Doug Thornton Quotations

I think the image of New Orleans that America had was that image of the damaged roof. It was very, very important to us not only from the operations side to get the roof temporarily repaired, but symbolically. ... It shows we are making progress.

If everything goes well, we will have the dome football-ready in November. The seating areas, locker rooms and press box will be ready and up to NFL standards.

It's unbelievable. All these big oak trees are just uprooted, everything is brown and the waterline is up to 7 feet on the house. It's like somebody dropped a nuclear weapon and just killed everything. There's not any sign of life. There's no greenery. It's bizarre. It's the weirdest thing I've ever seen in my life.

I'm a little more encouraged after walking through it a second time.

I don't get that. What was that all about?

We don't expect to take any water. But we wanted them up higher in case.

It's very early at this point to speculate about the future of the Dome and whether it can be repaired.

We were down to an hour-and-a-half of fuel.

One guy asked me why we wouldn't just want to tear down the Dome because it harbors so many bad memories of the storm, but we had 30 years of good memories here before the hurricane. It could be a symbol for the rebuilding of New Orleans, something people could rally around.

If you were to walk through it now you would say it's not that bad and could possibly be repaired.