CHAPTER 3
Katrina’s eye was still hours away, but parts of New Orleans were already flooding. Katrina’s eye moved past New Orleans at about nine a.m., approximately twelve miles east of the center of town. Across the city, a thousand others were also dead- or about to be. In many places, bodies floated in the streets, dead tissue beginning to bloat in the dirty flow. By early afternoon, the wind and rain were letting up and the sky brightening. The city continued taking on water like a great sinking ship. Its flood defenses had been all but destroyed. Earthen barriers protecting the east side had been overtopped and breached in dozens of locations. Canal levees within the city proper were breached at dozens of points. The swollen lake could take another two days to drain out, and as it did, most of the city would flood. Water was flowing freely into the city, and the flood would continue until someone found a way to stop it. The rain pounded the earth and began to fill the canals.
Katrina was sitting about 380 miles off the mouth of the Mississippi River. It wasn’t turning east as had been originally forecast. And the most probable place for landfall was now the New Orleans metropolitan area. Katrina was growing like Topsy, dropping in pressure, organizing around a massive eye, packing 115-mile-per-hour winds, and taking a shift to the west. Katrina had continued to grow, becoming a Category 5 superstorm, generating 165-mile-per hour winds and pushing a storm surge projected to easily swamp the city.
Eighty miles to the southeast, the city of New Orleans was quiet. Contraflow had ended before the sun went down, and as the rain beat down and the wind picked up, Louisiana looked to be prepared as it could be for the catastrophe everyone was certain was coming. All day Sunday, city streets resounded with sirens and blasts from bullhorns, radio and television stations broadcast scary prognostications, and the word to evacuate rang out from pulpit to podium. The hurricane moves upriver for nearly sixty miles, leaving catastrophe in its wake. It passes right over New Orleans, and as it does, the storm tilts nearby Lake Pontchartrain like a teacup and dumps it into the city. A quick rush of brackish water drenches New Orleans and leaves it sitting in as much as twenty feet of water. The hurricane prompted a massive and chaotic evacuation and would have been a serious killer had it hit New Orleans on the perfect path it had been taking.
The state of Louisiana was in no position to respond to such a cataclysm, and that would likely mean the death for many citizens. Hurricane Katrina wasn’t the storm of the century; it didn’t deal New Orleans a direct blow, and winds in the city were not as strong as in many outlying areas. Hurricane Katrina didn’t present a double disaster- indeed, many of the floodwalls collapsed below their rated strength, in advance of the storm’s passage. Perhaps the most unsettling element to the Hurricane Katrina disaster is the way it happened- not as a silver shadow streaking across the sky but as massive, lumbering tempest that signaled its intentions days before following through.
There were no dramatic fireballs, no sudden flashes of light, no buildings that fell to vapor over the course of an hour or so. The floodwater is the worst of it- it collects in the lower parts of the city and takes weeks to pump out. As it sits, the water becomes a thick and fetid mash of household chemicals and dead things and gasoline that bubbles from the tanks of thousands of submerged automobiles and service stations. The storm kills tens of thousands of people outright and leaves the city virtually uninhabitable, downing all computer systems and paralyzing the infrastructure. And thousand of dazed and dying survivors sit on their roofs in the semitropical sun awaiting rescue.
Thought the tales of heroic rescue are numerous and inspiring, many people perish, waiting for help that doesn’t come. A twenty-foot storm surge with accompanying rain overwhelms the local levee system and drowns low-lying areas. The gush of water, coupled with driving rain, fills New Orleans and the surrounding suburbs like a cereal bowl. The city of New Orleans alone is home to more than one hundred miles of hurricane protection- nearly thirty miles of river levee as well as all manner of floodwalls and dirt beams, along with more than two hundred floodgates. In eastern New Orleans, the back levee was subsiding and was thought to be as much as three feet below grade, meaning it would be no match for even a modest hurricane.
