Disaster hero terrified as Trump threatens new catastrophe for his tiny town

This town of 22,000 could be the set for Andy of Mayberry, a Norman Rockwell painting of America.

Patrick sports a military haircut befitting his years in the Coast Guard and steel blue eyes that reflect military determination, compassion — and fear. Fear of what could happen to his town.

We filmed Patrick while he watched the videos of bodies floating face down in another small town, in Kerr County, Texas, where the death toll from a flood in July has reached 136 and counting.

Patrick was shaken. Because it’s a horror he knows all too well.

Twenty years ago this month, Coast Guardsman Patrick was one of the first responders sent in after Hurricane Katrina drowned Gulfport and New Orleans. He told me about recovering the bloated bodies of pregnant women — or pieces of pregnant women — out of the water. He tried to pull one corpse from the flood, but the “arm slid off like a chicken wing.”

The horror still haunts him. Because he knows that drownings in Texas were not an act of God. They were an act of Donald Trump. Trump and his DOGE buddies had, just before the Texas flood, cut the heart out of Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA.

The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) slashed one out of three FEMA staff employees just before the Texas flood. The head of FEMA’s National Response Coordination Center, Jeremy Greenberg, whose job was to warn of such floods, was forced out just weeks before the Texas catastrophe. And since the DOGE massacre of April, FEMA’s San Antonio office has had no permanent Warning-Coordination Meteorologist.

Supervisor Patrick needs no reminder of the dangers his town faces. Patrick has two rail lines running through his town. In 2023, trains derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, spilling a deadly toxic cloud over the town. If the chemicals hit the fan in Villa Park, who’s he going to call? Trump has announced he’s planning to close FEMA by this December, leaving emergency response — and its costs — to states and local officials like Patrick.

This reporter, in a prior work life, was on the team that wrote an emergency evacuation plan for the very rich County of Suffolk, Long Island. That plan cost $20 million, which the Richie Rich kids of the Hamptons could afford, but an impossible sum for a town of 22,000.

The Untold Story of the Drowning of New Orleans

All Washed Away: A Greg Palast Investigation. [Now available on YouTube and Substack]

Trump’s fantasy is, ultimately, to privatize emergency evacuation.

Been there. Done that. The privatization of emergency evacuation led to over a thousand Americans floating face down in New Orleans in 2005.

Patrick still has nightmares about those bodies coming apart in his hands after Katrina. That too, was not an act of God. It was an Act of George W. Bush, specifically, the privatization of the New Orleans evacuation plan.

Back in 2006, I did an investigation of the drownings in New Orleans for a program called Democracy Now! hosted by Amy Goodman.

I’m asking you to watch the film of the investigation, All Washed Away, which I’ve just updated with an exposé of the Trump drownings of 2025 — out today for free on YouTube and Substack.

Back in 2005, as I watched the mayhem of those trying to escape New Orleans, I called FEMA to get a copy of the evacuation plan for the city. FEMA, which Bush had just put under the Department of Homeland Security, said the plan was “classified,” a national security secret.

How the f— do you “classify” an evacuation plan and expect people to evacuate?

Our investigation uncovered the truth: there was no real plan because the Bush gang had privatized the evacuation planning, turning it over to a GOP crony who ran a company called, Innovative Emergency Management (IEM).

When I went to IEM’s offices in Baton Rouge, the company officers literally hid from me. They hid because they knew that I knew they had NO PLAN to evacuate 127,000 residents who did not have cars. They were left to drown.

In our film, I talk to Stephen Smith, who had no car, no way out and couldn’t swim. Nevertheless, Smith floated on a mattress, pulling survivors from rooftops. He told me how Bush’s helicopters flew over the bridge where Black folk were stranded for days without food nor water. Smith closed the eyes of a man who died after he gave his grandchildren his last bottle of water.

Firing the truth

And the Bush crew knew it would happen because the Director of the Hurricane Center at Louisiana State University blew the whistle. Ivor van Heerden and his experts at LSU had an expert plan to save the city ready to go, but it was ignored so that the politically connected IEM could cash in.

Prof. Van Heerden, when I asked about the effect of rejecting the LSU plan said, “Well, 1,500 people drowned.”

The professor shouldn’t have told me that. The university’s response was to fire him. The pressure came from Chevron Oil Corporation, but that’s a story you’ll have to watch yourself when you watch the film.

IEM, as so many privateers, won its contract through flim-flam, claiming that its team included the Clinton administration’s evacuation expert James Lee Witt. In fact, Mr. Witt had nothing to do with these scoundrels.

I bet you won’t be surprised to learn that IEM has just received a contract with DOGE.

• Patrice Gallagher contributed to this article.