And in fact, people had gotten kind of lax in preparing for storms, because we had some false alarms where people would leave, and then they would come back, rake up a few leaves and it just was kind of a non-event. So people were a little lax, I think, because we had had so many close calls that really didn’t hit and so I don’t think people took it as seriously until the mayor and the governor and a lot of other people got on TV and said, “We’ve been told by the National Weather Service that this is going to be bad.”

Shawn: Do you remember the moment when you finally realized that this was a serious event that was nothing like the city had seen before, and knowing that you were going to be at the center of it?

Robert: I got a phone call from Terry Lisotta, who was at that time running Louisiana Citizens Property Insurance Corp. He lived in St. Bernard Parish and he told me, “St. Bernard is under about 12 feet of water.”

Then you’d start to hear reports about levees and whether they were failing or overtopping, but nobody was really sure, but water was starting to flood into the city. It was pretty immediate, and then you started seeing some of the first helicopter pictures where they were flying over the New Orleans Marina and showed the Southern Yacht Club on fire and just burning to the waterline. You started to get reports bit by bit.

Above: Floodwaters from Hurricane Katrina pour through a levee along Inner Harbor Navigaional Canal near downtown New Orleans on Aug. 30, 2005, a day after Katrina passed through the city. (AP Photo/Pool, Vincent Laforet)

A resident is rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard from the roof top of a home in New Orleans on Aug. 30, 2005. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

Shawn: A lot of the people I’ve talked to about that time credit you as being the one who was the anchor, the one who was able to marshal the troops and be that calm focus in the center of everything. Do you remember the whole process that you went through to keep it together for everybody else?

Robert: Yes. I called my senior staff and I said, “Right now they’re in the rescue phase, but we’re going to be the most important part of the recovery phase, because that’s where the money is coming from. The federal government is going to put up some, but the insurance industry is going to put up most of the money that’s going to rebuild the city of New Orleans and we need to be there to help make that go smoothly.”

We actually came in [to work] right away. We had generators. We managed to get the word out and asked our employees — even though most of the employees were being told to stay home — if they could come in, and they did. I was amazed. They all showed up, they all were ready to go.

We sat down and had several meetings where we just kind of discussed, what are we going to do? We can’t get overrun on the phones. We’re going to have tens of thousands of phone calls a day or maybe a week. We didn’t know, quite frankly.

We started immediately and set up a phone system and a phone line. We actually had an overrun system. We bought a phone bank in another state in case our line did become overrun; I didn’t want people put on hold forever, so we made sure that that wouldn’t happen to people because that would’ve been just aggravation upon aggravation for callers.

My staff was working seven days a week, 12-hour days after Katrina, taking phone calls from people. One of the things that we talked about that we did not want to do was tell people, “We know what you’re going through,” because until you’ve lost everything you own in a single day, I don’t think you can really understand what that’s like.

We worked 12-hour days all the way probably through New Year’s; we found that the most phone calls we ever got was the Monday after Thanksgiving, and that’s because families got together and started talking about their insurance settlements. So our peak call time was the Monday after Thanksgiving. That’s the one time that we did get our phones overrun and we actually had to use the backup system, the Monday after Thanksgiving. It was rewarding to see people helping their fellow citizens and not minding it.

Shawn: How did carriers then come into the picture?

Robert: We needed to communicate with the industry. So what we decided to do was, we wanted to have a meeting [with carrier executives] and have as many people participate as they could, but we knew we couldn’t have it in Louisiana because there were no hotel rooms. So we decided to do it in Atlanta. So the week after Katrina, we had a meeting at the airport Hilton in Atlanta, Ga., and it was an amazing turnout. I had never seen so many people.

Wooley speaks about communications as he addresses a hurricane emergency insurance summit in Atlanta on Sept. 7, 2005. Wooley urged insurance officials in states affected by Hurricane Katrina to be quick to respond to people's needs and discussed a proposed plan to help to the storm's victims. (AP Photo/Ric Feld)

I didn’t want to just start putting out [public] edicts that looked like I was helping people, when in fact, there were things that the industry couldn’t do administratively. It would be impossible for them to do. So I wanted input from the industry to make sure that, if we tell you this is what we need you to do, we know it’s going to be a hardship, but can you do it, and will it make a difference in your business, and can it help your constituents?

We had a great meeting; it lasted all day. Everybody was able to provide input and the biggest thing that came out of that, we learned how to communicate with each other, because — I forget how many people were there, but it was several hundred.

A lot of [insurance industry] people might have the same questions for us, so if they started calling into the office, it would have been impossible to deal with. So we selected four or five trade associations that most everyone belonged to, and gave them the answers to a lot of the types of questions we anticipated. It made a huge difference, because just in the first few days we saw that we could have quickly become overrun by being asked the same questions over and over again.

The other thing that we did that I thought made a tremendous difference was, we asked the top 10 insurance carriers to send us a senior claims person to live in Baton Rouge and to come to our office every day that my staff was there working the 12-hour days and they committed to doing that. What that did was, instead of us having to call an 800 number, we quickly found that we would get the same call about the same company six or seven times.

So when that would happen, my folks would come out of the room where they were taking the phone calls, and walk across the hall to the company who had their representative there and say, “Hey, we just got eight calls in the last hour with the same issue. Something’s broken in your system, can you figure out how to fix it?” It made a tremendous difference. You could see things start flowing smoother, the number of calls would drop and it really worked well. It was a great thing that we did.

Shawn: I want to talk about some of the high-level decisions that had to be made in the aftermath of the storm, some of the hard questions that had to be asked about certain areas that would never be the same again.

Robert: There were a lot of issues that people didn’t anticipate, such as, what if some people didn’t come back? We knew there were going to be people that wouldn’t come back that moved to Baton Rouge, maybe moved to Houston or another state, and they probably weren’t going to come back and rebuild. They were going to take whatever money they could and start a new life somewhere else. So were enough people going to come back [to a particularly hard-hit area] to, say, bring back utilities to a certain neighborhood. Because if you’re only going to have one person come back in a neighborhood, then would it really be worth it to do that?

A foundation of a former structure is seen with new construction in the background in the Lower 9th Ward in New Orleans. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

The government started to have to think about those things. We thought that there might be massive demolitions in St. Bernard Parish. We found out that the hurricane cleanup crews used a grid system, and they would systematically clean up areas. We wanted to do that with adjusters in St. Bernard Parish, so we got the industry on the phone and we said, “Look, there might be mass demolitions in St. Bernard Parish because of the extent of the flooding. So what we would like to do is just make sure that we’re not just sending adjusters all over the area, if we can [instead] do it in a systematic way.”

So we set up a grid map, and every week we gave the targets on the grid map that we wanted the industry to send in their adjusters and start the adjustment process so that we could move systematically through St. Bernard Parish, in case we did have to do that. Now we didn’t end up having to do that, but at the time we weren’t sure.

So there were a lot of things like that that the government had never dealt with before, individuals had never dealt with before, and so it was a learning experience for everyone.

In Part 2 of this interview, former commissioner Wooley discusses some of the more unusual sights he witnessed in Katrina’s aftermath, helping insureds find solace in the face of disaster, and where New Orleans stands a decade after the hurricane.