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CNN Newsnight Aaron Brown
Riding Out the Storm; Sorting Truth From Fiction in Hurricane Katrina Aftermath
Aired September 26, 2005 - 22:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
AARON BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: Good evening again, everyone, Anderson in New Orleans tonight, where the mayor has once given the green light for people to return to some parts of the city.
Anderson, good evening to you.
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: Aaron, I'm not feeling dynamic either right now.
Residents and business owners in several areas are being allowed to return. The situation in the city's Ninth Ward is much different, however. Some streets there remain impassable because of flooding caused by Hurricane Rita, a heartbreaking scene, considering the city had been pumped dry last Friday -- Aaron.
BROWN: We will get back to that in just a moment.
First, a look at the stories coming out of the Gulf Coast tonight. House-to-house searches for survivors continued today in eastern Texas, while, in the state of Louisiana, search-and-rescue missions are now believed to be complete. The death toll from Rita rose to seven today, after the bodies of five people were discovered in an apartment in Beaumont, Texas. They apparently were overcome by fumes from a generator.
Just over half-a-million people in Louisiana and Texas remain without power. That is a lot of people, but it's half as many as it was over the weekend.
And the two days out from the storm, there is no doubt which areas suffered the most. The Louisiana parishes of Cameron, Calcasieu and Vermilion were virtually destroyed, the governor asking Congress for another $31 billion to rebuild.
And that's where we turn now. Cameron Parish, where Rita came ashore, is under 15 feet of water. Those who call it home are just beginning to seat extent of the enormous damage.
We begin tonight with CNN's Randi Kaye.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
RANDI KAYE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): We boarded our airboat and headed straight for the town of Creole in Cameron Parish. This is where Hurricane Rita made landfall. More than 70 percent of the homes were destroyed here. Our driver, Ben Welch, is hoping his wasn't one of them.
(on camera): We haven't seen your home yet. How worried are you whether your...
(CROSSTALK)
BEN WELCH, RESIDENT OF CREOLE, LOUISIANA: Oh, I know it's not there. It's not there. They -- my home is another -- near a grove of trees down at the end. It's a ridge that runs up there. They just told us it's still got an ankle-deep, mid-calf deep water on it.
KAYE (voice-over): We kept on pushing toward his neighborhood. The ride there didn't offer much hope. If Rita could do this, what were the odds Welch's house was still standing?
WELCH: My father and my grandparents always told me about what happened during Hurricane Audrey. I would imagine it, but I never thought I would ever see it.
KAYE: We'd seen Cameron Parish and Creole by air. But, up close, the destruction was magnified and morbid, dead wildlife everywhere, rabbits, pigs, and cows half-buried in the brush. Some cattle looked like upside-down ornaments in a marsh made by Mother Nature. Those who survived appeared wild. When a cow came running at us, Welch pulled out his gun.
WELCH: Just the trauma of all what happened, in the saltwater, they don't have no freshwater to drink. And what it is, they're disoriented and, plus, the saltwater makes them go out of their mind. They just -- they just don't know what to do.
KAYE: This goose appeared disoriented and thirsty. We gave him fresh water and he drank it, then tried to follow us back to our boat.
WELCH: This is downtown Creole.
KAYE (on camera): Main Street.
WELCH: Main Street, Creole, Louisiana. What the mud. That is going to be real slippery.
KAYE (voice-over): We arrived in Creole to find Main Street destroyed, the only restaurant in town closed for business, the grocery store out of business, and the mechanic shop in need of repair.
(on camera): You see that yellow building right there? That's the Creole post office. It used to be over there, to the right of that mailbox. But when Hurricane Rita came through, it spun it around and slammed it on the other side of the bank.
(voice-over): These guys just returned from Welch's neighborhood. He's desperate for information about his home.
WELCH: They got a Baptist church right on this side. It's still up?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes. Well, no, not really.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Not much.
WELCH: Not much?
KAYE: Search-and-rescue missed his home by half-a-mile. Welch will have to wait another day. The water is now too low and our airboat won't make it.
(on camera): How frustrating?
WELCH: Bad. Thought I was going to get there today.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
KAYE: And Ben Welch does hope to go back first thing in the morning on a four-wheeler, hoping to get to his home. But it's not looking good. He may have lost his home, Aaron, and he has already lost his business. He actually had an all gator farm in Creole. Luckily, he did evacuate all of the alligators before Hurricane Rita hit.
In terms of cattle, Aaron, they're putting the numbers at more than 1,000 dead already. They're hoping to make a hay drop there tomorrow morning and trying to save whichever cattle they can -- Aaron.
BROWN: Do they worry that, with all the attention on places that are larger than they are, that they'll be forgotten when it comes time to dole out the recovery money?
