[simon]

An interesting article in today's Independent about the truth behind the stories of mayhem in New Orleans during the flood.

New Orleans: After the flood, the hard truths

Sharks in Canal Street? Snipers on rooftops? Terror in the Superdome? David Usborne sorts the reality from the myth to find out what really happened when Hurricane Katrina hit the Big Easy
Published: 15 October 2005

There was a fridge lying on a pavement of the French Quarter a couple of days ago. There are scrapped fridges everywhere in New Orleans right now, their doors taped shut to keep foul odours from seeping out. This one had writing scrawled across it. "Voodoo Party Tonight", it said in marker pen, giving a time and place.

Today, taking a break in a Bourbon Street bar, the talk turns to the same fridge. What was that all about? somebody asks. "Oh," replies another patron. "That was bullshit. Some freaky old man with a shopping trolley wrote that. I saw him do it." There was no voodoo party. (Or was there?)

Rumour and myth were always common currency in New Orleans. Black magic and ghost tours were touted to tourists, while the city's hanging moss and above-ground cemeteries inspired its once-resident celebrity author Anne Rice to write her vampire books. The image was deliberately cultivated of a metropolis that was not quite normal - a little out there - as well as vaguely scurrilous and irresponsible.

No wonder, perhaps, that just days after Hurricane Katrina roared across the Louisiana coastline weird and unlikely tales began to emerge. Remember the crocodiles roaming the Ninth Ward? Pictures of them were even posted on the internet, but it turned out they were taken years ago in Congo. There was also something about sharks cruising down Canal Street - ghoulish and obviously absurd.

Questions are now urgently being asked about some of the other stories that were circulating in the first days of the tragedy, which together created a picture of a city in outright anarchy, succumbing not just to Katrina but also to humankind's basest instincts. There were rapes and murders in the Superdome, bodies piled high in the basement of the Convention Centre and snipers firing on rescue helicopters.

Six weeks later, it seems many of the claims that were trafficked in New Orleans and amplified by the media had little or no evidence to support them. As manifold investigations into the storm and its aftermath get under way in the months ahead, both at the state and federal levels, part of the spotlight will be on finding out how much of what was reported was legend and how much was truth.

Whether anyone will be able fairly to apportion blame, however, is another thing. Was it the media that ran amok in the frenzy of those first post-Katrina days? Or were some of the evacuees themselves at fault for getting carried away, especially when put before a television camera? Or were local officials most guilty of exaggeration? Wasn't it 10,000 bodies that Mayor Ray Nagin said would be found when the waters receded? How come the latest death toll is just over 1,000, a tenth of his early estimate?

And wasn't it Mayor Nagin who went on national television three days after the storm and declared that the crowds left behind in New Orleans were somehow degenerating into an "almost animalistic state"? He said on The Oprah Winfrey Show that people left behind in the Superdome had for days been "watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people."

Leading the effort now to separate fact from fiction has been the New Orleans hometown newspaper, the Times-Picayune, which just last week was able to return from exile in Baton Rouge, an hour to the west, and re-inhabit its former headquarters.

"Few of the widely reported atrocities have been backed with evidence," was the conclusion of a recent investigation in the paper. "The piles of bodies never materialised, and soldiers, police officers and rescue personnel on the front lines say that although anarchy reigned at times and people suffered unimaginable indignities, most of the worst crimes reported at the time didn't happen."

To the best anyone can find out, there were six deaths inside the Superdome before the last evacuee was eventually shipped out by bus. Four of those seemingly were from natural causes and a fifth from a drug overdose. The sixth death was a suicide. Indeed, one story repeated with consistency by many of those who were inside was of a man standing on one of the arena's balconies and leaping off.

At the Convention Centre, four bodies were later discovered, of which one may have been the victim of a crime. It now seems, in fact, that there were four murders in all of New Orleans during the seven-day period after Katrina struck, about average for a city well accustomed to violence.

No one - not the editors at the Times-Picayune nor federal and state officials in New Orleans - will pretend now that they have a full accounting of what happened. There was no official record-keeper of the behaviour, criminal or otherwise, that went on inside the Superdome or anywhere else in the city for that matter. But few would disagree now that overstatements of the mayhem were made.

"Reports of bloodshed on the streets of the city were grossly inaccurate," the New Orleans District Attorney, Eddie Jordan, said this week. "And it's unfortunate that was the picture being represented to the public." The pattern appears the same when you examine all that was reported about shootings in the city, especially gunfire that was allegedly aimed at the rescue teams. So persuasive were some of the claims that rescue operations had to be halted at least once and precious time was lost for desperate victims, because pilots became fearful for their lives and their superiors ordered them back to base.

