Читать книгу No Ordinary Heroes: - Demaree Inglese - Страница 18

Early morning:

At 2 a.m. Katrina makes a slight turn north.

The storm is 150 miles in diameter, with winds of 155 mph and advancing at 10 mph.

Around 3 a.m. the 17th Street Canal levee is breached.

City power is lost, forcing jail buildings to switch to generator power.

By 5 a.m. Katrina’s eye is 90 miles from New Orleans, with winds of 150 mph.

At 6:10 a.m. Katrina makes landfall in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, as a category 4 hurricane.

In the early hours of Tuesday morning, Gary and I finally went up to Medical Administration. The smell of dogs was overpowering, and there was no room on the floor of my small office to stretch out. Every other bit of space was occupied by sleeping staff.

“Why don’t we go to my office?” Gary said. He held up his keys. As the jail’s director of infection control, Gary’s desk was several floors above.

We carried our bedding, Gary’s cooler, some food, and water up a few more flights of stairs. Although we were bone-tired, we didn’t regret the move. There was plenty of space in the large windowless room where Gary and eight medical assistants worked. And, as a bonus, Infection Control had excellent air-conditioning. Gary even found a gift basket of Sugar Daddy candy, Clark Bars, and KitKats on an assistant’s desk.

“It is an emergency,” Gary said, unwrapping a Clark bar before he plugged in an electric pump and inflated his air mattress.

There was another welcome discovery. Infection Control had an unexpected cache of water—a five-gallon jug in the water cooler.

“Gary, how many other offices up here have water coolers?” I asked, unrolling the floor mat that I had slept on in Korea.

“I don’t know. Let’s go look. We might need the supplies.” Gary followed me out.

We searched several administrative floors and found a number of unlocked offices with two partial and two full five-gallon jugs. We also found more bottled water and Gatorade in office refrigerators. If circumstances ever became desperate, the water stash up here might be a lifesaver.

We set our cell phone alarms for 6 a.m. and crashed. The glow of computer screensavers around us added an eerie image to the scene. As we dozed off, an intense drama began to unfold downstairs.

Captain Verret carried two sandwiches as he walked out the rear door of the Correctional Center onto the back porch. He had to remember to thank the kitchen staff for leaving the turkey and cheese trays in the hall. His deputies were too busy to eat on a schedule. He himself hadn’t even had time to change out of his wet work clothes. That was probably just as well. He’d be soaked many more times before the night was over.

Hugging the back wall, Verret stared at the mounting storm. Katrina was still offshore, but the wind was already breaking off tree limbs and shattering unprotected glass. Branches, papers, trash cans, and shingles shot past the building and disappeared into the howling night. Sheets of water resembling panels of frosted glass sliced a path down the street, tearing the leaves off trees.

He had hustled the last of the late-night gawkers inside an hour ago, before the storm turned deadly. Now anyone who stepped too far away from the building risked being impaled by once-harmless objects that the hurricane had transformed into missiles. Staying close to the wall, Verret moved around the corner, toward a more protected side of the Center. He paused and looked down at the street twenty feet below the porch, where the pouring rain was creating a rushing river. Trash and other floating debris sped by like small boats on a storm-tossed sea.

Kind of how I feel, he thought. Verret had acted as warden many times before, but never during a major emergency. He couldn’t afford to make a mistake. Too many people—inmates, families, and staff—were counting on him. And other officers, including Sheriff Marlin Gusman, would be scrutinizing every decision he made.

Deputy Skyles appeared and interrupted his thoughts. “It’s really coming down now,” he said.

Verret glanced at his watch: It was 2:36 a.m. “Is there water in the sallyport?”

“Almost a foot,” Skyles answered evenly.

Verret nodded. The basement floor stood only two feet higher than the sallyport. The water hadn’t reached the doors yet, but it would—soon. “Guess we’d better start the pumps.”

Verret, Skyles, a crew of deputies, and a few inmates assigned to the work detail went out the basement doors to the sallyport. Wind and rain assaulted the men as they trudged through the twelve inches of water, up the driveway to the trailer that held the pumps. The machines pull-started like lawnmowers, and it took several tries to engage the pumps. Verret made sure water was being sucked up and then drained through the hoses draped over the dam wall before ordering the men back toward the building for the final phase of flood-proofing.

Verret closed and locked one of the basement doors, and Skyles and two men bolted a large steel plate in front of it. The other deputies lined the bottom with sandbags. Then they placed a second plate next to the remaining open door. The group moved back into the basement, leaving one of the inmate workers—a small, agile man—outside.

The same crew had been through this unusual drill a month earlier during preparations for Hurricane Dennis. The inmate worker still in the sallyport slid the free steel plate across the open doorway, bolted it into place, and sandbagged the bottom. The plates were two feet shorter than the actual doorway, which left a gap at the top when the doors were open. Inside, Verret stood on a chair, reached over the plate, grabbed the inmate’s outstretched arms, and pulled him through the gap and into the basement. Once the inmate was safe, Verret closed and locked the second door.

It wasn’t an elegant system, but it worked. If the sallyport continued to fill with water, the steel plates and sandbags would keep the basement dry—at least for a while.