KAYE: Well, Aaron, I wish you could see what's on the other side of the camera, because there is Army and Navy all over the place here. General Russel Honore has made Cameron Parish one of his priorities. And he has generators here. He has food here. He's hoping to get them as much work for their repairs as he possibly can.
He promises them he will take care of them and he's at their service. Again, of course, you have to go through FEMA for that, but he said he'll do all he can.
BROWN: Randi, thank you -- Randi Kaye, tonight.
Officials estimate that 90 percent of all homes, 90 percent of all the homes in Cameron Parish were destroyed, a number impossible to absorb without actually seeing the damage with your own eyes, which is what many people are waiting to do. And the wait can be excruciating.
Here's CNN's Gary Tuchman.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
GARY TUCHMAN, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The 82nd Airborne has arrived. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What are you guys going to be doing?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Fixing the state!
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes!
TUCHMAN: Fixing the state and, more specifically, fixing Cameron Parish, one of the areas in Louisiana hit hardest by Hurricane Rita. But while the troops go over the bridge into the devastated town of Hackberry, the people of Hackberry are being told by police they can't go, because it's not considered safe.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I'm aggravated. I'm upset. We're getting to the point to where we have to make each other laugh instead of cry, but I understand their job. But, eventually, they are going to have to let us in. They are going to have to.
(CROSSTALK)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: ... to do it. And I know it's going to be hard. We was very tempted this morning to go by boats.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And they said they were...
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And they said they was arresting us. We was almost to the point to say, we just don't care. Arrest us.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I know they're doing it for safety reasons. I understand that a lot. But we're not going in there to take nothing out. We just want to go look to ease our minds.
TUCHMAN: Cameron Parish is where the eye of Hurricane Rita crossed. As a matter of fact, this is the precise spot on the southwestern tip of the state.
In the neighboring and also devastated parish of Calcasieu, Harold Herman (ph) was able to talk his way in. But what he saw wasn't good. He lost his home and his nest egg.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's like, where do you start? What do you do first?
TUCHMAN: His gas station convenience store, a business he spent years building up, destroyed.
(on camera): What do you think the monetary damage of this is?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You know, this place is worth $1 million. And, right now, I don't think you could give it away.
TUCHMAN (voice-over): Back at the bridge, they wait in the blazing sun, hoping police change their minds and let them see what happened to their homes. In the back of their minds, though, they know the news will likely not be good.
(END VIDEOTAPE) TUCHMAN: About 1,500 people lived in Hackberry. And many of them are not only eager to see their houses. They're eager to see their horses, horses that they left behind who are often members of the family.
And what they're most angry about is not necessarily that they can't get in. They'd be OK with it if nobody got in. But a lot of people who know people have gotten in. And the people we met at the bridge today didn't know the right people. And that's why they're still waiting -- Aaron.
BROWN: I just want to make sure I understand that. So, if you know somebody important, then you get in? And if you don't know somebody important, you don't get in?
TUCHMAN: It's like going to a rock concert or a dance club. We see that at every hurricane, that, if you know the cop, sometimes, they let you go by.
BROWN: Gary, thank you very much -- Gary Tuchman tonight.
Anderson, we talk a lot about Rita as the hurricane that wasn't as bad as it might have been and dodging the bullet and all of that, which all may be true if you're looking at the big picture. But when you look at these parishes and the Texas towns, one by one, that were whacked, it was plenty bad enough.
COOPER: Yes. To the people sitting on that bridge waiting because they don't know the right people, it doesn't matter that, you know, in the grand scheme of things, it wasn't that bad. For them, it's everything.
These people have lost everything in many cases. And that's pretty clear. This what is Lieutenant General Russel Honore, who is leading military relief efforts in Louisiana, had to say about what he's seen earlier today.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
LT. GEN. RUSSEL HONORE, COMMANDER, FIRST U.S. ARMY: It is bad. Cameron is destroyed. The only building that's usable in Cameron and Creole combined is the courthouse. All the other buildings are destroyed, sad to say. But that is the situation, with dead cattle and dead rats littered across the road.
There's probably 2,000 cattle that need food and water. We're working tonight to figure out how we can get helicopters to move the large bales of hay. We can do the hay. Now we're working through the problem of how do we get water to these cattle, who are scared and running around in the marsh.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
COOPER: Two thousand cattle, he estimates.
We have all heard of the calm before the storm. But I want to show you something about calm during the storm called Hurricane Rita, calm in the face of danger that provides a close-up, a very close-up view of Rita and of a father and son who lived through the storm, lived through it and caught it all on tape.
Take a look.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
COOPER (voice-over): At around 5:00 a.m., Cliff Choate woke up, thinking that Hurricane Rita had left him and his dad, Boyd, unscathed.