A spokesperson for the Coast Guard at the city emergency-operations centre told reporters on 1 September: "Hospitals are trying to evacuate. At every one of them, there are reports that as the helicopters come in, people are shooting at them." The same story was aired on CNN and across the world's media.

Yet today, officials at all the main agencies involved in plucking residents from rooftops - the Air Force, Coast Guard, Department of Homeland Security and Louisiana Air National Guard - say they have been unable to confirm a single case of their helicopters being fired upon. "We don't know of any shots ever fired directly at us," Captain Bob Mueller, commander of the Coast Guard in New Orleans, said.

Conversations over the past week with many of those who were in New Orleans in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane - rescuers and survivors - all carried a common theme. Among the things left behind by the storm's 140mph winds was a total information vacuum, created by a near complete breakdown of traditional means of communication. It was a handicap everyone struggled with.

That, for example, is what drove Roy Maggio bonkers, a resident who stayed with his large house on Esplanade Avenue through the storm and even after it passed. He was desperate to know just one thing, but there was no one to tell him. "I just wanted someone to give me an idea where sea-level was," he explained, standing on his front steps the other afternoon, gesturing horizontally with his right hand. "Was it here, here or here?" He had figured that the water would stop rising once it reached sea-level.

More critically, rescue personnel often could not communicate with each other or with their superiors. That, says David Banelli, a spokesman for the police union here, partly explains why there were so many stories of his members deserting their posts, which also, he insists, were exaggerated.

"We did have a couple of officers who got scared," he explained, but many simply got lost in the pandemonium.

"I was in Vietnam and the conditions here in New Orleans over those few days were worse than a year over there. Our people didn't have electricity to charge their radio batteries, so their communications were completely out. In many cases they lost track of their own units and joined other units. And then no one was able to radio anyone else to say where they were."

When the first evacuees from the Superdome reached the Astrodome in Houston at the end of the first week after the storm, many complained not just of the squalor but also of an information vacuum that left them in the dark as to what was going on, inside and outside. It is no surprise that many relied on the gossip of others to construct their versions of what had happened over those few days, multiple rapes and murders included

In this maelstrom of misinformation how much fault lies with the media? Senior reporters with the networks here said afterwards that it had been harder to cover events in New Orleans in those first days than the Iraq war. There was no petrol for their vehicles and even their satellite phones were useless.

Three days after the hurricane, Brian Williams, the anchorman for NBC News, did the evening bulletin live from the city after being able to discuss the line-up with his producers back in New York only once during the whole day.

Journalists are trained to check and double-check facts before passing them on to the public. But check where, with whom? This reporter was among those to pass on the experiences of evacuees in the Superdome as described to him on arrival in Texas. I reported only those claims that I heard from several sources. They included tales of a baby being discovered in a rubbish bin and of a young girl being raped and her chest slit open by a knife. Today, both horrors seem not to have happened.

Mayor Nagin's statement about a death toll of 10,000 became a headline around the world. As an assertion it was uncheckable. Defenders of the media will also point out that a senior official saying such a thing is an event in itself that nobody could have ignored. Nagin was not a lunatic, as far as anyone knew.

The New Orleans police superintendent, Eddie Compass, who has since resigned, also made comments that in hindsight fanned the hyperbole. "We have individuals who are getting raped; we have individuals who are getting beaten," he said on television about conditions in the evacuation centres. He also spoke on the record of "little babies being raped". Speaking to the Times-Picayune after stepping down, Mr Compass defended his words. "The information I had at the time, I thought it was credible," he said.

Why does all this matter? After all, New Orleans was hell in those few days, regardless of the actual numbers of rapes and murders. Nagin's overblown assertions arguably helped stir the federal government into finally delivering the scale of assistance that should have been there in the first place.

But here is another question, and a sensitive one, because it touches on matters of race. If the same hurricane had struck another big American city, wreaking the same degree of damage, would so many tall stories have been uttered and written about?

Jim Amoss, the editor of the Times-Picayune, stirred controversy recently when he said not. "If the dome and Convention Centre had harboured large numbers of middle-class white people, it would not have been a fertile ground for his kind of rumour-mongering."

Was the media content to go along with the unsubstantiated allegations of violence - even of baby rape (never mind crocodiles on Canal Street) - because it fitted a partially race-driven stereotype already scripted for New Orleans? If so, the press did the city and its people a terrible disservice, black or white.

"The mainstream media are only ever concerned with the negative stuff," contends Mr Banelli of the police union.

"The police were keeping this city alive during its darkest days under absolutely horrible conditions. But that's not what the media wanted to focus on."