and I did have were a tangle of “do not cross” tape. I asked him things like, “How are you?”
He said things like, “Great.”
I said things like, “Great?” with a bit of eager anticipation, hoping he might sketch out a more detailed portrait.
Instead, he would say, “Yup.”
There was one thing Nick told me during the breakup that did make sense, and which I held on to with both fists. He said, “I met you at the wrong time.”
I’d be walking along the Hudson River one Saturday afternoon and those words would float up into my head. Well, what would be the right time? And when I moved from New York back to Dallas, a 90-minute flight between us, those words returned. Could the right time be now?
I scoured the landscape for signs that we were supposed to be together, or that he still thought about me. A New Orleans fleur-de-lys insignia at the restaurant where I was dining: What could that mean? A book about an NOPD murder crossing my desk: Why that, why now?
It was ridiculous, it was pathetic – let’s all agree as a group – but I could not stop clinging to the notion that the universe would bend itself so that our lives would entwine once more.
And then came Charlotte’s wedding.
I sent Nick an email late at night, when I suspected he’d still be at his desk, and by the time I woke the next morning, he had sent his response. Yes, he’d be happy to see me again. Lunch, drinks, whatever. It was exactly the answer I anticipated, which brought tremendous relief. But what came next blindsided me.
“If she’s free, can I invite my wife?”
So much can happen in five years. When I took those long walks along the Hudson, I used to wonder if Nick had remarried. I made up so many stories about him, and that was certainly one of them. What she might look like. Who she might be. I also wondered if he’d gotten back together with his first wife, the on-again, off-again high school sweetheart he married at the age of 22, three years after they had a baby together. Divorces take a year in New Orleans, and our relationship tracked exactly with that time period. He broke up with me the same week his divorce was final.
Even now I don’t know if the email he sent refers to his first wife, or his second wife, or his third wife or his 40th, because I could not muster the nerve to ask. The fact that I find it easier to write an essay on this subject is one of a thousand strange quirks that makes me who I am. The fact that he will not tell me any of that stuff until I ask directly is one of his.
In the days that followed his email, though, something shifted inside me. It calved like a glacier. It burst like the prick of a safety pin held up to the swirly rainbow curve of the world’s largest bubble. I would have told you this was impossible. I swear to God I thought I would spend the rest of my days clinging to that stupid blue police shirt, a modern-day Miss Havisham, but now I felt different about him, much as he had once felt different about me. I did not hate him. In fact, I adored him. But I did not want to see him again. The longing was gone.
I emailed Nick a week later. The subject line read, “on second thought.” I told him I thought it was a bad idea that we see each other. I told him I had been mistaken.
I had been mistaken about so many things. I’m not just talking about Nick now. I’m talking about the stories we tell ourselves about our lives: That it is absolutely going to be this way, or it is absolutely going to be that way. It is fated. It is doomed. It is destined. It is done. I have believed so many lies about myself, for so many years, and closed the lid to lie down inside those coffins. I thought I could never stop drinking, but I did. And I thought I could never be happy in the city where I grew up, but I am. And I thought I would go to my grave crying for the cop in New Orleans who didn’t love me back, but I don’t feel that way anymore. In fact, I feel kind of grateful. I’d be a horrible cop’s wife. Are you kidding me?
We don’t know how our stories end, and the greatest plot twists are the ones we never saw coming. There is a line that I love. “God is a first-rate novelist.” It’s from Richard Price’s introduction to David Simon’s book, “Homicide.”
So I went to New Orleans, six years to the day after I’d been pistol-whipped, but that date has a new significance to me. Charlotte’s wedding was so lovely. It was full of personality, and color, and the peculiar language shared by two people as their lives interweave. After the ceremony, we paraded through the French Quarter behind a brass band in a Second Line procession. As we passed crowds watching us on Chartres, I kept wondering if I might catch a glimpse of Nick. I did not. But somebody did run into Leonardo DiCaprio. (Life is WEIRD, you guys.)