CLIFF CHOATE, HURRICANE RITA SURVIVOR: I got up and I looked in the backyard. And it looked like the yard was moving. So, I ran in the house to tell my dad that the water was coming.
CHOATE: Oh, it's up to the windows.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We can wait down here until either the door busts or whatever, you know. If the door busts, we're going to have to get up there. Ain't really a whole lot they can do for us, son.
CHOATE: We tried to get everything we could in the attic, stuff to break the ceilings open with, and food, water, stuff like that and the camera.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's starting to come back in at the door.
CHOATE: Yes, we got major damage.
COOPER: Despite the rapidly rising water, Cliff and Boyd remained remarkably calm.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There comes a shoe floating by.
CHOATE: The wind picked up. The water was already four foot in the house, four-and-a-half foot. And then the waves just started pounding the house.
After it gets up a ways, it's going to bust them windows.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, we all right.
CHOATE: At about that time, my uncle called and said they had a boat ready, people trying to come in.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I ain't seen no snakes yet.
CHOATE: The house was breaking apart. So, I made a decision. I crawled to the north side of the house and took my shotgun and blew the wall out. Just in case it fell, we didn't want to be in the attic. I jumped out the window and I swam across the road to the neighbor's house and got a boat.
I mean, and as I was swimming across Highway 82 in about six foot of water, the Coast Guard helicopter was coming over. And I was like, man, that's good news.
COOPER: Coast Guard choppers were rescuing dozens of stranded residents in Vermilion Parish. But Cliff had a boat and thought he and his dad would be OK.
CHOATE: Because I had the boat started and we was in good shape then. So, I went to pick up my dad.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Oh, I don't know where to go now.
CHOATE: Well, just -- they ain't got no power lines down, so just...
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Maybe go up here?
COOPER: They weren't sure where to go. Every place they looked was flooded. That's when their problems really began.
CHOATE: We was just trying to get to north, let go it north, anywhere to where we could walk or, you know, anything. Just to save fuel, we turned the thing off, the motor off. And we started floating. And I was like, man, dad, the body's leaning. So I ran to the back of the boat and I opened the hood and the engine's almost under water.
So, I grab a trash can and I start -- anything that could go wrong was going wrong. I start bailing it out, bailing it out as fast as I could, because we were sinking right there. So, we turned the motor back on and we got up against a tree. I finally got the water back down.
I was like, dad, we need to turn around and go, try to make it in. But when we turned around, boat ran out of diesel. So, by that time, the helicopter was coming back around. I flagged him down and they came and picked us up. That was all there was to it.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
COOPER: And that's all there was to it. It's amazing how calm they remained, Aaron, throughout that thing.
I mean, the father sees the shoe and he goes, oh, there's a shoe floating by. Cliff spends 15 months in Iraq. He had just gotten back a couple of months ago. He had saved up enough money, bought himself a truck. He bought a new boat. All those, of course, are gone tonight. But they're safe in the town of be Abbeville right now -- Aaron.
BROWN: That is an amazing piece of tape. Thank you.
(CROSSTALK)
BROWN: Come right back to you.
At about a quarter past the hour, time for some of the other headlines of the day. Erica Hill is in Atlanta for us again tonight. Good evening, Ms. Hill.
ERICA HILL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good evening Mr. Brown. Nice to see you tonight.
Anti-war protester Cindy Sheehan was among dozens of people arrested today when they sat down outside the White House. Ms. Sheehan's son was killed in Iraq last year. And you remember -- you may remember her as the focus of the anti-war movement. It all happened when she camped outside President Bush's ranch in Texas this summer.
Meantime, the soldier who was photographed holding a naked Iraqi prisoner on a leash at the Abu Ghraib prison has now been convicted by a military jury. Lynndie England was found guilty of maltreating detainees, committing an indecent act and conspiracy. She now faces up to 10 years in prison.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will visit Haiti tomorrow to show support for the country's presidential elections, which are scheduled for November. She'll also meet representatives of the U.N. peacekeeping force that's been there since a revolt drove President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from office last year.
And Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist says he did nothing wrong by selling stocks in a family-run company shortly before a disappointing earnings forecast drove the stock downward. The sale is being investigated by authorities. Mr. Frist says the stock was in a blind trust and the sale was approved by a Senate committee -- Aaron.
BROWN: Erica, we will see you in about a half-an-hour.
We have much more ahead on the program tonight. We head back to New Orleans, where they're starting over again.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
LESTER MESSA, RESIDENT OF ST. BERNARD PARISH: We have been here, what, 29 years, and never thought it would come to this.
BROWN (voice-over): They'd barely dried out from Katrina when the flooding began again.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You don't want to remember it like this. You just don't. It's heartbreaking.
