Katrina: Come Hell and High Water

0:00Rebecca Lavoie:I'm Rebecca Lavoie and this is You Can't Make This Up.

0:14Rebecca Lavoie:You Can't Make This Up is the podcast where we uncover the true stories behind your favorite Netflix documentaries and films. On today's episode, we take a closer look at the Netflix documentary series Katrina, Come Hell and High Water. The first casualty of Katrina and the floods was normal. And since then, we have been living with the new normal. Today we're talking to showrunner Elisa Payne and episode director Samantha Knowles. When a Category 5 hurricane changed its path to bear down on New Orleans, the city was caught flat-footed. Residents had discounted the warnings, politicians were slow to respond, and the infrastructure designed to ensure public safety failed.

0:56Rebecca Lavoie:Those who lived through the natural disaster found themselves struggling for days to survive in a battered city where help would not arrive. When it was over, officials saw an opportunity to build the community back better. But for people displaced and institutions altered, that promise remains unfulfilled. From executive producer Spike Lee, the Netflix series Katrina, Come Hell and High Water, tells the story of what happened, what's changed, and what hasn't. It recounts the horrifying experiences of those whose lives were forever changed by the storm. And it provides a report card 20 years later on the long-term efforts to rebuild a community and its culture and the effects of Katrina's wounds that won't heal.

1:3720 years later, this shit is still real. That's what makes it a disaster.

1:53Rebecca Lavoie:And I'm joined now by director Samantha Knowles and showrunner Elisa Payne. Welcome to You Can't Make This Up. Thank you so much. We're so happy to be here. Thank you for having us. So the executive producer of this is Spike Lee, who made the documentary When the Levees Broke, not long after Katrina hit. I want to talk about his contributions to this series a little bit later. But Elisa, can you tell me how this project came together and how you got involved? Netflix came to my partner, Sam Pollard, who was a producer on When the Lebbies Broke and If God's Willing and the Creek Don't Rise. And my other partner in message pictures, Geeta Ghanabir, who was the editor of both of those projects.

2:31And so when they came to them, of course, they wanted to do it because just like Spike, they have the love for the people in New Orleans, etc. And we all wanted to effectuate change. 20 years later, not a lot has changed for the better for a lot of the residents. And so we also wanted to set the record straight. And I'm so happy that it's been so well received. It's been number one.

2:54Rebecca Lavoie:Samantha, Katrina happened a couple of years before smartphones ended up in everyone's hands. And when everyone could have documented, I kept thinking even when Katrina was happening, like I wasn't seeing a lot of video from on the ground in Katrina. But you start with home videos of residents kind of casually preparing for the storm and then living through the flooding, even riding it out. What's up? People getting ready for the hurricane. What's up? People getting ready for the hurricane. I'm a photographer. I don't have to be on. The hurricane is coming right here. Well, put me on right. You can put me on right.

3:23And Louisa Anna!

3:24Rebecca Lavoie:Where did that footage come from? Yeah, so that was episode one that starts like that. That's Gita's episode. But we used that kind of footage throughout the entire show. And it came directly from our participants. One of our participants, Shakespeare, who's on the poster of the series, had a video camera. He was a documentarian in his own right. And he was shooting everything that was unfolding in the Superdome himself. and it's kind of part of our ethos as filmmakers to use that kind of footage as much as possible. You know, I kind of call it archival verite where it feels like it's this on the ground, really present archival and we knew as soon as we found that that we wanted to center it throughout the entire series.

4:05So we watched through and excavated everything we could from those moments and then really tailored our interview questions around what we saw. And so that's why you have this really kind of immersive, on-the-ground immediacy that exists throughout the whole series. And it really positioned our participants as collaborators. You know, they were filming everything that was unfolding and they really, you know, there was really a collaboration there. And it was really important for us to go. So we had a team of production assistants on the ground who went house to house, who looked at what our participants had, who went to other collaborators, photographers' homes, et cetera, other people in different neighborhoods that may have had some stuff so that we can find never before footage.

