Entries from August 1, 2006 - September 1, 2006
Thursday, September 1, 2005
Friday, September 1, 2006 at 01:22PM
After watching the news and reading the paper from front to back, I concluded that all I had left to hope for in my own little world was that the water in our house had not gotten high enough to flood out my car, or if that was gone, maybe the upper shelves of my book collection had survived. If all else failed, at least I could count on whatever garbage was left in our attic. (I would lose that too.)
We got in touch with my wife's family again. They had moved out of the emergency shelter at the elementary school and were now set up in an apartment near the Louisiana State University campus. We arranged to see them that afternoon.
In the meantime, we took a ride around Baton Rouge. The city was certainly not the sleepy midsize Southern town it had been only a week ago. Although Houston eventually got credit as being the destination for the largest number of evacuees, Baton Rouge undoubtedly took in the most in proportion to its population. Baton Rouge was a town of about 600,000 people prior to the storm, and accepted almost 250,000 evacuees. The city groaned under the burden.
After the storm Baton Rouge teemed with rumors about violent refugees. On Thursday morning a story spread that New Orleans hoodlums were roaming downtown Baton Rouge mugging and looting. This rumor induced many downtown businesses to tighten security and restrict visitors, or even close down completely. My cousin's office was ordered "locked down" by his managers, meaning no one was allowed in or out of the building until the business day was over. As we would learn in the coming weeks, these reports were completely false, but in a city where every third resident was an evacuee, it was easy for such talk to take wings.
Poor Baton Rouge was also an agony of gridlock. Traffic backed up in every direction. People from New Orleans crowded every store parking lot and anywhere it was rumored FEMA or the Red Cross had an office. (FEMA had responded to the disaster by commandeering an entire floor of a Baton Rouge hotel and kicking the evacuees there out on the street — and no, I did not make that up.) There was nowhere to go, but everyone seemed to be trying to get there, 24 hours a day.
Evacuees rushed to the open gas stations, sucking them dry. Before long it was impossible to get a tank of gas without a 30 minute wait. As is often true in such situations, shortage nudged everyone with less than 3/4ths of a tank to queue up to top off their supply just in case. This of course only served to make a bad thing worse.
Everyone was shopping. In the stores there were two types of patrons, the Baton Rouge residents trying to look collected as they worried about the fate of their overrun city, and lost-looking New Orleanians who wanted to buy everything to replace their losses but realized as they bought that they had nowhere to put their new stuff.
There was tension. Baton Rouge and New Orleans are only about 75 miles apart, but they are not very much alike. Baton Rouge is a typical deep southern town, with all the good and bad that comes with that. Easygoing style, unsophisticated and cordial, bad schools, strong moral compass, religious, patriotic, poor, blue collar, country music, relatively segregated. It is a place that is traditional and mainstream America.
New Orleans is very different. It is a city that was born under a foreign flag and had every intention of living out that foreign past as long as it possibly could. Something about New Orleans loves the past, loves it so much that it prefer nothing better than to wake up one morning to the sound of the hooves of horses in the dirt streets, realize it was once again 1880, and bound out of bed to take on another yellow fever epidemic.
New Orleans never wanted modernity. Baton Rouge has not quite embraced it, but like much of small-town South, has accepted it. Baton Rouge is traditional. It looks to the past. New Orleans is calcified. It lives in the past.
With these diverging attitudes, the two cities never meshed. John Barry, in his book The Rising Tide , argues that much of this enmity arose after the great Mississippi flood of 1927 when the city of New Orleans elected to flood rural St. Bernard Parish to protect itself from a massive Mississippi flood. The rest of the state resented this New-Orleans-is-more-important
-than-rural-Louisana attitude, and never forgave the city for it. Doubtless this has contributed to the division, but the difference runs deeper. Most people in Baton Rouge think of New Orleans as Sodom. Most New Orleanians think of Baton Rouge as Boring, which in French Quarter parlance is probably a far greater insult. Historically, New Orleans never wanted to be American. Baton Rouge, as the Louisiana capital and the representative of Louisiana to America, never forgave this.
So there we were, heathens in the Bible belt.
The bursting city was a peculiar combination of normality and confusion. In recent years, Baton Rouge has had traffic problems, but nothing it had before could touch this. A jam could occur at dawn, noon, or midnight. The grocery stores were stripped of the essentials, and especially of everything New Orleans, from Cajun seasoning blends to coffee and chicory to Zatarain's gumbo rice. I remember standing in the aisle at a grocery store, looking at an empty shelf set aside for New Orleans hot sauce, and feeling a sense of despair akin to what I felt seeing the barren looted shelves in all the news videos.
The New Orleanians were in town, and they planned on staying for awhile. The State Board of Education was advising people from evacuated areas to enroll their children in school wherever they were. Schools in New Orleans could be closed for an entire year. My aunt ran the kindergarten and preschool at a Catholic school in Baton Rouge; her phone rang constantly as evacuees plied her to get their children on the waiting list. She offered to reserve places for both of our children.
In the afternoon we crossed town to visit my wife's mother and sister at their apartment near LSU. They were in a run-down neighborhood full of rentals for struggling college students. It was a weary rather than emotional reunion. Our children were happy to see their cousins again, but mostly everyone was wondering how long this arrangement could last. My mother-in-law, my sister-in-law and her husband and three children, my wife's aunt, uncle and his sister and their two college-aged children, were all crammed into a 3 bedroom space.
From New Orleans the news continued to worsen. A hotel downtown was burning to the ground, the looting was getting worse, gunshots were heard all over the city and this supposedly was slowing rescue efforts. As if rescue efforts weren't slow enough. FEMA wasted no time kicking people out of hotels. If they could just expend some of that energy clearing out the Convention Center everything would be all right.
Eventually things would either have to hit bottom and then start to improve, or New Orleans would sink into the ground and be covered over with swamp, never to be heard of again. We were just waiting to see which way thinks broke.
