Words Whispered in Water. Sandy Rosenthal
The next day was Tuesday (September 6, the day after Labor Day), the maiden day for the Rosenthal family to practice one of the weirder post-flood rituals: waking up in a hotel room and preparing to send a child off to school. One does not normally awake in a hotel room before feeding a child his breakfast, fixing his sandwich for his bagged lunch, and driving him to the school bus stop. Even so, the ritual of waking and preparing to send a child to school provided another touchstone to reality. It felt normal and familiar and helped keep us sane and focused during those insane days.
We discovered how little we needed. Some basics one cannot live without. For example, I had to have boiling water and a mug for my Lipton tea in the morning. I had to have my laptop. And in that turbulent time, a television set became necessary. But, beyond that, as long as my husband, my son, and my little dog were nearby, I was content. A year later, upon reconnecting with friends, we would all report this same feeling. All of us would report feeling a need to “purge” ourselves of unneeded things. Even people whose houses had flooded and who had lost everything felt the same way.
On Wednesday morning (September 7), Dan Silverman, one of the senior members at Steve’s business, and Dave LaBruyere, the company comptroller, drove back to the flooded New Orleans region to check out the status of the Metairie office. They found that the building had taken on a couple of inches of water. Under normal circumstances, an inch or two of water would be considered “inconvenient” because the region’s pumping system could have removed the water in a few hours. But in this case, the water would sit for weeks because the pump-station operators had been sent away.
In the days leading up to the 2005 flood, the president of Jefferson Parish chose to adhere to its now defunct “Doomsday Plan,” which evacuated two hundred drainage-pump operators the day before the hurricane made landfall.56 Without a pump system, the water sat and allowed mold to accumulate. With closed windows and no ventilation, mold growth became a significant challenge that required extensive cleaning and disinfecting. In addition, the mold reached levels associated with respiratory symptoms and skin rashes.
After finishing their assessment of the office, Dave and Dan drove to our house and, using the key we gave them, let themselves in. First, they checked for flooding. As we had hoped, the flooding did not reach our house, stopping about six blocks away. Then, they emptied the refrigerator and freezer.
Our placing blocks of ice in the freezer and refrigerator to buy time would have worked had we been gone for just a couple of days, but a week was too long. The food was rotted, and all had to be discarded. But there was an unexpected benefit. The ice blocks saved the appliances from being destroyed by rotting food. Nearly everyone else in the city had to throw out their large appliances. But the ice blocks saved ours.
The dynamic duo then proceeded to their own homes before returning to Lafayette. Now, we could stop thinking about the status of our house and start focusing on getting through the next three months. We had just learned that our son’s school in New Orleans—Isidore Newman School—had announced that it would reopen in January 2006. So we set our sights on returning home after Stanford completed his fall semester at the little life-saver Episcopal school.
***
On Saturday morning (September 10), Stanford, Steve, Chester, and I went on our own trip back to New Orleans. There was the natural, albeit morbid, curiosity to see it for ourselves. And we also needed to get my car, which we had left to help relieve congestion on the interstate during the evacuation. We needed to check on the fish, and Steve wanted to get some pots and pans for cooking when we moved into the house.
The mood was cheerful enough as we traveled through the westernmost suburb of New Orleans to the city of Kenner. The famous, blue-tarped FEMA roofs were not yet installed and, to the untrained eye, the damage in Kenner and Metairie did not look serious. But our mood changed as we entered New Orleans. The great outdoors went from green to gray in a second. We had passed from the west side of the 17th Street Canal to the east side.
Driving was tricky because no traffic lights were working and downed trees blocked most roads and streets. We zigzagged our way down St. Charles Avenue to our home on Soniat Street. The garage door was down and, since there was no electricity, we entered the house through the front door. Search and rescue teams had marked the door with the omnipresent “X” and code numbers to indicate whether any people—or bodies—were inside.
The first thing we noticed in the front garden was that the wind strength wasn’t enough to knock the papaya fruit off our trees—a testament to the relative weakness of the hurricane’s wind in New Orleans. We opened the door. Even though the September day was blazing hot, the house was rather cool due to the boarded-up windows. Chester ran to his water bowl, and Stanford ran upstairs to check on the fish, who were all accounted for. Stanford replaced the batteries in the tank’s aerator and gathered up the clothes and items he wanted to bring back to Lafayette. At the other end of the house, I packed up my small desktop computer and several framed family photos.
Steve manually opened the garage door, I backed my car out of the driveway, and Chester hopped back and forth from my lap to the passenger seat. We picked our way to the house of our friends, Cherry and James Baker, who lived at the corner of Napoleon and Claiborne Avenues. Their home was elevated six feet from ground level, but still they had flooded. Two large motorboats rested on the dead, gray grass, moored to the porch rail in front of their house. Steve made a futile attempt to call James on his cell phone. Amazingly, he got through on the first try. “I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that you had a foot and a half of water in your house.”
“What’s the good news?” James asked.
“You now own two motorboats!”
This is how we survived. If you are going to hear the news from one of your closest friends about how much water your house had sustained—something that houses are not built to handle—you needed to hear the news with a joke. Humor relieved the nagging tension that clung to your very bones, to your cells. So many unknowns, so many unanswered questions, so many whys! And, most nagging of all, what was going to happen to all of us? Gentle humor made it bearable.
***
We got back into our two cars and continued our strange trip. We wanted to see the site of a levee breach. We tried to access the 17th Street Canal, which was about three blocks from one of our favorite tennis courts. To get there, we took the I-10 because it was the only dependable roadway.
As we exited at West End Boulevard, we looked up in shock to see a gigantic pile of debris! We continued down the boulevard toward the lake. But, as soon as we turned onto Old Hammond Highway, we were intercepted by armed guards, who told us that access to the 17th Street Canal was blocked because the Army Corps was doing emergency repairs to the levee and floodwall. It was for our own safety, they said. We would learn later that the Army Corps also blocked independent levee investigators, who flew in from California with the very same logic.
Having seen enough lifeless houses, downed trees and telephone poles, Xs on doors, and the sad, dead color of gray, we decided to return to our Land of Oz.
As we rode back to Lafayette, a “secret meeting” was taking place at the Anatole Loews Hotel, just north of Dallas. The room was reserved by James (Jimmy) Reissa, a wealthy, uptown blue blood who was chair of Mayor Nagin’s Regional Transit Authority. The meeting was attended by Nagin and members of the Business Council of New Orleans: Dan Packer, CEO (chief executive officer) of Entergy, and Joe Canizaro, a real estate developer and personal friend of President George W. Bush. Others from the Business Council included Jay Lapeyre, owner of Laitram Industry and the Greater New Orleans Business Council chair, Gary Rusovich, Gary and George Solomon, and William Boatner Riley.
During the Dallas meeting (September 10, which was twelve days after the 2005 flood), Canizaro had Karl Rove—senior advisor and assistant to President George W. Bush—on the phone. Rove had a directive for the mayor: “Put together a blue-ribbon panel of businesspeople and community leaders who would vouch for a rebuilding before the federal government committed to spending tens of billions.”57
In later interviews, Nagin’s attorney would describe the ensuing