It has been 10 years since Hurricane Katrina nearly destroyed the city of New Orleans. The massive hurricane exposed major issues with the city’s infrastructure, left thousands upon thousands of people without any place to stay, destroying their homes and leaving their neighborhoods in ruins. In all, 1,833 people would lose their lives.

In the hours before the storm hit and then after it left — when the levees failed and everything changed — the people who remained in New Orleans streamed toward a place where usually they would go to watch football, the massive structure at the city’s heart, the Superdome.

Over the next several days the Dome would sink into chaos. With limited power, no plumbing, a shredded roof and not nearly enough supplies to deal with 30,000 evacuees, it became a symbol of how unprepared the city and country had been for a storm experts knew could arrive.

Inside the Dome, though, a small group of women and men fought to retain whatever order they could.

This is their story.

Doug and Denise Thornton woke early to drive back to New Orleans. A storm worth worrying about had entered the gulf.

They drove four hours from Bossier City — where Doug, an executive with SMG, managed a facility — back to New Orleans, a lone car on the inbound side of the highway as thousands upon thousands of cars sat in traffic on the outbound lanes. Soon after they arrived, officials enacted contraflow, shutting down all roads leading in and opening up every lane out of the city.

Doug dropped his wife off at their home in the affluent Lakewood South neighborhood of New Orleans, right near the levee at the 17th Street Canal, and drove to the Louisiana Superdome.

As general manager of the facility since 1997, he had been through this several times before. About 850 patients with serious medical conditions — some in hospice care — would arrive to ride out the storm there; most of them from parts of the city not protected by the levee system. SMG opened up the club rooms in the arena, and the city’s health department would send staff to take care of the patients.

That night, around 6 p.m., Thornton got a phone call. It was Mayor Ray Nagin’s office. The National Weather Service was revising its forecast again. This was it. It was going to be the big one. The office asked him if he could open up the Superdome as a refuge of last resort for the city of New Orleans.

By then it was too late for Thornton to call in the staff he’d need to keep it running.

“All of our employees had left town with the mandatory evacuation,” he said.

He made two requests: He’d need a large contingent of National Guardsmen, and a few hours Sunday morning to prepare.

At 10 a.m., the Thorntons headed together to the Superdome. The line to get in was already a quarter-mile long.

The skies darkened, and the wind started to pick up. The smell of the air became humid, tropical. The storm was coming.

Thornton and his skeleton crew — he only had 18 management staff and security officers there, along with the National Guard — had to figure out how to best prepare the building to serve as a shelter. They knew they needed to do a security check before allowing the people inside — they couldn’t risk anyone bringing guns and knives inside the Dome.

At noon, they opened the doors and thousands of New Orleanians started shuffling in, carrying ice chests, kids’ toys, clothes, and whatever belongings they could carry.

Thornton held a status meeting at 5 p.m. with Lt. Col. Doug Mouton, an old friend who had arrived to take command of the 370 National Guard troops at the Superdome.

“I thought it would be two days at most and we’d be out,” said Thornton. “That’s been the history. With Hurricane George, it was 36 to 48 hours. Hurricane Ivan it was less than that. Never did we think we’d be here for nearly a week.”

Roughly 14,000 people were inside now. Thornton’s staff opened up the concourses, allowing people to walk around the arena, stretch their legs, find neighbors and friends who were there as well. Several hundred of Thornton’s part-time employees had shown up as well, unable to evacuate, and he’d placed them in one of the club lounges along with the families of some New Orleans Police Department officers.

By 7 p.m. everyone was inside and had been checked.

They had gotten inside.

They were safe.

The Thorntons woke early to the sound of the wind.

“I remember looking out my window and I could see the rain blowing sideways and the trees bent over,” Doug said. “And just from the sound of the rain and the wind, I said, ‘Look. I’ve been through a lot of hurricanes. This is not normal.’”