At the time I did not feel the sense of outrage over the slow response that was the national mood. I am not certain I can explain why. I was gnawed with anxiety, numbness, depression, but not yet anger. The fate of New Orleans, at this point, seemed a matter of chance. It would be annihilated or not, and it was almost as if no one could do anything about it, or no one cared to. New Orleans was earning its nickname The City That Care Forgot. I no longer believed in the federal government, or the city, or the state. This thing was going to run its course.
One of the troubling news stories of the day: The Army Corps of Engineers (which was responsible for the levee design and for flood control planning in Southeastern Louisiana) kept saying the levees had "overtopped" rather than being breached. This confounded me. I had a professor in medical school who was fond of saying that if you find a dead possum in the road it doesn't matter if it was run over by a car or a truck. In other words, if things go to hell the exact cause not relevant at the moment. The real question is what to do now. The whole overtopping spin was nothing but a lame excuse. Eighty-five percent of the city was underwater, and all the Corp had to say was that the levees had held. At this point in the game, a person of integrity wouldn't care if the levees had held or not. A person who cared would be desperately trying to come up with a plan to pump the city dry.
Months later, the Army Corps would admit that some of the flooding could be attributed to design flaws. (Note the use of the word some.) But often you learn more about what is in a person's heart from his first response to a challenge than from a later, more considered answer.
That night, I logged onto my aunt's internet account to try to find out what was going on with our house. The national and even local news was saying nothing about St. Bernard Parish. Either it was completely gone, or cut off from all communication and being ignored. I suspected the last.
Unfortunately, my aunt only had dial-up access, so finding information was a very slow process. After awhile I came across a public forum at Nola.com where people were posting about St. Bernard. The rumors were grim. Some of them turned out not to be true, but overall they would prove to be much more right than wrong. The posters were saying that the Meraux Food Store near our house had been destroyed by a tornado (true), that a tornado had destroyed the entire back street of our subdivision and nothing remained (that nothing remained is true, but the destruction may have been from the flood surge since this street was flat against the levee), that the water on our street was up to the gutters on the houses (true), that the storm had completely destroyed the Paris Road bridge that provided the main access to St. Bernard from the north (false).
According to the rumor board, the entire Parish Council, which had remained behind at the Parish Civic Center, had to be rescued from the roof of the second floor of that facility by boat and helicopter. This, sadly enough, was also true.
Life in St. Bernard would never again be the same.
To next Katrina Blog Project entry: Friday, September 2, 2005
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Thursday, August 31, 2006 at 02:43PM We devoted Wednesday morning to getting our smashed car window repaired. The dealership was busy, and we waited several hours for the mechanics to finish the job. In the waiting room all the televisions were tuned to Katrina coverage. Unfortunately, as the other customers watched they talked about it with one another, and then with us. It didn't take long for everyone to realize our predicament.
Wednesday was the first day stories leaked out about large numbers of people stranded at the Superdome and the Convention Center. Even more ominously, several major fires were burning around town. Despite the fact that the city was inundated with water, there was no power and no water pressure, which meant that fires were burning uncontrollably. New Orleans, it appeared, may not have been simply severely wounded, it was possibly dying. What was going to stop every remaining building from burning to the ground?
And help seemed to be nowhere. As my wife remarked, every single day looked worse than the day before. We expected Monday to be bad. But we did not expect to see Tuesday worse than Monday, and Wednesday worse than Tuesday. Louisiana Governor Blanco seemed to be calling a press conference every two hours, but nothing was getting done. The whole city was drowning and burning and being looted and no one knew what to do. And if New Orleans was in this kind of shape, I could only imagine what was happening to St. Bernard Parish, which was closer to the eye of the storm. There was no information whatsoever coming out of St. Bernard. Any fool could look at a map of the Gulf Coast and see this hunk of land jutting out into the ocean that Katrina cut directly through. But no one was talking about it, not even in passing. It was as if the place never existed. Maybe it no longer did.
A fellow sitting next to me was angrily talking on the phone. He hung up, and turned to tell me what was going on. He was the director of the YMCA in Tallahassee, and his office was handling a huge influx of calls from evacuees who were trying to find a place to stay. Evacuees were being forced out of their hotel rooms, he said with disgust. The weekend after Katrina was coincidentally the date of the biggest football game of the year, Florida vs. Florida State. The Florida game was a major social event — people had booked hotel rooms in blocks an entire year in advance. Game day was rapidly approaching and some of the hotels were telling Katrina evacuees they had to be out by the weekend. This was creating considerable anxiety.
For the second time in three days we heard someone apologize for Tallahassee. "The people of Tallahassee aren't like this," he said. "This is a nice town. It is outrageous that anyone would put these people out after what they have gone through."
We left town before the game, but I think the people of Tallahassee worked things out. If that guy had anything to do with it, they did.
We were finally ready to leave by about 2 o'clock. It was, I admit, a late departure for a 450 mile trip, but I was tired of being away from home. Not that there would be much for us to do in Baton Rouge; the city of New Orleans was closed to all traffic and, we were hearing, probably would be for weeks. Still, Baton Rouge was closer, if not all the way home. I also had the bright idea that by traveling at night we would avoid most of the traffic.
We left Tallahassee on I-10 west, and immediately came to a standstill. There was a major accident ahead. I got off the interstate and covered almost the entire remaining 400 miles on back roads.
Before we crossed the Florida state line we stopped for gas. We had heard that electricity was out over much of Mississippi and that we might not find an open gas station for awhile. This information was correct; in fact, after crossing the Alabama state line we did not find another open service station in 7 hours and 300 miles of driving.
Skirting Mobile, Alabama to the north, we saw the first sign of what Katrina had done to the Gulf Coast. Near the US 98 bridge over the Mobile channel was a 100 foot tall oceangoing oil platform. Katrina's storm surge had shoved it up Mobile bay and into the channel before crashing it into the bridge. Footage of this platform had been on all the news channels Monday. Then it was one of the more dramatic images of Katrina's power, but by now the horrors of what was going on in New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast had taken over public consciousness, pushing the wayward platform completely out of memory. The tugboats from the port of Mobile had pulled it safely away from the bridge and anchored it a few hundred yards downstream.