4:49It is very hard to do a documentary on Katrina and still have never before seen footage when it had been covered so much, right? So there were five-year anniversaries done, 10-year anniversaries done, 15-year anniversaries done. It's the 20th year. We had to do a lot, like Sam said, of excavation. We had the best archival producer, Cara Fitz. We even got some never before seen Fox News screen test. You know, there's a moment where Shepard Smith is talking to a young woman on the interstate who just had a baby five days ago.

5:26Rebecca Lavoie:This is a five day old baby. How is she? I guess she's all right. Hopefully she's all right. That never made air, but she was able to get that. I'm wondering, Alisa, can you explain why New Orleans and certain wards in particular were so susceptible to the kind of flooding that Katrina brought? So New Orleans is shaped like a bowl and it is in some places, I think, about 10 ,000 feet below sea level. It's also divided on one side by the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain. So there's a lot of water. Earthen levees are there because it's hills that were there. And then they created man-made flood walls, the levees humans made, right?

6:04The Corps of Engineers made. But when the Corps of Engineers made it and made the pumping stations to take the water out if a disaster happened, it was always only supposed to be for a Category 3 storm. And the levee, the hurricane walls, they were always supposed to be maintained and weren't. So you have all these people, these black and brown people and poor people who built up that swampland, because it used to be swampland and made homes and communities out of it, but were left very vulnerable when hurricanes come. And they're in a hurricane area, right? So there's not, it's not like, you know, you live in some place that never gets a hurricane.

6:43You get them all the time when you're in New Orleans. So they deserve better.

6:46Rebecca Lavoie:Something that we've seen in recent years is that near misses of big storms can cause a little bit of inflated confidence around the true dangers of storms. Can you talk about residents' attitudes toward Katrina coming and how much of that was shaped by Hurricane Ivan and that near miss? Sure. So there was Hurricane Ivan the year before in 2004. They were given the evacuation notice. Shakespeare says it best in the piece. And that's one of those storms that turned off at the very last minute. So they had a lot of people that I spent a lot of money in the hotels, on food, all of this other stuff, gas, right?

7:23It kind of disrupted everybody's thought process for when Hurricane Katrina did come. What we know, though, is yes, that did happen. But in the 60s, when Bessie hit, the eye didn't hit them completely, and they got a lot of flooding in the Ninth Ward. We always talk behind the scenes about the haves and the have-nots. There are some people that can afford all the time to evacuate, but a lot of people can't. And so if you're living check to check, you know, we love New Orleans history and culture. I always say that everyone around the U.S. and the world goes to New Orleans. They take in the history and culture and then they go home and throw it up.

8:01We love that. But those people who are the purveyors of that culture and history are the working poor. They work two and three jobs. They are musicians. They are artists. And they're also the hospitality workers. And so they can't afford to leave all the time. And then the other part that we have to remember is beyond the confidence that Ivan, missing them, gave, is that they also had to wait for the evacuation orders. All the other parishes got mandatory evacuation notices before Orleans Parish did. And by the time they got the mandatory evacuation, there's only one road in and one road out. It was a parking lot on the interstate.

8:43Rebecca Lavoie:So what were some of those complications about issuing that mandatory evacuation order, whether or not they had the authority to do it? And that really seemed to be up in the air, like really in question, even as a political question. Is that right? Mayor Ray Negan had said that it is very difficult to come to the conclusion that you should issue a mandatory evacuation. And it's very hard to enforce. And so we see a lot in the piece. General Honore says he who calls it, the evacuation owns it. So the mayor calls it, then he's responsible for getting everyone out and making sure that everyone's safe.

9:22If the governor calls it, then she's responsible for having the resources. And if the federal government calls it, they are responsible. And so what we see is that Mayor Nagin, even after he is told by the National Weather Service experts that he needs to evacuate people, he says on air, on the news, well, we're weighing all of our legal options. This is not a time to weigh legal options. It's a time to get your people out to safety. And we always like to, one of the things we were very careful behind the scenes in our piece was that we wanted to make sure this is not about poverty. Yes, there were people who couldn't afford to.

10:02There were people who were sick, who were elderly, who didn't own cars and had difficulty. But in addition to that, there was mismanagement of this. So there are many people who had means in Orleans Parish who could have left if they did this quicker.

