Читать книгу Words Whispered in Water - Sandy Rosenthal - Страница 8
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Pack like you’re not coming back home,” barked my husband Steve to our college-aged son.
“Dad, that’s a terrible way to wake me up!” grumbled Mark, startled by this grim command.
It was 6:00 a.m. on August 28, 2005—the day before a major hurricane was forecast to strike the southeast coast of Louisiana. Two hours earlier, the National Weather Service (NWS) had upgraded the storm to Category 5, the highest measure on the Saffir–Simpson scale. After rousting the rest of us none too gently, Steve explained that this was a bad one, and he did not think we could get back to our house sooner than three weeks.
“Mark, pack everything you need right now to go straight back to college.” Then, to all of us, he said, “We’re out the door in an hour.”
Steve, Mark, and our fifteen-year-old son Stanford had spent the prior day boarding up our two-story house under a blazing sun. In the eighty-eight-degree heat, they put plywood on every window of our uptown New Orleans home. Category 5 winds are over 154 miles per hour, and we prepared for them.
Born and raised in this historic city, my husband knew well the damage the storm’s winds could inflict. Forty years earlier, Hurricane Betsy had ploughed through the city with winds up to 110 miles per hour. In 1965, the technology to provide early warnings had not yet been invented. By the time the city’s residents knew that a hurricane was churning toward them, it was too late to evacuate. Steve’s family did what everyone else did: they hunkered down and weathered the storm. All night long, the winds battered the house with a deafening noise. At daybreak the next morning, Steve recalled, he pried open the front door and saw that all the leaves had been stripped from the trees and had plastered every house, building, and structure with a new coat of bright green. It was a breathtaking memory. But he also remembered having no electricity, no air conditioning, and no ice for six weeks.
Born and raised in Massachusetts, I had never experienced the childhood excitement of a hurricane passing over my house, but I had heard all about it in my twenty-seven years of marriage. I understood that if the oncoming hurricane was slow-moving and dropped a lot of rain, we could have some water in the house. Natural river levees to the south and natural lake levees to the north team up with man-made canal levees to the east and west. If the rain fell too fast, the pump stations could not keep up. So while the menfolk were boarding up the house, I was inside doing the lighter work of moving furniture and curtains out of harm’s way. We were fortunate to have two stories.
***
However, the Millers were not as fortunate. Nine miles away in the Lake Vista neighborhood of New Orleans, Harvey and Renee Miller decided to ride out the storm in their home. After all, they had ridden out at least five or six storms. And besides, they had a safe harbor if needed: keys to an empty two-story house only two doors away. Their own home, and every other house in the neighborhood, was single story.
***
After boarding up the exterior, Steve went to the front yard and plucked ten almost-ripe papayas from our trees. They would be good eating in the days ahead when we would be living mainly on unhealthy fast food. Though Steve was convinced that we would not be able to come home for three weeks, there was a chance that he may be wrong. So, in the kitchen, we “bought time” by placing four large pots of water in the freezer. Just before departing for our evacuation destination, we would divide the pots between the freezer and refrigerator to create vestiges of old-fashioned ice boxes. The slowly melting chunks of ice would help keep our food from perishing for up to three days without electricity.
A habitual list maker, I adhered to the same hurricane evacuation list I had used just one year earlier for Hurricane Ivan. In advance of that 2004 storm, Governor Kathleen Blanco had ordered a mandatory evacuation for all the coastal parishes of southeast Louisiana and a voluntary evacuation for New Orleans. With the discomfort of remaining in New Orleans for Hurricane Georges in 1998 still fresh in our minds, we had opted for the luxury of electricity by evacuating to a motel in Jackson, Mississippi.
Hurricane Ivan wasn’t remembered for its ferocity; rather, the name became synonymous with state government incompetence. The year 2004 was the first time that Louisiana had employed “contraflow,” turning all lanes of the interstate into one-way roads outbound from the city. The concept is simple, but the devil is in the details. The system requires perfect coordination between local parish governments and the state police. That very first use of contraflow to evacuate residents for Ivan was fraught with problems, mainly due to the unexpectedly large amount of staff required to close highway exits. Traffic delays were so severe that many turned around and went back home in time to watch Ivan sputter and weaken to a tropical depression.
