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Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time - Season 1 Episode 2 - Worst Case Scenario - Full Movie
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06:30We were asking folks what their addresses were and then finding out it didn't matter what your address was because the force of the water had moved homes off of their foundations.
07:10We were like, okay, you go by the front door, you go by the front door, everybody had their own portion of something to this recipe of survival.
07:24And then we started hearing, and then we started hearing, and then we started hearing, and then we started hearing barrels from off the railroad track or wherever they came from.
07:36We're coming in the next day, which isICH to care, and then weaven in the next day to the next week.
08:06Your mother's furniture that she prided is being thrown against a wall.
08:12Your icebox or refrigerator is floating.
08:16You move things to a higher level.
08:19You get as much in the attic as you possibly can.
08:24But when you go towards the front of the house and you realize that that water is at least that high in the street or higher,
08:33then you're worried about an exit plan.
08:37You got to get out.
08:49No, it's safe to say that house is history.
08:52It's going to burn down to the wall line.
08:54If I have a hard time picking that one up on the camera, I'll see it behind the trees.
08:58We were at the Lake Marina Tower, just right on the other side of 17th Street Canal.
09:04And me and firefighter Gabe King and Captain Paul Helmers were watching the winds on the south side of Lake Marina Tower.
09:15I'm 80 stories in the air right now.
09:18Well, I brought my camera with me for obvious reason that it's very likely you will have things that you want to film in a Category 5 hurricane.
09:28Oh, wow, the water's getting pretty deep down there.
09:30I have to keep an eye on the water and see what it looks like in another 30 minutes.
09:36When you see water coming up that much at 6 inches every 15 minutes, that's 2 feet an hour.
09:42You're just talking an incredible flow of water.
09:44So, yeah, when I spotted the 200-foot area of water coming through, I was 100% certain of what I was looking at.
09:53It looks like there's a possible levee breach on the 17th Street Canal right on the angle behind that burning house.
10:00I don't see any levee against it, yeah.
10:02Looks like it's at least 3 feet higher on the outside.
10:06Okay, you want to see it better, Joe?
10:08Let me, I'll focus in with this.
10:10I was hesitant to make the report because we didn't have a confirmation.
10:13But Captain Helmers, he zoomed in on that breach.
10:19Yeah, you want to see it better?
10:20Watch right here, Joe, look.
10:22And you can see that 6-foot wall, it's gone.
10:24You can see the water pouring through.
10:26And my heart just sank.
10:28So I radioed it in.
10:30We had a breach and a levee.
10:31I think I reported it from 4 to 10 feet wide at the time.
10:35I didn't want there to be any confusion on the other end at all.
10:39Everybody knows the implications of a broken levee.
10:43The entire city flooding, possibly thousands of people dying, could be the end of the city.
10:50It was, it was apocalyptic.
10:55We all knew exactly what we needed to do.
10:58We knew that we needed to get boats, needed to get as many people as we could,
11:04as fast as we could, and we knew that there was just a, you know,
11:07certain amount of time that people had.
11:22I ran into our fire chief, Charles Parent,
11:26and he said that he had two or three firemen reporting a very large break in the levee.
11:36And I questioned him and I said,
11:38Are you sure?
11:39What do you mean a break?
11:40And he said, That's what I said to them.
11:44I was in the communication room in the emergency operations center,
11:48and I heard a report come in that the levee at the 17th Street Canal had busted,
11:55and that heavy flows of water were flowing into the city.
12:01From that moment on, I knew that Katrina was going to be something different.
12:07Levee busting in New Orleans was a worst-case scenario.
12:10So I immediately called back to FEMA headquarters to alert them
12:15that there are reports that a levee had broken.
12:18I can't confirm it.
12:19That's just what I had heard.
12:21My tone at the time was, I think, real concern.
12:27I know that that information then was passed along to others so that they would know.
12:33Now, whether they believed it or not, I had no control over.
