Words Whispered in Water. Sandy Rosenthal
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