Taking 98 north and west, my plan was to exit at Lucedale, Mississippi and then travel west on Highway 26 through a town called Wiggins, then to Poplarville, and to cross into Louisiana at Bogalusa, far from the coast. From there I expected smooth traveling to Baton Rouge.
My wife thought my plan to cover 200 miles of Mississippi back roads at night was foolhardy. In retrospect, I have to admit she was right. While I would not say we were ever in significant danger, the trip was far more harrowing than I had planned.
We left Mobile, heading northeast on US 98. As we passed the outer limits of Mobile, we drove by illuminated homes less and less frequently. At first I thought we were entering less populated areas; but then I realized the homes were there, but they were dark. The electricity was out in vast areas of Alabama. No more than 25 miles out of Mobile we passed the last electrically lit home we would see until Amite, Louisiana — 250 miles later.
Lucedale was not just dark. It was smashed. It looked like an army of thugs had passed through, breaking windows and signs, knocking over fences, stripping shingles off roofs and branches from trees. It was obvious that the people of Lucedale had been hard at work — branches were stacked high on both sides of the road — sometimes so high that the houses behind them were invisible.
Past Lucedale, the tree stacks on the side of the road were getting larger. First large branches, then whole trunks lay in piles like kindling waiting for the largest bonfire since Sherman paused in Atlanta.
Another unexpected obstacle was wire in the road. We ran over the first one in Lucedale, and shortly recognized them as downed power lines. By the time we crossed the far end of the devastation we must have driven over 500 downed lines. Of course, none of them were electrified, or you would not be reading this now.
We made it to Poplarville, crossed over I-59 and entered Louisiana through a narrow two lane highway, putting us in Bogalusa. We were almost 60 miles north of New Orleans. I had expected some wind damage but what we saw was unbelievable. Tree trunks 4 feet thick snapped in half. Bogalusa was an endless lumberyard. The cut stacks of wood stood well over the top of our car, so tall in fact that I had a real concern that if we sideswiped one of them the toppling stack would crush us.
There were no lights anywhere, save an occasional candle in a window cutting the darkness. Most of the homes looked intact, though in the darkness it was hard to tell. The forestation helped shield the houses from what must have been howling winds, although we also saw an occasional home cut in half by a massive fallen bough.
I had been watching New Orleans on the news as everyone else had been, but had heard nothing about the parishes and counties to the north. The governor of Mississippi had said earlier in the day that 80% of the homes in his state were without power. I didn't believe it then but will attest to it now. As horrible as New Orleans was, it was worth thinking about the poor people of Poplarville, Bogalusa, Frankinton, Wiggins. They were well off the coast and probably had no idea what they were in for. Holed up in their homes in the woods 100 miles from the coast, almost none of them evacuated, and their punishment was watching Katrina rip their little towns to pieces. Country people know they cannot depend on police, or the National Guard, or boats, or helicopters to bail them out when things go to hell. They were on their own. A family hiding under its beds as a 60 foot pine crashes through the roof and into their living room, knowing there was no help for hours with gusts of 125 mph blowing overhead — a family like that must have had a story to tell indeed.
We just kept moving. Again and again we would come to a tree lying across the road, and I would think the road was completely blocked and we would have to turn back, but each time when we got right up to the fallen tree I would see that someone had come by with a chainsaw and cut just enough limbs away to let a car slip through. The Citizen's Highway Brigade. The road must have been blocked in this way ten times, and if any of the fallen trees had not been pruned back we would have been trapped at midnight on a pitch black road without enough gas to make it back to the last functioning gas station. My back road plan was clever in our escape, and stupid in our return.
The worst part of the trip was another kind of gas. Natural gas pipelines were broken everywhere and at times the smell was overwhelming. Whenever we hit a patch of heavy natural gas smell we just crept out way down the road and prayed none of the power lines we were driving across had enough juice to produce a spark. That I know of there were no major explosions or forest fires in that area that week, which was an unrecognized miracle. At least, unrecognized to anyone outside of Washington Parish.
We followed the country road, and followed it, and followed it, and it deteriorated to a gravel road (the blacktop had been stripped for resurfacing prior to the storm) and that point I thought we were completely lost. There was no hope for gasoline until Baton Rouge. We pushed on, and finally emerged in Amite, Lousiana and found Interstate 55. By the time we were on the interstate my wife was no longer talking to me. She thought my decision to drive the back roads in the middle of the night was a big mistake, and she was letting me know it. I guess she was right.
There was still no gasoline anywhere. This would be a fact of life for weeks in Southeast Louisiana. No electricity, no gas pumps. And even when the pumps worked, so many people rushed to top off their tanks that the station was empty in a matter of a few hours. But that night, the little red needle on my dashboard levitated just above "E," and we entered Baton Rouge city limits without needing any more fossil fuel. For the first time in my life I felt the urge to light a menorah.
We got to my aunt's house in Baton Rouge at about 3 am. Thirteen hours, 450 miles. Not a bad time, if I do say so myself.
To next Katrina Blog Project Entry: Thursday, September 1, 2005
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Wednesday, August 30, 2006 at 01:13PM
The water was rising.
All the media were talking about it. Streets with only a trace of standing water in the gutters on Monday now had one foot, two feet, three feet of water, and the level was rising. I knew immediately what that meant. The levees had failed. New Orleans was filling up with water.
