Laura Wright Urban Legends
Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast of the United States in late August 2005, becoming one of the most destructive natural disasters in American history.
Communities across Louisiana and Mississippi were devastated. New Orleans suffered catastrophic flooding after failures in its hurricane protection system, while thousands of people were displaced throughout the region.
In the confusion that followed, another phenomenon began spreading almost as quickly as news of the disaster itself.
Rumors.
Photographs appeared online showing enormous storm clouds supposedly approaching New Orleans. Stories circulated about sharks and alligators swimming through flooded neighborhoods. Dangerous prisoners were said to be roaming the streets. The floodwater was described as a poisonous chemical soup that might leave parts of the city uninhabitable for years.
Some stories were easily disproved.
Others contained just enough truth to survive.
The Photographs of Katrina
Soon after Katrina, dramatic photographs began circulating through email and online forums.
Many supposedly showed the hurricane approaching the Gulf Coast as enormous walls of black clouds and terrifying storm formations.
The photographs themselves were often genuine.
Their descriptions were not.
Several were photographs of completely different storms taken at other places and times. As they passed from one person to another, however, they became photographs of Katrina.
Other manipulated images appeared as well, including photographs supposedly showing President George W. Bush and former President George H. W. Bush fishing in the flooded streets while victims struggled nearby.
Those images were fabricated.
But another extraordinary photograph wasn’t.
The Giant New Orleans Crocodile
One widely circulated image showed an enormous crocodile lying in the bed of a truck.
According to accompanying messages, the sixteen-foot animal had been captured in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.
The photograph was real.
The crocodile was real.
It simply wasn’t from New Orleans.
The animal had been captured in the Republic of the Congo in 2003, approximately two years before Katrina. As the photograph circulated, the crocodile was sometimes transformed into a giant Louisiana alligator.
The image fit the Katrina landscape almost too perfectly.
Floodwater had covered entire neighborhoods.
Louisiana had plenty of alligators.
It wasn’t difficult to imagine what might have entered the city along with the water.
Soon, the reptiles became considerably more dangerous.
Alligators Feeding on the Dead
Stories circulated that alligators were swimming through flooded neighborhoods and feeding upon hurricane victims.
Then came the sharks.
According to some accounts, enormous great white sharks had entered the flooded portions of New Orleans and were attacking people.
The image was horrifying.
It was also greatly exaggerated.
There was, however, an interesting detail buried inside the legend.
A small shark really was reportedly seen swimming in a flooded area.
One small shark was a long way from packs of man-eating great whites.
But legends rarely require much to begin.
One shark becomes several.
Several become enormous.
And before long, they are hunting people through the streets of New Orleans.
The Escaped Prisoners
Another rumor warned that dangerous criminals had escaped during the disaster.
Convicts were supposedly roaming New Orleans.
Some stories specifically warned about murderers and sex offenders who had escaped during evacuations.
With law enforcement overwhelmed and communications disrupted, the stories were frighteningly plausible.
The widespread alarm surrounding these claims, however, was never substantiated to the degree suggested by the rumors.
Like so many Katrina legends, the story flourished in the absence of reliable information.
Nobody knew exactly what was happening.
That uncertainty left plenty of room for imagination.
The Toxic Soup
The floodwater covering New Orleans quickly acquired an ominous nickname:
The toxic soup.
The water was unquestionably contaminated.
Floodwater mixed with sewage, bacteria, petroleum products, household chemicals, debris and other pollutants.
Anyone entering it faced genuine health risks.
But the rumors went considerably further.
Some claimed the contamination was so severe that large areas would remain poisoned and uninhabitable for years.
The reality was less apocalyptic. The water was filthy and potentially hazardous, but the extreme predictions surrounding its toxicity proved exaggerated.
The legend had again taken something real and enlarged it.
Al Gore and the Airlift
Not every extraordinary Katrina story was false.
One rumor claimed former Vice President Al Gore had helped arrange the evacuation of hospital patients from New Orleans.
The story had an unusual personal connection.
Gore’s son had previously been seriously injured in an automobile accident and treated by neurosurgeon Dr. David Kline of Charity Hospital.
During Katrina, Kline alerted Gore to the increasingly desperate situation.
Gore helped arrange and partially finance aircraft used in the evacuation effort. A total of approximately 270 patients were evacuated by air on September 3 and 4, with groups transported to Tennessee.
It sounded like the sort of embellished story that frequently appears after disasters.
This time, much of the story was true.
Politics and Katrina
Political rumors were inevitable.
One claimed that President George W. Bush had delayed firefighters from helping hurricane victims so that they could participate in a photo opportunity.
The chronology didn’t support the story as it circulated. The photograph associated with the claim was taken on September 2, while the firefighters involved were not dispatched to Louisiana until September 5.
Other political stories circulated with similar speed.
Some were based on misunderstandings.
Others were deliberately fabricated.
But political anger surrounding the response to Katrina was very real, making almost any sufficiently outrageous story believable to someone.
Divine Punishment
Then came an explanation considerably older than television, email or the Internet.
Hurricane Katrina had been sent by God.
Some versions claimed New Orleans was being punished because of Southern Decadence, an annual LGBTQ event held in the city.
Others blamed New Orleans’ historic association with Voodoo.
Still others simply declared the city wicked.
The particular sin depended upon the person telling the story.
The explanation itself was ancient.
Human beings have interpreted disasters as supernatural punishment for thousands of years. Floods, earthquakes, epidemics, droughts and storms have repeatedly been viewed as signs of divine anger.
Katrina simply gave an ancient belief a modern setting.
Legends in the Wake of Disaster
Disasters are remarkably fertile ground for folklore.
Normal sources of information disappear.
Telephones stop working.
Electricity fails.
Officials contradict one another.
People become frightened.
Someone hears something from a rescue worker.
A neighbor heard something from a police officer.
A relative knows someone trapped inside the city.
The story travels.
Details change.
And eventually nobody remembers where it began.
Katrina created almost perfect conditions for this process.
Some of the resulting stories were absurd.
Some were malicious.
Some were misunderstandings.
Others contained fragments of genuine events.
That last category is often the most interesting.
There really was contaminated floodwater.
There really were dangerous animals in Louisiana.
There really were desperate evacuations.
And apparently, somewhere in all that water, there really was a shark.
Hurricane Katrina and Her Legends
The legends surrounding Katrina reveal something peculiar about catastrophe.
When something enormous and frightening happens, facts alone rarely seem sufficient.
People create explanations.
They find villains.
They search for signs.
They exaggerate dangers.
They repeat stories because the stories make chaos easier to understand.
A photograph from another storm becomes Katrina.
An African crocodile becomes a Louisiana alligator.
A small shark becomes a school of man-eaters.
Dirty floodwater becomes an apocalyptic poison.
And an enormous hurricane becomes divine judgment.
Most of these stories can be explained.
Some can be disproved.
Others occupy the murkier territory between rumor and fact, beginning with something that really happened before acquiring details that never did.
Perhaps that is why disaster legends endure.
Long after the water recedes and the buildings are repaired, people continue telling stories about what they heard happened during those strange days when the ordinary world seemed to have disappeared.
And sometimes, buried beneath all the exaggeration, there remains one small detail that turns out to be true.
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