BROWN: How much can one city take?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: So, are there still many dead people inside the houses, do you think?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Oh, thousands.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Thousands?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Thousands. BROWN: But, in fact, they weren't.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We have little babies in there, little babies getting raped.
BROWN: Only, they weren't. How did that happen? How did people in charge get it so wrong?
REP. BENNIE THOMPSON (D), MISSISSIPPI: It's now time for Congress and the president to call a halt to this absolute wasteful spending under the guise of Hurricane Katrina relief.
BROWN: The enormous cost of cleaning up. Who is being paid? Do they deserve the job?
And Rita and Katrina, a new breed of hurricanes?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If the worst scenarios that the global warming people imagine come to pass, it's a major problem for humanity.
BROWN: Is it a force of nature made worse by man?
From New York and New Orleans, this is a special edition of NEWSNIGHT.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
COOPER: Welcome back.
We're live in New Orleans on Stafford Street (ph), to be exact, in the Lakeview part of town. The 17th Street Canal is actually just about a block over there. You can't see it because it's blocked by a house that has been now deposited in the middle of the street. The house shouldn't actually be there.
And, as you can see, there's a lot of devastation. The car is in a tree. The tree has fallen on a house. So, this whole area has just been destroyed. The Army Corps of Engineers is removing steel plates today at the end of the canal as repairs continue on the levee walls. Now the big pumps can get back to work draining the water out of downtown New Orleans, as people are beginning to try to get back into this ravaged city.
Temporary repairs with giant sandbags continue. Pumps are coming in to help suck the water out of the city right now. It remains, though, a tale, really, of two cities in New Orleans and a tale of two storms. The difference can be measured in feet and inches, in some places, lines at the supermarket, in other, muddy lines on the walls of houses still standing, marking how high the floodwaters reached.
It was enough to bring the president of the New Orleans City Council to tears. He said Rita just spilled more bad dreams on us.
CNN's David Mattingly reports on what the people returning to New Orleans are finding now.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
DAVID MATTINGLY, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It was the latest flood to hit New Orleans. For a short time, traffic crowded the interstates, as displaced residents flowed back into their neighborhoods to resume work interrupted by Hurricane Rita.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Louisiana State Police opened up the roads back into the greater New Orleans area.
MATTINGLY: In New Orleans, only people in the least affected areas were allowed to return. In some of these neighborhoods, flooding never was a problem.
But, to the east, in neighboring St. Bernard Parish, residents were allowed to return for the first time, temporarily, to visit their flood-ravaged streets and homes.
MESSA: We have been here, what, 29 years, and never thought it would come to this.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: No.
MATTINGLY: Members of the Messa family slog through the ankle- deep muck inside their house to recover a lifetime of memories one piece at a time.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You don't want to remember it like this. You just don't. It's heartbreaking.
MATTINGLY: And the heartache has just begun. Areas that reflooded from Hurricane Rita's storm surge will have to remain off- limits even longer. In New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward, ground zero for two levee failures, some streets remain nearly impassable.
(on camera): The only traffic coming through here right now are the helicopters.
(voice-over): The noise from above is the only thing that breaks the eerie silence. Wading through the inundated and deserted neighborhoods, I found trees that are still filled with tattered clothing and rows of houses that have been smashed and shattered.
(on camera): Looking at all this water, it's almost impossible to believe that this area had actually been pumped dry by Friday. But now, because of the new flooding, all the recovery work that had been going on was for nothing. It will have to start over again.
And one thing hasn't changed. For all the residents who live here, on that day when they're finally allowed to come back to their homes, many will be coming back to find they have nothing to come back to.
(voice-over): That moment of reckoning will have to wait until the damaged levee is shored up and the water is again pumped out. (END VIDEOTAPE)
MATTINGLY: But, even in the most fortunate neighborhoods, today was just the first step of many difficult steps toward recovery. You look at the less fortunate areas, where the devastation is most overwhelming, Anderson, and you have to wonder if any sort of recovery will be possible there at all.
COOPER: Well, also, David, without any schools open, I mean, anyone who comes back to actually live, they can't have kids, because there's no place to send the kids to school right now.
MATTINGLY: This is a many-layered problem. You look -- you have the questions about, when do you bring the children back? Where do you send them back to school? When do you open businesses? When will you have employees to make your business viable? When will you have customers to make this happen?
This is going to be a very long and difficult process, with no peace right now seeming to fit together perfectly. And it's going to take a very long time.
COOPER: All right. That definitely seems to be sure. David Mattingly, thanks for that.
Aaron, let's go back to you in New York.
You know, I feel like this entire month -- and it's strange to think that this is the one-month, really, anniversary of Hurricane Rita (sic). So much has happened and, yet, I still feel like we're kind of, as David mentioned, just sort of piecing the pieces of this puzzle together still.