New Orleans is a city of excesses and improbabilities, of neighborhoods built on swamps and million dollar bridges that go nowhere and lavish development projects that just never take off. But if there was one ongoing project that had long inspired confidence and pride in New Orleans, it was the city’s elaborate drainage system, an intricate network of open and underground canals that moved storm water off the streets and into the river and the lake. New Orleans is a terrible place to locate a city. Trapped between raging river that often slopped its banks, a pair of shallow lakes, and seemingly endless vista of marsh to the south, the “Isle of Orleans”. Hurricane Katrina was born in typical fashion, as a wisp of wind somewhere over the Ethiopian highlands in early August 2005. As the scrap of weather drifted westward, it picked up a bit of steam and a bit of rain until it hit the Atlantic Ocean. Over the ensuing days, the depression chugged northwest and got bigger in the late summer heat. And as it approached the Bahamas from the south, it got a name:
Tropical Storm Katrina, the eleventh named storm of what was shaping up to be an unusually active hurricane season. The business of predicting hurricanes is as much art as it is science. Better and faster computers, improve simulation programs, high-tech ocean buoys, and a fleet of hurricane-hunting aircraft: capable of flying into storms to measure wind speed, temperature, and humidity, have made it easier to predict where a hurricane is going. But all this advanced technology belies the fact that storms are mysterious, capricious phenomena; they weaken when scientists think they’ll strengthen. Meanwhile, Katrina was sitting about 380 miles off the mouth of the Mississippi River. It wasn’t turning east as had been originally forecast. And the most probable place for landfall was now the New Orleans metropolitan area.
Katrina was growing like Topsy, dropping in pressure, organizing around a massive eye, packing 115-mile-per-hour winds, and taking a late shift to the west. Katrina had continued to grow, becoming a Category 5 superstorm, generating 165-mile-per-hour winds and pushing a storm surge projected to easily swamp the city. Eighty miles to the southeast, the city of New Orleans was quiet. Contraflow had ended before the sun went down, and as the rain beat down and the wind picked up, Louisiana looked to be as prepared as it could be for the catastrophe everyone was certain was coming. Katrina then moved east back into open water and then north, making a second landfall near the Louisiana-Mississippi line. The storm flat devastated the Mississippi coastline to an extent never seen in that state. Many communities along the Mississippi coastline were literally taken down to slab. The storm knocked out bridges, moved buildings, and sent giant trees crashing to earth. Louisiana got better treatment.
Though the storm drenched the city of New Orleans with as much as twelve and a half inches of rain in some spots, many areas in the metropolitan area received less than half that amount. The storm surge that hit the city’s lakefront area was less that twelve feet at its peak, which is in the range of what can be handled by that area’s hurricane protection system. Katrina caused plenty of the usual hurricane related mayhem in New Orleans. Across the city, Katrina’s winds killed the electrical grid, cutting power to the Superdome and pretty much everywhere else. Skyscrapers lost windows by the hundreds, and large pieces of public art crashed to the ground. Farther west, along the grand boulevards near the city center, three-hundred-year-old trees crashed onto the sidewalks and many New Orleans streets were jungles of broken limbs and dangling electrical wires.
As the city’s venerable oaks came crashing down, they wrenched gas and water lines out of the earth, which caused plenty of localized flooding and sparked a number of fires. Shortly after Katrina hit, the city of New Orleans reported two buildings in the French Quarter had collapsed and seven other structures around the city were engulfed in flames. Indeed, the city’s lakefront was a Matterhorn of cabin cruisers and sailboats that Katrina’s wind and water had heaped into huge piles along the shorelines. Several hangers at the city’s Lakefront Airport were shredded by Katrina’s wind. The lakefront’s restaurant district was in splinters, and the Orleans Levee District, which had pulled back its men and equipment to a large maintenance shed in the Seventh Ward, found itself on an urban island, surrounded by floodwaters at least six feet deep.
Two parishes to the east and south of the city- St. Bernard and Plaquemines- received a wallop from Katrina’s storm surge from Lake Borgne flopped over the low back levee of the parish with such force that it flung high, outrigger shrimp boats into suburban neighborhoods and washed trophy-sized redfish inland to swim along the parish’s flooded roadways. The massive surge swept across the parish like a broom, knocking out the electrical grid and most communications, and flipping cars and boats up onto the rooftops of tract homes.