The next afternoon I took one last stroll through the Quarter before heading out of town. I snapped a picture of the sign on Royal Street, the same street where I had been mugged, the street where I first told Nick I was in love with him. That street is a knot of complicated meaning to me.
I couldn’t help laughing at the big ONE WAY sign hanging right below it. I know it doesn’t mean anything. But I took it as a message from the universe that it was time to move on.
This article originally appeared on
AlterNet.
Beneath the veneer of New Orleans’ vibrant culture lies a history of tragedy. From the yellow fever outbreaks of the 19th century, the many catastrophic storms that have visited the city, the violence of the Civil War and Reconstruction, to the vast social dysfunction of contemporary New Orleans, this is a city that has known adversity throughout. It is sadly fitting, then, that Occupy NOLA is one of the few occupations to have witnessed a death at the encampment. Last week, 53-year-old Ronald Dean Howell, known as “Curly” or “Old School” to friends, was found dead in his tent. The coroner’s chief investigator, John Gagliano, stated that the cause of death was “complications from alcohol abuse.” According to other occupiers, the man was homeless, and likely relocated from another tent city at Calliope Street and the Pontchartrain Expressway, which was closed by authorities on Oct. 27.
Occupiers throughout the country have naturally found themselves sharing space with local homeless populations: the most vulnerable and marginalized of the 99 percent. This has been particularly pronounced in New Orleans, which continues to struggle with an acute homeless problem stemming from the devastation of the city’s housing stock during Hurricane Katrina. According to data provided by UNITY of Greater New Orleans, the city’s largest homeless nonprofit coalition, the homeless rate remains 70 percent higher than prestorm levels, with nearly 10,000 people lacking some form of permanent shelter. Many of these suffer from serious mental and physical illnesses, including high levels of alcohol and drug abuse. Howell’s story is typical, and his death would probably have gone largely unnoticed had it not occurred in the midst of this burgeoning movement. Instead, his passing has served to illuminate the systemic problem of homelessness in New Orleans, while also raising suspicions about the city’s motivation in closing down his previous home on Calliope Street.
In post-Katrina New Orleans, affordable housing has become a serious issue. In the immediate aftermath of the storm, four of the most recognized public housing sites were demolished: Lafitte, St. Bernard, B.W. Cooper and C.J. Peete. This came on the heels of contentious debate in the city council, which voted unanimously in favor of the demolition despite vocal opposition from community members. According to the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO), these units were replaced by mixed income housing, each managed by various private developers.
Meanwhile, the general housing stock was devastated by the storm. According to HUD, 75,000 units were destroyed, and 45,000 remain abandoned today. The diminished supply has naturally resulted in increased rents across the board. In the same HUD report, the median cost of housing in New Orleans increased 33.2 percent, from $662 in 2004 to $882 in 2009 (adjusted for inflation). Meanwhile, the rate for the most affordable housing has risen dramatically. According to Linda Gonzalez, the Director of New Orleans Mission, a nonprofit providing services for the homeless, “basic apartments cost about $250 before the storm and are now up to $500 to $700 depending on what area of the city.” This is confirmed by data from the HUD report that shows the number of units available in the $300-600 range has fallen from 66,300 in 2004 to 19,300 in 2009. Affordable rents have greatly dissipated in the city, while wages have stagnated as part of the larger, national trend. In response to the HUD report, UNITY Executive Director Martha Kegel was then quoted as saying: “We have more unaffordable rent than even New York City. That’s because we have very high rent and we have very, very low income.”
As such, the homeless population has grown so rapidly that “tent cities” have become a relatively common occurrence. The Occupy NOLA encampment, located at Duncan Plaza, is not the first of its kind. In 2007, a homeless camp took shape in the same location, eventually growing to include 249 individuals, according to UNITY. That encampment was ultimately closed by the city, beginning Nov. 21 of that year. Then-Mayor Ray Nagin’s administration worked with the nonprofit community, including UNITY, to relocate these people to a mixture of hotels or apartments. A similar encampment at Claiborne and Canal with about 150 individuals was broken up in similar fashion the following July. In both cases, the nonprofit community was provided prior notice and allowed to make assessments of the physical and mental health of people at the encampment.