He went to his 6 a.m. status meeting with the National Guard and SMG staff, and twenty minutes in the lights flickered off, then back on. They knew what that meant: The Superdome was now running on its backup generator, which could power the lights but not much more.

The building’s air conditioning system would no longer run, nor would the refrigeration system keeping massive amounts of food from spoiling.

Thornton and Mouton were walking away from the meeting when they heard a loud bang. They took off running to the concourse, and saw a nightmare come true – the roof in one section above the field had been torn off by the wind. Water poured onto the field.

Hurricane Katrina had intruded on the last safe place.

By 4:30 p.m., the winds were dying down and Thornton and Mouton went outside and surveyed the building.

It was worse than they imagined.

“There was water pouring in every crevice,” Thornton said. “And we look up and see a metal beam, a massive beam, that had been windblown into the aluminum siding. This is 40 or 50 feet up in the air. And cars were overturned on Poydras Street.”

Because they had lost power and were relying on the generators, a lot of the building’s outlets had ceased to function, meaning many of the machines being used to keep the medical patients safe and alive were failing. They had to find out if they could move these people.

Thornton and Mouton climbed into a Humvee and drove toward the New Orleans Convention Center, dodging debris and navigating through a little standing water down Poydras Street. They found the building in better shape than the Superdome – fewer windows were blown out and the building, unlike the Superdome, had a roof. It was a good option, but one never used. They couldn’t find any vehicles to transport the patients safely.

Everyone would stay in the Superdome.

When they got back to the Dome, they arrived to chaos. The National Guard’s headquarters had flooded, so the entire operation had moved to the Superdome.

While Mouton and Thornton worked to find space for them to operate, two massive, 18-wheeler refrigerated trucks pulled into the loading dock, not far from the door where new arrivals entered the building.

FEMA had sent the trucks to act as a makeshift morgue. A FEMA employee told Thornton and Mouton they expected to find lots of dead bodies, and had decided to bring them here, right next to the place where those left in the city were fighting to live.

Thornton and Mouton unleashed days’ worth of frustration.

“We had a very, let’s just say, heated conversation with one of those guys about where they were positioning those trucks,” said Thornton.

The trucks were moved.

It wasn’t until midnight that things started to settle down. A few blocks away, the strobes inside Charity Hospital flashed. But that was the only light they could see.

“It was the most eerie sight I’ll ever recall in my life. To see all these downtown buildings completely shut down,” Thornton said. “No lights. Nothing.”

The streets were still flooded, perhaps even worse than before. Thornton and Mouton found this odd, but figured the drains in the city had been backed up.

Early the next morning Thornton woke from a fitful sleep, then went out into the hallway outside his office. Mouton was there, walking quickly toward him.

“Have you been outside?” he asked.

“No,” Thornton said.

“You need to go take a look. There’s five feet of water on Poydras Street.”

They would later learn what had happened: Levees at various locations in and around the city had failed, and the pumping stations, overwhelmed with water and damaged by the storm, weren’t working. But Thornton wasn’t thinking about that right then.

“Oh my god,” he said. “The generator.”

The generator was near ground level behind the Superdome, and water was pushing against its exterior door. It also had burned through half of the fuel in the 1,000-gallon tank. A refill was supposed to be on the way that day, but opening the door for the fuel truck would flood the room.

If water engulfed the generator, the building would be cast into complete darkness. No one knew what would happen.

All they could do was try to protect the generator. To do that, they needed to keep it dry. Mouton found out that there were sandbags available on Franklin Avenue in Lakefront. It would be impossible to drive there with the roads in their current state, so Mouton called in Blackhawk helicopters to get them.

Mouton then sent two diesel mechanics from the National Guard down to Thornton, and told them to invent a way to refuel the tank without opening the door that led to the outside.

They worked furiously. The water kept rising outside the exterior door, and was slowly coming in. They tried to use a trash can to create suction around the generator and pump the water out, but that plan failed.

Then, one of the mechanics had an idea: Bypass the tank altogether. They would back the fuel resupply truck up to the door, smash a hole in the wall, and run a line directly from the truck to the generator.