The stormwater ran with such a force through the Murphy Oil refinery that it moved a half-filled, 65,000- barrel tank of crude oil off its concrete mooring. The tank flexed and then collapsed like an aluminum can, allowing some 1.1 million gallons of crude oil to cascade into the surrounding community of Meraux, tarring about 1,800 homes. Stem to stem, virtually the entire parish of St. Bernard simply disappeared under the floodwaters.
A twenty-foot section of the 17th Street Canal floodwall collapsed around 6:30 a.m. and probably began to collapse catastrophically, at about 9:30 a.m.; the London Avenue Canal floodwall, which suffered two major failures, collapsed at roughly the same time. Stopped clocks also pegged the collapse of the Industrial Canal levee on the Lower Ninth Ward side at about 7:30 a.m. Some city neighborhoods, along with St. Bernard Parish, were sitting in eight feet of water, and we have people swimming in there. The flooding was extraordinary or out of the norm for a significant hurricane with substantial rainfall; or whether the more than thirty pumps in the city of New Orleans would be able to channel the excess water appropriately. He though Katrina had somehow managed to gash the massive earthen levees that ring the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain.
With the floodwalls gashed and hemorrhaging billions of gallons of water into the city, it was only a matter of a few hours on Monday before the communications citywide began to fail as the moisture crept into the ground-based junction boxes and electronic switching stations. Even satellite phones became useless as the water shorted out ground-based transponders. Communications was about to become the biggest problem of the catastrophe. Most of eastern New Orleans, wracked by levee overtopping's, was swimming in up to fourteen feet of water, and people were literally swimming to highway overpasses and tall buildings. In the heart of the city’s residential area, Gentilly and the Seventh Ward, the London Avenue Canal, gashed in two places and seriously overtopped in another spot, was letting loose a cascade of water that filled living rooms miles away. And on the city’s lakefront, a twenty-foot-long breach grew like a summer weed.
Hundreds of people were already hanging on to crumbling rooftops and balconies trying to escape rising waters and storm damage. The 17th Street Canal floodwalls was in tatters, its concrete caps bent askew like tombstones in a country graveyard. Water was pouring into the city like Niagara. The breach was now a quarter mile wide. All through the neighborhood, people huddled forlornly on the roofs of their single-story homes while floodwater lapped at the eaves. The city had been filling with water for ten hours, maybe more.
The heart of the city and many of its suburbs were cut off and inaccessible to trucks. Lingering on the human toll, hundreds of people were on rooftops and bodies floating in the city’s streets. On Bourbon Street, near the highest spot in the city, where people seemed to be having a party. Neighborhood after neighborhood succumbed to relentless, creeping flood. Thousands were trapped by rising water. The levees had been breached in several places. Were the city’s flood pumps working? Was the lake still spilling into the city? All anyone seemed to know was that the flooding was bad. Many of the houses had been flattened by water, not wind. More that twenty-four hours had passed since the levee breaches were first reported, and thousands of people had been driven from their homes or were trapped in their attics without food and water. Looters began bashing in storefronts on Canal Street, the city’s main shopping corridor, making off with armloads of liquor and expensive running shoes. The big-box stores farther into the city became scenes of merchandise free-for-alls. On street corners in virtually every section of town, people broke into drug stores and bodegas, making off with diapers, canned goods, and cigarettes. What Washington seemed unable to provide, people just took. A large pawnshop in Central City was stripped of its firearms stock.
The looting was open and brazen and went on during the day in plain view of reporters. But while many stores in New Orleans were looted, many were pilfered only for food, and a surprising number of the city’s shops, including grocery and liquor stores, were left untouched. The Mississippi coast had been absolutely ripped by Katrina’s storm surge, and though it was a more conventional disaster than what was unfolding in New Orleans, it was a catastrophe on a scale rarely matched in disaster annals. Entire towns had simply disappeared. Mississippi was facing many of the same supply and communications problems that Louisiana was experiencing. Floodwaters were still rising in the city, but by this hour, there was a falling tide on the lake and the Industrial Canal breach had already reversed, allowing water to start flowing out of the drowned Lower Ninth Ward. Even as thousands of people were being removed from the floodwaters, serious problems pervaded the rescue efforts.
