Mood:
chillin'Topic: Politics
During those three hours I sat in the tire center on such a wonderful Valentine's Day, I finished reading Jed Horne's Breach Of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City.
Breach begins by telling the story of a family in the Lower Ninth Ward—a place now notorious after Katrina. After hearing about the possibility of the approaching hurricane, the grandmother and son decide to leave, while the mother and daughter decide to stay behind and hold down the fort.
(page 7): "It wasn't the morning news reports that did it. The mayor had made the evacuation mandatory, but he could do what he wanted. Peters wasn't planning to leave; she had already passed up her ride. And it wasn't the phone call from her cousins over on Jourdan Road, four or five blocks away, to say that they were reconsidering their decision to stay put. In hindsight, Peters would remember being spooked as much as anything by a numerological coincidence: that exactly forty years separated 2005 from 1965, Katrina from Betsy. "You know, I think we made a bad decision," she said to Keia as the symmetry of the two events dawned on her. "I have a funny feeling about this."
Horne follows several other families as they decide to stay or go. Years later, reading this, knowing what is to come I was curled up in my bed with chills, wishing families like Peters' would have all bolted from the city. While some of the other families Horne covered left, not all of their prayers were answered. However, it was Peters' story that chilled me to the bone.
(page 9): "On a hunch that a mattress might float, mother and daughter managed to haul one out through an upstairs window and onto the camelback's lower front roof, water now lapping at its eaves. Neighboring houses had been wrenched free of their foundations and were easing out into the street. When a small cottage floating high in the water knocked up against their house, they heaved the mattress onto its more gently sloped roof and clambered aboard."
I have to say, for these parts of the book I felt so ignorant. Having lived in Baton Rouge for six years now, I was here for Katrina. Although New Orleans is only an hour drive, Baton Rouge is a world's difference than NOLA. So when the national news stations were broadcasting what became, what Horne calls, Katrina Icons—the people on their roofs, the helicopters, the Superdome, the looting—many of my friends and family thought what was happening in New Orleans, was also happening in Baton Rouge. Indeed it was not. In fact, I honestly had no idea until now what was really happening. And for that I feel stupid. However, I was watching the same news channels as everyone else, seeing those same icons. I didn't know people were floating down streets on rooftops.
I am unsure if it was Horne's intention to do so, but he did a great job of making Hurricane Katrina the star in this book, and she was a big, bad, bitch. Frankly, I was just as terrified reading this book as I was reading about Derrick Todd Lee; afraid that Katrina was going to knock her windy knuckles on my door at any second.
Aside from the personal stories, the section of the book that describes the weather coverage of Katrina was my favorite part—probably because that is one of the things I remember most about my own preparation for the storm. The original projection of Katrina was displayed in that familiar cone on the television; it could go to Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, or Florida. Katrina made landfall in Florida, east of Miami, at only a category 1. There was a thought Katrina would weaken or even disappear after she toured Florida. However—(page 13): "The hurricane had not simply survived the Everglades, it had been deeply refreshed in transiting south Florida." Over that Friday night, while New Orleans was inside the Super Dome watching the Saints, Katrina was growing into an unbearable force—"The Big One."
Of course, there can't be a book written about Katrina without the mention of New Orleans' two biggest failures—(former) Mayor Ray Nagin and the levees.
(page 208): "Nagin dug in his heels. Yes, the muck into which he dug them, that ghostly whitish gray ooze covering so much of the city, was of uncertain toxicity and was likely to become an airborne presence that would carry even into unflooded neighborhoods. Yes, there were no hospitals, at a time when big-city residents with limited experience as lumberjacks would be firing up chainsaws and attempting to clear fallen trees off their property. Yes, they would be up on rooftops, trying to patch ripped shingling, until they fell off rooftops and needed to be patched themselves—but where, with so many hospitals out of service? Yes, there were no working streetlights or traffic signals in a city where emergency crews had grown accustomed to blowing through major intersections and defying one-way signs. Yes, New Orleans had been hit by a bad hurricane, but in Nagin's view, and many shared this view, the citizenry as well as the city would be better off if people got back to their accustomed haunts."
The New Orleans' levees were the supporting roles in Horne's book, and with great mean. Hurricane Katrina was a storm; winds, rain, etc. But "Katrina" as often referred to is a flood. It's all the lives lost, the homes ruined, the before, the during, and the aftermath. In fact, after the hurricane passed, many came out from their shelters and thought "We did it, we survived Katrina." The fear was that the hurricane would bring so much rain, the levees would overflow (even though the walls stood 14 feet above the normal level and were built by the best). But, then the levees breeched and the flood began. And so, many think Katrina happened because of an explosion at the levees—something done on purpose to keep the wealthy white neighborhoods safe. There were others were out to prove Katrina was a manmade disaster, explosion or not. Enter former deputy director of the Hurricane Center at LSU, Ivor van Heerden (currently suing the university for wrongful termination after his Katrina criticism).
(page 154): "In van Heerdan's view, this evidence pointed to underlying structural failures. Two explanations jumped to mind. One was that the soils beneath the levees were unstable, as might be expected of drained swampland. Swamp soils were likely to be full of everything from rotting wood to alligator carcasses. At the London Avenue Canal, it was immediately clear to van Heerdan from the hillocks of sand that had blown out from the sides of the levees as they failed, that these ramparts had been built above an old beach, which greatly augmented their instability. The other key variable was the depth of sheet piling, the huge interlocking iron plates that were driven into the levees, and in theory at least, deep enough below the levees to provide an impenetrable barrier to water migrating horizontally from the canal."
Of course, in 400 pages, Horne covers much more than what I've mentioned here. I would most definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in what really happened before, during, and after the hurricane and flood of Katrina.
Horne, a metro editor for The Times-Picayune, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his work in covering Hurricane Katrina. He is also the author of Desire Street: A True Story of Death and Deliverance in New Orleans.
