Dispatches From the Edge_ A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival - Anderson Cooper [59]
When the storm hit, Rouse got his family out, then came back to the city with bandages and medicine. He also brought his nine-millimeter Glock, which he still wears strapped to his waist.
“I was not coming back to this town without this,” he says, putting his hand on the Glock. “I have a sworn oath to help. And the last thing I want to do is hurt somebody. But I had to get here to help.”
Rouse is clearly exhausted, shaken by what he’s seen, and what he hasn’t. “Where was the help for the helpers?” he asks. “People have died when they didn’t need to. If a psychiatrist has to come in on his own with a gun and a backpack to help, that’s not a failure of an individual, that’s a failure of the entire system.
“This is the only chance we get for a test run if something even more horrible happens or something as horrible happens with a nuclear device in this country. And we botched this one. We won’t get a chance to botch it again.”
THERE’S PLENTY OF blame to go around. What began as a natural disaster has become a man-made one. Nowhere is that clearer than at the New Orleans Convention Center.
“This is where hell opened its mouth,” Dr. Greg Henderson says, standing on a garbage-strewn street outside the Convention Center one week after the storm. “You remember that scene in Gone With the Wind, after the battle of Atlanta, where they just pull back with all the bodies lying in the street? That’s exactly what it looked like outside the Convention Center, the entire front of it was covered with people just lying there.”
Dr. Henderson is a pathologist. He was in New Orleans for a conference at the Ritz Carlton Hotel when the storm struck. Rather than flee the city, he decided to stay and see if he could help. He approached several New Orleans police officers who told him there was no clinic for first-responders, so he decided to set one up in the Sheraton Hotel on Canal Street.
“We broke in with two officers to the Walgreen’s drugstore,” he tells me. “There was one broken into down in the French Quarter, and all of the foodstuffs had just been taken but a lot of the drugs had not been looted, so those police officers held the looters at gunpoint and handed me some Hefty trashbags and said ‘Okay, you got fifteen minutes, Doc.’ So I went into the pharmacy with a flashlight and just opened the bags and just went down the shelves and pushed everything into the bag, just up and down for fifteen minutes and started handing them out, and that’s how I started a pharmacy in the Sheraton.”
Two days after Katrina hit, Henderson heard that conditions at the Convention Center were bad, so he went there, escorted by a New Orleans police officer, thinking he could join up with a medical team already there. When he got to the Convention Center, however, he discovered that there was no medical team there, just evacuees. Thousands of them.
“The smell was overwhelming,” he says, walking with me through an unlocked door into the now-empty Convention Center. The smell is still revolting. The people were bused out on Saturday; it’s now Monday, one week since the storm, but the garbage they left behind is still all around. Two small dogs abandoned inside bark nonstop.
“They were packed everywhere,” Dr. Henderson says, “all the way out into the street, and pretty much on the other side of the street; it was just one mass of humanity. No air-conditioning, just people, crying and dying. Crying and dying.”
The day of the storm, officials at the Superdome had told those fleeing the floodwaters to head to the Convention Center. They said that buses would soon arrive to take the evacuees out of the city. However, no buses arrived until the end of that week. The Convention Center was not really a shelter at all. There was no medical attention, and no police presence inside. At the Superdome, people were searched before entering; at the Convention Center, no one got searched.
“I’d be walking