***
Harvey Miller filled his car with gas. Then he and his wife Renee brought food and a couple of gallons of water to their neighbor’s two-story house. They also brought a cot, folding chairs, and a portable television, most of which they left on the first floor. The house was raised, meaning that it was ten full steps to reach the first floor. The water might rise to the front door, they thought, but no higher. With everything ready and in place, they settled down for the evening in their own home, believing that their “safe harbor” would make everything alright if needed.
***
By the prior Wednesday (August 24, 2005), my husband had already reserved twenty motel rooms in Jackson, Mississippi, three hours due north. Two rooms were for our family; the others were for the families of critical employees with Strategic Comp, my husband’s workers’ compensation insurance company. The Days Inn, which had been previously scoped out and selected, had reliable internet connections and was pet friendly. Reserving rooms five days in advance for a possible hurricane might appear overly cautious to most, but the arrangements can be made in five minutes and canceled in one.
During the day on Friday, August 26, some of the computer models shifted the track of the storm, now a hurricane, west. Then, late in the afternoon, the models shifted in unison, and New Orleans was moved to the center of the cone of certainty.5 Governor Blanco declared a state of emergency at four o’clock. Mayor Ray Nagin followed suit but stopped short of calling for a mandatory evacuation. It was now certain that we would need those motel rooms.
By 7:00 a.m. on Saturday (August 27), the hurricane was over the center of the Gulf of Mexico. At first, the eye started to disintegrate, normally a sign of weakening, but in this case it was redistributing. Wind speed picked up around the central vortex, and pressure fell again. Later, the eye contracted, and masses of thunderstorms sprang to life. Within a few hours, the storm doubled in size, eclipsing most of the gulf.
Throughout the day on Saturday, radio and television reports urged residents to evacuate. Officials for Plaquemines and St. Charles Parishes (low-lying coastal areas south of New Orleans) ordered mandatory evacuations. The governor ordered contraflow to be put in effect, and by four o’clock that afternoon the state police had reversed all inbound lanes. By this time, the hurricane watch had been widened to include everything from western Louisiana to the Alabama-Florida border.
The National Hurricane Center (NHC) issued a bulletin that warned of a powerful hurricane with unprecedented strength: “Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks. Perhaps longer. At least one-half of well-constructed homes will have roof and wall failure. All gabled roofs will fail… Water shortages will make human suffering incredible by modern standards.”6
Then, on Saturday night, Max Mayfield, then director of the NHC, did something he rarely did. He called all the governors in the cone of certainty to warn them. Upon urging from Governor Blanco, he also called Mayor Nagin, telling him that some levees in the Greater New Orleans area could be overtopped.”7
***
At nine o’clock on Sunday morning (August 28)—the day before the levees broke—we parked my three-year-old sedan on our elevated driveway and climbed into our packed Ford Expedition to depart for Jackson. Just before leaving, we checked on our elderly neighbors because we were worried about them. Steve had spoken to Charles Prince the day before and, at that time, he and his wife Zelda planned to shelter in place. Now that the storm had swelled to a Category 5, staying was not an option for our neighbors.
“Charles, I’ve been through a hurricane like this,” my husband told him. “You won’t have electricity for a month. And that’s not all. All these big trees will come down, and you won’t be able to drive your car.”
“I’m a World War II veteran, and I’ve been through hurricanes,” Charles answered defiantly.
Charles and Zelda had moved to New Orleans from Long Island, New York, fifteen years earlier and had little comprehension of the danger they faced. Steve realized that he had no choice but to frighten Charles into action.
“What if something happens to Zelda? If there’s an emergency, you won’t be able to get her medical treatment.”