It was dark in Louisiana and really dark in New Orleans, where power had been snuffed out in the entire area. New Orleans was swamped with tens of thousands of hungry and thirsty evacuees. People like to say New Orleans is all below sea level, but it isn’t. Along the Mississippi River the land sits twelve above sea level, and a handful of low ridges cutting out perpendicular from the river are above sea level as well. But in general, the land dips as it heads from the river to Lake Pontchartrain and hits its lowest spots- about six and a half feet below sea level- as it nears the shoreline. For the first two hundred years or so of the city’s existence, ground elevation dictated development: People built on the high ground along the river and on the ridges that spread out like fingers toward the lake. Everything else was swamp. And because water always flows downhill, the swamp became the city’s sewer, the repository for household filth and runoff from the storms that routinely swept the place. But as the city developed, people built canals to the swamps and then through the swamps and then all the way to the lake. These canals were mostly ad hoc affairs, privately excavated and designed to drain specific neighborhoods and plantations. The complex array of earthen levees, levee walls, and drainage canals designed to protect the New Orleans metropolitan area from hurricane storm surge was a “system in name only”. Some levees were still not complete, more than forty years after the construction on the system had begun. Others were not built to mandated heights or had sunk below authorized levels. Several levee walls were improperly designed and were pushed over by Katrina’s surge.
Some levees were built with substandard materials and washed away. Much of the city was built on top of a swamp, below sea level and gradually sinking. The hurricane levees around it formed a shallow bowl that, if breached or overtopped by a storm surge, would fill with water. Anyone there would be trapped by quickly rising floodwaters, their escape routes cut off. As streets became rivers and neighborhoods lakes, hundreds, maybe thousands, would drown. If a more powerful storm struck the city, the levees would fail- end of story. In Washington, those in power had other constituencies requiring immediate attention, and in Louisiana the salvation of New Orleans was surprisingly low on the to-do-list. After all, New Orleans had thus far avoided the Big one. And its citizens and the nation thus essentially agreed to gamble that, as hurricanes roared over the Gulf of Mexico each year, it would keep lucking out again and again. There was no rescue strategy for the city itself.
If New Orleans got hit, the plan was simply to let it be destroyed, then clean up the mess. There has always been an element of folly in mankind's attempts to control or outsmart nature. The self-important activities of human society are brief flickers. One day the sky turned gray. Puffy clouds hung low, and the wind gusted hard out of the east. Rain began to pelt rooftops. The wind soon turned into a steady, howling gale. It tore roofs off, then began shredding walls and toppling trees. Snapped branches and driftwood smashed into obstacles with loud cracks. Nearby bayous flowed backward and spilled over their banks. Suddenly, the river itself began to flow backward. One minute the flood was ankle deep, the next, up to a man’s neck.
The churning waters swallowed communities and carried the people away. People gasped for air, reaching for stray branches or anything that might keep them afloat. The salt water stung their eyes, nostrils, and throats. Many were pulled under or struck by debris and drowned. Bodies and debris floated in silty water, shoved to and fro by the wind. Soon an eerie quiet settled over the marshes. The wind stopped and the sun came out and dappled a new sea that stretched for miles in every direction, with only the boldest of treetops reaching out of the water. Then the rain and wind began again, before finally dying down. The water began to recede. Only settlements built on the highest ground remained. As dazed survivors surveyed the damage, the vitas were unrecognizable: they saw a broken landscape of fallen trees and ragged marshes, everything covered with a layer of fine gray sand swept miles inland from the floor of the Gulf. Bayous had shifted course. Some bank sand ridges were higher. Others had completely disappeared.
A gathering of great waters had welled up and overflowed its banks, depositing silt and muck for miles on either side, building land mile by mile out into the Gulf. Communities along the river’s new course flooded, while those Cajuns living along its old course suddenly found themselves sipping salt water. If disaster did strike, the most powerful nation on earth was poised to intervene, rescue, and rebuild. It flowed into canals next to homes and streets. It poured over levees. It pressed against floodwalls and they fell like dominoes. Water flowed through the streets, submerging homes, schools, convenience stores, gas stations, and cars. A thousand people drowned.
