Only a game? Not to this man
Doug Thornton could have abandoned the Superdome -- and the desperate people in it -- during Hurricane Katrina, but he stayed until everyone was out
But as the regional director for SMG, the company that manages the big white mushroom in New Orleans, he felt obligated to stay at the helm.
On Sunday, Aug. 28, 2005, the night before the monstrous hurricane struck land, Thornton slept on the floor of his office. His wife stayed with him.
''I would have left if it weren't my job,'' Thornton says. ''It was optional.''
But citizens were piling into the vast indoor arena, home to the Saints, as winds built and chances for leaving town disappeared.
The cylindrical structure, with its 27-story-tall ceiling and its 10-acre roof, had been declared a ''refuge of last resort'' by authorities, meaning it was there for those who could go no further.
To abandon the building and the terrified evacuees to emergency workers and the National Guard didn't seem right to Thornton.
''They were telling us to expect 3,000 dead to be brought here,'' he says, speaking Friday from his office in the rebuilt Superdome. ''To be kept in refrigerated morgues, 18-wheelers. Thank God, that didn't happen.''
Indeed, at the start, things seemed to be working smoothly. The Superdome had been a refuge in 1998, when 14,000 people went there for safety from Hurricane George, and in 2004, when 1,000 people sought shelter from Hurricane Ivan, which narrowly missed the city.
There was strategy, protocol in place. There was electricity, the air conditioning was on, water pressure was fine, the toilets worked.
''Then at 6 a.m. Monday morning, I got up and walked down a hallway, and the lights went out,'' Thornton says. ''The storm is raging. There is an awful sound.''
That sound would increase as the fury of the storm built, and it soon was joined by a more terrifying noise, a low rumbling of otherworldly proportion.
''It was the roof coming unglued, ripping bolts from the steel structure,'' Thornton says. ''The roof was peeling back. I look, and I see that water is starting to fall onto the middle of the field, like raindrops, as the water penetrates the screw holes. It's raining indoors. The wind is coming in, and there is an uplift out the other side. There are parts where the water is gushing in.''
Thornton and his skeleton crew moved evacuees from the lower bowl into the concourses and hallways to avoid falling debris.
The stairways were a problem because they were flooded like ''cascading waterfalls.''
Only the emergency lights were on. There was no cooling, no refrigeration, no recharging, no plumbing.
Thornton wouldn't leave the building for five days, and 30,000 desperate people would come to the Superdome for help during that time.
It was a touch of Hades on earth -- hot, dark, crowded and fetid, with tales of crime and deviance leaking out like noxious fumes.
Thornton, a devout optimist, says that image is wrong, that ''98 percent of the people were plain, hardworking, decent citizens.''
They volunteered for work, he says. They helped the sick.
''We had a suicide, three overdoses, some natural deaths,'' he says. ''Ten people total. None by violence.''
The scariest thing Thornton saw was a man trying to steal a National Guardsman's gun. The gun went off, putting a hole in the soldier's leg.
''I walked right into it,'' Thornton says.
But it was resolved, and no one died.
On Saturday, Thornton flew to Chicago, to be here to watch his beloved Saints battle the Bears. It is just a funny coincidence that SMG also manages Soldier Field, a coincidence that makes Thornton wonder about these things.
I have told him about my trip to New Orleans two weeks after Katrina, when it was still a ghost town. How the lightless, empty, destroyed city freaked me out.
''I know what you mean,'' he says. ''It was surreal.''
But for him, there was a moment when it descended even further.
Thornton was the last civilian to leave the Superdome, doing so on a helicopter Sept. 1.
His house was across from the 17th Street canal, 3½ miles west, and he asked the pilot to fly as close to his neighborhood as he could.
''I looked back and saw the beaten and battered roof of the Superdome for the first time,'' he says. ''I saw smoke billowing from random fires. I hadn't slept for two days. It was hot and miserable, and I was nearly delirious. I saw 10 feet of water on my street, glistening water stretching all the way from my house to the Superdome. And I broke down.''
Thornton recovered.
Against all odds, the Superdome recovered, too.
It was rebuilt, along with New Orleans' hope.
And they say this is just a game.
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