That convinced Charles, but he claimed that he had no family within driving distance, and it was too late to find a motel room. We offered to give them the motel room that we had reserved for our two sons, and they would sleep on the floor in our room until we got things figured out. I would find out later that hundreds of elderly residents refused to leave their homes. Many stayed to care for their pets, but most were just too stubborn.
***
It was time to go. We backed out of our driveway after Charles and Zelda got into their car to follow us to Jackson. Mark and Stanford were jammed in the back seat between suitcases and bags. Our tiny dachshund Chester jumped back and forth from the back seat to the front in his usual overexcited state whenever we took him for a car ride. (My twenty-two-year-old daughter Aliisa was living and working in New York City, having just graduated from Brown University.)
We drove down elegant and picturesque St. Charles Avenue toward the contraflow evacuation route. The stately Southern homes were eerily quiet as most people had departed the previous day or earlier that morning. House after magnificent house was boarded up. The proverbial hatches were battened down.
At nine thirty, we turned on the radio and heard Ray Nagin, our soon-to-be-infamous mayor, describe the first ever mandatory evacuation8 of New Orleans, which state police had called at 8:17 a.m. Though his voice was calm, he implored the city’s residents to leave. Max Mayfield’s warning had apparently frightened the mayor. “You need to be scared. You need to be concerned. And you need to get your butts moving out of New Orleans right now.”
I listened raptly to the radio. Despite the mayor’s tranquil tone, his message was blood-chilling.
“When the floodwaters rise to your second floor, you will need an ax to chop a hole in the roof,” he admonished.
“Goodbye, New Orleans,” I murmured to the passing houses.
I leaned down to rearrange my tennis gear on the floor of the cramped car to give my feet more room. Just before leaving the house, I had decided to bring my tennis gear. Oddly, because of that decision, I would soon challenge one of the most powerful bureaucracies in the world.
Cars streamed out of the city all day. Under the contraflow plan, on-ramps worked, but exit ramps did not. There was nowhere to go but out. The key to contraflow is the phased evacuations, fifty hours in advance in Louisiana’s southern-most parishes, and thirty hours in advance for New Orleans. With the improved contraflow system, our journey to Jackson was relatively painless.
Years later, it was agreed upon that Hurricane Ivan saved a lot of lives on August 29, 2005, because that earlier storm exposed a contraflow plan in need of revision. If not for the dry run of Hurricane Ivan in 2004, thousands might have abandoned their attempt to evacuate for the 2005 hurricane. Governor Blanco’s evacuation of 90 percent of the New Orleans region in 2005 using contraflow would be cited as the most successful rapid evacuation of a major city in American history.9 Nonetheless, the trip took over twice the time it would have taken in sunnier weather.
In a noon teleconference on Sunday (August 28), Mayfield said, “On the forecast track, if it maintains intensity, about twelve feet of storm surge in the lake, the big question is will that top some of the levees? … I don’t think any model can tell you with any confidence right now whether the levees will be topped or not, but that’s obviously a very, very grave concern.”10 While talk of possible overtopping was discussed right up to the first storm surge, there was no warning that the levees could break.
***
We pulled up at about four o’clock to the small, two-story motel about a mile from Jackson’s city center. The motel was full to bursting with New Orleanians and their pets, but the mood was upbeat. Smiles were abundant, and the important work of caring for the needs of pets was a good distraction. And besides, most thought they would be going home in two days: everyone except the Rosenthals. We planned to be in Jackson for at least three weeks. I unpacked our suitcases of clothes, supplies, and equipment while Steve checked on his employees to make certain that everyone had their laptops for work and that the internet was accessible and functioning.
I touched base with the Jacobs family. Steve’s sister Leslie, her husband Scott, their daughter Michelle, and their dog Cayenne had two rooms on the second floor alongside ninety-three-year-old Rose Brener (Grandma Rose), my husband’s maternal grandmother, who needed special care. Grandma Rose was an amazing lady. The family called her “Grand Central” because she remembered every detail of everyone’s life. Grandma Rose was not exactly happy to be living in a motel room evacuated for a hurricane; however, she was a model of strength, having survived many catastrophes including the Great Flu Epidemic of 1918–1919 in New Orleans and, of course, the Great Depression from 1929 to 1939. Later that day, Leslie and Michelle departed for Philadelphia on the last flight out of Jackson. Michelle would be starting her first year at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Scott stayed behind to take care of Grandma Rose and Cayenne.