I had concluded, based on the thin knowledge we had gathered so far, that our house had suffered significant damage. Katrina, after all, had missed New Orleans, and veered directly our way. If our house was gone, at least, I hoped, New Orleans had survived. In a way, this was more important to me than the survival of my own home. I had insurance and a medical degree, which meant my losses would be paid off and I would eventually find a job. But New Orleans was another matter. New Orleans is a delicate place, a place of poverty and old architecture, of comforting decay, a town of haunting shabbiness and charisma. There was no great wealth, no Information Age economy to hold communities together after a catastrophe. The people there loved their carefree, idiosyncratic lives, but many, many of them lived on the edge. I could survive, but many of the New Orleanians I had known as my patients over the years would suffer great hardship if the city was wiped out.
It is one thing to lose your home. It is another to watch the culture you grew up in quietly drown.
The national media had backed off of their "dodged a bullet" assessment. The new metaphor of the day was the "bathtub" and the "toxic gumbo." New Orleans, as a city below sea level, was the bathtub filling up with a mixture of swamp water, lake water, sewerage, street sludge, and refinery waste. Though I again had concerns about the media's rush to cliché, I sensed this time they were closer to right. I had walked the levees many times. On one side families, homes, children playing in the street, bars, churches. On the other, water — billions of gallons of it. If the levees were gone, the destruction would be unimaginable.
That morning I hooked up my laptop to the hotel internet and started searching for information online. I sent off a email to a fellow St. Bernard physician suggesting an emergency plan. Perhaps all the evacuated St. Bernard doctors could get together in Baton Rouge, I opined, and organize to re-establish medical care in our parish. My colleague had a better grasp on the severity of the situation than I did. He wrote back to me:
Thus far I have nothing except what can see on TV.
We had to get my wife a new phone with Houston prefix as no 504-985 and 225 (Miss) [Gulf Coast area codes were out.]
Clearly the whole city is underwater with fires, no water, sewer or power,
Twin span and Hwy 11 bridge is out
Chalmette is under 12-15 feet so prob total loss.
Will be weeks or months before any possibility of normality.
Currently with family in Houston and I-10 closed to BR [Baton Rouge]
We are trying to find a place in BR to stay while hoping to get into town to see what can be salvaged.
Left with shirts on our backs
I was not ready to accept that St. Bernard Parish was "a total loss." It seemed as incomprehensible to me then as it does now. But it was, as it turned out, the most accurate assessment of what had happened at home that I would read in many weeks.
The time we spent in the hotel room was little more than slow torture. All we had was the TV and internet. The information was repeated and repeated, like the same train running through the same station, except that every once in a long while a new piece of information was added, like an additional boxcar to the long circuitous train. After awhile I learned that there was no need to carefully scan the reports for the new information; if I missed something it would be around again in fifteen minutes.
All the major channels were starting to broadcast footage of looting. It was the same handful of people looting the same store, over and over and over. (I wondered how they kept restocking that Walgreens so fast.) There was no telling how bad the looting was, but the media knew how to make it look very bad.
The gap in the 17th Street canal levee was another matter. The pictures were even more horrible than the rumors. As someone who had seen street flooding many times in his life, I knew how devastating even a few feet of water in a house could be. Nothing escapes filthy water, from pictures, furniture, and appliances down to the sheetrock on the wall and the electrical wiring inside. Then the mold comes and the whole place smells. A flooded house is a wasted house. When it comes time to sell no one wants to buy a flooded house any more than they want to buy a car that has been in an accident. A flooded house is a total financial calamity. And that doesn't even touch the emotional loss.
I saw the same picture everyone else did, a thin concrete wall that had been overwhelmed in a 500 foot stretch, the water silently flowing into the Lakeview neighborhood as if it had been invited. Just a black sheet of water with a few white wave crests outlining the breach to remind the viewer that the water was rushing at a rate belied by the serenity of the picture. Houses and scraggly trees in long, straight lines indicated that there might have been streets between them. The water just flowed and flowed, and it looked like no one was around trying to plug it.
Of all the things that happened that week, the one I cannot get over is that the city and the Army Corps of Engineers did not have an emergency plan to patch a levee breach. Certainly they would have a few helicopters or barges and a few hundred tons of sandbags sitting around waiting to be rushed to a breach. It was inconceivable that if a levee started to break the emergency plan was to watch it on television. But that, in fact, was the plan. I wish I could say members of Army Corps or the Levee Board were just standing around watching the city fill up with water -- fiddling as Rome burned, as it were – but even that accusation would be generous. There was no one in sight of the broken levees, unless you counted drowning people.
Every ship on the ocean has a bilge pump, every car on the road a spare tire, but New Orleans had no plan to rapidly fix a levee breech before it developed into a chasm. In fact, there was not even a sensor system to detect a levee breech. The first reports that the levee had broken came from eyewitnesses who waded to higher ground and told reporters what they saw. The authorities were denying that a breach had even happened up to 12 hours after the first levee broke. Twelve hours to discover a 500-foot levee breach, in the United States of America. Heaven help us.
Today, even more so than on Monday, we grasped at every shred of information, watching every video image over and over, first on one channel, then on another, then a third, hoping each time that the story would turn out better, and it was always, always the same thing, this is bad, far worse than we thought, this is no dodged bullet, I wonder how many people are trapped in those flooded houses.
We tried to get out briefly, but I was not comfortable driving the car without being able to see out of the passenger window. So mostly we stayed in the room, and watched the other New Orleanian kids running up and down the hall as their parents worried in the rooms just as we did.
I learned one thing in that hotel room. Women are naturally better suited to care for children than men. Our room was small, and I would pass the time wrestling with our kids on the bed. When a man is on the bed roughhousing with two toddlers he can expect at least two good kicks to the groin an hour. For a woman that sort of play is much less hazardous business.
We finally escaped to a mall in the area. It was a pleasant enough mall at the bottom of a slope near one of Tallahassee's main highways. The highway ran on a ridge at least 20 feet above it. In New Orleans such a location would flood with every summer cloudburst, but I had to remind myself that we were not in New Orleans. In places well above sea level such matters are not a concern. In Florida water is a way of life. In New Orleans it is a way of life too, but today it was also turning out to be a way of death.