The men found a weak spot in the wall, a metal panel around head height, and punched a hole through it. They found a 50-foot fuel line and screwed it into the reserve tank of the generator, then ran it out to the truck, which was parked in several feet of water outside the exterior door.

Thornton, pacing inside, turned to one of the mechanics.

“Do you think this is going to work?” he asked.

“Hell if I know,” the mechanic said. “But it’s the only shot we got.”

The men hooked up the line, fuel started flowing. It ran into the reserve tank. The generator kept burning. The lights stayed on.

The men had little time to celebrate though — water was still coming in under the door. The Blackhawks had landed on the top parking level of the Superdome, and then the sandbags were driven down to the back door by the generator room. Taking them in through the exterior door would have been quicker, but Thornton couldn’t risk the flood of water if they opened the back door.

So they hoofed it. Thornton recruited off-duty NOPD officers to come grab sandbags and carry them from the parking lot, through the loading dock, and back to the generator room from the inside. It took 17 men several hours to do the job. But it worked.

One crisis had been averted. But inside the Superdome, things were deteriorating rapidly. Temperatures had reached the upper 80s, and the punctured dome at once allowed humidity in and trapped it there. Food rotted inside the hundreds of refrigerators and freezers spread throughout the building; the smell was inescapable. In the bathrooms, every toilet had ceased to function. The water pumps had failed, and without water pumps to the elevated building, they couldn’t maintain water pressure. Every sink was broken.

That afternoon, Mayor Nagin asked to meet with Thornton and Mouton.

“The bad news is it’s going to take us several days to pump the water out of the city even if they can stop the water flow from coming in,” Thornton recalls Nagin saying. “So that means you’re going to have to be here probably another 5 or 6 days.”

Thornton looked him in the eye.

“Mr. Mayor, you’ve got to get these people out of here,” he said. “This place won’t be here in six days.”

The population of the festering, battered dome had gone from 15,000 to 30,000 in a short time as helicopters and vehicles capable of cutting through the water picked up stranded citizens and brought them to the only place left to go in the entire city.

Nagin had no solution. He could only offer supplies.

Nagin told the men to get him a list of supplies they needed, and he would get it from FEMA. Whatever they needed was theirs.

Thornton and Mouton went to work, spending a hour writing up a two-page, handwritten list of everything they needed. They got it to the city and waited for their supplies.

They never came.

That night, NOPD Chief of Police Eddie Compass arrived to see Thornton and Col. Mouton.

“It looks like we can’t stop the levee breaches and we’re being told there could be as much as six to eight feet more of water,” Thornton recalls Compass saying.

“Well,” Thornton replied, “our generator has 10 inches to spare. We can’t spare 6 feet.”

Thornton remembers Compass telling him: “That’s why I wanted to come over here and tell you so that you can get your families out.” Thornton says Compass then told him he was taking his men out of the Superdome, before hugging him and saying he enjoyed working with him all these years.

With that, Compass left.

The men sat in stunned silence. The NOPD was gone. Light was fading fast. The water was still rising.

Thornton finally spoke. “My instincts as a building manager are to evacuate,” he said. “We’ve got about an hour of daylight. We need to get these people into the parking garages, where at least they can get out of the building and into some fresh air.”

They mulled it over. They had no good options. Finally, Mouton spoke.

“Let’s think about that very carefully,” he said. “If we let everybody go into the parking garage then we’re going to lose control of the situation and it could be worse.

“We won’t be able to feed these folks. It’ll be harder to manage them. Plus they’ll be out in the heat.”

Mouton suggested checking the water level every thirty minutes. If it rose, they’d evacuate. For now, they’d monitor. No one had a better plan, so they agreed to go with Mouton’s recommendation.

Inside the Superdome, things were descending further into hell. The air smelled toxic. People had broken up into factions by race, separating into small groups throughout the building that the National Guard struggled to control. A few of these groups wandered the concourse, stealing food and attacking anyone who stood up to them.

