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12:50The mood was kind of easy in the beginning.
12:54At least we did have some shelter.
12:57But things started deteriorating real fast.
13:00Storm coming through the dome.
13:03Whatever all that's trying to get in there for real.
13:06The only light we really had if you went inside the superdome
13:09was from the four holes in the rooftop.
13:12Of course, they have emergency generators, but no air conditioning,
13:14so that's going to be obviously an interesting situation
13:17as the morning progresses.
13:18It started getting more muggy, and it was really, really hot.
13:23Steamy.
13:24It's getting hot in there.
13:26The toilets are overflowing.
13:28All the bathrooms got flooding everywhere to the top.
13:32Man, it's nasty already.
13:34The smell was getting worse.
13:36People was kind of, like, closed in, and it just wasn't good.
13:40So we went on the outside where we could congregate
13:44and where people had radios.
13:46Hurricane Katrina hitting the Big Easy very hard today.
13:49And as the day was going on, they was having more and more reports.
13:52Police inquired that there was a breach at the 17th Street Canal.
13:56All you see is water, pretty much, and the tops of roofs.
13:59A significant part of the city is underwater.
14:01A significant part of the city is damaged.
14:03What you hear are people screaming for help.
14:05They've confirmed reports of bodies floating.
14:09We didn't see water yet, so we're just hearing all of these horror stories.
14:13And caller after caller, caller after caller, caller after caller.
14:16They couldn't get to the people.
14:17You just really don't know what's going on.
14:20The water was coming up more, and we had three non-swimmers.
14:37And then we had the swimmers, myself, who's injured, and my daughter and my niece.
14:44They were saying, we'll get help.
14:48I was like, no, we can't separate.
14:49And I can't help you if you go off somewhere.
14:54They stayed.
14:55I convinced them to stay.
14:56And my uncle and I went on the porch.
14:58And the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain looked like everything had merged.
15:08There were trains floating.
15:10My neighbors are gone.
15:13I never felt so isolated to where I just thought the world has ended.
15:21And we're the only few people that are left.
15:24So now we got water towel angles on the second floor.
15:28Of an extremely tall house.
15:31So now we have to move to the attic.
15:33Now, mind you, I have a broken neck and a broken back.
15:36And I'm in a cast.
15:37And I have a brace on my neck.
15:39So before we went into the attic, my daughter started writing our names and our date of births on the wall.
15:46Just like I'm writing our names and our date of births.
15:48So when they come inside the house and find us, I say, find us.
15:52She said, yeah, you know, because you know, Mom, we're probably not going to make it through this.
15:56It's, you know, too much.
15:59So I erased it off the wall.
16:01It's like, girl, we're going to live.
16:03And we're going to make it through this.
16:05I felt hopeless during that time when she was writing that on the wall.
16:09But something inside me told me, this isn't it.
16:12You got to convince them that this isn't it.
16:16Because they're giving up.
16:19We're going to keep our heads together.
16:21We're going to live.
16:23We're going to be okay.
16:24It's almost 1 o'clock p.m. now.
16:33Storm's dying down pretty good.
16:36We're going to go out pretty soon and try to get a boat.
16:40One thing about firemen, firemen are going to find a way to do what they need to do.
16:44And it's obvious that our job at that moment is to help people who are stuck in the floodwaters and possibly drowning.
16:54There's not a lot of water in that big boat.
16:57We were looking around for boats, and we did spot two on the street.
17:01We swam to that building, and we got that boat.
17:04We had some other guys that could hotwire boats.
17:10There was a parking garage, so we went and actually siphoned a lot of gas out of those cars.
17:17And as soon as the wind died down at 2 o'clock, we launched operations.
17:29When we started, we probably had four or five boats that we had come and did.
17:32I told the guys, I said, go find whatever boat you can find.
17:35Let's get to work.
17:37Once comms went down, it was chaotic.
17:40You know, once communications went down, you know, you just went to work.
17:47You know, you have that.
17:48You've got to have direction.
17:49Who's going to do what?
17:50Who's going to be responsible for this?
17:51Who's going to be responsible for that?
17:52We never had any of that.
17:53Never had access to any of that.
17:58We expected FEMA to come in quickly.
18:00And that it would be something that would allow the local officials the reprieve needed for that type of catastrophe.
18:10It was obvious that we were dealing with something bigger than our capabilities.
18:16It means you're on your own.
18:21But we figured it out.
18:23You know, we made it.
18:24We went and did what we had to do to get to the neighborhoods that we had to get into to try to save people's lives.