The most recent closure, however, has diverted from this practice. While City Hall spokesman Ryan Berni stated that all of the “usual groups were included in the process,” some relevant organizations say they were not involved. Linda Gonzales, director of New Orleans Mission, which is just across the street from the Calliope encampment, says she was not given any prior notification. When asked if this was unusual, she replied “Yes. They typically call and let us know when they are going to do a sweep. I guess they just didn’t need us.” Meanwhile, Mike Miller, lead outreach worker at UNITY, said “We weren’t involved with the Calliope closing, and the plans did not meet our standards for humanitarian enclosures.” He says they were only given a few days’ notice, and that the city actually fenced off the camp a day prior to the announced closure date.
Miller further explained that his team was unable to make appropriate evaluations prior to the closing. “We knew it was coming. Were we given a specific date? No. We were not given an opportunity to assess the physical and mental health of the individuals at the encampment.” When asked about the city’s claim that the vast majority of the population was provided some form of temporary or permanent housing, he responded “Whatever their numbers are, I take it with a grain of salt. I don’t believe it because we are dealing with the same faces.” He emphasized that the city was essentially just “rearranging the problem” rather than solving it. “By shifting people around, you lose people: the sickest of the sick.”
Given the city’s diversion from the norm in closing this camp, some Occupy protesters have grown suspicious that the city maliciously intended to use the homeless as pawns to help destabilize their movement. Nia, who is integrally involved with the movement, said: “It would be utterly ridiculous to not think of the possibility that this was done with that intent.” While she emphasized that the group has welcomed the homeless population to the camp, she also explained that much of the group’s organizing capacity has been exhausted by attempting to meet their needs: providing food and tents, dealing with security issues, and trying to integrate them into the movement. Furthermore, she points to a potentially coordinated effort of authorities throughout the country to destabilize these movements by displacing homeless communities to the Occupy encampments. She said: “People have been coming here from throughout the country saying they have had the same exact experience with long term homeless (in their occupations).”
City officials, meanwhile, deny such machinations. When asked why the Calliope encampment was closed, mayor’s office spokesman Berni said: “Anytime there is a large encampment, there is a risk to public health and safety. What we did underneath the expressway was a lengthy process, in ensuring the necessary housing and vouchers to help people get back on their feet.” When asked if he thought that anyone from the Calliope encampment may have relocated to Occupy NOLA at Duncan Plaza, he was willing to admit that “some people” probably did.
However, the scene at the camp suggests the effect was probably more pronounced. What began as a few dozen people has grown to over 100 permanent campers, the vast majority of whom are homeless. On the increase in homeless numbers since the Calliope closure, Nia said: “There was an immediate slight increase. Then, a bunch of people were given hotel vouchers, which was fine, until they ran out and they came here.” Another Occupy NOLA organizer, Dehlia Labarre, corroborated the hotel voucher story, saying “We have reports of a number of people who were given a week-long voucher and then ended up here when it expired.” Berni, meanwhile, denied any knowledge about expired vouchers.
Adding to peoples’ suspicions has been the overly compliant nature of the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) with regards to the encampment. Only one arrest has been made thus far at the site, and that was of a “machete wielding transient” that NOPD public information officer Frank Robertson said “had nothing to do with Occupy NOLA.” He explained that there have been no further reports of violence or noise complaints. When asked if they have any plans to close it down, he refused comment. However, he did admit that the police have “undercover officers in the area of the camp.” This rather surprising admission suggests that the NOPD may be focused on covert means of destabilizing the movement, rather than facing the scrutiny that would come with overt confrontation a la New York, Chicago and Oakland.
