On Sunday, Parish President Aaron Broussard goes on NBC's Meet the Press and declares, only half joking, that Jefferson Parish is seceding from the nation and declaring war on the United States. That, he added, might finally bring the feds in.
"We hadn't heard from anybody," Maestri says. "We all felt abandoned here." One night, Maestri heard Brown say at a press conference that parish heads had not asked for more resources sooner.
"I almost threw a brick through the television set," he says. "We began requesting FEMA assistance a day before the storm."
A suicide, and pain for the police chief
Compass gets one more piece of bad news. Sgt. Paul Accardo, a longtime friend and a public information officer for the department, is found dead in his unmarked car. He had shot himself. Only an hour earlier, Accardo had called Compass. Compass remembers him being extremely distressed and at wits' end, broken up over all the desperate people he had not been able to help in the chaos of Katrina's aftermath.
Compass told him to take some time off.
"It tore me up," says Compass (who later cried when Dr. Phil [McGraw] came to counsel him).
A prediction: fundamental alterations
"The storm will change the geography and the socioeconomic makeup of the state forever," says emergency preparedness spokesman Smith. "Large parts of New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish will have to be taken to dirt. And some of those areas may never be rebuilt, depending on what the flood plain managers say."
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