Eddie Compass thinks Brian Willams's Katrina stories were bullshit

Eddie Compass and Ray Nagin weren't the only people making up bullshit stories about the chaos in New Orleans after Katrina. Turns out Brian Williams was doing it as well.  It's good to know that in times of crisis you can rely on the Mayor, the Chief of Police and the national media to remain level-headed.

There were definitely helicopters shot down in Iraq.  Not Brian Williams's helicopter, though.  There were also definitely bodies floating in the water in New Orleans.  Brian Williams probably didn't see any.

In a 2006 interview with former Disney CEO Michael Eisner, Williams said he witnessed a body floating in the French Quarter area of the city. "When you look out of your hotel window in the French Quarter and watch a man float by face down, when you see bodies that you last saw in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, and swore to yourself that you would never see in your country," Williams told Eisner, who suggested in the interview that Williams emerged from former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw's shadow with his Katrina coverage.

Citing former city health director Brobson Lutz, the Advocate reported that the French Quarter was largely dry. "We were never wet. It was never wet," Lutz told the Advocate.

Now that we have Dr. Lutz and Sean Payton's combined record of where "it used to be wet," we can finally start mapping that.  Keep in mind, though, that this map would differ from any record of where the floodwaters actually were. It turns out that, even though Dr. Lutz was in the quarter himself at the time, he's not most reliable source on this. There really was some water near Williams's hotel.  Not a tremendous amount, but definitely some. 

Still, it's unlikely there were bodies floating in that few feet of water. At least not within Williams's view.  Had there been, Lutz would have paid them to wait in line at Galatoire's anyway.