12:35I could only tell them what I had heard, but I hadn't seen any of it yet.
12:40Boy, that's some water.
12:45I ain't fucking through that.
12:48That's coming through that, bro.
12:51The mood was kind of easy in the beginning.
12:54At least we did have some shelter.
12:57But things started deteriorating real fast.
13:01Some coming through the dome,
13:03but that water is 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 as the morning progresses.
13:19It started getting more muggy, and it was really, really hot, steamy.
13:24It's getting hot in there.
13:25It's getting hot in there.
13:26The toilets are overflowing.
13:28All the bad things got flooding.
13:31Everybody's in time, man.
13:32It's nasty already.
13:34The smell was getting worse.
13:36People was kind of, like, closed then, and it just wasn't good.
13:40So we went on the outside where we could congregate and 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.
13:59The 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.
14:30The water was coming up more.
14:32And we had three non-swimmers, and then we had the swimmers, myself, who's injured, and my daughter and my niece.
14:45They were saying, we'll get help.
14:48I was like, no, we can't separate, and I can't help you if you go off somewhere.
14:53They stayed, I convinced them to stay, and my uncle and I went on the porch, and the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain looked like everything had merged.
15:06There were trains floating.
15:10My neighbors are gone.
15:13I never felt so isolated to where I just thought the world has ended, and we're the only few people that are left.
15:23So now we got water towel ankles on the second floor of 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, and I'm in a cast, and I have a brace on my neck.
15:38So before we went into the attic, my daughter started writing our names and our date of births on the wall.
15:46She's like, I'm writing our names and our date of births, so 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.
15:57This, you know, too much.
15:59So I erased it off the wall.
16:01I was like, girl, we're going to live, and we're going to make it through this.
16:04I felt hopeless during that time when she was writing that on the wall, but something inside me told me, this isn't it.
16:12You got to convince them that this isn't it, because 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.
16:30It's almost 1 o'clock p.m. now.
16:33The storm's dying down pretty good.
16:37It's 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.
16:45It'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.
17:00We swam to that building, and we got that boat.
17:04We had some other guys.
17:08They could hotwire boats.
17:10There was a parking garage, so we went and actually siphoned a lot of gas out of those cars.
17:16And as soon as the wind died down at 2 o'clock, we launched operations.
17:21When we started, we probably had four or five boats that we had commandeered.
17:33I told the guys, I said, go find whatever boat you can find.
17:35Let's get to work.
17:36Once comms went down, it was chaotic.
17:40Once communications went down, you just went to work.
17:47You 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.
17:53We never had access to any of that.
17:55We expected FEMA to come in quickly and that it would be something that would allow the local officials
18:05the 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.
18:40And that's how we broke it down.
18:42I'm worrying about saving people's lives.
18:44That's my job.
18:45And that's what the hell, that, pardon my French, that's what we did.
18:49That's what we did.
18:52Now, you know, you're hearing things on the radio, but until you see it, you just can't imagine it.
19:01It was kind of like a moment that you, not in shock, but you're almost like, oh my God, I did not realize.
19:10It was the, even though you're hearing things on the radio, you don't realize it's that bad.
19:15It was hot as hell.
19:19And you could only imagine how awful it would be if you're stuck on a roof.
19:22If 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 attack team started doing their methodical searches, 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.
19:51How many people y'all got?
19:53It's just a good trip.
19:55You know, you get in a hasty mood.
19:57So you're just out there trying to pick up as many people as you can, wherever you can, until you're able to get some solid intelligence.
20:05In some areas, water was 15, maybe 16 feet deep.
20:08We would shut off the motor and holler, and someone hollers back.
20:12And obviously, if someone sees you, we would go very slowly so, 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.
20:22And they said, no, not us.
20:24The house right there.
20:25We can hear a man screaming.
20:27Turns out that he was standing on his tub, and the water was up to his neck.
20:32And 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 time.
20:48How long do you think this water's going to stay 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 going to take them away.
