Ex-Mayor Nagin Paints Himself As Hero In New Memoir

a brief rain shower to cool the people packed for days into the Superdome after the hurricane, preventing a potential riot, he said.

Many of Nagin’s claims are startling to those who stayed through the storm and were involved in the decisions he claims to have made.

The ex-mayor, who has set up a business in disaster consulting, writes that he urged everyone to leave the city before the storm hit. He also asked churches and neighbors to take those who were sick or could not afford to evacuate. And finally he provided city buses to take people to the Superdome — the so-called shelter of last resort.

The city ”planned for food and water to sustain up to twenty-five thousand sheltered people for three days,” Nagin writes.

But Doug Thornton, vice president of SMG, the company that manages the Superdome, said there were no plans before the storm to use the stadium as a general shelter. It could be used, he said, to house people with medical needs.

”On the Saturday night before Katrina we got the official notice that he was thinking of opening the Superdome as a shelter for the general population,” Thornton said. The storm hit before dawn that Monday.

Thornton said he had called Nagin’s CEO, Charles Rice, in January 2005 to propose storing portable toilets, cots and other supplies, as well as raising the generator to protect it from flooding. He said he got only an informal reply saying there was no money.

Nagin also claims that an effort by some residents to leave the city by walking over the Mississippi River Bridge and out through Jefferson Parish, only to be rebuffed by gun-wielding police, was actually part of a ”freedom march” designed to go to the governor’s mansion in Baton Rouge to call attention to the city’s plight.

Nagin said he and Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, who was brought in to oversee the post-Katrina evacuations and clean up, planned the march only to have it stymied when Blanco’s office leaked word of it to parish officials. However, Honore said he recalled no such conversation.

”The only discussion I remember was about having the people march through a shopping center to reach the buses,” Honore said. ”Anything else was never on my scope.”

Nagin writes that Blanco did not quickly respond to his requests because she wanted revenge for him backing her opponent during the election, and that she was engaged in a power struggle with the president.

Nagin also singles out President Bush’s post-storm speech from Jackson Square, saying he was surprised it would be given at night because there was no electricity in the city’s French Quarter neighborhood. But by speech time, the area had been spruced up and well-lit, he said.

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