Evidence seems to point to intent by the city to diminish Occupy NOLA. If authorities were genuinely interested in protecting protesters’ First Amendment rights as Berni claims, would the NOPD be deploying undercover patrols? Meanwhile, the concurrent closing of the Calliope camp is suspicious, given the break from past trends and discrepancies in reports from the city and homeless nonprofits. Furthermore, the city’s claim that most of the homeless at that camp were provided alternate housing is contradicted by the reality on the ground at Occupy NOLA, where dozens of tents have sprouted up since that closing.
Malicious intent or not, the reality is that authorities have failed to address the underlying issue of inequality at all levels of government. Decades of conservative orthodoxy, attacks on the social safety net, stagnant wages, and rising education and housing costs have culminated in a level of precariousness unseen in decades. It is hard to envision a more appropriate illustration of this than frustrated youth occupying public space together with the most marginalized members of the population in the “city that care forgot.” While the death of Ronald Dean Howell was probably unavoidable, the tragedy of poverty and homeless can be conquered. By refocusing debate on the needs of the marginalized majority, the Occupy movement has taken a significant step forward in this continued struggle.
Renee Ledoux cried when the National Guard and sheriff’s deputies showed up at her front door and warned her she needed to get out to avoid water gushing from the Mississippi River after a floodgate was opened for the first time in four decades.
But by the 5 p.m. deadline Sunday, the 44-year-old Ledoux and her boyfriend Billy Hanchett decided to ride it out one more night on air mattresses inside the empty home in Krotz Springs. They have a camper they plan to stay in on a friend’s property outside the flood zone.
“We really don’t want to go,” Hanchett said. Ledoux added that she felt blessed that they had the camper because a lot of others have nowhere to go except shelters.
Meanwhile, President Barack Obama planned to fly to Memphis, Tenn., on Monday to meet with families affected when the river flooded there as well as local officials, first responders and volunteers.
Deputies all over Louisiana Cajun country were warning residents to head for higher ground and most heeded it, even in places where there hasn’t been so much as a trickle, hopeful that the flooding engineered to protect heavily populated New Orleans and Baton Rouge would be merciful to their way of life.
Days ago, many of the towns known for their Cajun culture bustled with activity as people filled sandbags and cleared out belongings. By Sunday, some areas were virtually empty as the water from the Mississippi River, swollen by snowmelt and heavy rains, slowly rolled across the Atchafalaya River basin. It first started to come, in small amounts, into people’s yards in Melville on Sunday. But it still had yet to move farther downstream.
The floodwaters could reach depths of 20 feet in the coming weeks, though levels were nowhere close to that yet in the towns about 50 miles west of Baton Rouge.
About 11 miles north of Krotz Springs in the town of Melville, Mary Ryder, her fiance and her fiance’s father were loading up a trailer with as many belongings as they could fit to drive over the levee to stay with relatives on the other side of town. Ryder lives in a mandatory evacuation area, where water is starting to creep into backyards. They worried about what might happen if a broader evacuation is ordered.
“They say we have to leave town. We have nowhere to go,” she said. “What are we going to do? I have no idea. We need help up here.”
The spillway’s opening diverted water from the two major Louisiana cities — along with chemical plants and oil refineries along the Mississippi’s lower reaches — easing pressure on the levees there in the hope of avoiding potentially catastrophic floods.
That choice angers John Muse, who drove from Lafayette to Melville to help his 86-year-old father-in-law Clovis Cole move his belongs. He said officials seem to be paying more attention to the concerns of Baton Rouge and New Orleans than people who live in the basin.
“They hurt a lot of feelings by putting that water in here like they did,” he said. “What’s happening here, I’ll tell ya, it’s not fair.”
In Butte LaRose, some 50 miles downstream from where the Morganza spillway was opened, Chalmers Wheat, 54, was among the few left — and even he was headed for his father’s home in Baton Rouge outside the flood zone. He and his twin brother, Chandler, were making a few final preparations to protect his home with plastic lining and sandbags.
“It’s almost like a ghost town,” said Wheat.
