Echo Chamber in the Superdome

A Louisiana National Guardsman explains how he dealt with false rumors being piped into Ground Zero of Hurricane Katrina.

Matt Welch | October 4, 2005

We are now into Week Two of elite news organizations' re-evaluation of the New Orleans horror stories they helped transmit to the world in the first seven days after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast. It was known already by September 6 that tales of evacuee ultra-violence in refugee centers like Baton Rouge and Houston were both false and strikingly similar to one another, but it took much longer to begin clearing the muck from the Big Easy.

But starting with New Orleans' heroic though not-infallible Times-Picayune, the correctives have come rolling in, from (in order) the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press, Knight Ridder, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. Most focused on apocalyptic tales of violence that did not leave an evidentiary trail after the Superdome and Convention Center were finally cleared out—the mythical seven-year-old rape victim with her throat slit, the 30-40 bodies in the freezer, the constant gun violence.

I spent last week trying to track down one particularly persistent yet difficult-to-confirm rumor—that rescue helicopters had been shot at, specifically an Air National Guard Chinook at the Superdome in the pre-dawn hours of September 1, which was the main source for the shooting-at-helicopters storyline that immediately swept the globe. This Sunday, the Knight Ridder news service published a very thorough take on the issue, duplicating my private findings that "representatives from the Air Force, Coast Guard, Department of Homeland Security and Louisiana Air National Guard say they have yet to confirm a single incident of gunfire at helicopters." It's more complicated than all that—please read the whole article to see the various conflicting reports, especially about the effects of the rumors on rescue efforts—but in the process of trying to verify competing claims, I got on the phone September 29 with Major Ed Bush, public affairs officer for the Louisiana National Guard, who was there at the Superdome before, during, and after the alleged shooting incident.

Our conversation proved far more interesting than I'd bargained for, with Maj. Bush discussing the practical challenges of managing information flow in an extremely stressful environment of wild oral rumor, piped-in falsehoods, and desperate hopes. This wasn't intended to be a Q&A, but Bush's story comes best out of his own mouth.

Reason: On Sept. 1 there was a report that perhaps a Chinook helicopter at the Superdome was fired upon before daybreak. Do you know whatever became of that, was that true, where does the report come from specifically, etc.?

Bush: Huh! I was at the Superdome for eight days, and I don't remember hearing anything about a helicopter getting shot at at the Dome.

Reason: That's ... interesting.

Bush: Oh, not really. There's a whole bunch of [laughs] stuff out there that never happened at the Dome, as I think America's beginning to find out slowly.

Reason: Tell me a little bit about your precise duties at the Dome while you were there.

Bush: I am a public affairs officer, so I went at first to cover down on media.... I was there on Sunday, when the Dome first opened its doors as an evacuation center. And as there were thousands of people lining up, certainly the media showed up, so I came on down, and was more or less just telling them what we were doing. And at the end of the day everybody came into the Dome, and we rode out the storm, and I did more of the same, and press conferences via cell phone talking about "No, the Dome has not fallen on us, the building is not crumbling, etc. etc."

Later in the week, 80 percent of my job became public information. I would meet with the commander down there, and we would talk about those four or five most important messages to get out to the 16, 18, 20,000 evacuees in the Dome, and I would take my two guys, and we would take our three megaphones, and we would walk around the Dome for hours and put that information out. Because there was so much miscommunication and misinformation coming from internal in the way of just rumors...

Reason: "Internal"—you mean internal to the Superdome?

Bush: Yeah, internal within the Superdome. Because the Superdome itself was its own little microcosm—I mean, those 20,000 people no longer had TV or really any contact with the outside world, for the most part, from their point of view.

And then there was a lot of things that made my job a lot harder in the way of what they would hear on the radio. A lot of them had AM radios, and they would listen to news reports that talked about the "dead bodies at the Superdome," and the "murders in the bathrooms of the Superdome," and the "babies being raped at the Superdome," and it would create terrible panic, of which I would have to try and convince them that no, it wasn't happening.... You could use logic, but I mean there was so much desperation and so much fear already, because of what had happened to us.

Someone would say, "You know they're killing people in the bathroom; they found a girl's body and she'd been raped and her throat was slit and they found her in the bathroom," and you could say, "Well, did you see it?"

Comments

Paul Harris|11.13.09 @ 5:49AM|#

Thank you for helping to clarify what really happened. I was a San Diego tourist trapped in the Superdome and to the best of my knowledge I never saw a dead body, never heard a gunshot at any helicopter, but knew that fear was taking over our minds so we did believe the rapes and murders. My 2008 memoir, "Diary From the Dome, Reflections on Fear and Privilege During Katrina" discusses these issues further.

Paul Harris

http://diaryfromthedome.webs.com