Douglas Brinkley: Chronicling 'The Great Deluge' (saw FEMA deny aid) [View All]

[Roland99]

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4851087

Fresh Air from WHYY, September 16, 2005 · Historian and author Douglas Brinkley teaches at Tulane University and was displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

He has since returned to New Orleans and begun to document the catastrophe by gathering oral histories -- he hopes to collect as many as 20,000 -- for a book, tentatively titled The Great Deluge.

Brinkley plans to donate all proceeds to the Historic New Orleans Collection, a museum and research center in the city's French Quarter.

If you listen to the interview, you'll hear him saying he saw first-hand several incidences of FEMA turning back aid. If a truck wasn't on their clipboard, it was turned away. Civilians who'd rescued people (some schizophrenic, some in pain, some diabetic, etc.) and brought them to dry land where FEMA officials were located were told that they would be taken to hospitals. He didn't trust the Feds and came back hours later and the same people were still sitting there, unattended to.