Spoken from the Heart (58 page)

On Sunday, George and I traveled to the American Red Cross National Headquarters in Washington, D.C., to ask for donations of blood and for volunteers. On Monday, I returned with George to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for a briefing on the emergency operations and then visited with more evacuees at the Bethany World Prayer Center. In total, after Katrina, I made twenty-three visits to Louisiana and the Gulf Coast; the first year, I traveled there nearly every month.

At the Bethany Prayer Center, I sat on the ground with children, and I saw in their eyes the same devastation that I had seen in New York after 9-11. For the kids in New York, the fears were loud noises, traveling on planes, or riding in the subway. Here, the fear was of water. Some children were terrified of getting in a bath, or even of the sound of the tap running. I heard stories about people who had driven out just as the storm hit, people in pickup trucks who had been caught in the flood surge and spent a day or a night trapped inside, with water up to their doors. And in the chaos, thousands were still missing.

In tragedies there are heroes, and Hurricane Katrina produced a tremendous share, from the volunteers who came not just in the first weeks but also in the first years. They helped build new homes and fed and clothed the displaced. There were the heroic Coast Guard rescuers who had maneuvered boats and helicopters to pick people off of rooftops as the floodwaters engulfed their homes, and the National Guard troops and airmen who saved lives and brought order and relief, as well as the volunteer medics and ambulance crews. But there was also a group of retired law enforcement officers, including former sheriffs and former Secret Service agents, who volunteered to find the missing. They were activated as part of a special project run by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Alexandria, Virginia. On September 5, the center opened a Katrina missing persons hotline. It processed over eleven thousand calls in its first nine days of operation. Five thousand eighty-eight children were reported missing; by September 15, the retired lawmen had resolved 701 cases.

One reason there were so many missing kids was that when evacuation boats and helicopters arrived, there were often only a few seats left. Without hesitation, parents and grandparents said, "Take the children." But frequently families were evacuated to different centers, even different states. One child who was plucked from the top of a New Orleans apartment building amid the floodwaters was two-year-old Gabrielle Alexander. But no one knew her name. She was evacuated to a children's center in Baton Rouge, where she would not speak a word. Volunteers from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children traveled to Baton Rouge and photographed the children. Their pictures were repeatedly broadcast on television, particularly by CNN and CBS News. When a center volunteer knelt down to photograph Gabrielle, he turned the camera over to show her the digital image, hoping to get her to speak. She pointed at her picture and said, "Gabby." Now the volunteers had a name to put with a face. They began combing the lists of missing children and found an entry for a two-year-old Gabrielle Alexander. Her mother had been evacuated to San Antonio, Texas. After confirming with law enforcement that these were mother and child, the center arranged for a special Angel Flight to fly Gabby to her mom. They raced into each other's arms on the tarmac in San Antonio.

Within six months center volunteers located and reunited every missing child on the list with his or her family. The center volunteers came from around the country and worked, many of them, eighteen to twenty hours a day, because they had the skills to help. And they did it solely from the goodness of their hearts. The following spring, I had the center volunteers and some families that they had helped to reunite, including Gabby's, come to the White House to meet in person and to share their stories.

Other heroes were the teachers and the principals in schools throughout Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Many of them had lost everything. They were living in their cars or with relatives, yet from the first days after Katrina struck, they were back at their schools, using buckets to clear the mud from the floors and walls. I spoke with one teacher who had to throw out every book from her second-floor library; they were entirely mildewed by the time she reached the school. In Pass Christian and Southaven, Mississippi, and Chalmette, Louisiana, and New Orleans, I saw so many teachers who were stressed and weakened and, if not crying, on the verge of tears. They could cry with me when they could not at other moments or in other settings. The rest of the time, they were trying so very hard to be strong for their students, their schools, and their communities. And they knew that if parents had schools for their children to attend, they would be more likely to return home.