The tiny jail cell down in the bowels of the Dome, which they kept for game-day security, was filling up. A man had been caught sexually assaulting a young girl. Reports of other rapes were widespread. Three people died in the Superdome; one apparently jumped off a 50-foot high walkway.

Supplies were running low, and as the National Guard began to ration things like water and diapers the crowd grew incensed and accused them of hoarding goods for their own use.

A violent, free-for-all riot seemed sure to break out with the next bit of bad news.

On Wednesday morning, Mouton and Thornton checked the water first thing. It had barely risen at all – maybe an inch. The chief of police had been given bad information.

“If we had evacuated who knows what would’ve happened” Thornton said. “ saved thousands of lives.”

FEMA reached out that morning: It was sending 400 buses to begin an evacuation. There was a plan. Finally.

Thornton and Mouton just needed to find a way to keep things under control for 20 hours before it could be enacted.

That night a National Guardsman got jumped as he walked through a dark, flooded locker room. His assailant hit him with a metal rod taken from a cot. The guardsman’s gun went off during the confrontation. The bullet went through his own leg.

In response, guardsman put up barbed wire at various areas around the building, protecting themselves from the general population.

There was still no word on when, exactly, the buses would arrive. And food was running short.

Doug Thornton knew he had to get his people out.

That night SMG sent a private helicopter to evacuate the staff and their families. Though leaving in the light of day would be easier, it could also cause hysteria from those left behind in the Dome. They’d evacuate the group in shifts later that night, they decided, taking them west to a helipad at the Lamar Dixon Expo Center in Gonzales, outside Baton Rouge.

They’d leave at midnight.

Denise Thornton was tasked with deciding the order of evacuation. She came up with the list, talked to the dozens of people there, her husband’s employees, people she knew a little bit before the storm and now knew like family.

First went the disabled and the elderly. Then the women and the children. Then the male employees, and, finally, the men who worked security would be the last to leave. Her husband would be on the last helicopter.

The groups went in shifts, sneaking down over to the garage, up the stairs and to the helipad.

At 1:30 in the morning, Denise Thornton walked with her group up to the helipad, out in the open air, and there it was. Her escape out.

Thornton, who’d been cooped up in the Superdome for going on five days, looked down on her city, at the soft waves lapping against the houses in the moonlight. She had heard a lot, from the National Guard, from her husband, from rumors among the employees. She knew the destruction was bad, that water was everywhere. But now, in the moonlight, she finally understood what had happened.

“Just looking out I saw glare of the water,” she said, choking up. “I was able to see how bad it was, even though it was night. The moonlight was shining on the water.”

She paused. “You could see water everywhere.”

For the remainder of that night, it was just Doug Thornton and a few remaining members of his management and security teams.

“We never slept,” he remembers.

The National Guard had pulled back from many parts of the building. They guarded the office where Thornton and his team huddled, but that was about it. Outside, there was anarchy.

And then the next morning, more bad news: The buses had been rerouted and delayed, sent to a highway overpass where people were stranded.

Thornton felt the seconds ticking, each one more dangerous than the last. He needed to start getting people out.

Finally, at 11 a.m., the buses arrived.

The job was far from over; it took two days to get everyone out and onto buses. Many of them boarded without having any idea of where they were headed. Families torn apart by the storm wouldn’t re-connect for months in some cases.

The Superdome was, as far as Thornton was concerned, completely destroyed. The roof had ripped off in sheets. Feces covered the walls of bathrooms. The air conditioning ducts would have mold in them by now.

That would be sorted out soon, Thornton thought, or maybe never at all. There wasn’t much more he could do.

At noon, he boarded a helicopter. On the flight out west, Thornton looked down and saw his home in Lakewood South, as well as the seven feet of water surrounding it. The Superdome was gone. His home was destroyed. He flew on to Gonzales, where his wife was waiting for him.

READ PART TWO.

Isaac Chipps contributed reporting to this story.