We went to buy shoes for my daughter and socks for me. I had forgotten to pack any socks, and as I watched the broken levees on TV it dawned on me that the socks on my feet might be the only socks I owned. So we shopped.
My daughter got a pair of Dora the Explorer sandals, which she was immensely proud of. Two saleswomen in the shoe department stood nearby and oohed and ahhed as she pranced around, showing off her new shoes. The more they encouraged her, the more she puffed up. I half-suspected we were once again being recognized as Katrina refugees. Maybe they were just being kind, but I couldn't help my self-conscious state of mind.
I tried to buy my socks in the shoe department, but this turned out to be a big mistake. The socks were technically from a different department and didn't scan properly at the cash register. So our whole family stood there while a clerk and two managers tried to figure out how to charge me for a $6 pack of white socks. Three people to close a sale on a pack of socks. And to think I wondered why the government couldn't figure out how to close a levee.
Since they were the only socks I was going to own, I felt a little like the guy in the joke who goes to the store to buy tampons for his wife and the price is not on the box, so the clerk calls for a price check on the overhead system. Price check on socks? Hell, just charge me the full amount and send the bill to my St. Bernard address. I'll be there to receive my mail, I swear.
While we were at the mall we decided to buy a luggage carrier for the roof of our car. Since we were probably out of a home and would be on the road for awhile, it made sense for us to get some extra storage capacity. In case we needed to buy more socks. We went to Sears and picked one out. In the automotive department we met a middle-aged man also looking at roof carriers. I hardly had to ask, but naturally he was from New Orleans. His home was in Metairie, and he was a professional musician by night and a school teacher by day. Classic New Orleanian: half community pillar, half seedy drifter. Well, in his case, to be fair, maybe 10% seed.
We had a pleasant talk with him; pleasant in the way chat at funerals is pleasant. We hoped he hadn't lost everything and he hoped we hadn't lost everything. There really wasn't much else to say.
Sears only had two luggage carriers left. Louisianans had been flocking in over the last two days and buying out the stock.
It would take about an hour to get the carrier installed on the car, so we walked around a bit more. In the food court we ran into more refugees. There was just no getting away from those people. We were sitting at a table minding our own business, when two families standing nearby started trading Katrina gossip. They were talking about which neighborhoods were flooded, how many people were killed.
After a few minutes of listening, my wife got involved with them. When they found out we were from Chalmette, they volunteered information for us. One member of the family had a husband with the state police. Ten thousand people were dead in St. Bernard, he had told them. The government was bringing in trucks full of body bags and refrigerated tractor trailers by the hundreds to take away the bodies.
None of this would turn out to be true. The final body count in St. Bernard was just over 130. Which is terrible enough, but an order of magnitude less than 10,000. Were they just making this stuff up, or did they really believe what they were telling us?
I doubted every word they said, and told my wife so even as they walked away. After all, how could a couple of women in Tallahasse, Florida know things the entire national press (who had the advantage of being in New Orleans) did not? On the other hand, I was amazed at how easy it was to pick up rumors about St. Bernard 450 miles from home. This may say more about my strangeness than of the strangeness of the situation, but I thought about ancient times and how chance meetings like this were the only way information about disasters was spread. It explains a lot about epic poetry.
That moment was probably the lowest point of the week. I knew nothing about our home. Nothing I could trust, anyway. I wondered if my two medical practice partners were dead. I wondered how many of my patients were now dead. If my house was wrecked, if my church, my daughter's school, Today's Ketch Seafood (my favorite spot to buy crawfish during Lent) — if anything was left. And here I was listening to pure gossip, to people who knew nothing more than I did making the reckless speculation that St. Bernard was America's Hiroshima. I didn't want to hear it. They should have kept their mouths closed.
It reminds me of know-it-all friends who volunteer medical advice. A person needs a gallbladder surgery, and tells his friend about it; instead of the friend responding, Good luck, Sam, I'm sure you'll do great, he instead says, Oh, I had an uncle who died from gallbladder surgery. Thanks for helping, pal. Everyone needs friends like you.
It makes it worse when people who do not know you at all think it is their duty to volunteer such information.
Katrina, as it turned out, would be the first major American disaster of the digital age. And the digits pretty reliably let us down. Every phone in the 504 area code was almost impossible to reach. We were constantly trying to call family members, and getting through about 5% of the time. By trial and error, we discovered a peculiar way to pass information around on my wife's side of the family. We were able to call my wife's father, who was in South Carolina on business, at any time and get through. He could call my mother-in-law and get through. But my mother-in-law couldn't call my father-in-law, and my father-in-law couldn't call us. And we and my mother-in-law couldn't call each other. So we fashioned a rickety information highway: We called my wife's dad every few hours, he called his wife, who then passed on news to my wife's sister and kids.
My mother-in-law had spend the night of the hurricane in a school in Baton Rouge with my sister-in-law and her three children, and then the next day found a room to rent there. Baton Rouge was jammed with evacuees, so this was a great stroke of luck. My mother-in-law had a friend who knew someone that managed rental property in Baton Rouge. She ended up in an apartment with my wife's sister, her husband, their three kids, my wife's uncle and his wife and their kids. And to think some were afraid to use the term refugees.
That night we made definite plans to leave Tallahassee. This was partly a financial decision. I was not certain how much money we had available to us, since our bank was in New Orleans and could be out of service for weeks. I supposed I was out of a job, and had no idea how long it would be before we had money coming in again. I didn't want to drain our resources at a rate of $100 a night. My parents were at my aunt's house in Baton Rouge, and we would be a lot closer to the action at her house if there was something we could do. And my aunt was not charging rent.
We still had the problem of the broken car window. Hopefully the car dealership would come through with the part and get us up and going by the early afternoon on Wednesday. For the second time this week we were depending on good service to get us by.
So we sat in the hotel room, and waited, as the water rose 450 miles away. In a way, it was drowning us too.