21:15There was no way in the world they were going to survive that.
21:17It was absolutely horrific.
21:18Well, we were walking around, we went up the street a couple of blocks, and I would say there's nothing like the flooding that we might have anticipated.
21:32This 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 here in downtown New Orleans.
21:49That's not the case.
21:50What they were predicting for New Orleans was 175 mile an hour winds and 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.
22:16Maybe 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.
22:24They 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.
22:40So therefore there's no water.
22:42We were in a bowl.
22:44We got the Mississippi River Levee over here and the Lake Levee over here.
22:49The city's in the middle.
22:50So we are surrounded by water.
22:54We're six to eight feet below sea level.
22:57And we have some battles with the water staying out.
23:02So during the storm, there are sewage and waterboard pumping stations throughout the city
23:10that 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 had all these boats.
23:28They're going to dead.
23:29Probably getting 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 of us who worked in an emergency operations center became the lifeline for people who were
23:52calling 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.
25:45We flew out towards Slidell and could tell that the bridge was all damaged and impassable.
25:57The airport underwater, that there was no access into the city.
26:04We 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.
26:24So 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.
26:40I 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.
27:19And I then proceeded to tell them everything that I had just seen.
27:24Where all the floodwaters were.
27:29I remember looking at Mayor Nagin and seeing a face of disbelief.
27:35And almost of, what do we do now?
27:40I don't know how to break it.
27:42I 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.
27:53Everything is damaged.
27:56It was things like shelter.
27:59It was things like shelters.
28:01Knowing that there were people that needed shelter.
28:06Rescues.
28:07How are we going to rescue people from rooftops?
28:09To what every department needed in order to run the city in this new, very strange dynamic that was occurring.
28:21We were a different city.
28:22The old city was gone.
28:24When that list of our needs was handed over to Marty Bahamandi and FEMA, maybe naively, but we expected immediate results, that wasn't actually the case.
28:39FEMA's not really a first responder.
28:42Local officials are first responders.
28:45The state with the National Guard are first responders.
28:49And FEMA wasn't designed to be a first responder.
28:51Back then, at that time, we put a lot more emphasis on state and local governments to handle the initial response and preparation for disasters.
29:02And only when they couldn't handle it were we actually then designed to come in on the back end and provide that support.
29:10We 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.
29:27One set of power lines there.
29:29Clear down there.
29:30Roger.
29:31Baskets coming up.
29:32Roger.
29:33Baskets coming up.
29:35Moving survivor in the cabin.
29:36The 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.
29:50We didn't need to be asked by anybody.
29:53Roger.
29:54You're on hot bike.
29:55Starting at 2 o'clock.
29:57Check water.
29:57My crew had a game plan that we were going to fly and just pick a location that had a lot of people.
30:09And the door's ready.
30:11It didn't take us long.
30:13We found a huge three-story apartment complex with people everywhere.
30:18We trained to get people off of, you know, cruise ships, sailboats.
30:26We had never trained to get people off of rooftops or off of balconies with urban hazards.
30:35Copy it.
30:36Someone's going out the door.
30:39Someone's outside the door.
30:40Out target sight.
30:41Forward and right.
30:4275.
30:42We picked this balcony with women and children and elderly people.
30:47And 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.
30:59She didn't even bat an eyelash.
31:01It was like, I don't know you.
31:05You're connected to a giant, loud helicopter with hurricane-force winds blowing us around.
31:13But here's my baby.
31:14Get him out of here.
31:15And, you know, I just snatched him.
31:22And he's so small.
31:23We don't have rescue equipment for babies.
31:26So to carry a baby in your bare arms with nothing keeping him from falling, except for me, is very nerve-wracking.
31:37Survivor are in the cabin.
31:38My first day, I rescued 48 people.
31:44We just didn't stop.
31:46We were picking up as many people as we could as fast as we could around the clock for days and days.
31:54And honestly, kind of waiting for the cavalry to come, but it was all about life-saving.
