Dome Away From Home
For two weeks in September, the Eighth Wonder of the World was miraculously transformed into the largest emergency shelter in the universe, where 17,500 Katrina survivors found comfort, hundreds of families were reunited, and New Orleans showed its first signs of rebirth.
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Jeffrey seemed at ease while he talked about it all. As he grabbed a towel and shampoo to go wait in line for the showers, a woman’s voice made an announcement over the Astrodome P.A. system. “If you are looking for a person whose last name begins with a letter between A and L, please report to the message center on odd-numbered hours and wait there for an hour. If you are looking for someone whose name begins with a letter between M and Z, please report to the message center on even-numbered hours.”
Jeffrey’s tone shifted. He said he’d heard about evacuees robbing people at nearby hotels. Pecola spoke up. “Man, what’s the mentality of people jacking people in the middle of something like this? They’re not human.”
Jeffrey said he and Pecola both worked two jobs in New Orleans, his for construction companies, hers as a housekeeper for a couple hotels. He figured they could find work anywhere. “She wants to go to Baton Rouge. She’s got family there. But that’s never been one of my stops. I want to find work in Dallas. But first I need to get back home. When I got out, I forgot to get my wallet.”
TEN ROWS OF COTS and two thousand or so people away, a couple in their fifties, Benjamin and Ermica Wilson, sat next to each other on a cot with a Bible. He was a big man, wearing a black T-shirt and a black New York Mets cap. She was much smaller, in bright purple sweatpants and a white T-shirt covered in little purple flowers.
Benjamin said they’d gone to their Ninth Ward church, St. Mary of the Angels, to weather Katrina. When the water rose too high in St. Mary’s, they’d climbed to the roof with their own family of 18, from Benjamin’s mother on down to his young nieces and nephews, plus about 75 other people. They were up there for two nights.
“We had a grill up there,” said Benjamin, “and I put a life jacket on and swam to my mother’s house to get meat from the freezer. We had pork chops, ribs, smoked sausage. My mother made a pot of gumbo for everybody, and my wife made a pot of chili. It seemed like we were stretching those five loaves and two fishes. Everything was all right so long as the children didn’t look over the roof at the bodies floating past.
“The worst part was at night. It was pitch-black. No street lights or lights in the buildings because there was no electricity. It was dead silent except the sound of people trapped in their attics screaming as the water rose.”
As volunteers with push brooms and mops cleaned the aisles on either side of the Wilsons, Benjamin reached under his cot and pulled out a big black flashlight that looked as if it held a car battery inside. “This is what saved us. Coast Guard helicopters found us because of the smoke from the grill, and the kids had made a big sign that said, ‘We need water.’ But the helicopters took us just three or four at a time. When they came back at night, I signaled ’em with this flashlight.”
The P.A. interrupted him, announcing that if anyone wished to relocate to Colorado, an airline had donated fifty seats on an afternoon flight to Denver. The message was repeated throughout the morning, with all fifty seats available each time.
Ermica said they never lost faith up on the roof. “We saw people in boats loaded with so much liquor and beer you would have thought it was JazzFest.” The Superdome was never an option. “Every time there’s a storm, people go into that Superdome and loot. A woman told me there were two inches of feces on the floor in those bathrooms. I’m fed up with New Orleans. I don’t want to go back.”
“But, man,” Benjamin went on, “I got a brand-new GMC Sierra in the church parking lot, and that truck’s under water.” He shook his head. “And I just filled it up with seventy dollars’ worth of gas.”
That was the way of most conversation. By and large, Katrina survivors were counting their blessings, not losses. But other kinds of stories were floating around. A woman complained that things were not as fine as they seemed. She said she’d heard that a white man dressed as a woman had raped a ten-year-old girl and slit her throat in an Astrodome bathroom. Half an hour later I overheard a volunteer repeat the same story, minus the cross-dressing, to a grandmother minding four little kids. The volunteer was with a group of people wearing dark-blue shirts with “Harris County Juvenile Detention Center” written on the front, and they looked official enough to be well informed. But when I asked them about the story as they walked off through the crowd, I was told that it had been made up just to scare the old woman into keeping better track of the kids.
THE BEST MEASURE you’ll get of how poor the response to Katrina was in New Orleans—no matter which level of government you choose to blame—is how quickly the Astrodome was readied. At three o’clock Wednesday morning, August 31, with New Orleans still filling with water, Harris County judge Robert Eckels was awakened by a phone call from the coordinator of Governor Rick Perry’s division of emergency management. (The Dome is under Harris County jurisdiction, making Eckels, the county’s chief executive, the man to call.) By six o’clock Eckels was at the home of Reliant Park’s general manager, and the two of them were working with Mayor Bill White and a host of others to make the relief effort happen. The Astrodome had seen only occasional use in the past six years, and the first step was to get it up and going. That morning the air-conditioning and plumbing were upgraded. While that was happening, the Red Cross shipped in tens of thousands of cots, blankets, and “comfort kits,” little bags containing toiletries. The televisions along the level-four concourse, once wired for closed-circuit broadcasts of games so that fans at concession stands wouldn’t miss any action, were rigged with basic cable so the new residents could watch television. When the first buses arrived at ten that night, the Dome was ready.
The initial arrivals were brought in by a twenty-year-old named Jabbar Gibson in a school bus he’d “borrowed” in New Orleans. It was a perfect symbol of the effort under way in the Dome, where some of the most significant contributions were made by people and institutions who didn’t wait for an invitation. Alice Aanstoos, a regional manager of external affairs at SBC, realized early on that the relief officials would be concentrating on essentials and that once those were covered, the Dome inhabitants would need to be able to communicate with the outside world. SBC had once serviced the Astrodome phones. Aanstoos knew where the wires were buried. Without being asked, she sent a team over with 185 red phones equipped with POTS lines—SBC-speak for “plain old telephone service,” which included free long distance—who set them up at tables scattered throughout the Dome. SBC also donated five thousand telephone numbers with voice mail accounts so that calls could be returned.
When Aanstoos described this, I pictured phone company employees dressed in ninja suits, sneaking into the Astrodome with armfuls of red telephones. She said it wasn’t that dramatic. “We just went in and set up, and if anyone asked what we were doing, we said, ‘We’re setting up telephones. What does it look like we’re doing?’”
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