10:15Rebecca Lavoie:One of the things that really struck me is that the Lower Ninth Ward flooded hours before other levies were breached. Yet at the same time, there were TV crews and media standing on Bourbon Street saying everything was fine. Samantha, did you get a sense of how it was that the media just missed that all of this was happening in that part of the city? I think Soledad says it well, and she talks about the media really well throughout the series as a whole. But that's sort of the tourist center of the city. And the city has had, you know, this history of protecting that area since Betsy. And so a lot of the attention often goes there when it comes to the media.

10:52And because of that, the media was ignoring the lower Ninth Ward while it was flooding, while people were still dying. And that really cost the city a lot of, you know, a lot more lives. In that moment, I think we really start to see the way in which the media becomes this character throughout the entire series and how it sort of exacerbated the issues even after the levees broke.

11:13Rebecca Lavoie:It also seems to me that there's this perception of how America sees New Orleans versus what New Orleans actually is. Is that right? Absolutely. New Orleans is such a special city. And I think people a lot of the time see it as a place to go drink, to go party. Right now, 20 years after Katrina, it's rapidly being gentrified. So we see these clashes even more. But I think that that's how a lot of America saw the city at the time. and it's really a tragedy because there's so much life and culture in the city that people don't really understand. And then even after the levies broke, I think people, despite the fact that it had been this tourist center, it had been a place for people to party, they felt like politicians and the media talked about it as if the city was disposable.

11:58Chertoff even says, like, should this city, you know, it's a soup bowl, should it even exist? It's shocking to hear that kind of thing, But I think that really emphasizes how much of a disconnect there is between, you know, how the city is perceived outside of it.

12:11Rebecca Lavoie:We hear from Robert Lynn Green Sr. who described what happened to his family when the flooding occurred. We were going to Nashville, but my mother was so sick she could have died from the road trip. So we went to the Superdome. Can you talk about his story? So we meet Robert Green when he is trying first when he's trying to get to the Superdome with his family, his young granddaughters, his cousin that has special needs and his elderly mother. And they were thinking they were going to go to Nashville, but then they realized that their mother would not make it alive if she would not get to Nashville alive.

12:52So they hear that the Superdome is being opened as a shelter of last resort and they go there. When they go there, they're surprised to see tens of thousands of people, 20 ,000 people ahead of them. So they go around to the outside of the superdominee because they heard that there was a place for the infirmed and it wasn't set up. So the person looks at his mother and says, well, you should probably maybe go back home and come back. And as he says in the piece, they went home and there was no coming back. And so before they knew it, the levees had broken and their house became a raft of sorts.

13:27and they were on the roof trying to balance. His first granddaughter fell over into the water and they couldn't find her. She was two years old. The second granddaughter, who was four at the time, who had never taken swimming lessons, but as he says, taught herself how to move around in her mother's tub, jumps into water that was powerfully raging so heavy that it lifted the house off of its foundation and it was so high that it was above the roof. and this little baby jumps in to try to save her sister. In doing that, she ends up on a truck and they understand like, wait, we can get there. The truck moves towards them and they try to get everyone over there.

14:09When they're trying to get his mother on, she falls into the water, they pull her back up, but both her and the youngest granddaughter pass away. He later comes back in Spike's episode and is talking about his journey with trying to rebuild and being the spokesperson of the Now DeFunk Make It Right Foundation.

14:29Rebecca Lavoie:Some of these very memorable visuals that I remember from the time, but that also really prevalent in your documentary are these helicopter shots of people trapped on their roofs, some of them holding signs saying, help us. We hear tape of one of these helicopter crew members saying something like, they're fine, they look fine. What was it like hearing that, Samantha, and looking at these visuals at the same time? It was really genuinely heartbreaking. I think, you know, the first time we kind of re-encountered these stories is when we were interviewing the people in the series. And I remember Phyllis, Montana LeBlanc in particular, described it.

15:06I saw a helicopter come so close to us, I can see the man's wisdom tooth. That's how close it was. I'm waving the towel. I'm losing my mind, screaming and yelling. That broke my heart because I think, especially in episode two, a lot of it is about the feeling of waiting and the feeling of waiting and not getting help. And there's a challenge in trying to depict that because you're trying to depict inaction and how that felt. And I think that the helicopter sort of sequence is one of those moments where you really feel what that must have felt like. And then later when we were kind of scrubbing through all of this archival footage and we saw this moment, you know, we're seeing the other side of it.