BROWN: The difficult thing about Rita is that, for a while, we pivoted off Katrina and all of the stories that weren't reported or hadn't been reported kind of got lost for a few days. And the question I think -- we will see where viewers are, but there are a lot of stories still to be told about why things happened the way they happened and what's going to happen in the tomorrows ahead.
For any reporter, the old Watergate admonition is good advice. And there is more money out there than you can imagine, so there's more reason to follow that money these days. Rebuilding after the two hurricanes will cost something north of $200 billion. Following that money trail could be full-time work for reporters and auditors. The winds have barely stopped blowing. The questions are being raised.
Here's CNN's Allan Chernoff.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
ALLAN CHERNOFF, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Biloxi, Mississippi did not trust the federal government to hire contractors to clean out the tons of debris Hurricane Katrina left. Mississippi's third largest city conducted its own bidding. Nine companies bid. Biloxi hired three firms. The cost of debris removal, $15.89 per cubic yard, as Biloxi reported to residents in this newsletter, estimating the cleanup cost at $50 million.
A.J. HOLLOWAY, MAYOR OF BILOXI, MISSISSIPPI: We hired three contractors and hopefully they can make at least one round and get the majority of it up.
MATTINGLY: The Army Corps of Engineers relied on pre-negotiated emergency contracts at first. Then it conducted a quick, but competitive bidding process, hiring four companies to remove debris in Mississippi and Louisiana. The rates vary widely, but some are cheaper than Biloxi's.
But the highest price for much of the debris hauling is $17 a cubic yard from Ashbritt, a Florida company that was a client of the former lobbying firm of Haley Barbour. Barbour, former head of the Republican National Committee, is now governor of Mississippi.
The cleanup contracts are for half-a-billion dollars and can be extended to as much as $1 billion each. At FEMA's parent, the Department of Homeland Security, the inspector general is skeptical. Through a spokesperson, he told CNN: "History shows debris removal is vulnerable to abuse. That's where the waste is. We're focusing on those contracts."
THOMPSON: I think it's now time for Congress and the president to call a halt to this absolute wasteful spending under the guise of Hurricane Katrina relief.
MATTINGLY: All the contractors referred questions to the Army Corps of Engineers. The Corps says it is watching for abuse, its own auditors checking to make sure the companies haul away as much debris as their bills claim.
But, by the very nature of this work, it's difficult to precisely measure cubic yards when bulldozers are collecting hundreds of thousands of tons. Faced with an emergency, the federal government has hired large firms it believed could get the job done, a job so massive that it could cost taxpayers hundreds of millions more than anyone could have imagined.
Allan Chernoff, CNN, New York.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
BROWN: Just ahead on the program tonight, hasty words, why initial reports in the aftermath of Katrina turned out to be wrong.
And pointing the finger, why some scientists say there is a reason for this year's storms, and it is us.
We will take break. This is a special edition of NEWSNIGHT.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK) BROWN: We often remind you, when reporting breaking news stories, that the first reports are often wrong. With Katrina, it turns out that some of those reports, and not just the early ones, were really wrong.
Some were fueled by people who were tired and hungry and clearly desperate. But some were fueled by the people in charge.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
BROWN (voice-over): In the early days after Katrina struck, the news from New Orleans city officials and others was impossibly grim.
SUPERINTENDENT EDDIE COMPASS, NEW ORLEANS POLICE: There are little babies in there. Little babies getting raped.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: No, no, no, no.
BROWN: That would be the New Orleans Convention Center, where thousands had sought shelter.
Not only that, predictions of the death toll were beyond frightening. Here's New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin in an interview with WWL radio on the first of September.
MAYOR RAY NAGIN, NEW ORLEANS: You mean to tell me that a place where you probably have thousands of people that have died and thousands more that are dying every day, that we can't figure out a way to authorize the resources that we need? Come on, man.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Thousands? Thousands?
COMPASS: I would say thousands.
BROWN: Newspaper and TV accounts ran with those numbers for days. The reality, of course, was something else. The official death toll from Katrina in Louisiana is nearing 1,000, an awful number to be sure, but not tens of thousands.
And there has been no confirmation of any babies being raped anywhere in the city. Six people did die at the Superdome, four of natural causes. Four bodies were recovered from the convention center.
DAN HITCHINGS, ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS: We're looking at about 80 days, and the revised estimate takes it to about 40.
BROWN: The Corps of Engineers originally felt it would take more than two months to drain the water from New Orleans. If it hadn't been for Hurricane Rita over the weekend, New Orleans would have been de-watered, as the engineers say, in about two and a half weeks.