Around seven thirty, we hopped into our car and drove to our favorite Jackson eatery—a family-owned Thai restaurant that we had visited the previous year during our evacuation for Hurricane Ivan. This time, the owner welcomed us with special delight because he remembered our gift to him the year before: one of our papayas. Later, back in our room with tummies full of chilled, spicy green papaya salad and warm duck curry, the whole family watched television for developing details of the storm. Its strongest winds were blowing at about 175 miles an hour, and the center was 200 miles from the mouth of the Mississippi River.11
By early evening, the state police suspended contraflow. Most of the metropolitan population of one million people had left. But about 100,000 people remained inside the city, most of them in their homes, and about 14,000 people had taken refuge in the Superdome.12 It was time to hunker down and ride it out.
***
While my family and I slept, emails zinged back and forth between the NWS, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and other agencies. One email was focused on storm surge: “Any storm rated Category 4 on the Saffir–Simpson scale will likely lead to severe flooding and/or levee breaching. This could leave the New Orleans metro area submerged for weeks or months.”13 This email, sent long after the evacuation was completed, was the first to suggest the possibility of levee breaching. It went up the chain of command. At 1:47 a.m., the Homeland Security Operations Center watch officer emailed it to the White House Situation Room.14
The events of the next few hours are the reason that the world remembers this day: August 29, 2005.
At about five in the morning, a thirty-foot section of floodwall—called a “monolith”—on the east side of the gigantic Inner Harbor Navigation Canal (known locally as the Industrial Canal) breached and released stormwater into the adjacent Lower Ninth Ward, a dense neighborhood of primarily black homeowners. The breach spread to 250 feet wide,15 next to the blue-painted Florida Avenue bridge in front of the New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board (S&WB) pump station 5. Operators throughout the metropolitan area listened to their brethren beg for help as the station flooded.
***
Elsewhere in the city, there were other signs that something sinister was unfolding. Harvey and Renee got up at seven o’clock to foot-deep water all around their house. Without hesitation, they rounded up their black Labrador, Monet, and the trio sloshed through the water to what they expected would be safety and relative comfort. But it turned out that both the water and the gas were turned off. At the very least, they were able to turn on the battery-operated television. On the news, they saw that the marina was burning.
***
At approximately 7:45 a.m., a much larger second hole opened up in the Industrial Canal just south of the initial breach. The horrific surge of water lifted up whole homes nearly intact, which all joined a ghastly parade in the flowing current on Tennessee Street before disintegrating. Floodwaters from the two breaches combined to submerge the city’s entire historic Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood in over ten feet of water.16
Levee monoliths on the west side of the Industrial Canal also gave way and flooded the Upper Ninth Ward, Bywater, and Treme neighborhoods in water between four and six feet deep.17 Storm surge overtopped and melted levees that should have protected the primarily residential northeastern portion of New Orleans (locally called New Orleans East) and put that entire area underwater.
Farther to the west, between six and seven in the morning, a monolith on the east side of the London Avenue Canal failed and allowed water over ten feet deep into the mostly black Fillmore Gardens neighborhood.18 At about six thirty, on the western edge of the city, several monoliths failed on the 17th Street Canal.19 A torrent of water blasted into the mainly white Lakeview neighborhood of homeowners. Several firefighters, who had sheltered in the upper floors of the Mariner’s Cove condominium complex, watched in shock as water flowed through the breach to a depth of over ten feet.20
The final breach of the flooding catastrophe took place between seven and eight in the morning when the west side of the London Avenue Canal breached—in addition to the east side—and flooded the mixed-race neighborhood of Lake Vista.21 This second breach is a startling testament to the walls’ weakness.
