Ritz-Carlton Hotel Manager During Katrina Says Brian Williams 'Misremembered' Basically Everything...

Washington Post
Feb. 10, 2015

What's so funny about this story beyond the obvious is there is no question everyone who worked on the show and knew this man must have known he was a pathological liar, yet no one took any steps to replace him. - Chris, InfoLibIn August of 2005, as Hurricane Katrina approached the Gulf Coast, a seasoned hotel manager realized she needed to think fast. As the general manager of a mammoth Ritz-Carlton at the edge of the French Quarter in New Orleans, Myra DeGersdorff was in charge of more than 1,200 people. She needed to batten down the hatches. She needed security. She needed doctors. Anything, she thought, could happen.

The storm was worse than anyone expected. But DeGersdorff was ready. She enlisted a number of local cops to stay in a half-dozen of the hotel’s 452 rooms, and at any given moment there were at least “six or seven” officers on hand. She dispatched a team of “strong, tall” employees to barricade the exits with king-sized mattresses, and to “make sure those doors stayed locked,” she recalled in a telephone interview with The Washington Post. And she had set up an impromptu “MASH unit,” stocked with medicine from a nearby Walgreens and manned by more than a dozen doctors.

The preparation paid off. Though the hotel was packed, everyone there made it through one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history in one piece. And the very next year, in 2006, the company’s corporate office gave DeGersdorff the Ritz-Carlton President’s Award.

That’s why DeGersdorff was surprised to flip on the news this week and see a perplexing story about NBC News anchor Brian Williams and the hotel she once managed. His recollection of what happened there didn’t match hers. In interviews that surfaced over the past week that she had never seen, Williams said the hotel was anything but secure. In fact, he told Tom Brokaw last summer, gangs had “overrun” the place. He spoke of seeing a dead body floating past the hotel. Williams also once told a book author that he got dysentery during Katrina. During his stay at the hotel, he said he declined an IV and then “had no medicine, nothing.”

DeGersdorff, now a resident of Scottsdale, Ariz., was confused. She said there was more than enough medicine and doctors in the MASH unit.

“Maybe he misremembered,” she told The Post of Williams’s claims. “I’m not going to judge him, because it was such an unpleasant week and there were times to be concerned. … And when there is that kind of concern, you can misremember. And maybe he was out there, and it wasn’t impossible he could have encountered a body, but I don’t think it was in the French Quarter. The French Quarter only got inches” of flooding.

Read More













All original InformationLiberation articles CC 4.0



About - Privacy Policy