This exaggeration by authorities of news already bad made into something even worse is not new. This is a "New York Daily News" headline the day after September 11. Ten thousand, it blared, were feared dead. The real news, of course, was bad enough. RUDY GIULIANI, FORMER MAYOR OF NEW YORK CITY: As far as the number of people in the building, that will be in the thousands, but there's no way of knowing at this point.
BROWN: The official death toll, as stark as it was, wound up at 2,752.
Actually seeing things, of course, is the best way to separate fiction from fact. And that takes time. And the early reporting of officials' statements, as well intentioned as those statements may be, often turns out to be wrong.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
BROWN: "The New Orleans Times-Picayune" has done a fair amount of reporting on what was said and what actually happened or at least what can be verified as happening. Brian Thevenot did much of the reporting, and he joins us tonight.
When you asked the mayor or you asked the police chief, how did -- where did the stuff come from, the rapes of children or the 10 thousands of dead? What did they tell you?
BRIAN THEVENOT, "NEW ORLEANS TIMES-PICAYUNE": Well, I think what we reported in our story today was that the city officials, as well as the reporters down there and, of course, all of the refugees who are suffering, were in the same sort of harsh situation that we were.
And I have some sympathy for their initial reporting of supposed atrocities at the dome and the convention center, because their communication apparatus had completely broken down. And they had, you know, for a number of days, no access to credible information.
I also think that the media, in some sense, has to take responsibility for this and to come back to check, to verify some of these stories, basically just to finish the job. As I think we tried to do today.
BROWN: You did a very good job of it today. At some level, taking the convention center and the Superdome, it sounds like there was almost a giant game of post office being played. One person believes to have seen one thing, tells someone else and as it goes down the line, it keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Before you know it, you have hundreds of deaths.
THEVENOT: Yes, I think you're right. There was -- there was a quote in the story today, I think a smart one, from deputy chief Warren Riley, where he says one guy saw six bodies. Then another guy saw six bodies. And another guy saw the same six and all of a sudden, it becomes 18.
And then you have those -- I mean, you had a complete and utter lack of communication with authorities. As I was saying before, it did become almost like the telephone game, the gossip line.
I also think that, you know, you had people who were desperate to get out. And you know, maybe using some of those stories to alert the federal authorities to come down and help them.
BROWN: Did you find any evidence or do you think at any level that officials went with the worst case scenario so that if a -- when a smaller number came in, as bad as that smaller number was, it wouldn't seem so bad?
THEVENOT: I think there may be some truth to that, but it's hard to say what was in the officials' head at the time. I know that they were incredibly beleaguered, overwhelmed.
And, you know, when I first heard the 10,000 number, it didn't seem to me to be beyond the realm of believability, as high as it was. But -- and I also think that we're going to see this death toll continue to rise. I don't think 1,000 is the end of it. The body recovery operation was very slow to start and it still goes on to this day.
BROWN: Brian, you and your colleagues did a terrific job today and have done a terrific job. It's nice to meet and talk to you. Thank you.
THEVENOT: Thank you so much.
BROWN: Thank you.
Anderson, by no means should this sound like we are dismissive of the fact that a large number of people perished in the storms and clearly, there were acts of violence. It just turns out, it was never as bad as our worst imaginations made it seem.
COOPER: Yes. Certainly in terms of crimes being committed, of people being murdered, some of the stories we had heard in the early days, that the mayor and even the chief of police were talking about, but again those conditions inside there, no one is refuting were horrific and inexcusable by any -- any measurement.
I just want to show you some of, Aaron, what people coming back here can expect. This is -- we're on a street, Stafford. We picked in Lakeview kind of by random. It's very near the 17th Street Canal.
But I mean, just on this one street, look, you have this enormous tree completely toppled over by the storm. It has toppled on to this house.
Clearly, rescuers have been by each house. They've marked -- we all know this by now. They mark an x on the 9/22. That's the day they searched the house, September 22. The zero on the bottom, that means there were no bodies found inside this house.
But it's not just -- it's not just homes that they check. It's also cars, because a lot of people you know, when the flood waters were coming or the storm was coming, they wanted to get out. They got that into their cars.
Looks like some rescuers here have sort of wiped away the dust to peer inside here. And then they write zero bodies inside here. And this is, you know, block after block, house after house. And you find, I mean, it's all these -- there's a -- look at this. This is Brother Martin High School. It's an academic scholarship. Put it back where I found it.
I mean, this is what New Orleans still looks like, you know, away from the French Quarter, away from where most of the cameras are on any given day. On just these side streets, it is just complete devastation. And it is, again, I've said it, it's block after block and house after house.
You can only imagine people coming back here, you know, trying to rebuild their lives. Where do you begin with something like this? How do you start to clean up? What do you pick up? What do you just throw out? It's the questions that people are going to have to be facing in the coming days and weeks and months as they slowly return, Aaron.