***
Harvey and Renee Miller did not hear this final breach just two city blocks away from them, but Renee was the first to notice dark spots on the wall-to-wall carpeting. Water was coming up through the floorboards. They rushed to the window and watched in disbelief as water surged down the street like river rapids. They stood stunned and watched as—in a matter of seconds—a Cadillac was picked up, carried down the road, and deposited in a tree.
But there was no time to watch because cold water was already a foot deep in the house, and they had to get upstairs! Monet balked at first because she had never seen steps inside of a house, but they managed to coax her up. They brought everything they could up to the second floor—the food, fresh water, and the television set—as floodwater rose shockingly fast inside the house. Fifteen minutes later, on Harvey’s last trip downstairs, he found that the water came up to his chest. At that moment, he understood that their own home must be underwater. Exactly one month earlier, Harvey and Renee had made the final payment on their home.
***
As we ate breakfast in blissful ignorance at the Days Inn, the City of New Orleans was going underwater. The catastrophic breaches of the Industrial Canal, the 17th Street Canal, and the London Avenue Canal immediately killed hundreds and destroyed homes, commercial buildings, and infrastructure.22 Breaches of levees and floodwalls on two other navigation canals—the Mississippi River–Gulf Outlet (MR-GO) Canal and the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway (GIWW)—were also releasing floodwater that would inundate the rest of New Orleans and nearby St. Bernard Parish. Police stations began flooding as storm surge sliced up the communications webs on which emergency managers in Baton Rouge and Washington, DC, relied. Landlines and switching stations were being submerged, and the 911 system went down. One by one, police, city, state, and federal agencies were blinded.23
***
Still oblivious at our mid-state Mississippi motel, we passed some of the time with Grandma Rose doing a crossword puzzle. We wandered through the motel, making friends and tending to our pets. We checked on Charles and Zelda but found out that they had departed at sunrise. They left a note, explaining that they had decided to drive to Zelda’s sister’s home in Birmingham, Alabama.
Jackson was a reasonable choice as an evacuation destination. But, in the case of this particular hurricane, the motel was now partially in the storm’s path. Around noon, the hurricane’s outer bands had begun sweeping through Jackson, bringing winds over fifty miles per hour and accompanying rain. The storm veered eastward and eventually lost strength. But that evening, the winds knocked out our motel’s power. Only the fire escapes were lit.
The managers of a nearby Baskin-Robbins restaurant brought all their ice cream to the motel to be enjoyed rather than watch it spoil. While we ate our melting ice cream, FEMA director Michael Brown painted a grim picture of a ruined city on CNN’s Larry King Live. But he was coy about discussing levee breaches: “We have some, I’m not going to call them breaches, but we have some areas where the lake and the rivers are continuing to spill over.”24
At the Homeland Security Operations Center, Matthew Broderick, the marine brigadier general in command, received reports that levees were breaching, but there was also a televised image of people in the French Quarter toasting their survival on high, dry land. Broderick concluded that he needed to have more specific detailed information in hand before reporting to the president of the United States. And he went home to bed.25
***
With nothing to do but fret in the dark, we decided to go to bed too. Normally, a Mississippi night in late August with no electricity would be insufferable, but the wind and rain had cooled the outdoor temperature to a reasonable seventy-two degrees. We fell into an uneasy sleep along with hundreds of thousands of other evacuees.
The next morning, amid downed trees and power lines, it looked like electricity would not be restored for days. The whole point of evacuating to Jackson was so that my husband could continue operating his workers’ compensation company. This meant that we, along with his other employees at the motel, needed to pack up and relocate. We decided on Lafayette, Louisiana, which had not lost power and had a large, dog-friendly hotel: the Drury Inn, just off Interstate 10 (I-10).
So, for the second time in two days, our extended family evacuated. For the entire ride, our ears were tuned to Garland Robinette on WWL (AM) radio, trying to learn what was happening in New Orleans. We knew that power was knocked out, but other strange reports were trickling in. We heard that thousands were still in the city at the Superdome and that no help was in sight.
