The second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina
Witness to the nightmare
of New Orleans post-Katrina
By Chip Drago
Mobile Bay Times
Arriving in New Orleans two days after Hurricane Katrina, Joe McDavid spent the next 23 hellish days amid a dispiriting and mind-boggling chaos whose images and stench linger so unpleasantly even two years later that he hopes never again to see New Orleans.
A retired federal law enforcement officer working for a private security firm under government contract, McDavid said he could imagine returning to New Orleans only as a prisoner.
In the Big Easy’s battle with adversity, adversity won big and easily during McDavid’s stay.
As a participant in the unfolding spectacle, McDavid said the public was presented a sanitized version of reality that did not square with the horror of the truth. Despite his combat experience as a Marine captain in Vietnam and a 27-year career with the U.S. Secret Service, McDavid said he had never known greater fear than in moving about the flooded streets of New Orleans.
“It’s almost an unbelievable story,” he said. “I don’t care what all you’ve ever been through, you can’t imagine what New Orleans was like. My eyes kept sending my brain messages that I couldn’t interpret. Not this. Not in the U.S.”
The contrast between New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast in the aftermath was also notable, said McDavid, because for the most part the Mississippians rallied to recover while in New Orleans lawlessness was embraced.
Before the storm, New Orleans possessed for him an “aura or personality” that was attractive to someone wanting an occasional escape from the strictures of home.
But New Orleans’ darker, meaner streak always existed in counterpoise to its bawdy, playful side, said McDavid.
“New Orleans has always been a place that was violent,” he said. “It has problems and will continue to have problems. And it’s not just the violence.”
McDavid, now 65, said he began to second-guess his decision to take on the post-Katrina New Orleans assignment even before arriving in the city. Seeing bodies floating in Lake Pontchartrain, McDavid said a feeling of fear welled up in him “heart and mind” that he hadn’t experienced since Vietnam.
McDavid said the military in New Orleans was based overlooking the zoo which “was appropriate, I guess.” The contract workers were given the rules, one of which was “wherever you are at 5 p.m., you stay.” A second was “if and when you are shot at, shoot back to kill.” They were also asked, said McDavid, in moving about their jobs providing security to telecommunications workers, to move bodies to the street for pick-up. Otherwise, the stench might become unbearable.
“I realized I had made a terrible mistake,” McDavid said.
Carrying a sidearm, McDavid said he also was provided an M-16 with 200 rounds of ammunition.
“They told us how dangerous it was,” he said. “It was hard to believe.”
McDavid said he believes four gangs of drug dealers had divided the city and they wanted to “stay long enough to control the drug trade.”
“People came back in and set buildings on fire,” said McDavid. “These were homegrown gangs. These guys were organized.”
Much of the violence that’s still going on is “the drug trade getting sorted out,” said McDavid.
The military had taken the high ground from the river to Bourbon St., said McDavid. With 10 feet of fetid water in places and dead fish trapped in the city's sweltering heat, the odors were horrific and the waters were contaminated.
“You didn’t touch the water and you would bleach your shoes,” he said. “We got shots for tetanus and typhoid.”
He again “realized I had made a mistake,” McDavid said. The thought never strayed too far from mind.
“It looked like a horror movie,” he said. “Like aliens had taken everyone out.”
Many people not involved in rescue and relief, said McDavid, were drug dealers who were armed and prepared to shoot.
Getting a look at “one guy who was dinging us with shots,” McDavid said the gunman had that “1,000-meter stare.”
“Why would you shoot at guys (who were armed) with automatic weapons? Who would do that?” McDavid wondered. “Probably they were hopped up.”
New Orleans in the wake of Katrina was a war zone, said McDavid, as gangs of drug dealers let it be known that they planned “to take New Orleans.”
“That’s why it was shoot to kill,” he said.
The illogic of the gangs' desire to control a New Orleans without utilities, flooded with pollution from chemical plants and devoid of buyers for drugs apparently did not register with them, said McDavid.
