The Digital Journalist
© Ted Jackson/The New Orleans Times Picayune
"WE'RE ALL SAINTS" Clifford Coates, 23, made his bed on the 50-yard line, smack in the middle of the Saints' fleur-de-lis logo. "I picked this spot because, in this situation, we're all saints," he said. Just to his left was a family lying quietly on the carpet. The woman told me she was terrified of having to leave the dome. She had heard the rumors of bodies floating in the streets and the civil unrest. She was from the Lower Ninth Ward and kept shaking her head saying, "They dynamited the levee on us again." She and many others were convinced that authorities had sabotaged the industrial canal levee and flooded the Lower Ninth and Chalmette in order to save the city just as they had in the 1927 Mississippi River flood. Most people knew it had happened before, and now they thought it had happened again. "Do you really believe that's true," I asked. "Yes," she replied quickly. "You know that the 17th Street Canal broke too and that Lakeview (the affluent area) was under water also, don't you?" I asked. "It is really?" her eyes lighting up. "OK, I feel better now."