It will be at least a week before the Mississippi River crest arrives at the Morganza spillway, where officials opened two massive gates on Saturday and another two Sunday. There are 125 in all. The Mississippi has broken river-level records that had held since the 1920s in some places.
The Army Corps of Engineers has taken drastic steps to prevent flooding. Engineers blew up a levee in Missouri — inundating an estimated 200 square miles of farmland and damaging or destroying about 100 homes — to take the pressure off floodwalls protecting the town of Cairo, Ill., population 2,800.
The Morganza flooding is more controlled, however, and residents are warned each year that the spillway could be opened. A spillway at the 7,000-foot Bonnet Carre structure in Louisiana also has been opened.
Just outside Krotz Springs, 23-year-old Jake Nolan said National Guard troops knocked on the door of his home in a subdivision to tell his mother of the evacuation order. He said they advised her to have white towels and have access to the roof if they planned to ride it out — presumably in case of a rescue — though that didn’t appear to be part of any official instructions. And besides, he didn’t need an order to leave with his wife and three children.
“I don’t want to be stuck here if the water does get bad,” said Nolan, who planned to stay with a sister in Port Barre.
It seemed animals didn’t want to be stuck anywhere: Deer, hogs and rabbits have started running from the water flowing near the floodgates, said Lt. Col. Joey Broussard of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. An electronic sign on Interstate 10 warned of a possible animal exodus: “Wildlife crossing possible. Use caution,” it read.
Despite the mandatory evacuation order, Krotz Springs town clerk Suzanne Bellau said it was unlikely the sheriff’s office would force people to leave. For most, the worst part was wondering what may happen. National Guardsmen were building a second levee to bolster protection for the town.
“It’s the unknown, that’s the problem,” Bellau said. “Is it going to come into their homes or not? And the people who are leaving, what are they coming back to?”
Associated Press writer Kevin McGill in New Orleans and AP Video Journalist Robert Ray in Krotz Springs, La., contributed to this report.
Deputies warned people Sunday to get out as Mississippi River water gushing from a floodgate for the first time in four decades crept ever closer to communities in Louisiana Cajun country, slowly filling a river basin like a giant bathtub.
Most residents heeded the warnings and headed for higher ground, even in places where there hasn’t been so much as a trickle, hopeful that the flooding engineered to protect New Orleans and Baton Rouge would be merciful to their way of life.
Days ago, many of the towns known for their Cajun culture and drawling dialect fluttered with activity as people filled sandbags and cleared out belongings. By Sunday, some areas were virtually empty as the water from the Mississippi River, swollen by snowmelt and heavy rains, slowly rolled across the Atchafalaya River basin. The floodwaters could reach depths of 20 feet in the coming weeks.
The spillway’s opening diverted water from heavily populated New Orleans and Baton Rouge — along with chemical plants and oil refineries along the Mississippi’s lower reaches — easing pressure on the levees there in the hope of avoiding potentially catastrophic floods.
About 11 miles north of Krotz Springs in the town of Melville, water was already starting to creep into some people’s backyards. Parts of the town not protected by levees were under a mandatory evacuation order. Glenda Maddox’s husband had temporarily reopened the gas station he closed in December so people could fuel up before they leave.
“Nobody knows what’s going to happen,” she said. “We don’t know if the levee is going to hold up.”
The station’s shelves were mostly barren, save for a few soft drinks and bottles of motor oil. Only cash was accepted 7/8 7/8– no credit cards.
In Butte LaRose, some 50 miles downstream from where the Morganza spillway was opened, no water was expected until at least later Sunday. But Chalmers Wheat, 54, was among the few left — and even he was headed for his father’s home in Baton Rouge outside the flood zone. He and his brother were making a few final preparations to protect his home with plastic lining and sandbags.
“It’s almost like a ghost town,” said Wheat, who was getting some help from his twin brother, Chandler.
Sandbags were still available in the center of town, but there were few takers Sunday.
