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

(Page 3 of 4)

Bush: Yeah. In eight days inside the Superdome, there was no gunfire, there were no battles. There was one incident where...somebody had a pole from one of the cots, and I think [our] security guy might have surprised him; they opened the door and he came at him. And the Guardsmen got hit, and there was water down there, and I think slipping and pulling and this and that, and three rounds went off and one of them went into the Guardsmen's legs. More or less he shot himself.

Reason: [Laughs.] That's not funny.

Bush: No it's not, and he's OK; he's probably a little embarrassed, quite frankly. And in eight days that's the only shots fired that we had in the Superdome.

Reason: And this includes the perimeter, too, and the heliport?

Bush: Yeah. I mean, we would have heard it. The instant reaction over the radio would have been overwhelming.

Reason: Because there's hundreds of guys there.

Bush: Yeah.

And certainly we had tense times, and that was where my job shifted so hard. Major Baldwin would come and say, "You know, we've got a big crowd forming." And one day in particular, somehow somebody said, "The busses are here, they're gonna pick us up here." So everybody wanted to be first in line at that spot. [...]

People started pushing and shoving, I mean just crowded, like a concert. And the people in the front were getting—I mean it's hot out, it's hard to breathe—and they were getting crushed. And I hopped up on a back of a truck, where we had a sound system, and I talked everybody through. I was like, "Come on people, we were going over it this morning, you're completely going against everything we said we were going to try to do; this isn't the line for anything, you've got to believe me, everybody's going to get out of here." [...]

But it would be so frustrating, where you might spend hours to get people to believe what the plan was, and that, "Sure, this is unlivable, and we don't have flush toilets, it's a horrible, nasty place that we're all in, and it stinks, and it's hot. And you know what? We know that, too, because we're here with you. But no, there's not people being killed, we wouldn't let that happen. And we're gonna make it, everybody's gonna make it." And then one radio report might nullify all of that.

Reason: Have you gone back and tried to trace any of the roots of some of these wild rumors?

Bush: Nah, I'm going to leave that to y'all.

Brian Thevenot, the Times-Picayune reporter, did the most in-depth backtracking that I've seen, and I think it got him national recognition in the blink of an eye. I mean, he found nothing. And I think he got a whole lot of people going, "Oh jeez, you know, OK: I'm guilty of it."

And I'm not going give any of them a break. Because if you're in a position of leadership, you need to be able to think through what you're saying. And there's nothing wrong with saying, "You know what? I don't really know what the condition is in the Dome, let's go down and talk to 'em. Let's go down and see."

That might have made things a lot better for all of us. Certainly, it wouldn't have changed how quick help arrived. Because quite honestly, I heard that help stayed away—I had heard that FEMA stayed away because it was too dangerous. Well, then you can certainly connect some dots and say that perhaps FEMA would have been quicker in if we hadn't heard all these urban myths about shootings and rapes and deaths and killing and bodies everywhere.

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