Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [18]
Williams called her father again. He said he had made up his mind: he was staying. “These storms always make that turn to Pascagoula,” he told Williams. She argued with him. He laughed. “You are all very dramatic,” he said.
On Sunday morning, less than twenty-four hours before the hurricane’s landfall, Nagin called for an unprecedented mandatory evacuation. “We are facing a storm that most of us have long feared. This is very serious,” he said on TV. “I want to emphasize, the first choice of every citizen should be to leave the city.”
Turner went to Mass, just like he did every day. There weren’t many people there. After the service, when the priest asked him what he was going to do, he said he would stay put. “My family’s aggravating me, but I’m staying.” Turner was stuck in denial, while everyone else around him moved on to deliberation and decision. It wasn’t that he thought he was immortal. He thought often about death, especially as his siblings began to pass away. No, Turner was in denial about Katrina because something else scared him more.
Williams and her brother decided to ride out the storm in a neighbor’s house, which was well built and far from any trees. That way, her father wouldn’t have to deal with evacuating the city. She asked him to come spend the night with them. He would not. He invited her to come to his house, a one-story structure two blocks from Lake Pontchartrain, but she said no. “Something just came in the pit of my stomach,” she says. She made one last request of him: “I said, ‘Daddy, I don’t know if you remember Hurricane Betsy. But they found claw marks in people’s attics. People couldn’t get out. If you’re going to stay, please put some tools up there in your attic.”
By this point, Turner was starting to get truly annoyed with his children and their entreaties. He’d already stopped watching the weather on TV. “I don’t think he even knew the name of the storm,” Williams says. It was around then that he took his phone off the hook.
Blind Spots
About 80 percent of New Orleans’s population got out before the storm—a huge success compared with previous evacuations there and around the country. The vast majority of people navigated through the denial and deliberation phases and took action. But what happened to the remaining 20 percent? The consensus in most media reports was that people were simply too poor to leave. And it’s true that the more resources you have, the more choices you have about how to evacuate and where to go. About 21 percent of New Orleans households were carless when Katrina hit, according to the Census Bureau.
But poverty does not explain what happened in New Orleans. An analysis of 486 Katrina victims by Knight Ridder Newspapers found that they were not disproportionately poor—or black. Michael Lindell, director of the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center at Texas A&M University, has studied scores of evacuations, and he says people’s behavior defies simple explanations. “If you’re looking at 100% of the variance in evacuation behavior, income accounts for no more than 5–10 percentage points,” he says. “What really accounts for the differences are people’s beliefs.”
Why wouldn’t Patrick Turner leave? Turner had an old Chevrolet and a family full of people with cars headed out of town. In New Orleans, most people knew much of the city lay below sea level. In July 2002, the New Orleans Times-Picayune ran a five-part series on the inevitable. “It’s a matter of when, not if,” wrote reporters John McQuaid and Mark Schleifstein about a hurricane decimating the city. “It’s happened before and it’ll happen again.” They described a precarious levee system and flooding that could kill thousands.
In hindsight, it’s always easy to craft a narrative