18:31We set up quadrants.
18:33You were a sergeant.
18:34You had one quadrant.
18:35You took your men, put one officer on every boat.
18:38You assigned that quad.
18:39And that's how we broke it down.
18:42I'm worried about saving people's lives.
18:44That's my job.
18:45And that's what the hell...
18:46That's what we did.
18:48That's what we did.
18:50Now, you know, you're hearing things on the radio, but until you see it, you just can't imagine it.
18:58Find the location.
19:012332.
19:03It was kind of like a moment that you're not in shock, but you're almost like, oh, my God, I did not realize it was...
19:10Even though you're hearing things on the radio, you don't realize it's that bad.
19:17It was hot as hell, and you could only imagine how awful it would be if you're stuck on a roof.
19:23If you're not in superior physical condition, you probably wouldn't survive that.
19:27So, yeah, it was really important to get people off of roofs as quickly as possible.
19:31The TAC team started doing their methodical search and pulling out as many people as we could.
19:42To us, it was to get there, get the people on a boat.
19:45If they want to go, you take them.
19:47If they don't want to go, they're going to stay there because we're not going to fight with them and flip a boat.
19:52How many people y'all got?
19:53It's just a good day.
19:55You know, you get in a hasty mood, so you're just out there trying to pick up as many people as you can,
20:00wherever you can, until you're able to get some solid intelligence.
20:05In some areas, water was 15, maybe 16 feet deep.
20:09We would shut off the motor and holler.
20:11Hey!
20:11Someone hollers back, and obviously, if someone sees you, we would go very slowly,
20:15so, you know, people would have a chance.
20:17They'd hear our motor.
20:19There was a family on a roof, and we went to go rescue them, and they said,
20:23No, not us. The house right there.
20:25We can hear a man screaming.
20:27Turns out that he was standing on his tub,
20:29and the water was up to his neck, and he just, he didn't have much longer.
20:35The water was halfway up the bathroom window, one of those small bathroom windows,
20:40and they got him, they broke out the whole window, and they were able to drag him out the window.
20:44And so, yeah, they got him out of that house just in town.
20:47How long do you think this water gonna stink up here like this?
20:53You know the dire position that these people are in.
20:56You got elderly, you got young kids, you got women with children, pregnant women up there.
21:01The numbers didn't even come to my mind because I knew people were in trouble.
21:04Some people just feel bad because you know they never had the means to get out.
21:10And if they got out of their houses, got in their car, tried to run, the water was gonna take them away.
21:15There was no way in the world they were gonna survive that.
21:17It was absolutely horrific.
21:18Well, we were walking around, we went up the street a couple of blocks,
21:29and I would say there's nothing like the flooding that we might have anticipated.
21:33This was clearly a horrific storm.
21:36Clearly it is going to be a mess to clean up.
21:38But, Wolf, they were expecting Armageddon here.
21:41Armageddon, it wasn't.
21:42The worst case scenario was that we would be floating atop 25 feet of a highly toxic suit
21:48here in downtown New Orleans.
21:49That's not the case.
21:50What they were predicting for New Orleans was 175 mile-an-hour winds
21:54and a direct hit from Hurricane Katrina.
21:57They didn't get that.
21:58The folks in New Orleans are certainly lucky.
22:02The city of New Orleans is filling up with water.
22:06But all the media was down in the French Quarter.
22:09There's no water in the French Quarter.
22:11That is Bienville down the street.
22:13So they're reporting it's not as bad as it seemed.
22:16And maybe New Orleans dodged a bullet.
22:18New Orleans indeed dodged what they expected would be a very strong direct hit.
22:24But they didn't know.
22:25They didn't know any more than what was in the neighborhood that they were standing in.
22:31There was no water in the French Quarter.
22:34Because anything that is close to the river is at the highest point in the city of New Orleans.
22:39So therefore there's no water.
22:42We're in a bowl.
22:44We've got the Mississippi River levee over here and the Lake levee over here.
22:49The city's in the middle.
22:51So we are surrounded by water.
22:54We're six to eight feet below sea level.
22:56And we have some battles with the water staying out.
23:02So during the storm, there are sewage and waterboard pumping stations throughout the city that propel the water into the outfall canals.
23:15It's a very good system when it works.
23:22Please, please.
23:23I heard the boats.
23:25But nobody stopped to get it.
23:27We heard all these boats.
23:28They're going to die.
23:29They're trying to get someone in the area also, ma'am.
23:33You know how much more this is supposed to come up?
23:35I don't know how much more, sir.