32:01That's it.
32:02And basket is clear of the rooftop.
32:09And you are clear to move back and left.
32:12As we move people out of the Superdome, people begin to move in.
32:24So people are coming out of either parishes where they've been in their homes and not out on the streets.
32:31They're continuing to come out of homes where maybe they were on the second floor.
32:35And now they can get out and start moving around.
32:37And there is just simply no way we can estimate the numbers of people that are out there like that.
32:43When the levees broke, everything changed.
32:46Our population doubled.
32:48And that was really our first indication that, okay, something worse has now happened.
32:54And there's a stage two.
32:56They just had so, so many people just coming in.
33:00It doubled real fast.
33:02It just kept going nonstop, nonstop.
33:04It also made you more aware that if people are getting rescued like this and they're flying this many people in, now it's starting to grow with numbers.
33:15So whatever so-called plan they had for food or drinks or whatever the case may be, now they wasn't going to be ready.
33:22The population coming in pre-landfall is dramatically different than post-landfall.
33:29Pre-landfall, it was by large people who chose to come to the Superdome.
33:34They were nervous but optimistic and we were kind of all in it together.
33:39And then things rapidly and dramatically changed when we became aware of a second wave of people who are now presenting at the Superdome.
33:50Those people had, in many cases, had ridden out one of the worst nights of their life.
33:54Every rescue boat that goes out comes back heavy with human cargo and they will be at it for days to come.
34:02The police aren't coming and that is a reality when you have a disaster.
34:06There aren't enough police to respond.
34:08There were too many people and you can only help so many people.
34:11You can only do what you can do.
34:12A small group of firemen can't help everybody.
34:16It's just not physically possible.
34:18What's your first name?
34:19Shirley.
34:20Shirley.
34:20Shirley.
34:21We were watching the news.
34:23We were seeing people on the roofs waving towels and flags.
34:27We seen people floating in the water.
34:31Felt hopeless.
34:32When 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.
34:48And now they were going to have to start all over again.
34:51I'm 62 years old and I've never been involved in nothing like this in my life.
34:54And I've got to ask you, what did you leave behind?
34:57What?
34:58Now, today?
34:59Everything.
35:00Everything.
35:02Quite a few of the folks that lived there were seniors.
35:06How were they going to do that?
35:09My family was also caught in Hurricane Betsy back in 1965.
35:22Betsy is here.
35:24Gusts now topping 100 miles per hour.
35:26Tides three feet above normal and escape routes will be cut off shortly.
35:30The storm was coming into New Orleans and suddenly we heard the explosion, but we thought it was from the storm.
35:42And then we saw all this water gripping coming to us from the levee.
35:54Hurricane Betsy was a storm more powerful than Katrina.
35:57It was on a worse track for New Orleans, and as a consequence, levees flooded.
36:04We'll rebuild.
36:05We will rebuild.
36:06Oh, yeah.
36:07You don't think this is knocked out, but...
36:08No, indeed.
36:09We're going to build a levee higher and have a pretty good community.
36:12After Hurricane Betsy, we ended up with a significant funding program to build hurricane levees.
36:22There 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.
36:34They didn't get the science right on the height that they needed to build it.
36:38They didn't get the geotechnical engineering right in deciding whether the site was suitable.
36:44And lastly, they did designs that we knew would fail.
36:49They had done their own research on some of these and had found that the failures would occur.
36:56To add insult to injury, as Hurricane Katrina was approaching, the levees weren't finished.
37:04So the net result was catastrophic structural failure.
37:10It's really been a double disaster.
37:12We had the hurricane, and on top of that, we had a flood.
37:16But both of these things, with all due respect, sir, were predicted.
37:19They knew it was a Category 3 hurricane hitting the area 48 hours before it struck.
37:23People have been writing about the potential disastrous conditions of the levee system for a really long time, years and years and years.
37:32There is a sense that everyone knew a disaster could happen, and no one was really prepared.
