Read Katrina: After the Flood for Free Online

of the bank’s employees lived in the East as well.
    At a little past 8:00 a.m., McDonald slipped behind the wheel of his red BMW convertible. Only later would McDonald understand this drive around New Orleans East as a kind of farewell to his home of more than thirty years. “These are my people,” McDonald would say of the residents of New Orleans East after Mayor Ray Nagin, a month after Katrina, appointed him to a blue-ribbon commission charged with determining which portions of drowned-out New Orleans should be rebuilt and which parts might more wisely be returned to marshland in a city certain to lose residents. “These were my neighbors.” McDonald had been twenty-nine years old and a college dropout when, in 1972, Liberty opened in a trailer in a sketchy part of town. Thirty-three years later,with a massive storm gathering over the Gulf of Mexico, McDonald was readying for yet another storm. At that point, Liberty ranked sixth on a list of the country’s largest black-owned banks.
    The air already felt oppressive, heavy with humidity. The car radio blared ominous warnings about the potential for calamitous flooding that could damage half the city’s homes and leave New Orleans without power for weeks. McDonald’s first stop was Liberty’s headquarters, a rectangular-shaped, six-story glass box gleaming in the morning sun, with LIBERTY spelled out in large white letters across its top. This building, only a few minutes from McDonald’s house, was so new that not every department had yet moved over from the old headquarters on the opposite side of the I-10, the freeway that bisected the East. A few days earlier, the bank had taken delivery on a new mainframe computer that had cost around $500,000. Brand-new desktop computers matched the new furnishings. He parked his car and walked around the building, giving each door a tug to make sure it was locked. Inside was a man the bank had hired to ride out the storm. Accompanied by a pair of dogs and outfitted with several days of food and water, he would serve as a last line of defense against looters.
    The percussive sound of nails pounding through plywood accompanied McDonald’s pre-storm tour. Everywhere he looked, people were boarding up windows and loading cars. Despite the dour newscast, his spirits were lifted by the sight of so many of his neighbors taking warnings about the storm so seriously. He crossed to the opposite side of the I-10, parked in front of one of his bank branches, and again jumped out of his car. Standing just under six feet tall, McDonald is a courtly, light-skinned black man with a doughy face, wavy white hair, and matching mustache. Peering through the glass, he saw that his branch managers had placed Saturday’s deposits on top of the filing cabinets—exactly as he had asked them to do.
    Next McDonald visited the low-slung bunker next door, the old headquarters his people were vacating. The building housed the mainframe they were using to run the bank until the new machine could be brought online. Most of the bank’s paper records were stored there as well. McDonald was frugal and sometimes questioned the wisdom of writing a $5,000 check each month to a Philadelphia-area disaster-reliefcompany that promised to keep his bank online if ever his central computers went down. Now the decision seemed wise. As he had done in advance of past storms, he had his people make four backup tapes of the bank’s computer files so they had up-to-date depositor records. One he sent to a Liberty branch in Baton Rouge, another he sent to a Jackson branch. The other two were with a pair of bank employees who had evacuated the area. Let people make fun, but a cautious streak had him creating backup plans for his backup plans. “Without those tapes,” he said, “I’m dead in the water.”
    MCDONALD’S WIFE, RHESA, WAS also out of the house early that Sunday morning. She had wanted to leave town rather than ride out the storm at the Hyatt, but her