23:37Please go to your attic, sir.
23:39If I'm going to die, the water is steady rising in the attic, ma'am.
23:43All right, all right, go.
23:47All of us who worked in an emergency operations center became the lifeline for people who were calling for assistance.
23:54And our resources were stretched beyond measure.
23:59There was no playbook written for a disaster and a catastrophe of that level.
24:06By Monday afternoon, there were several reports that levees had busted.
24:17That straight ahead is the London Outfall Canal, if I'm not mistaken.
24:22Over there is the greatest break of the levee.
24:26Now, there's a huge chunk of concrete you can't even see, but you can see that diagonal piece of concrete.
24:30So I called back to FEMA headquarters.
24:35I certainly wasn't informed about any actions that were taking place.
24:39And I knew I was the only one from FEMA in New Orleans.
24:43And that was the moment where I felt that they couldn't grasp the severity.
24:49Nobody ever believes a worst-case scenario.
24:52I knew at the time that lives were being lost left and right.
24:55There were thousands of people on rooftops.
24:57My mindset at the time was, I've got to get on a helicopter.
25:02I got a little pushback when I talked to the Coast Guard saying,
25:05I don't know that we're going to be able to get you on a helicopter.
25:09I informed them that the White House was really counting on me to give them some situational awareness.
25:18Not completely truthful, but I just needed to find a way to get on that helicopter
25:22because I really needed to put eyes on what was happening.
25:27Anybody not believing what I was saying was just going to delay any kind of response.
25:37I got on, and the pilot said to me, where do you want to go?
25:42And I said, I need to see how bad this is.
25:47We flew out towards Slidell and could tell that the bridge was all damaged and impassable.
25:53The airport underwater, that there was no access into the city.
26:05We flew all over the city of New Orleans.
26:10It was unlike anything I'd ever seen before.
26:14And I saw that the actual levees had breached in New Orleans.
26:20So when we flew to the 17th Street Canal, and you could see just this humongous gap in the levee,
26:33it wasn't overtopping, it wasn't minor water going over.
26:38The levee was gone.
26:39I said at the time, 80% of the city looked like it was underwater.
26:46It was a guess.
26:47It was a pretty good guess.
26:51This is it.
26:52This is the worst case scenario.
26:54We talked about it.
26:55It's here.
26:55In the morning, I gathered everybody into the conference room at the emergency operations center,
27:16and I asked them to lay out a map.
27:18And I then proceeded to tell them everything that I had just seen, where all the floodwaters were.
27:29I remember looking at Mayor Nagin and seeing a face of disbelief and almost of, what do we do now?
27:38I told the mayor, you need to make a list of all of the priorities that you think you're going to need
27:50in this environment where everything is damaged.
27:54It was things like shelters, knowing that there were people that needed shelter.
28:01Rescues.
28:02How are we going to rescue people from rooftops?
28:05To what every department needed in order to run the city in this new, very strange dynamic that was occurring.
28:16We were a different city.
28:18The old city was gone.
28:21When that list of our needs was handed over to Marty Bahamondi and FEMA,
28:28maybe naively, but we expected immediate results,
28:32that wasn't actually the case.
28:35FEMA's not really a first responder.
28:38Local officials are first responders.
28:41The state with the National Guard are first responders.
28:45And FEMA wasn't designed to be a first responder.
28:47Back then, at that time, we put a lot more emphasis on state and local governments to handle the initial response and preparation for disasters.
28:58And only when they couldn't handle it were we actually then designed to come in on the back end and provide that support.
29:05We knew just from putting all the puzzle pieces together, that catastrophic failure was beginning to occur around the city, beyond our capacity, way beyond our capacity.
29:18The Coast Guard was able to assist immediately because we're not like the National Guard that needs permission or like a formal request from the governor.
29:32We didn't need to be asked by anybody.
29:48My crew had a game plan that we were going to fly and just pick a location that had a lot of people.
30:04It didn't take us long.
30:08We found a huge three-story apartment complex with people everywhere.
30:15We trained to get people off of, you know, cruise ships, sailboats.
30:21Because we had never trained to get people off of rooftops or off of balconies with urban hazards.
30:31Copy it.
30:32Someone's going out the door.
30:34Everyone's outside the door.
30:35Have target sight.
30:37Forward and right.
30:3775.
30:38We picked this balcony with women and children and elderly people.
30:43And when a mother is so desperate to get her baby out of danger that she hangs him over a two-story balcony, that's alarming.
30:55She didn't even bat an eyelash.
30:57It was like, I don't know you.