To next Katrina Blog Project entry: Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Monday, August 29, 2005
Tuesday, August 29, 2006 at 08:22AM This whole town does look like whatever hope becomes after it begins to weary a little, then weary a little more. But hope deferred is still hope. I love this town. I think sometimes of going into the ground here as a last wild gesture of love — I too will smoulder away the time until the great and general incandescence.
— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
By the time I awoke the next morning, Katrina had already landed and expended most of itself against the Louisiana and Mississippi coast. The morning was typical only in the sense that the children woke us up. In a two-bed hotel room that was a given.
First thing we turned on the TV and collected a newspaper. From that moment on we were, unknowingly, at the beginning of the long process of figuring out What Happened. My wife and I realized we would not get all the details for a few days, but we had no idea that finding out What Happened would take more than six weeks.
The storm had hit just a few hours after midnight. All the news reports were saying that Katrina had jogged slightly to the east after its initial landfall in Buras, Louisiana. New Orleans had missed the worst of the storm. Dodged a bullet — this was the phrase of the day.
By 11 o'clock in the morning these dodged-a-bullet reports were starting to irritate me. Intuition told me they were wrong. I lay no claim to clairvoyance or voodoo priesthood, but the reports were problematic. All the news was coming from the French Quarter, the Superdome, and the Central Business District — relatively high ground. These reporters didn't know the geography of New Orleans, and the more they talked, the more obvious that became. Huge sections of the city were east of the Quarter and the CBD. My house was about 20 miles east of the Quarter. If the storm had shifted 25-50 miles east and was originally forecast to hit downtown New Orleans, didn't that mean the eye had crossed over my house?
The reporters had read too many tourist brochures, and, like a lot of people, thought the Quarter and the Superdome and the Riverfront were all there was. Not hardly. I would believe them when they started exploring further east. There was no telling how long it would take for them to figure that out.
Another thing that vexed me was the degree of agreement in the news assessments. It hadn't been that bad, they said in unison. New Orleans had dodged that bullet. That observation put me at unease, not because it was unwelcome, but because it seemed too tidy. A rush to judgment by a bunch that had not yet examined the most affected part of the city.
Eyewitness reports usually differ in specifics, sometimes sharply. Everyone has his own point of view, and so, one naturally expects that ten different accounts of the same event will differ from one another at least slightly. But when ten people tell the same story down to the particulars, it rings false. All these reporters were reading from the same script. There was no healthy disagreement, as if the source of all the information was one guy.
In a search for dissent I tried to raise some of the stronger AM stations in New Orleans on the hotel room radio, but we were too far away.
My wife and I held our breath, said a few prayers and hoped the suspicious news line was true to its last doubtful letter. The storm had veered east. That could mean it missed us too, or that St. Bernard Parish was now a polluted pond. I hoped no one had been dumb enough to stay down there, but I knew from personal knowledge that was not true.
The information was coming in bits and pieces, and in true modern journalism style each bit was recycled over and over. It was like watching a bunch of kids sing "Row, Row, Row Your Boat." One reporter would start his story, then another would join in shortly after, singing the same tune, then another, then another. Before long there was all this information looping through the channels, but it was the same thing, the same theme, over and over. We saw every window in the Hyatt Hotel blown out. We saw trees everywhere. We saw a video of a shopping cart being pushed by the wind across an empty parking lot. Street signs wagging in the rain. Exciting stuff like that. Most tantalizing to me were the satellite and radar images of Katrina. Over and over, every chance I could get to watch it, I stared at that spinning blob wobbling ashore. I saw it feint east at the last second. Was it passing over our house? Wasn't it? I felt like a Kennedy nut in a frenzy over the Zapruder film.
After a few hours of this misery we decided to get out for a while. The hallways of the hotel were full of kids and their dazed parents. Everyone was from New Orleans. I couldn't decide if that was a comfort or more misery. There is something unsettling about being 450 miles from home and seeing nothing but people from your home town. It was like being at an LSU Tigers road game, but a lot less fun. Then it occured to me: I am looking at the true lottery. Some of these people will make out all right; others will be, already have been, ruined. And at the moment none of us knew who was who. We were all holding lottery tickets. Some winners, some losers. The drawing was early this morning, but no one could find the results.
We drove around town for a while, got the kids something to eat, and ended up at the place most Americans drift to in a time of need — Wal-mart. By this time we knew from the news reports that we would not be going home for several days at least. New Orleans may have dodged a bullet, but the authorities did not want us back peeking under the bandages.
At Wal-mart we picked up a few supplies. As we came out of the store, an ugly squall swept in from the Gulf. Katrina weather, no doubt. It was amazing — three states away from New Orleans and getting bad weather from Katrina all the same. What an enormous storm.
I waited under the shelter in front of the store with the kids, and my wife ran out to get the car. Today I can't remember why I stood under dry shelter and let my wife get the car in driving rain. I thought I was raised better than that, but maybe not. Perhaps I had concluded that with my superior muscle I could better fend off pilferers from our purchased goodies.
My wife drove the car around, and I saw that the passenger window was open and rain was pouring into the passenger's seat. My first thought was, that goofy wife of mine forgot to roll up the car window. It was a mean thing to think and I was wrong, but that is what I thought at the time.
When she pulled up to the curb I saw a jagged ice-green edge along the bottom of the window where the glass should have been. Someone had smashed in our car window. Probably a delinquent cruising the parking lot and checking out the license plates, knowing that any car from Louisiana would be loaded with valuable stuff. Great to see people responding to natural disasters with that Amercian entrepreneurial spirit.
A quick inventory showed that there was nothing taken from our car, which was a relief. The parking lot was very busy, so probably the guy called attention to himself when he popped the window and didn't have time to complete the smash-and-grab. So he just went for the smash. Welcome to the refugee life.
To recap, we had all our stuff, but lost a window, and more importantly, it was raining like crazy. I ran back into the store and bought a plastic drop cover, a knife, and some tape. Eventually we got the window covered over, enough protection to at least discourage the water.