There were countless lessons to be learned. Katrina was in many ways the perfect storm; everything that could go wrong, did. There was virtually no communication on the ground. The New Orleans mayor had retreated to the Hyatt Regency hotel, where phone service was lost even before the storm hit. For three days his command center could not receive e-mails or incoming calls. The White House gave him a mobile phone on Friday, September 2, but he had to lean out a window to get a signal. Police officers in New Orleans didn't have cars; they broke into the local Cadillac dealership and drove off with whatever they could find. During the first few days, George and the White House repeatedly offered to send thousands of additional federal troops to stop the looting and violence in New Orleans, but Governor Blanco declined the offer because she wanted her office to be in charge, rather than the federal government. No one in a position of authority for emergency planning at the state or city level had envisioned anything like Katrina, and when it came, almost no one was prepared for the devastation.

Perhaps there was never any way to be fully prepared. The destruction was so huge, a near tsunami-size surge and violent storm covering an area larger than all of Great Britain. Over the next few years, when I landed in New Orleans and drove into the city, I would pass street after street where the houses were boarded up and marked with orange X's to show that they had been searched. Sometimes they had another code, a black circle, spray-painted alongside, to show that the body of a person or an animal had been found within the walls. The National Hurricane Center's official estimate is that, in Louisiana and Mississippi, fifteen hundred people died as a direct result of the Katrina storm.

When I landed in New Orleans on October 10, I saw packs of abandoned dogs running through the streets, barking and scavenging. Some eight hundred abandoned dogs and cats were rescued in a special airlift organized by Madeleine Pickens, wife of the oilman T. Boone Pickens. Volunteers located watermelon trucks to ferry the weak and dehydrated animals to the airport, where they were flown to shelters as far away as California. About 50 percent of the animals were reunited with their owners; the others, some whose owners could no longer care for them, were fostered and adopted. One New Orleans man spent seven days with his dog on the roof of his house, until he ran out of heart medication and had to be airlifted out of the city. The dog, Brutus, was transported to San Diego for care. A female volunteer at the San Diego animal control office located the hospital where the owner had been taken, but the man had been released. She began combing phone books and calling every number with the same last name, eventually finding the man's cousin. The owner was flown to San Diego for a tearful reunion with his dog--the reason he had spent seven days on his roof was that he had not wanted to abandon his pet. To this day, every two months a New Orleans animal shelter worker drives to San Diego with forty animals in need of adoption, in a custom van donated by Madeleine.

But as bad as New Orleans was, the devastation was often worse in other places along the Mississippi Gulf. In parts of Louisiana, houses had been flooded, perhaps moved slightly off their foundations, but inside something might be salvaged. In Mississippi, for miles on end, there was nothing but bare foundations. I drove through coastal towns where hundreds of gorgeous antebellum homes, houses that had withstood over 150 years of other storms, had been completely washed away. Blocks were empty except for the debris. Week after week I met young mayors in these towns; many of them had been in office only since January. Now their homes and stores were wiped out; there were no businesses, no economy. They were presiding over ghost towns. All knew that, no matter what, some residents would never return.

I visited with those who had lost their homes, and I came back as communities were rebuilt, as they opened schools or cut the ribbons on playgrounds. But I wanted to do more. In 2001 I had started, with the help of some very good friends, the Laura Bush Foundation for America's Libraries. Money was raised to provide small grants for school libraries around our country so that they could purchase books and research materials; many times these grants would double or triple a library's annual book budget. By May 2005, the Laura Bush Foundation had given grants to 428 school libraries nationwide.

I had already invited the foundation's fund-raisers for breakfast at the White House on September 24, 2005, the day of the National Book Festival, to thank them. That morning I asked them to continue to raise money, to be given only to schools along the Gulf Coast; a basic elementary school library book collection costs $50,000, a high school collection at least $100,000. My friends Bill Marriott, Marshall Payne, Ruth Altshuler, and Pam Willeford agreed. They raised and we have given nearly $6 million to rebuild the library collections of these devastated schools.