McDavid said he spoke with some soldiers just rotating into New Orleans straight from Iraq who said the post-Katrina streetscape was their “most horrifying experience ever.”
The flood waters opened up graves and floated bodies out, joining those of vagrants and huge fish rotting. Eying a pile of trash, what's that, “and there’s a foot sticking out.” Awful images all around.
“They (bodies) were all over the place,” he said. “They’ll never know how many people died.”
“I will never go back to New Orleans unless I’m a prisoner,” McDavid said.
“I was there 23 days and I never saw a squirrel, a rat, a cat or even a roach,” he said. “A few dogs survived.”
Of all the people there -- military, police, fire, medical caregivers, volunteers, drug trafficking combatants -- workers for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals were “the bravest and craziest people I ever saw.”
“They would go straight away into the scariest places you can imagine,” he said.
Repairing a cellular tower late one afternoon, the workers drew fire but McDavid and the security forces were able to hold their position. Darkness fell, and they were forced to hunker down for the night, he said. McDavid said he was shot at more than once and occasionally moved about as a “soldier with an automatic weapon covered me.”
“I never thought I’d see anything like this in the U.S.,” said McDavid. “I told someone, ‘I think I’m in Mogadishu.’”
New Orleans was “without a soul, a dead city,” said McDavid, adding that he disliked being negative but he doubted the city could ever be brought back.
“The levees collapsed and I’m not here to say whose fault that was,” he said. “But there were just so many people who did not know how to survive. People were complaining about the food and the water. They were complaining about how badly they were being treated and they wouldn’t walk down some steps to get a bottle of water. It was the same water and food that we were getting.”
“You can blame FEMA or anybody you want, but you can’t help people who won’t be helped,” McDavid said. “I’m not defending FEMA or anyone else.”
He said the Superdome “just smelled so bad,” with “feces, urine and bottles” everywhere. The empty bottles were mostly whiskey and wine bottles, he said.
Initial reports of raping and killing were debunked in later news accounts, but were in fact true, said McDavid.
“People can deny it, but it was true; I was there,” he said. “It was the most visible case of anarchy I’ve ever seen and I’ve been to war.”
For the most part the media was camped at hotels on Canal St., said McDavid.
“They had trucks with generators and the news media stayed there,” he said. “I never saw a news team where I was. Probably 10 guys were broadcasting from Canal St., but they were not where the real problems were.”
McDavid said he still finds it incredible that so many people didn’t escape the city – on foot or in one of many vehicles that were there for the driving.
“There were 1,000 school buses, 400 city buses unused; thousands of cars with fuel in them and nobody tried to drive out,” he said.
“We had to get a boat to the Superdome and we boated down Poydras,” he said. “There was talk about a shark there (around the Superdome) , but I don’t know that for sure.”
Mayor Ray Nagin was in Dallas and there were no New Orleans police officers to be found anywhere in New Orleans, said McDavid.
“Four or five times the mayor came in and gave a press conference and then he’d get right back out of town,” McDavid said.
“I never saw a New Orleans police car in 23 days,” he said. “I saw 100 vehicles from the California State Highway Patrol. I saw troopers from New Jersey. I saw police from Boulder, CO. They were really scared.”
Fire departments from New York and Chicago assisted and he encountered troopers from Kentucky and Georgia and police officers from Texas, said McDavid.
McDavid credited the military with a solid performance, seizing and holding the area.
Katrina was a disaster with no precedent.
“Hurricanes blow through and they are gone,” he said. “The New Orleans flood was different. It stayed.”
The University of New Orleans had three-story buildings underwater. There were $10 million mansions on the lake with art work and statues and jewelry swamped in a deep, deep green slime.
An ugly 23 days in New Orleans.
He left New Orleans with nothing positive, “nothing but bad memories,” said McDavid.
“It was something to behold,” said McDavid. “I would not wish it on anyone. I don’t ever want to see anything like it again.”