Unfortunately, the car was not easy to drive that way. The plastic made a godawful racket flapping in the wind when I went over 30. Worse, on left hand turns I could not see oncoming traffic. I had seen so many junk cars with busted out and taped-over windows in my life, and never realized how tough those poor suckers had it. It is like driving with your right visual field blocked out. The proper medical term is right hemianopsia, as I recall.
Shortly we realized the plastic was not going to work, and that going back to New Orleans would be impossible without a new window. The next stop was a car dealership.
Naturally the repair shop did not have the part, would have to order the part, but when they recognized our situation they were suddenly helpful. For the second time we had been quickly identified as refugees. I kept looking at myself in every available mirror or glass to see what it was that induced casual onlookers to conclude that our house had just been consumed by a tidal wave.
The people at the dealership made it a point to apologize for Tallahassee. Tallahassee is a good town, they emphasized; people usually don't go around victimizing hurricane evacuees by smashing their car windows. They offered to vacuum out the shards of glass that still covered the passenger's seat for free. Truth is, I could never hold it against Tallahasse that car was broken into. Not considering the beating my own home town would take in the media for the next week — looting, shooting at rescue helicopters, raping in broad daylight. I will probably spend the rest of my days defending New Orleans against the charge that it is a pit of vipers. I may even think better of Tallahassee because I know it, like my own city, is not perfect.
The dealership promised the window would be in by Wednesday. This meant we would be in Tallahassee until at least then. Not that we had anywhere to go, but nonetheless, I was ready to leave.
To next Katrina Blog Project entry: Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Sunday, August 28, 2005
Monday, August 28, 2006 at 09:31AM Six thirty AM I was awakened by the sound of hammering. George and Juan were back, and boarding the window directly above the head of my bed. I needed to get up anyway.
First thing was to check the weather reports. Katrina was now a Catagory 5 hurricane, sustained winds about 160, and still predicted to make a straight hit on New Orleans. We had to leave; there was no going back now.
The house was oddly dark. It took me a moment to realize that was because all the windows were covered with plywood.
And there was a new problem: Katrina was big, big, big, much larger than the average hurricane, and the National Weather Service was now predicting hurricane-force winds in Mobile, AL. All it would take is for the storm to veer a few degrees to the east and Mobile would be a direct hit. We needed to move our hotel reservations much further east.
I jumped back on the internet, cancelled Mobile and found a hotel room in Tallahassee, Florida. Tallahassee was over 450 miles from New Orleans. We were in for a long evacuation trip.
My parents called for the 10th time. They had already evacuated to Baton Rouge, and wanted us out of there, understandably. Many people had left town yesterday, but I waited primarily out of concern for my patients. If the storm track changed and we could stay, I wanted to. But Katrina was now given an early Monday landfall, which meant we had about 15 hours to get out of town before the winds topped 100 mph. I would not be able to delay action much longer.
We loaded everything in my wife's car. Regrettably I left behind my own car, an Infiniti with only 11,000 miles on it. The Infiniti was worth more than the family car, a Toyota Highlander, but the Highlander was bigger and could carry more provisions. We did not seriously consider taking both cars. With over 500,000 vehicles headed out of New Orleans, we knew that if we two got separated it could be days before we found each other again. And we made this decision without knowing that Katrina would take out cell phone service across much of the Gulf Coast. So we parked the Infiniti in the garage and locked it up, at a time when it was increasingly obvious to me that we would probably lose it.
George and Juan worked quickly, completely boarding up the house by 10 am. I can't remember the last time I accomplished so much by 10 am. I walked around the house to inspect their handiwork. Our house was all brick, and the windows were aluminum, so rather than screw or nail the boards to the window frames Juan had drilled holes in the brick and inserted steel pegs to hold the plywood in place. Yeoman's work. All the times I had stood in line at a bank or a fast food restaurant and complained about the service, all the times I waited in vain for the cable guy to show up, and the one time in my life I needed someone to do a good job with no notice this guy Juan comes out of nowhere and does an outstanding job. I promised myself I would remember that next time I had to suffer through poor service.
On the side of the house where we had a small greenhouse window that bowed out from the wall, Juan had built a wooden shell that slipped over the glass and locked in place. Truly fine work.
We filled up the car and secured everything. As we packed up, my wife called my attention to the neighbor's back yard. Our next-door neighbor, Daisy, had left with her two kids the day before. Her yard was filled with junk, the kinds of things any person with a brain would realize could fly away in high winds (and probably smash our house) -- a swingset, a trampoline, a pair of bikes. I swore if I found any of that stuff in my living room next week I was going to find a lawyer.
Our neighbor across the street, Mr. Fred, came over to talk to us. "I have never evacuated for a hurricane in my life," he said, "but I'm getting out for this one." Mr. Fred was a widower, but his daughter and her family lived two doors down. He planned to leave with them by noon. As was true for many families in Chalmette, generations of his family lived within a few blocks. This was truly his home, and his children's home, and his grandchildren's home. His wife was buried in St. Bernard. He stood to lose a lot more than us. We had only been there for four years, and compared to him, our roots ran scarcely below the topsoil.
My wife expressed concern about water coming over the levee along the Mississippi river.
"Oh no," Mr. Fred said. "The water is coming from over there." He pointed to the north, towards the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet. "And if it does, it will flood every house in the Parish."
We said goodbye to him, expecting to see him again soon. Unfortunately, Mr. Fred would die during the evacuation. The story we were eventually told was that he caught pneumonia in the stress of the evacuation, and died hundreds of miles away from his lifelong home because his family could not find a hospital in time.
In Meraux, he lived across the street from a doctor.
Finally the kids went into the Highlander, and we strapped them to their car seats. As I locked up the door, I had this self-pitying feeling I was looking at my house for the last time.