Ten of thousands more were caught by surprise, suddenly trapped in attics and on rooftops.
Battered survivors struggled through a week of hell awaiting rescue, and government officials from the president on down seemed indifferent or clueless. Many residents surveyed the wreckage and wondered if their beloved city could ever be rebuilt, its color and spirit restored. For now, it was little more than a ruined shell. In the space of a few hours, the storm stripped away the security blanket. In the aftermath, only a narrow rim along the natural high ground of the riverbank was still inhabited and functioning. A hurricane is a heat engine packing unimaginable energy.
At the height of its strength, it can release the equivalent of a ten-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every twenty minutes. A storm surge- a massive energy pulse moving through the water- is brutal but brief: the wave rises as it comes ashore and washes inland, obliterating most everything in its path before quickly receding. The winds began rattling the rafters around eleven o’clock the night of August 19. The river quickly rose. Though the city now had a substantial earthen levee, the great mass of water from the surge washed a section of it out and gushed through muddy streets, rising over dozens of newly constructed homes and shops. The floodwaters ran downhill into the swamp that remained between the city and the lake, then flowed north and eastward around the back of the French Quarter.
Much of the city flooded, except for the Quarter and the settled bank of the Mississippi upriver along the crescent. Marshes provided New Orleans with some protection, but closer to the Gulf that buffer all but disappeared. When a hurricane moves over land, it is cut off from the sea’s great well of warmth and moisture.
As a result, its massive whorl starts to disintegrate into bands of thunderstorms and unsettled air, which is why a hurricane’s strength diminishes as it moves inland. As Katrina moved northwest through the Bahamas and then turned west toward Florida, its pressure kept falling. Updrafts of hot ocean air laden with water vapor fed thunderstorms clustering around the storm’s core: a poorly formed column of warm, wet air welling six miles up through the top of the storm, where it cooled and spilled out in all directions. Winds drawn by the low pressure began to spin clouds, raindrops, and hail around the core at a steady 75mph. Water vapor condensed into showers and thunderstorms whose clouds streamed out for hundreds of miles in a familiar, disarmingly beautiful spiral. Katrina was now a hurricane. Katrina moved out into the Gulf early Friday morning. Beneath it was a sea of warm, shallow water, and Katrina’s heat engine roared to life as the high-pressure system’s winds drew warm air up and out of the top. Within hours, Katrina had transformed from a tropical storm to a Category 3 hurricane. Its winds were now blowing at 115mph- about one and a half times as strong as they’d been when it struck Florida.
As Friday wares on, Katrina keeps strengthening. Satellite images now showed Katrina’s eye sharpening and growing more compact. The clouds capping the eye disappeared and the hole was suddenly visible from space: a dark, perfect circle at the center of a vast whorl covering most of the Gulf. Storm Clouds rose higher, their temperature dropping, and banks of heavy rains thickened outward from the eye. Their curved tenduls stretched across Florida and south to Cuba. This meant New Orleans had entered Katrina’s potential strike zone. Would its eye move inland to the west or east, or right over New Orleans?
At seven a.m. Saturday, Katrina was out over the center of the Gulf, moving straight toward the mouth of the Mississippi, 420 miles away. It is a Category 3, its top sustained wind speed 115mph. The first official hurricane watches went up in southeastern Louisiana. Soon a new outer eyewall began to form and the winds held steady. Wind speed then picked up around the central vortex and pressure fell again. Later in the day, Katrina’s eye contracted quickly, like an iris reacting to a strong light, and the storm grew more powerful.
Masses of warm air rose higher and band after band of clouds and thunderstorms ripped to life. Within a few hours, the storm doubled in size. Katina’s clouds obscured most of the Gulf. Tropical force winds were churning waves over an area 320 miles across. A grand exodus away from south Louisiana and the Gulf Coast began. Cars had been streaming out of the city and suburbs all day, from the outer rim of the delta to the center of the city. Under the Contraflow plan, there was nowhere to go but straight ahead: on ramps worked, exit ramps didn’t. Traffic was moving slowly.