Krotz Springs is roughly 30 miles closer to the floodgates, and deputies ordered people to evacuate Sunday morning even though the water hadn’t yet arrived.
Wayne Duplechain, who lives in the parish about eight miles outside Krotz Springs, said he would have his family stay in a camper parked on his son’s property outside the flood zone. He hoped to return, though, and ride out the flooding. He has three layers of sandbags stacked 2 feet high surrounding his ranch-style, brick house and figures the water won’t start lapping against them for seven or eight days. Plus, he has a generator and a boat to escape in if the water gets too high.
“It’s going to be slow-rising, so I’ll get out if I have to. I’m not totally stupid,” he said. “If it comes over the sandbags, I’m leaving.”
It will be at least a week before the Mississippi River crest arrives at the Morganza spillway, where officials opened two massive gates on Saturday and another two Sunday. There are 125 in all. The Mississippi has broken river-level records that had held since the 1920s in some places.
The Army Corps of Engineers has taken drastic steps to prevent flooding. Engineers blew up a levee in Missouri — inundating an estimated 200 square miles of farmland and damaging or destroying about 100 homes — to take the pressure off floodwalls protecting the town of Cairo, Ill., population 2,800.
The Morganza flooding is more controlled, however, and residents are warned each year that the spillway could be opened. A spillway at the 7,000-foot Bonnet Carre structure in Louisiana also has been opened.
Just outside Krotz Springs, 23-year-old Jake Nolan said National Guard troops knocked on the door of his home in a subdivision to tell his mother of the evacuation order. He said they advised her to have white towels and have access to the roof if they planned to ride it out — presumably in case of a rescue — though that didn’t appear to be part of any official instructions. And besides, he didn’t need an order to leave with his wife and three children.
“I don’t want to be stuck here if the water does get bad,” said Nolan, who planned to stay with a sister in Port Barre.
It seemed animals didn’t want to be stuck anywhere, either: Deer, hogs and rabbits have started running from the water flowing near the floodgates, said Lt. Col. Joey Broussard of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. An electronic sign on Interstate 10 warned of a possible animal exodus: “Wildlife crossing possible. Use caution,” it read.
Despite the mandatory evacuation order for some people, Krotz Springs town clerk Suzanne Bellau said it was unlikely the sheriff’s office would force people to leave. For most, the worst part was wondering what may happen. National Guardsman were building a new levee to bolster protection for the town, in addition to a levee already standing.
“It’s the unknown, that’s the problem,” Bellau said. “Is it going to come into their homes or not? And the people who are leaving, what are they coming back to?”
That was also true downstream in Butte LaRose, where Chalmers and Chandler Wheat had been making last-minute preparations. Chalmers Wheat figured his house would be all right so long as the water level didn’t exceed 2 feet.
“If the water gets higher, we’re pretty much …” Chalmers Wheat said, before his brother chimed in: “Screwed.”
Associated Press writer Kevin McGill in New Orleans and AP Video Journalist Robert Ray in Krotz Springs contributed to this report.
The author in a red dress in a Second Line processional
through the French Quarter. (Credit: Laurence Kretchmer) 
A homeless man sets up a tent at Occupy Seattle on Oct. 5, 2011 (Credit: AP/Ted S. Warren) 
42nd street, New York City 
Water diverted from the Mississippi River spills through a bay in the Morganza Spillway in Morganza, La., Saturday, May 14, 2011. Water from the inflated Mississippi River gushed through a floodgate Saturday for the first time in nearly four decades and headed toward thousands of homes and farmland in the Cajun countryside, threatening to slowly submerge the land under water up to 25 feet deep. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky) (Credit: AP) 
A member of the Louisiana National Guard stands guard as water diverted from the Mississippi River through a bay in the Morganza Spillway begins to fill a pasture in Morganza, La., Saturday, May 14, 2011. Opening the Morganza spillway diverts water away from Baton Rouge and New Orleans, and the numerous oil refineries and chemical plants along the lower reaches of the Mississippi. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky) (Credit: AP) 