***
At 7:08 p.m. EST, the Army Corps issued its first press release, stating that the agency believed the 17th Street Canal had overtopped, which caused its collapse—a claim immediately proven false by eyewitnesses and later by multiple levee investigation teams. The press release ended with this statement: “The New Orleans District’s 350 miles of hurricane levee were built to withstand a fast-moving Category 3 storm. The fact that Katrina, a Category 4-plus hurricane, didn’t cause more damage is a testament to the structural integrity of the hurricane levee protection system.”26
It is possible that this initial information was off-base due to the environment of sheer chaos caused by land-based and cellular phones having become useless in Greater New Orleans proper.
***
Renee and Harvey Miller were initially panic stricken, but by Tuesday afternoon (August 30), they realized that they were safe where they were. They had food, water, and a couch. There was no water for the toilet, but they had a bucket and plenty of floodwater—all the comforts of home except for just one thing: the dog had to go out! For this challenge, they managed to get their very accommodating Monet to use the roof for her business. Off and on throughout the day, they heard helicopters flying overhead. Each time, they went to the windows and waved frantically, but no one paid attention.
***
Michael Chertoff, secretary of Homeland Security, saw no reason to interrupt his trip from Washington, DC, to Atlanta to discuss the threat of avian flu with the Secretary of Health and Human Services. But, at the meeting’s conclusion at noon on Tuesday, August 30, he was dismayed to learn that things in New Orleans were spinning out of control. He decided that the situation needed his full attention and, upon returning to Washington, he drafted language that invoked the National Response Plan.27
Meanwhile, engineers from the Army Corps and staffers with the Orleans Levee District and state Department of Transportation and Development all met at the 17th Street Canal breach site. They realized that none of the agencies had an emergency contingency plan for sealing levee breaches.28 Such an absence of planning for breaches spoke to the fact that, in 2005, the Army Corps was considered the gold standard in levee-building.
***
We arrived in Lafayette at about four o’clock on Tuesday afternoon (August 30), at the jam-packed, four-story hotel. The mood at the Drury Inn was far different from the Days Inn in Jackson just twenty-four hours earlier. A forced, three-day mini-vacation and a “let’s make the best of this” attitude had turned into a bona fide evacuation with fear and anxiety. One small blessing in this hotel was that our two boys had a room of their own, and Steve and I were lucky enough to get one of the hotel’s few rooms with a tiny kitchenette.
After waiting over an hour for the single, coin-operated washer and dryer, we drove to Shoney’s for some dinner. We spoke little. Our eyes and everyone else’s were fixated on the television high in a corner of the busy restaurant. There was nothing new, only the same reports over and over. We drove back to the Drury Inn and climbed the stairs to the fourth floor. Walking down the hall, we could hear the sharp bark of our very yappy wiener dog.
Steve and I settled down with Grandma Rose and Scott to watch television, hoping for something different from the hurricane-racked region. Then we got the most shocking news of our lives. The levees had broken, the “bowl” was filling, and the City of New Orleans was going underwater. And that wasn’t all; stories told of chaos at the convention center, looters at One Canal Place shopping mall, and “marauding black youths” walking down St. Charles Avenue and breaking into each house, one by one.
We did not know it yet, but our house—six feet above sea level along the Mississippi River—was high and dry. We also did not know that the reports of looters were exaggerated. Nonetheless, the night of August 30 was tearful for everyone. We all thought of the city and those still in New Orleans. Would the city come back? How many had died?
Steve and I walked from Grandma Rose’s hotel room on the third floor to our sons’ shared room on the second floor to tell them this terrible news. But they already knew because they were watching the same news reports. Of course they were. For a while, we just sat together, saying nothing. After asking them if there was anything they needed, we said good night, and shuffled back to our room. Unlike when we arrived in Jackson, I was too numb to unpack, too numb to do anything except watch the news reports on CNN over and over before falling into the first of countless uneasy nights’ sleep.
