CHAPTER IV
Colonial policy, and subsequent state policy, sought to maintain structural defenses. New Orleans’s topographic condition has rendered it extremely susceptible to both river floods and hurricane storm surge over the years. Wind and waves lifted homes off their piers and piled them up along the levees that lined the lower river. Thousands of people were camped out on the outside ramps of the Superdome. About 100 dogs were tied up to the ticket window. The National Guard was able to keep the people relatively quiet during daylight hours, but apparently, after dark, people started to get anxious and panic. They then became rowdy and dangerous.
Eventually, lots of people came into the city to help. For the first several days there was nothing, and then the boats began to appear. They were lined up on Canal Street ready to go out and rescue people who had been stranded in the flood waters. A battery-powered radio announced that the storm would pass through New Orleans by one or two in the afternoon. The power was out in New Orleans and all along the Gulf Coast region. In between these arbitrary moments of pressure, people stood helpless. The city was quiet now. The air was perfectly still. The trees had been stripped bare.
The communication system in New Orleans was in chaos. Entire neighborhoods in one of America’s oldest and most beloved cities sat under many feet of water, with thousands needing help. And for days that help did not come. Everything was ruined. You had to start from scratch. New Orleans had just suffered a disaster that is comparable to an earthquake.
Less than a day after Katrina struck, about 80 percent of the city was flooded, some areas by as much as 20 feet of water. Hundreds of thousands of New Orleans residents were displaced by Katrina. More than 100,000 houses in New Orleans sustained major damage or were destroyed. New Orleans wasn’t devastated by an act of God. It was devastated by the inaction of man. It was the storm surge that caused the levee and canal breaches and failures, dumping more than 100 billion gallons of water into the streets.
The pumping stations that could have helped alleviate the problems stopped working because of power outages and flooded equipment. Katrina extended 460 miles and brought death and destruction to many communities along the Mississippi and Louisiana Gulf Coast. This crisis was not only predictable, it was predicted. The greatest natural threat to the New Orleans area is posed by flooding from hurricane-induced sea surges, waves, and rainfall.
Hurricanes have been a constant, if irregular, threat to New Orleans and its vicinity since the city’s founding in 1718. Even before surveyors platted the old Vieux Carre’, a hurricane swept over the incipient settlement.
Back-to-back storms in September 1722 and 1723 destroyed much of the new colonial capital, and at least nine additional storms battered the city before the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Since becoming part of the United States, another thirty-seven storms have lashed the city, and others have swept ashore nearby, delivering rain and storm surges to Louisiana’s coastal wetlands and Mississippi’s beaches. New Orleans and its residents are no strangers to the power and damage delivered by hurricanes. Soldiers searching the crowd said they found a scattering of weapons, steak knives mostly, and one rusty pistol that didn’t appear to be operable.
The catastrophe, as many seem to grasp, is one of those big moments that jolt public consciousness and alter the course of national history. The water in the lower Ninth Ward is thickening into a glassy, fetid slick as the gasoline, oil, solvents and sewage from thousands of submerged vehicles and homes leaches out. The water’s blue-black sheen casts back an almost mocking mirror image of the horrible devastation and incongruously beautiful blue sky above.
It was steaming hot and there was a smell of death. Today, New Orleans’ streets are under military occupation: its property is guarded by hired guns; and the corporations of the whirlwind are pouring into town. All that’s missing is the insurgency. New Orleans, like a rotting corpse, naturally attracts all sorts of flies.
Every cloud has a silver lining. Hurricane Katrina has devastated New Orleans, leaving thousands dead and hundreds of thousand homeless, and plunging the entire city into chaos. How many killer hurricanes will it take before America gets serious about global warming? In a single catastrophic event, it brought together the most urgent environmental problem of our time-global warming-with the most telling but least acknowledged environmental truth.
And who said Mother Nature has no sense of irony? What’s more, Katrina primary target already ranked as the most environmentally ravaged state in the union. Traditions of racism, exploitation and exclusion are visible in every aspect of this crisis.
By the Wednesday after Katrina hit, people here began to grow desperate as their stockpiles of supplies ran out. The empty streets of this city present a vista of apocalyptic desolation: windripped roofs, downed trees, smashed fast-food signs, dangling power lines, columns of dark smoke and everywhere heaps of garbage.
At first the city appears like a giant conceptual art installation, or the set of some archetypal cold-war disaster movie. In the tropical waters off the coast of the Bahamas, Hurukan, the Mayan god of storms, stirs. From the heavens, thunderstorms crackled, while forked fingers of lightning reach for the brewing waves of the Atlantic.
A slight rotational twist of a tropical wind, and Hurukan’s daughter emerges, hungry. Tuesday, August 23, 2005, 5 p.m. The center of a tropical depression lumbers toward Florida at a cautious speed of eight miles per hour, with winds gusting to 35 miles per hour. She blew into southeast Florida between Hallandale Beach and North Miami Beach with wind gusts measuring more than 90 mph. As the storm’s feeder bands continued to hit the lower Florida Keys, Katrina was upgraded to a Category 2 hurricane, heading up the Gulf. Sunday, August 28,2005 By early Sunday morning,
Katrina had rocketed to a Category 5 hurricane with a minimum central pressure of 902 millibars. Its girth is what made it so disastrous. Further compounding Katrina’s damage potential was her eye. Katrina had an eye diameter of 40 miles (64 km) and, once the storm itself came toward the Louisiana coast, the eye started to explode and expand the wind field around it.