37:38This is a natural disaster, the likes of which our country may have never seen before.
37:43The president, he says, he doesn't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.
37:48Now, I don't know how he can say that, given the fact that everybody anticipated the breach of the levees.
37:53We knew immediately that the levees had breached once it just continued to rise and rise and rise.
38:00And as I said, from past experience, we knew that the levees had breached.
38:05People were passing with boats rescuing people.
38:08When I seen the water and the way that the water was coming, I said, they did it again.
38:13Witnessing these things is what led us to use the terms catastrophic structural failure.
38:23It wasn't the storm.
38:25It was shoddy design and construction by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
38:30We had water all the way up to my mama doorstep, and so we started getting kind of worried.
38:57And the only thing we could do is just try to get to some kind of shelter.
39:02We just, you know, we didn't want to stay there, and the water was steady, rising and rising and rising.
39:07And, you know, we didn't have no way out.
39:10So we took off walking.
39:13But where we was at, it was like, what are we going to do with the levee children?
39:17Because the water is almost four feet.
39:20Well, they had this doe floating in the water.
39:23So we grabbed the doe, put the children on top, and pushed the doe so it could glide through the water.
39:41In my neighborhood, we were lucky because my property sits three feet nine inches above sea level.
39:48So 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.
40:06I didn't have water in my house, so it was not a necessity for me to leave.
40:11And since many buildings are built at least three feet off the ground, a lot of the people around here felt the same way.
40:21We did everything.
40:22We ain't going away.
40:23We leave.
40:23I'll be free from you.
40:25We got to get out.
40:27So 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.
40:37They sent us in a direction where the water was deeper.
40:46So my sister and I were carrying kids and helping these seniors who were with us.
40:53Man, I don't think I was more frightened about anything than walking in that water.
40:58You couldn't see under that, so you just really walking on faith.
41:12And my brother, he kicked a stop sign because he didn't see it under the water.
41:16So 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.
41:28There wasn't nothing he can do, so he walked in the water with an open wound.
41:34The first thing I thought about was we're in this dirty water and then the germs from the water.
41:39That scared me more than anything.
41:45We were just trying to find refuge on higher ground.
41:49The safest thing to do is take that raft to the interstate.
41:52And one of the highest points in this area was up on the interstate 10.
41:58So that's where we headed.
42:02All you could see is all the people just coming towards the bridge, you know, because the bridge was really like the safest place.
42:10You know, my main focus was to get the kids to safety.
42:13You know, anywhere where they had shelter, where they can rest.
42:16From where we was at on the bridge, you can kind of see the Superdome.
42:24And the Superdome was swamped with people.
42:26They just kept bringing more and more people to the Superdome.
42:30You see high water vehicles with 100 people stacked into it, bringing people to the Superdome and dumping them off.
42:37And people were walking in the water, coming to the Superdome, as if that was the savior place.
42:44This was a population who were coming to the Superdome or being brought to the Superdome because there was nowhere else for them to go.
42:51Many times, I would say unwilling.
42:54They certainly didn't want to come to the Superdome, but there was, it was desperation.
43:01We didn't know where we was going.
43:02The military was running people away from their houses.
43:05Like, you had to go.
43:06It didn't matter where you went or whatever, like, you had to go.
43:11We've seen tens of thousands of people on the bridge.
43:14Eventually, they also got to the Superdome.
43:18Now, we're three, four times the number now.
43:21We don't have nowhere to go.
43:23My house is underwater.
43:24I don't even have another house to go.
43:29I don't even know where my chair is.
43:31Go ahead.
43:33Seeing people coming in rescued, it was like, man, something really bad is going on on the outside.
43:40Because all you're hearing is helicopters, you're seeing people getting dropped off.
43:45At least they was out of one bad situation.
43:48situation, but they didn't know they was coming to another hell.
43:57It's really, we're living like dogs and pigs up in here.
44:02We need help.
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