BROWN: And it is awful. Thank you.
Still to come on the program tonight, what the hurricane season means for you in terms of gas and your home heating bills. You figured out the news isn't good. We'll give you a sense of how bad it's going to get.
And a man who found sanctuary after Katrina, only to be forced on the run again. But this is not the story you think. We'll take a break first. This is a special edition of NEWSNIGHT.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BROWN: The president said today "Gasoline prices are on our mind." He urged Americans to car pool, to cut out unnecessary driving.
It's been several decades since a president has spoken so openly about conserving fuel in the country. President Bush is talking now because another storm could badly hurt the economy.
Here's CNN's Ali Velshi.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
ALI VELSHI, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It's true. Most refineries were spared the worst of Hurricane Rita. But your wallet might not be.
TOM KLOZA, OIL PRICE INFORMATION SERVICE: The hurricanes are going to haunt us for really about four, or five, six weeks or so. And then we'll be OK in November and December.
VELSHI: At a national average of about $2.80 a gallon, gasoline costs nearly a dollar more than it did a year ago. If it stays around this price, that's 500 bucks more per year for the average American driver. Five hundred bucks seems like a deal compared to what you'll soon pay to heat your home, especially if you live in one of the more than 50 million American homes that use natural gas.
The government says if it's a cold winter, it could cost you 71 percent more to heat your house this year than it did last year. That's $600. If you use heating oil, you'll pay about 30 percent more to heat your home this winter. For most persons, it's still hundreds of dollars you won't have to spend on other things, the other things you buy that make America one of the strongest economies in the world. And that's if nothing else goes wrong.
PHIL FLYNN, OIL ANALYST: We are extremely vulnerable. If we have another tropical storm that shuts down production I fear for the economy.
VELSHI: The president knows it's a real fear. For the second time in a month, he urged Americans to conserve.
GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We can all pitch in by using -- by being better conservers of energy. We can curtail nonessential travel. If it makes sense for the citizen out there to curtail nonessential travel, it darn sure makes sense for federal employees.
VELSHI: Oil companies are urging conservation, too. Exxon Mobile is flying full-age newspaper ads, including urging drivers to save gas by reducing trips.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
VELSHI: Now, if you've had a long day at work and you come home and you hear that the administration and Exxon Mobile are encouraging you to save gas, it's not surprising, Aaron, that someone might have to have their meal before they digest that. But that's the world we're in today.
BROWN: One person's nonessential trip is another person's business. The nonessential trip might be a trip to the movies which costs Hollywood or the trip to Wal-Mart.
COOPER: That's exactly the point. Everybody gets a piece of this. And you know, in Georgia, they aren't sending the kids to school today and tomorrow. Apparently that saves a half a million gallons of diesel fuel. So I thought taking kids to school might be essential. But to some people, it's not.
BROWN: No to the kids. To the parents, it is. Thank you.
Still ahead on the program, are Katrina and Rita just the beginning? Scientists take a look at whether global warming is causing stronger hurricanes. There's a debate over that. And we'll get into it.
This is a special edition of NEWSNIGHT.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BROWN: Still ahead, to Katrina and Rita and a couple of active hurricane seasons, spell global warming.
But first, to one check the other news of the day. Erica Hill again in Atlanta tonight -- Erica.
ERICA HILL, CNN ANCHOR: Hi again, Aaron.
A New York factory manager who was fired for having child pornography on his computer returned and shot three people before killing himself. An office manager was in critical condition. Two of the factory's owners were stable after the shooting spree.
The head of the disarmament commission in Northern Ireland said today the Irish Republican Army has scrapped all its weapons. General John de Chastelain described the arsenal as enormous. And political leaders said the disarming was an important step towards peace.
Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon narrowly survived a leadership challenge today. The leader of the Likud Party claimed victory in a balance that was seemed as seen as a referendum on his rule.
Don Adams, the actor who portrayed Maxwell Smart in the spy spoof "get Smart," has died at 82. Adams played the role of the -- what some people would call incompetent agent, 86, from 1965 to 1970.
I loved that show. I don't know about you, Aaron.
BROWN: You were a baby when that show was on.
HILL: It's fantastic. There are re-runs, come on!
BROWN: Thank you. It's always tough when you saw it the first time it was out.
Coming up, is there a connection between stronger hurricanes and global warming?
From New York and New Orleans, this is a special edition of NEWSNIGHT.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
COOPER: For some, the debate on the global warming certainly has become not just degrees on a thermometer, but also a question of life or death. The question is: could global warming have made hurricanes like Katrina and Rita, even more deadly? CNN's Tom Foreman investigates.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): In the wake of all of the hurricanes that have hit American shores in recent years, some scientists are convinced they have spotted a trend. Global warming, they say, is making these big storms bigger.