31:01You're connected to a giant, loud helicopter with hurricane-force winds blowing us around.
31:08But here's my baby.
31:10Get him out of here.
31:11And, you know, I just snatched him.
31:17And he's so small.
31:19We don't have rescue equipment for babies.
31:22So to carry a baby in your bare arms with nothing keeping him from falling, except for me, is very nerve-wracking.
31:32Submarine survivor are in the cabin.
31:35My first day, I rescued 48 people.
31:39We just didn't stop.
31:42We were picking up as many people as we could as fast as we could around the clock for days and days.
31:51And honestly, kind of waiting for the cavalry to come.
31:54But it was all about life-saving.
31:57That's it.
32:02And basket is clear of the rooftop.
32:04And you are clear to move back and left.
32:07As we move people out of the Superdome, people begin to move in.
32:21So people are coming out of either parishes where they've been in their homes and not out on the streets.
32:27They're continuing to come out of homes where maybe they were on the second floor.
32:31And now they can get out and start moving around.
32:33And there is just simply no way we can estimate the numbers of people that are out there like that.
32:38When the levees broke, everything changed.
32:41Our population doubled.
32:44And that was really our first indication that, okay, something worse has now happened.
32:49And there's a stage two.
32:51They just had so, so many people just coming in.
32:56It doubled real fast.
32:58It just kept going nonstop, nonstop.
33:01It also made you more aware that if people getting rescued like this and they're flying this many people in,
33:08now it's starting to grow with numbers.
33:11So whatever so-called plan they had for food or drinks or whatever the case may be,
33:15now they wasn't going to be ready.
33:17The population coming in pre-landfall is dramatically different than post-landfall.
33:24Pre-landfall, it was by and large people who chose to come to the Superdome.
33:29They were nervous but optimistic and we were kind of all in it together.
33:35And then things rapidly and dramatically changed when we became aware of a second wave of people
33:42who are now presenting at the Superdome.
33:44And those people had, in many cases, had ridden out one of the worst nights of their life.
33:52Every rescue boat that goes out comes back heavy with human cargo.
33:56And they will be at it for days to come.
33:58The police aren't coming.
33:59And that is a reality when you have a disaster.
34:02There aren't enough police to respond.
34:04There were too many people.
34:05And you can only help so many people.
34:07You can only do what you can do.
34:09A small group of firemen can't help everybody.
34:11It's just not physically possible.
34:14What's your first name?
34:15Shirley.
34:15Shirley.
34:16Shirley.
34:17We were watching the news.
34:19We were seeing people on the roofs waving towels and flags.
34:23We seen people floating in the water.
34:27Felt hopeless.
34:27When I saw the images of the Lower Ninth Ward, I was just so sad to see it, because I know how hard the folks worked to get their homes.
34:43And now they were going to have to start all over again.
34:47I'm 62 years old.
34:48I've never been involved in nothing like this in my life.
34:50And I've got to ask you, what did you leave behind?
34:53Now, today, everything.
34:57Quite a few of the folks that lived there were seniors.
35:01How were they going to do that?
35:05My family was also caught in Hurricane Betsy back in 1965.
35:14Betsy is here.
35:19Gusts now topping 100 miles per hour.
35:22Tides three feet above normal.
35:24And escape routes will be cut off shortly.
35:30The storm was coming into the water.
35:33And suddenly, we heard the explosion.
35:36But we thought it was from the storm.
35:37And then we saw all this water gripping, coming to us from the levee.
35:42Hurricane Betsy was a storm more powerful than Katrina.
35:53It was on a worse track for New Orleans.
35:56And as a consequence, levees flooded.
36:00We'll rebuild.
36:01We'll rebuild.
36:02Oh, yeah.
36:02You don't think this will knock you out, man?
36:04No, indeed.
36:05We're going to build a levee higher and have a prettier community.
36:08After Hurricane Betsy, we ended up with a significant funding program to build hurricane levees.
36:18There are computer models that were available to the Corps of Engineers since they started building these levees in the late 1960s that they didn't use.
36:30They didn't get the science right on the height that they needed to build it.
36:34They didn't get the geotechnical engineering right in deciding whether the site was suitable.
36:40And lastly, they did designs that we knew would fail.
36:45They had done their own research on some of these and had found that the failures would occur.
36:52To add insult to injury, as Hurricane Katrina was approaching, the levees weren't finished.
36:59So the net result was catastrophic structural failure.
37:06It's really been a double disaster.
37:08We had the hurricane, and on top of that, we had a flood.
