Words Whispered in Water. Sandy Rosenthal
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
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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