The day before the world changed

Two years ago yesterday, I was sitting in front of the boobtoob with the laptop on the coffee table, considering whether or not we were going to leave our home in the face of Hurricane Katrina. The storm tracks weren't looking good. My instincts were that the storm was going to turn eastward, but would it turn enough to allay my wife's concerns about staying?

On August 27, 2005, the concern was not water, but wind. While many areas of the east bank of Jefferson Parish had flooded because of heavy rains, our Metairie home had never, ever flooded. There were times when the water came up over the sidewalk onto the lawn, but that was it. Street flooding that ruined carpets and floors in Metairie in the past had cost politicians their jobs as pump upgrades and other drainage issues went front and center in the 1990s. By 2000, flooding wasn't on our minds like it used to be. But wind is always a huge concern, wind that would damage the roof, uproot trees, or throw debris through windows.

Then there was the traffic. By Saturday afternoon, voluntary evacuation orders had been given for Orleans, Jefferson and St. Bernard Parishes. The roads were already jammed with cars moving less than five miles an hour. Neither my wife nor I had ever evacuated because of a hurricane in our lives, and the inconvenience was definitely outweighing the peace of mind factors. We decided to watch the storm through Saturday night and make a decision early Sunday morning. We hoped the traffic would settle down overnight as well.

By Sunday morning, the storm had reached Category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale. It was the wind that made us leave. We packed up the car and headed across the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway to I-12W to I-55N to I-20W, finally arriving on the doorstep of friends in Shreveport eight hours later. We were tired and stressed, and our friends immediately whisked us out to dinner and drinks. We all figured that we would be imposing on them no more than a day or two, then we'd drive back and (hopefully) no trees would have blown into the house. Because the concern was the wind.

Yes, the threat of wind, not water. That's because so many of us in the New Orleahs area trusted the work of the US Army Corps of Engineers. In 1965, Hurricane Betsy flooded the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, prompting state, local, and federal governments to work with the Corps to raise levees from 10-15 feet to 25-30 feet. Those of us in our forties had seen the expansion of flood protection around the area all our lives. Levees, floodgates, floodwalls, improved/revised evacuation plans, communications coordination, all contributed to making us feel like we were on the right track in terms of defending our homes against the storms.

What none of us expected was that the US Army Corps of Engineers had botched the job. Not everyone agreed with everything the Corps did, but, when it came to flood control, most folks trusted their work. One good reason for this was the success of projects like the Old River Control Structure, which regulates the flow of the Mississippi River, to keep the river from changing course and completely merging with the Atchaflaya River. Old River has been operational since 1963, keeping the Port of New Orleans economically viable. Then there's the Bonnet Carre' Spillway. Built by the Corps in the 1930s as a response to the great flood of 1927, the spillway is designed to divert the Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain via a floodway connecting the two twelve miles upriver from the city. The spillway has been opened several times since its construction, protecting the city from high water from the River. Projects created by the Corps worked. Sure, people had issues with rights-of-way near levees, designations of areas as "wetlands," and Environmental Impact Statements that some viewed as bureaucratic nightmares, but the big-picture projects worked. We trusted the Corps.

We totally trusted the Corps on Sunday, August 28, 2005. Sitting on our friends' deck, drinking wine and talking, the worry was that the wind would push the water over the levees. As with all of these storms, the hope was that it would turn east or west from the city just enough that the counter-clockwise winds would not push Lake Pontchartrain on top of the levees along the north of the metro area. The "strike probability" of the storm hitting the city increased Sunday morning, but by that evening, it looked like this storm was turning enough that our suburban Metairie home would be safe. We went to bed.

(continued tomorrow)

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