15:45But this is exactly, you know, what they described. And I think it really feels really heartbreaking in that moment.

15:50Rebecca Lavoie:I mean, one of the big things about Katrina is the Superdome, right? I remember hearing that everybody was going to be sheltering there and thinking at the time, oh, this is going to be one of these places where there's all of this aid and all of this help, which didn't turn out to be the case. Can you talk about how thousands of people ended up there and why it was they were stuck there? Yeah, so the evacuation notice wasn't given soon enough. If you have 36 hours before landfall to make it out of the city at a city as populous as New Orleans, the parish of Orleans Parish, when some people don't have cars, etc.

16:30and transportation, there is going to be a problem. on. We spoke to Marc Morial, who's now the president and CEO of the National Urban League, who was the first person who instituted the Superdome as a shelter of last resort for a hurricane. And one of the things he said was that there has to be more preparedness when you're going into that. When he did it at a previous storm, he made sure that he talked to the people who owned the Superdome in advance and said, we need your concessions. They have supplies there. We need to be in partnership with the people who own it. He did the same with the people at the convention center.

17:09And he told us this funny story that at first the people at the convention center was like, I don't know. And he was like, well, you need to know. And that's the type of decision making that has to happen and preparedness that has to happen. It's interesting too, because my sister was a third year law student at Tulane at the time. And she had heard that it was a tradition that you just wrote it out. So she was actually going to go to the Superdome with her friends to have a hurricane party. Yippee! And my family was like, no, get out. She still wasn't listening. And luckily for her, her classmate's mom was a VP at Entergy, the New Orleans energy company.

17:49And before the evacuation notice was given to the people, she said, we found out that it's going to hit New Orleans squarely. The governor and the mayor have not given notice. Everybody has to go. And so my sister was able to be one of the last people to get on a plane out of New Orleans in time.

18:07Rebecca Lavoie:It's incredible. What were some of the reasons that officials gave about why they couldn't provide basic aid to people in the Superdome? Like, we know where they are, right? And we know what the conditions are. So why not go in there and help? What did you hear there? One of the things we heard throughout the entire time, and definitely in reference to the Superdome aid, was a lot of pointing the fingers. You know, among the three levels of government, Nagin, you know, in the city, Governor Blanco and President Bush and his team, there was a lot of President Bush would say, listen to your local leaders.

18:42You know, we have Nagin begging the president for help. And it just became this circle of who is going to do anything. Also, the federal government had hired people like Mike Brown, who was managing FEMA, who wasn't really equipped. They didn't really understand how logistics were supposed to work, as General Honore says. And it just became, to use Soledad O 'Brien's phrase, it became a clusterfuck. It became, you know, a lot of pointing the fingers and a lot of inaction. You know, I think it's not until you see General Honoré come through that you really start to understand what is lacking in that response and what is required.

19:17And then when it came to the convention center, they didn't even know that anything was going wrong at the convention center. That's, you know, one of these big moments that I even remember from the time, but that we also emphasize in the episode that they didn't even know what was going on. So it was, in fact, on so many levels, just a complete clusterfuck.

19:41Rebecca Lavoie:There's this incredible moment where you have this live interview on NPR in which Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said he hadn't heard there were people in the convention center. And then FEMA's Michael Brown says that they just, quote, suddenly appeared. So this is day three, right? This isn't immediately while the storm is happening or the night of or the morning after. Is this when the public perception switches from this fallout to this big tragedy to, wow, the government really has no idea what it's doing? You know, it's a major moment where I think people are starting to get the sense that, OK, the government doesn't know what they're doing.

20:19But what I also think is important about this moment is that immediately in that same interview, Mike Brown turns and deflects and says, I've watched all day long the stories of the people who are causing trouble, who are, you know, screaming and yelling about things and just being thugs. And he immediately pivots to people, quote unquote, looting, when in reality, all they're doing is trying to find the food that the government themselves can't provide. I think that's so key because in this moment where we could get, you know, this attention and pressure on the government, the government deflects and the media follows that story.