Across the region, people made their decisions on whether to go and where. Just after sunrise on Sunday, a Hurricane Hunter measured the storms maximum sustained winds at 167mph. Katrina was officially a Category 5 hurricane. Katrina was officially a Category 5 hurricane. Katrina got another shot of energy Sunday morning, its top wind speed reaching 175mph- as fast as tornado. The Superdome had opened at eight a.m. as a special needs shelter, and with the danger mounting, the Superdome became the city’s number one destination. By late Sunday, Katrina’s tropical storm force winds covered an area of the Gulf equal in size to California double what it had been the day before. The vortex of winds and low pressure pushed and pulled surface waters up into a low bulge in the sea, about fifteen feet high, centered just northeast of Katrina’s eye and moving before the storm.
Tides rose along the coastline and pressed up the Mississippi, across Lake Borgne and through the open passes into Lake Pontchatrian. Already, Katrina was brushing against the outermost reaches of the levee system. Traffic began to let up late Sunday afternoon, and by five p.m., the state police suspended Contraflow. As Katrina’s outer bands of clouds and rain enveloped the delta in the darkness just after midnight Monday, marsh grass fluttered then flattened in the wind, pointing west, then gradually southwest. The wind shifted as Katrina slowly turned due north, on a track that would take it just east of the New Orleans. That was a lucky break, meaning the city would be spared the worst: if the storm had tracked west of the city, its counterclockwise spin would have brought even more intense easterly winds, rain, and a bigger storm surge in off the Gulf. Instead, the city would be on the drier left-hand side of the storm and winds would come more from the north, off the land.
The course change had also brought Katrina over cooler waters, and it began to lose the terrifying strength it exhibited over the open Gulf. At the same time, a stream of dry air began to leach into its western rim, draining strength from bands of thunderstorms. The knot of winds around the eye lost speed, and the barometric pressure rose. The inner core of Katrina’s eyewall- the continually regenerating heart of its convection enginebegan to erode. The storm weakened like a deflating balloon, dropping from Category 5 to Category 3 in the space of twelve hours. But as it neared landfall it was still powerful, its winds keeping up a sustained speed of 127mph.
Showers pelted lakes and bayous as Katrina’s eye moved closer to the coast. Nutria huddled in their mud burrows. Schools of redfish and black drum flitted to silty lake bottoms and stayed put. Then, slowly at first, the storm surge wave began to rise over the delta. Stormy winds over the Gulf had already pushed tides higher along the coast. Then, under the canopy of the storm, a great wave moved across the open marsh, filling lakes, bayous, and canals. The waterways soon overflowed their banks. Multiple streams and rivulets spread out through the grass, ponding at low spots, then rose higher and coalesced. Within minutes, vast swatches of marshland disappeared under water. Soon only trees, signs, pipelines, abandoned oil derricks, and buoys could be glimpsed above the waterline. Most of Plaquemines Parish was soon under water; thousands of homes and all their contents, and everything from shrimp boats to pickups, were tossed in a giant stew and stirred. Katrina’s eye was still hours away, but parts of New Orleans were already flooding. An eighteen- foot storm surge moved against the city’s eastern hurricane levees.
They were only sixteen feet high, and water poured over them. The steady flow peeled off the grassy covering on the barriers and ate away at the earth underneath; miles of levee disappeared in an hour. As they did so, water gushed over floodwalls protecting eastern New Orleans, eroding the supporting earthen beams on their dry side. The walls kneeled over in multiple spots. The walls finally broke with an explosive bang and collapsed. Water thundered through the two-hundred-yard gash, taking chunks of concrete with it and widening the breach. The double blow pushed some buildings off their foundations and into streets, then ripped them apart from the inside out. From the air, the neighborhood looked like someone had picked it up, shaken it to pieces, and dropped it on the ground. Levee failures allowed waters from Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf of Mexico to pour into much of the city and neighboring parishes. Damage to thousands of houses and businesses disrupted the economy of the city, the state, and the region.
The tragic impacts were not just the result of a short-term meteorological event but the outcome of flawed and incomplete human preparations. Since levees and other structural devices used to guard against floods have a design limit, they do not guard against the most extreme storms. Thus, disaster is a function of social actions as much as meteorology.