At 11 a.m., for the first time in New Orleans history, the mayor issued a mandatory evacuation order. The National Hurricane Center advised a storm surge of up to 28 feet (8.5m) and issued a dire warning: 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, leaving those homes severely damaged or destroyed…power outages will last for weeks…water shortages will make human suffering incredible by modern standards.
Monday, August 29, 2005 Katrina was downgraded to a Category 4 hurricane, still with devastating potential. She made landfall in Louisiana between Grand Isle and the mouth of the Mississippi River three hours later. A little more than 12 hours later, Katrina-the monster storm that shocked the country-subsided to a tropical storm. The city itself is 5 to 10 feet (1.5 to 3m) below sea level, depending on which part of the city you’re in. Effectively, New Orleans is a bowl, surrounded by water. As the storm approached, ferocious winds tore at buildings and torrential rains pounded its exterior. Weakened, the buildings roofs sustained leaks, and at 3 a.m. fire alarms sounded. The water and extremely high humidity had shorted them.
The roar of hurricane winds was deafening. By noon Katrina had passed, but the problems and difficulties remained. In the wake of the storm, the air was hot and oppressive. Human beings are not the only creatures affected by extreme weather phenomena. Gulfport reeled under Katrina’s attack. Bordering Louisiana on the east side, this coastal community was hit more savagely than expected when the hurricane looped up the coast.
The immense storm surge pulled fish out of the ocean and spit them onto the beaches, their eyeballs burst from the pressure changes. In the space of a single week, Hurricane Katrina grew from a tropical depression to one of the most destructive hurricanes in U.S. history. Along with the physical and environmental toll Katrina left in her wake, she also revealed some glaring problems with the human reaction to a disaster of this magnitude. By Tuesday, August 30, the day after the hurricane, New Orleans found itself without power or drinking water. 80 percent of the city was under water, as deep as 20 feet (6.1 m) in some places. Rescuers in helicopters and boats began plucking people off rooftops, but the help didn’t come fast enough for many.
On relatively high ground, the historic French Quarter emerged from Hurricane Katrina reasonably undamaged. With the majority of the city underwater after the levee breach, there were fears that the contaminated standing water would promote the spread of hepatitis A, cholera, and typhoid fever. The warm, moist conditions were favorable for mosquitoes, and the city mounted concentrated mosquito spraying in the hopes that mosquito-related diseases, such as malaria and West Nile virus, would be prevented.
The first part of the storm probably lasted about half an hour. And it was so hot! You know, it’s August in New Orleans. It was totally dark. Usually, there is this orange glow when you look up. That was totally gone. There were falling storms flying past the constellations. Then the hurricane hit. The flood waters went, the second week of September, it was about seven weeks after the storm hit, that the lower Ninth Ward was the last area to drain.
Napoleon Avenue went from being bone dry to being covered by two feet of water within twenty minutes. The water continued to come on Tuesday night. People seeking dry ground were congregating. Some of the uptown gangs that had been fighting each other for years found themselves in closer proximity than usual.
Around 2:30 a.m., gunfire broke out and continued for the next 48 hours. A lot of it sounded like it was coming from semi-automatic weapons. The water was very deep, but there was an eighty-by-thirty-foot island on the neutral ground that was dry. Over thirteen hundred citizens in Louisiana and Mississippi died due to Hurricane Katrina.
The levee systems failed inexcusably. This wedge of the continent has been changed forever, physically, economically, culturally. What will the new city be like? This wave or maybe the tip end of a low-pressure trough or some other mechanism we don’t fully understand gently pulls the trigger on the rapidly rising column of air at the center of the disturbance, which has a lower pressure than the surrounding air, and this low-pressure action sucks in more air, and this rapidly moving air evaporates seawater from the ocean, bringing still more moisture and heat into the system the heat as a result of friction, both from the action of the wind on the water and from the molecules in the atmosphere rubbing against each other- and the planet below spinning toward the east induces a cyclonic, counterclockwise rotation to the whole thing.
The storms do move independently, but they are embedded in the atmosphere and track in conjunction with the overall movement of that atmosphere, which in turn is often guided by powerful steering currents. A key controlling factor for storms is the jet stream, a current of fast-moving air in the upper level of the atmosphere, usually between six and nine miles above the surface.
It’s hard to become a storm, and apparently it’s hard to reach maximum potential as a storm. Meteorologists suspect two main culprits. The most important of these is believed to be wind shear, which is a conflict between the direction of air flowing into the center of the storm at different altitudes. A wind coming from the east at five thousand feet and one from the west at ten thousand feet creates a lot of shear, which will probably have a weakening impact on the storm. Such conflicting winds may disrupt the symmetry of the counterclockwise circulation. They may also import cooler or drier air.
The wrong strong winds aloft- thirty thousand feet, say, five or six miles up- may shear off the tops of the highest thunderstorms, definitely disrupting the efficient functioning of the heat engine.