Dispatches From the Edge_ A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival - Anderson Cooper [72]
We arrange to meet back at my hotel. He doesn’t want his name used.
“I don’t want to point fingers,” he says, settling into a chair in a darkened room. “I’m just a patrolman, but nothing was prepared, and lack of organization and planning cost people their lives.”
“Officials say no one could have predicted this would be so bad,” I say.
“Well, the Hurricane Center knew what was going on. FEMA knew what was going on. Everybody knew what happened if the big one came to New Orleans. It came, we knew it was coming, we had plenty of warning, and people were told, ‘Hold on, we can handle it ourselves. Hold on, we can handle it ourselves.’”
He pauses as tears fall down his face. “The people I swore I’d serve and protect—they’re floating. They’re dead. I didn’t sign up for this. I didn’t sign up to be abandoned. These are American citizens dying. This is not Ghana. This is not Burundi. These are not Hutus and Tutsis, or whatever, you know? They are American citizens. Old people were left in nursing homes to die.”
He doesn’t pretend to know exactly what went wrong, what happened, but he’s pretty sure race had something to do with it.
“I hate to go there, ’cause I’m white, but how can you not think race played a role?” he says. “If this was Governor Blanco’s sisters and brothers dying here, do you think she can say, ‘Forget it. We can handle it’? ‘Give us twenty-four more hours, we’ll figure it out.’ I mean there were buses here, there were things we could’ve done to save those people. And they died in the hundreds, because nobody had an idea what to do. If this was a city in Connecticut, these people wouldn’t have died.
“Man, all I can pray is an independent commission comes in and looks at what happened. Whether or not there are criminal charges, at least the public knows who to vote for next time. The poor planning caused a lot of people to die. There was no plan, there was no plan.”
AFTER A MONTH, I reluctantly leave New Orleans. I head back to Mississippi for several days. John Grisham and his wife have begun raising money for rebuilding the Gulf, and they agree to meet me in Biloxi so I can report on their efforts. He suggests we meet at a restaurant called Mary Mahoney’s. It’s a Biloxi landmark that Grisham has included in several of his most popular books. Mary Mahoney’s was badly flooded during the storm, and workmen are busy trying to get it reopened. I arrive before the Grishams, and when I walk into the restaurant, the owner, Bob Mahoney, smiles and says, “Welcome back.”
“What do you mean ‘welcome back’?” I ask.
“You came here with your daddy in 1976. He was on a book tour, and you’d just been at the waterslide park. You came in. You were still wet, wearing shorts and wrapped in a towel.”
As soon as he mentions it, I remember the trip, the waterslide park; I was shivering, but didn’t want to leave the clear blue water, I kept prolonging getting out. A friend of my father’s had taken me to the park, and afterward brought me to the restaurant. I remember riding in her car, the feeling of my wet shorts on the vinyl seat, the clicking of the turn signal as we pulled into the restaurant’s parking lot. I walked through the crowd to the table where my father sat. I remember the feeling of being with him so far away from home. Just he and I, two men on our own.
Bob takes me through a series of rooms and points out a large round table. “That’s the table y’all sat at,” he says, smiling. “It survived the storm.”
“How did you remember all this?” I ask