Dispatches From the Edge_ A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival - Anderson Cooper [56]
New Orleans is largely underwater. The evacuation of the Superdome has just been completed. After days of waiting and inexplicable delays, buses arrived to take the stranded to Houston’s Astrodome. The Convention Center has just started being evacuated. Medical tents have been set up across the street, and helicopters land nearby to shuttle the most vulnerable evacuees to the airport and shelters in Baton Rouge. Coast Guard helicopters continue to fly over the city, occasionally hovering over flooded neighborhoods to pick up people still stranded in their homes.
CNN has set up a base at the New Orleans airport, and we briefly stop there to pick up some gear—waders and handheld satellite phones. When we enter the city, it feels like we’re crossing a frontier. The farther we go the more we find stripped away. Maps are useless. We double-back from dead ends and slowly find our way along the water’s edge. We head toward the Lower Ninth Ward.
A FEW BLOCKS from Bourbon Street, we stop at a police station to borrow a boat. A cowboy crew of cops has been holed up there for days. A hand-drawn sign on a sheet of cardboard hangs over the entrance. FORT APACHE, it says. That’s what they’ve renamed the station.
“We call it Fort Apache ’cause we’re surrounded by water and Indians,” says a cop with a cowboy hat and swimming goggles around his neck.
“Why are you wearing swimming goggles?” I ask.
“Because if things get really hot, I’m just going to swim out of here.” I can’t tell if he’s serious or not. I don’t think he knows, either.
I feel like a character in a Joseph Conrad novel. I’ve turned the bend in the river and found an isolated tribe armed to the teeth. They’ve been out on their own too long and are dazed by the horror.
“We’re survivors, man. We’re survivors,” a young African American cop tells me, clutching a shotgun. He’s talking to me but stares far away. “It’s a war zone, man, but we’re alive. The criminal element tried to get us down but they couldn’t get us. We stayed together. They thought they could get us, but they can’t. That’s how it’s going down.”
He graduated from the police academy just four weeks ago. “Nothing they showed us in the academy could have prepared us for this,” he says, slowly shaking his head, “but you gotta do what you gotta do.”
Tricked out like a storm scavenger, one cop wears a Kukri tucked in his belt. It’s a thick knife with a curved blade, used by Gurkhas in Nepal. I had one when I was a kid. It’s said that a Gurkha can split a man from his collar bone to his waist with one slice of a Kukri. I don’t ask this guy if he’s ever used it.
The police say they’ve been taking incoming fire the last couple of nights. Now they’ve posted snipers on the roofs of surrounding buildings. “Shoot to kill, man. Shoot to kill,” one cop says, smiling.
They loan us their boat so we can go out into the Lower Ninth Ward. Actually, it’s CNN’s boat. Chris Lawrence, a reporter for CNN, brought it into New Orleans the day after Katrina and loaned it to these cops so they could rescue their families and others.
“Shouldn’t the city have had some boats ready for you guys to use?” I ask one of the sergeants.
He just stares at me.
“Don’t get me started on the list of things this city should have done,” another cop says, spitting. “You’d think they would preposition some vehicles or some extra ammunition or guns, but they didn’t. There was no go-to point if disaster happens, no word on what to do. Nothing was in place. Nothing.”
The French Quarter wasn’t flooded, but it’s a short drive from it to the water’s edge. We climb into a pickup full of police, all of us huddled in the back. Guns stick out from all directions. It’s the first time these police officers have been out on patrol. We drive down St. Claude Avenue, strangers in a strange land. A few residents glance at us as we pass. They move slowly, still shell-shocked by the