diary 27

From: Jack Sarfatti

Date: 09/05/05 16:38:31

Subject: *** SPAM *** Fwd: Jimmy Nolan's article in the Washington Post

Begin forwarded message:

>> THE WRATH OF NATURE

>> Our Hell in High Water

>> By James Nolan

>> Sunday, September 4, 2005; Page B01

>> BATON ROUGE

>> The real nightmare began last Wednesday morning, when the city cut

>> off the

>> water supply two days after Hurricane Katrina devastated New

>> Orleans. Until

>> then, I hadn't regretted the decision not to evacuate my second-

>> story French

>> Quarter apartment, even when the electricity flicked off in the

>> middle of

>> the storm, plunging the city into darkness and ending most outside

>> communication.

>> I still had hope.

>> I'm not particularly brave, but I am a fifth-generation New

>> Orleans native

>> raised in a culture that knows how to deal with hurricanes. As a

>> matter of

>> fact, the first light I ever saw streamed from a generator at

>> Hôtel Dieu,

>> the hospital the Daughters of Charity had founded in the 19th

>> century. I was

>> born there during the unnamed hurricane that wiped out New Orleans in

>> September 1947, and was rowed home to the Faubourg Tremé along a

>> flooded

>> Canal Street. So as clouds darkened on Sunday afternoon,

>> generations of

>> storm folklore -- sheer instinct by now -- sprang into action. I

>> filled the

>> bathtub with water, cut the wick on the hurricane lamp, froze

>> water in

>> plastic jugs to keep the refrigerator cool, secured the

>> dilapidated wooden

>> shutters on the front gallery, stocked up on batteries, food and

>> bottled

>> drinking water, and got out the portable radio and the plug-in white

>> Princess phone. Then I opened a bottle of wine. By the time my

>> friends José

>> and Claudia arrived to weather the storm with me, I'd cooked a

>> three-course

>> meal, which we topped off with a bottle of Spanish cognac.

>> "Here's to Katrina," we toasted, "the Russian spy," even as the TV

>> broadcast

>> its unrelenting instructions to evacuate, evacuate, evacuate.

>> After Katrina began to pound us at 7 a.m. Monday, the only moment

>> of panic

>> took hold when a storm shutter tore open and a buckling set of

>> French doors

>> threatened to usher the hurricane into my study. While José and

>> Claudia

>> wired the doors shut, I held them in place with a wooden cooking

>> spoon

>> wedged inside the handles. Then we retired to the back gallery to

>> watch the

>> howling wrath of the storm whip through the brick courtyard. My

>> building

>> dates back to 1810 and has survived two centuries of storms from

>> the Gulf.

>> It knew what to do.

>> Or rather, the original architects of the city knew just what to

>> expect, and

>> designed houses on brick pilings, windows and doors with jalousied

>> shutters,

>> thick plaster walls and enclosed courtyards. Most of the buildings

>> constructed before 1910 have been waiting during centuries for a

>> storm of

>> Katrina's magnitude, and survived her with iron-lace grace, as did

>> my place.

>> Houses with concrete slab foundations poured on reclaimed

>> swampland, and

>> towering plate-glass hotels and office buildings, were chewed up

>> and spat

>> out. As my mother complained after her suburban home was flooded

>> several

>> years ago, "Honey, things like this aren't supposed to happen

>> anymore. These

>> are modren times."

>> Nature hasn't changed, but the city certainly has.

>> Summer camp by kerosene lamp didn't last long. By Tuesday

>> afternoon I was

>> already beginning to hear about martial law, widespread looting

>> and the

>> city's mandate that everyone leave and nobody return. "You have

>> nothing to

>> come home to," the lone local radio station announced to the

>> evacuated. "New

>> Orleans as we know it has ended." Friends from both coasts called

>> to inform

>> me that the French Quarter was under water, even as I peered down

>> from my

>> balcony into a bone-dry street. When we took a walk around, the

>> Quarter

>> resembled a cross between the morning after Mardi Gras and a grade-

>> B war

>> movie. Choppers swooped overhead, sirens wailed and Army trucks

>> rumbled

>> through the streets.