Peter Webster is a professor at Georgia Tech who studies rising ocean temperatures. And he sees a simultaneous increase in the frosty of storms.
PETER WEBSTER, PROFESSOR, GEORGIA TECH: What you see is a universal change in character of the hurricanes. A move towards more intensity that can't be explained by any natural variability that we know of or understand.
FOREMAN: Webster and others have expanded on their theory in prestigious scientific journals, and the idea is simple. The world's oceans are getting warmer. Only by about one degree Celsius over the past century, but that is enough, they say, to make storms grow more rapidly and furiously as they feed off of that warm water.
And then, the steady supply of heat makes them last longer, too. Their evidence, based on storm measurements and computer models is so compelling, even experienced hurricane watchers are becoming at least tentative believers.
HUGH WILLOUGHBY, FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY: What global warming may have done, and I emphasize may, is made a hurricane like Katrina a little stronger at its greatest intensity.
FOREMAN: Other scientists, however, have doubts, especially with regard to storms that hit the U.S. As bad as hurricanes have been here in the past decade, the 1940s produced stronger hurricanes and more of them.
So when one computer model predicts a six percent increase in hurricane wind speed over the next 80 years, researcher Pat Michael says natural cycles could easily account for that.
PAT MICHAEL, CATO INSTITUTE: If you plot out hurricanes from year to year, they'd do this. And trying to find a six percent change in this is going to take a long, long time. We have, you know, bigger fish to fry.
FOREMAN: Still, even some doubters say the idea of a link between global warming and these terrible storms should be investigated, if only because we've built so much along the water. And it could get so much worse.
WILLOUGHBY: If the worst scenarios that the global warming people imagine come to pass, it's a major problem for humanity.
FOREMAN (on camera): Neither side in this debate has indisputable proof, at this point. But like people all along the gulf, they're watching the skies to see what comes next.
Tom Foreman, CNN, Washington.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
COOPER: Still ahead tonight on "360," he has fled two hurricanes, lived in five shelters in the past five weeks. Along the way, he made friends he will not soon forget.
This is a special edition of NEWSNIGHT: STATE OF EMERGENCY, New Orleans and chicken.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BROWN: Geraldo Montgomery has plenty to complain about. He lost everything when Katrina struck his home in New Orleans, and the place in which he sought shelter did not turn out to be so safe.
But Mr. Montgomery isn't complaining. He's chosen, instead, to be grateful for the friends he's made along the way.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
BROWN (voice-over): It's hard not to like Geraldo Montgomery, and it's hard not to admire his attitude.
GERALD MONTGOMERY, EVACUEE: It was an adventure. That's the best way to look at it. And the lord -- could not make a better move.
BROWN: First, Katrina took his home and everything in it.
MONTGOMERY: Everything. Furniture, books. They just say the whole house has to be gone through, repaired.
BROWN: He fled with a few important papers, insurance forms and the like. But the storm took most everything else. The things you can see and the things he can feel.
MONTGOMERY: Independence. I don't have that anymore. And I would say somewhat dignity. That's gone.
BROWN: But after all that, bitter he is not.
MONTGOMERY: There was thrills, there was anger and there was warmness.
BROWN: The warmness of being taken in by a town and made part of a family. The town is the little Cajun village of Sulphur.
MONTGOMERY: I feel lucky and maybe I feel that I'm here for a purpose. Just because the people I met here, as if they've known me for years and years. And we just met. And they're really truly worried about me.
BROWN: The people were the Farnums. Geraldo met Tim Farnum, and his wife, Jody, while cooking dinner at a local Holiday Inn turned into a Fifth Street shelter in almost as many weeks.
BROWN: Over time, Gerald just, you know, took a liking to the people that were there and everybody took a liking to him.
BROWN: But Rita made sure the adventure, or the heartache, or both, didn't stop in Sulphur. FARNUM: We got a phone call from a local church member that said that everyone from the hotel needed to be evacuated. And Gerald really didn't have anywhere to go. So we decided to go by and take Gerald with us.
BROWN: Gerald and the Farnums evacuated to a shelter a few hours north. The Farnum now had their own problems, cleaning up a home after Rita struck. But Gerald can stay as long as he wants.
FARNUM: He really doesn't have anything in New Orleans. He said his house has been under water for a week. It's probably no good. And we told him you know, there's always room in Sulphur.
BROWN: Gerald wants to go home and will. But he will go home changed some from the experience of this month, changed by the people who took him in.
When I get straight, or get my home redone, I'm going to pay a surprise visit. I always said when the leaves turn green and the flowers bloom I'll make an appearance in Sulphur.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
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