Disaster met with generosity and pragmatism
as a businessman running energy and construction companies. White, a Democrat, had been mayor of Houston since January of 2004. He had been raised in San Antonio. His father was a leader in registering Mexican Americans to vote. Fighting to eliminate poll taxes and a staunch advocate of “one man, one vote,” White went to the state Senate as a page when he was 13 years old. “We did voter registration drives, in the west side of San Antonio,” White said. “That got me started. By 1975, I was legislative assistant to a U.S. congressman.”
White was obsessed with studying energyconsumption issues. Atrue “wonder boy,” when the OPECembargo of 1973 hit, White, not yet 20, headed to Washington, D.C., to write energy legislation pertaining to fuel efficiency standards and strategic petroleum reserves. Upon graduating from the University of Texas School of Law in 1979, White remained in Texas and opened a public interest law firm in Houston. His reputation soared, and he was admired by Democrats and Republicans alike. Along the way, he became heavily involved in the oil business. Short, bookish and soft spoken, with big ears and a Howdy Doody grin, White was the antithesis of a Texas cowboy; everything about him spoke of Georgetown salons and Cambridge think tanks. Married with three children, White taught Sunday school at St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in Houston and attended, seemingly, every social event in town.
What differentiated White from most other politicians of his generation was his nonpartisan nature. Like Perry, White responded to Katrina with pragmatic generosity. Both intended to accommodate the refugees of the storm, but to do so in an organized way that would be accountable financially as well as socially. In opening Reliant Park — the convention, sports and entertainment complex consisting of the stadium, center, Astrodome and arena — for the evacuees, Perry and White were undaunted by the fact that the Superdome had deteriorated under a similar weight of people. Acatering company was engaged at Reliant Park to serve three hot buffet meals per day. Medical personnel began to set up stations to screen for those who needed hospital treatment. The Red Cross arranged for cots and extra toilet facilities. Metropolitan buses were put on a schedule to ferry people to shopping malls, parks and other sites around the city. According to this plan, Reliant Park was projected to be a temporary stop, until more permanent housing became available; if necessary, though, it could handle evacuees for up to 90 days. At the same time, Perry made sure that Texas schools prepared to receive children displaced by the storm. “No community is equipped for such an enterprise,” White later recalled. “It’s just a reality we had Americans in need and we were the closest urban area with the capacity.”
The civil-spirited candoism of Perry, White and the entire city of Houston was a high watermark in the post Katrina miasma that had struck the Gulf South. In particular, I remember being uplifted by the saga of Jabbar Gibson, a 20-year-old AfricanAmerican from New Orleans who borrowed an abandoned school bus (No. 0235), loaded it up with des- perate storm victims, and drove from the Big Easy to Houston. Gibson didn’t even know how to shift the bus gears. Texas police were warned that a “renegade bus” was on the way to Houston. At midnight on Aug. 31, Gibson pulled up to the Astrodome — the first evacuation bus to arrive. The fact that a high school dropout found a workable bus when none of the city of New Orleans officials could become the stuff of postKatrina legend. Houston got it done
It was Harris Country Judge Robert Eckels, the county’s chief executive, who was on hand at the Astrodome greeting Gibson when he arrived. At the request of Jack Colley, the Texas governor’s Emergency Management director, Eckels had gotten Reliant Park ready for the Louisiana evacuees. “We don’t need 2,000 beds like we thought,” Colley had telephoned him. “Wehave 23,750 and we’re going to evacuate the Superdome and transfer them to the Astrodome. Can you do it?” The idea of saying no never crossed Eckel’s mind. ATexas Republican, the judge, whose father had been a Harris County commissioner, was best known for promoting a highspeed-light-rail system between Houston, Dallas, Austin and San Antonio.
Although Harris County had a reputation for cowboys, as everything branded Texas did, in truth, Harris County was only 50 percent Anglo. “Wehave a huge Hispanic population, a large AfricanAmerican population, and the largest Asian population in this part of the country,” Eckels said. “We have more consulates than Los Angeles. The port anchors a lot of that. What we have focused on, more than diversity, is the commonality, the things that bring us together. Weunderstand that there’s more that unites us than divides us as a community.”
When Gibson pulled up to the Astrodome, Eckels welcomed the baby-faced hero to Harris County. It was an odd moment, the first of the many buses the judge would greet. “Gibson just jumped in the bus and drove,” Eckels said. “He just grabbed a bus and drove here, picked up people on the highway and drove them to Houston. That was the first bus. We had other people showing up. He got off the bus and people saw him and asked, ‘Where’s the driver? We need to park this.’ And he was like, ‘What do you mean? I drove it.’”
Eckels claimed that in the end none of the Superdome evacuees were problematic. In fact, he thought the reports out of New Orleans were exaggerated. The people he encountered at Reliant Park were bedraggled and scared. There wasn’t even a scent of violence about them. “All day we were getting ugly reports from the Superdome,” Eckels said. “Governor Blanco called me and said, ‘There are criminal-type people; there have been a lot of problems in the Superdome. You need to be ready for it.’ What we found was just the opposite. The people that got here were tired; they were in poor physical condition. They had been without food or water for several days, picked off the roofs of their houses or from a bridge. They had a long bus ride, some of them 12 hours or longer coming from New Orleans. But they were nice, courteous, no problem at all really. We made sure 2,700 doctors came to see them from medical centers all over the country.”
Houston proudly embraced Americans in need with corporate efficiency and down-home openheartedness. As America laments the 1,833 deaths of Katrina and an estimated $108 billion in damages on the 10th anniversary of the storm, it’s worth remembering that Texas — and particularly Houston — showed the world what good governance and good Samaritanism were all about. If only Louisiana had listened to Berger. Brinkley is a professor of history at Rice University. This article is adapted from his award-winning book, “The Great Deluge: New Orleans, Katrina and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.”