And the schools were devastated. In January of 2006, I visited Chalmette High in St. Bernard Parish, which had been used as an evacuation center because it was two stories tall. When the levees broke, it took less than ten minutes for rushing waters to reach the ceilings of local homes. Terrified residents climbed onto rooftops or went up to their attics as the waters kept rising. Some drowned. Those who could took to boats. One seventh grader at Chalmette, Erika Guidroz, told of being knocked out of her family's boat and into the rancid floodwaters. She also watched her father and another man peel back the metal roof on a home to save a woman and her grandson. The woman's husband and her own son, the boy's father, had already drowned. Some twelve hundred residents in St. Bernard had sought refuge in Chalmette High School. The school's entire first floor had flooded. Stranded residents and families had gathered on the second floor, eating boxes of Froot Loops cereal from the cafeteria and rationing small sips of water. There were disabled teenagers with ventilators. One elderly man died; a blanket was placed over his body.

As the waters rose, evacuees began arriving by boat. The school's principal, Wayne Warner, and the school superintendent, Doris Voitier, lifted scores of refugees into the building by hoisting them through a second-story window using a yellow plastic chair. For three days the storm refugees huddled in the school, without working toilets or a sewer system, until rescue boats reached them. Some first responders were Canadian police officers, who had sailed down the length of the Mississippi River. In parts of St. Bernard Parish, other residents waited six days for rescue. They walked through waist-high floodwaters and were forced to break into local stores to find food. Ironically, in 1927, during the Great Mississippi Flood, St. Bernard and its neighboring parish of Plaquemines had been decimated by floodwaters on purpose. To save the city of New Orleans from the raging river, engineers stacked thirty tons of dynamite and blew a hole in the levee at Caernarvon, Louisiana, to divert the water. In 1927 St. Bernard and Plaquemines were submerged while the city was saved. This time, none had been spared.

When the waters receded, Doris Voitier and Wayne Warner began cleaning up Chalmette High School's second floor first. Even with families living in tents and out of the backs of trucks, they were determined to reopen their school. By the time I visited, they were still working to remove the mud on the first floor. Lost in the flooding were all 29,000 books in the school's library as well as a complete set of original
Life
magazines. This little high school had saved every issue since 1936, and they used them as primary sources to study history. I contacted Ann Moore, the chairman and CEO of Time
Inc., and in May of 2006 she came with me when I returned to Chalmette. She brought an entire replacement set of original
Life
magazines, as well as a hundred large, framed classic
Life
photographs, including twenty-five from New Orleans, such as the iconic portrait of the jazz great Louis Armstrong. The Laura Bush Foundation also gave the school two grants to replace its collection of books and materials.

Getting kids back to school, even if it was just a temporary school, was one of the most important things that could be done to return some normalcy to their lives. I met so many children who had lost everything but held on to a library book and, weeks or months later, brought the book back to their school librarian and nervously asked, What is the late fine? Books matter. Schools matter. And at times like this, I am again struck by how strong teachers, principals, and superintendents are. They matter in ways we often take for granted.

It takes years, even decades, to recover from a disaster like Katrina, and the destruction spared no one in its path. In Mississippi, Democratic congressman Gene Taylor, who represents Gulfport and Biloxi, lost almost everything he owned. Republican senator Trent Lott and his wife Tricia's family home was destroyed. At the Congressional Ball that December, a few in attendance complained to the White House social staff that we were not serving shrimp--the gulf shrimp industry had been decimated by the hurricane and there were few shrimp to be had that year. But Congressman Taylor was reluctant to come with his wife because the ball is black tie, and most of their clothes, including their dress clothes, had been ruined along with their home. The Taylors arrived late and stayed off to one side, hesitating to go through the receiving line. My chief of staff, Anita McBride, spotted them and urged them to walk through, saying, "President and Mrs. Bush will want to see you." And we very much did.