I, like everyone else in America, have seen the following on the TV news: A woman gets out of her car to look at her house after a disaster and confronts a pile of sticks. The cause could be hurricane, earthquake, fire, tornado. The woman falls on her knees and breaks down crying. Every time I saw that in the past, I thought the same thing: "Stop crying. You lost your house, but you have your life, which is all that really matters. Your house is just stuff."
As I looked at the kitchen door for the last time, I decided when I got back and confronted my own pile of sticks I would probably cry too. It is just stuff. But it is my stuff, and I don't guess anyone else will cry for it.
The drive out of our neighborhood was unnerving. Meraux was completely empty, like 5 am on a Christmas morning. Except no cars parked in the street, no boats in the driveways, most windows boarded up. After the storm, authorities would estimate that about 10,000 people stayed behind in St. Bernard to ride the storm out. If so, I didn't see them.
The road remained deserted until we approached the interstate, then it was an endless traffic jam all the way to the Mississippi state line. We alternated between listening to children's CDs and the weather and news reports on AM radio.
My plan was to take I-10 East straight to Tallahassee. There was a problem, however. I-10 ran straight through the hurricane zone, following the coast, and we kept hearing rumors that the Mississippi I-10 was closed. On the radio we heard I-10 east was closed, then it was open, then it was closed. Finally we reached the point east of the town of Slidell where the interstate divided into I-59 and I-10 and entered Mississippi. As we approached the split, a reporter on the radio announced confidently that the State Police was allowing cars onto I-10 East. No more than 30 seconds later we saw a cop holding a cardboard sign that said, "All Lanes to I-59 North." That's the way it was that weekend. It was impossible to take anyone at his word. Except the National Weather Service.
We took I-59 all the way up to Poplarville, Mississippi, then planned to cut through a series of back roads to get to Mobile. The length of I-59 from the state line until Poplarville was converted to Contraflow, which meant the southbound lane was being used for northbound traffic so that all four lanes were going out of Louisiana. We were directed into the southbound lanes now going north, allowing us to enjoy a rare experience, if enjoy is the word, of driving the interstate the wrong way while sober.
It was a little peculiar. I felt like I was in England, driving on the wrong side of the road. The shoulder was on the wrong side. The passing lane was the outside lane, instead of the lane closest to the median, as it always is on this continent. Every once in a while I would forget where I was and give a start, thinking I had gone the wrong way and was about to get run over by a FEMA convoy loaded with food and water going south. The other problem was that all the signs were backwards. There was no way to tell exactly where we were, or what exits we were passing. I amused myself by counting the number of cars that pulled over for passengers to empty their bladders. Obviously the people leaving town had taken a lot of bottled water with them.
We got off at Poplarville and turned east on a state road. It was 3 pm. It had taken us 6-1/2 hours to go 80 miles. I was relieved when we finally got off and the traffic appeared to be light. Prior to that, as slow as we were going, I had real concerns that Katrina would find us stuck on the interstate.
We got through to Mobile and stopped off for gas and food just over the Florida border. The kids would not let us pass the golden arches, so we stopped to eat at McDonald's. The parking lot was full of Louisiana license plates. It was a scene I would get used to -- for the next few weeks, there were probably almost as many Lousiana license plates to be found outside the state as in.
As we took the kids around to the side door, a huge Oldsmobile pulled up into an open spot in the parking lot and an elderly couple got out. Both of them were well over 80. The husband was using a walker, the wife a cane. My wife observed that they were traveling completely alone. Two people who could barely walk, evacuating New Orleans to God knows where, to return to God knows what. I could only imagine how many thousands of people there were like them.
I guess something about us told people we were fleeing Katrina, because as we ate a man and his wife at the next table asked us where we were from. We told them.
"We lost everything we had to Hurricane Ivan," the wife said. "Then, one year later, our house burned down and we lost everything again."
The husband said, "We are praying for you. We know what you are going through. Just remember that the only thing that really matters is sitting with you at this table." He was referring to our children. I told him we would remember.
I appreciated their concern. On the other hand, I was a little distressed that they had picked us out as evacuees so easily. Did we really look as morose as we felt?
It also bothered me a little that they had assumed we lost everything. How did they know? Katrina hadn't landed yet. Of course, I felt we had lost everything. Maybe I was broadcasting that too.
We arrived in Tallahassee at about ten. Twelve hours, 450 miles. Compared to other evacuation times I was hearing on the radio, we had done very well. I was proud. I had gotten us through Mississippi via a dozen local roads and highways, and had beaten most people by hours and hours. Folks were calling in on the radio complaining that it was taking 20 hours to get to Houston, 100 miles closer. Yes, I was the man.
The hotel parking lot was loaded with Louisana plates. People were hauling paintings, furniture, computers, all kinds of things you would never expect to see in the car of a business traveler or vacationer. Clearly this was not the usual hotel crowd. It looked like the traveling flea market had come to Tallahassee.
The more I looked at the assorted junk in all those cars, the more I wished we had packed more of our own assorted junk. Another lesson learned from Hurricane Katrina: The junk you miss and the junk you think you will miss is never the same junk.
As soon as we got to our room, my wife called her mother. They evacuated the same morning we did with the goal of reaching a hotel in Kinder, Louisiana, about 80 miles from Houston. Unfortunately, the traffic was so heavy going west that they couldn't get past Baton Rouge. They ended up at a public school that was set aside as an emergency shelter. My wife was furious. Her mother was in her sixties, only one year out from chemotherapy for throat cancer, and she, with her three school age grandchildren, would be sleeping on the floor at a Baton Rouge elementary school. "Next time, if there is a next time," she said, "my mother is going with us."
I was sorry to hear what had happened to them. But I could not resist selfishly congratulating myself that we had outsmarted the crowd and gotten out in good time. We had escaped safely to a decent place.
As I fell asleep, I worried about our house, now in the path of this monster. And then I thought about my patients, many of whom lived in trailers, many of whom were disabled or retired, and almost all of whom had far fewer financial resources than I did. These people would be victims of Katrina to a degree I would never fully comprehend.