37:11But both of these things, with all due respect, sir, were predicted.
37:15They knew it was a Category 3 hurricane hitting the area 48 hours before it struck.
37:19People have been writing about the potential disastrous conditions of the levee system for a really long time.
37:25Years and years and years.
37:27There is a sense that everyone knew a disaster could happen, and no one was really prepared.
37:35This is a natural disaster the likes of which our country may have never seen before.
37:39The president, he says he doesn't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.
37:44Now, I don't know how he can say that, given the fact that everybody anticipated the breach of the levees.
37:50We knew immediately that the levees had breached once.
37:53It just continued to rise and rise and rise.
37:56And as I said, from past experience, we knew that the levees had breached.
38:01People were passing with boats rescuing people.
38:04When I seen the water, and the way that the water was coming, I said, they did it again.
38:11Witnessing these things is what led us to use the terms catastrophic structural failure.
38:19It wasn't the storm.
38:21It was shoddy design and construction by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
38:26We had water all the way up to my mama, those steps.
38:49And so we started getting kind of worried.
38:52And the only thing we could do is just try to get to some kind of shelter.
38:57We just, you know, we didn't want to stay there.
39:00And the water was steady, rising and rising and rising.
39:03And, you know, we didn't have no way out.
39:06So we took off walking.
39:09But where we was at, it was like, what are we going to do with the little children?
39:13Because the water is almost four feet.
39:15Well, they had this dough floating in the water.
39:19So we grabbed the dough, put the children on top, and pushed the dough so it could glide through the water.
39:36In my neighborhood, we were lucky because my property sits three feet, nine inches above sea level.
39:44So I would not have left my house, except for the fact that the militia, guys that were in flatboats with AKs, came and knocked on our door and told me I had to leave my house.
40:02I didn't have water in my house.
40:04So it was not a necessity for me to leave.
40:07And since many buildings are built at least three feet off the ground, a lot of the people around here felt the same way.
40:16We got to get out.
40:22So we were forced to leave the house and walk an eighth of a mile from the residence to what was supposed to be a safe haven.
40:32They sent us in a direction where the water was deeper.
40:42So my sister and I were carrying kids and helping these seniors who were with us.
40:49Man, I don't think I was more frightened about anything than walking in that water.
40:54You couldn't see under that, so you just really walking on faith.
41:07And my brother, he kicked a stop sign because he didn't see it under the water.
41:11So the pressure that he was applying to, you know, to be able to walk through the water and then he kicked a big gash in his leg almost like almost two inches deep.
41:24There wasn't nothing he can do.
41:26So he walked in the water with an open wound.
41:30The first thing I thought about was we're in this dirty water and then the germs from the water.
41:35That scared me more than anything.
41:41We were just trying to find refuge on higher ground.
41:45The safest thing to do is take that raft to the interstate.
41:48And one of the highest points in this area was up on the interstate 10.
41:53So that's where we headed.
41:58All you could see is all the people just coming towards the bridge, you know, because the bridge was really like the safest place.
42:06You know, my main focus was to get the kids to safety.
42:09You know, anywhere where they had shelter, where they can rest.
42:15From where we was at on the bridge, you can kind of see the Superdome.
42:18And the Superdome was swamped with people.
42:22They just kept bringing more and more people to the Superdome.
42:26You see high water vehicles with 100 people stacked into it, bringing people to the Superdome and dumping them off.
42:33And people were walking in the water, coming to the Superdome as if that was the savior place.
42:39This was a population who were coming to the Superdome or being brought to the Superdome because there was nowhere else for them to go.
42:47Many times, I would say unwilling.
42:50They certainly didn't want to come to the Superdome, but there was, it was desperation.
42:55We didn't know where we was going.
42:58The military was running people away from their houses.
43:01Like, you had to go.
43:02It didn't matter where you went or whatever, like, you had to go.
43:07We seen tens of thousands of people on the bridge.
43:10Eventually, they also got to the Superdome.
43:13Now, we're three, four times the number now.
43:16We don't have nowhere to go.
43:19My house is underwater.
43:20I don't even have another house.
43:21I don't even know where I'm I'm cheering at.
43:29Seeing people coming in rescued, it was like, man, something really bad is going on on the outside.
43:36Because all you're hearing is helicopters.
43:38You're seeing people getting dropped off.
43:41At least they was out of one bad situation.
43:47They were coming back for you.
43:49But they didn't know they was coming to another hell.
43:54It's really, we live like dogs and pigs up in here.
43:57We need help.
43:58We need help.
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