>> I began to notice groups of residents lugging water bottles and

>> suitcases,

>> heading for the convention center. Hours later they straggled

>> back. At this

>> point my chief means of communication was shouting from the

>> balcony, and I

>> learned that there were no evacuation buses. The city had ordered

>> us to

>> leave, but was allowing nobody in to rescue us and providing no

>> transportation out. On Tuesday evening, my skeletal neighbor Kip, a

>> kidney-transplant patient, waded home alone by flashlight from the

>> convention center, where there were neither dialysis machines nor

>> buses to

>> get him to one. His last treatment had been four days earlier, and

>> he was

>> bloating. We had to get him out.

>> By Wednesday morning, when the water was cut off, the city was

>> already

>> descending into mayhem. A looter had shot a policeman in the head,

>> a car was

>> hijacked by someone wielding a machete, gas was being siphoned

>> from parked

>> cars, mail trucks and school buses were being stolen, and gangs of

>> kids from

>> the projects were circling the streets on bikes. The social

>> problems in this

>> impoverished city had been simmering for decades; now the lid was

>> off, and

>> the pot was boiling over.

>> Despite the orders to leave, roadblocks had been set up, and

>> nobody was

>> being permitted to enter or leave the city. Molly's, a local bar,

>> opened by

>> candlelight and the rumor spread like wildfire: They have ice. If

>> evacuated

>> residents and proprietors had been allowed to return, to take a

>> stand, some

>> public order would gradually have prevailed. Yet the only advice

>> from the

>> city was to head for the convention center.

>> The city's heavy-handed tactics made me bristle. "We got too many

>> chiefs and

>> not enough Indians," the mayor complained. I knew what that meant:

>> Nobody

>> was in charge. The Homeland Security police state had collided with

>> Caribbean inefficiency, and the result was disaster. I took action. I

>> latched the shutters, kissed my deceased mother's rabbit-foot and

>> cat's-tail

>> ferns goodbye, and in five minutes had packed a bag. In a daze, I

>> was acting

>> out a recurring nightmare: The borders are closing, the Nazis are

>> on their

>> way, grab grandfather's gold watch and run.

>> I'd heard that hotels might be busing their guests out, and the

>> place to

>> head was the Monteleone hotel on Royal Street, a Quarter

>> institution. So at

>> 5:30 p.m. José, Claudia, Kip and I arrived trailing luggage and low

>> expectations. But it turned out the Monteleone had gotten together

>> with

>> several other hotels to charter 10 buses to the Houston airport

>> for $25,000,

>> to do privately what the authorities should have been doing

>> publicly. We

>> bought a few of the remaining tickets at $45 each. The sweltering

>> lobby was

>> littered with fainting bodies, grandmothers fanning themselves and

>> children

>> seated in shadowy stairways, a scene straight out of "Hotel

>> Rwanda." The

>> last bus out of New Orleans was set to leave at 6:05, the Austrian

>> hotel

>> clerk informed me. I had my doubts.

>> We weren't the only locals in line. I spotted the legendary jazz

>> musician

>> Allen Toussaint. "Allen," I said, "where did you hear about this?"

>> He shot

>> me a broad grin and walked on, as if we shouldn't talk about such

>> things. By

>> 9:30 that evening the buses still hadn't arrived, much less left

>> and about

>> 500 people were milling around in front of the hotel, guarded by a

>> hotel-hired security force of teenagers in "New Orleans Police" T-

>> shirts

>> with shotguns slung over their shoulders. An obscenely obese man

>> was hauled

>> in on a beeping forklift, and a row of passengers in wheelchairs

>> formed at

>> the corner. A run on the buses was expected, and we were warned

>> that only

>> those with tickets would be allowed to board. Anyone else would be

>> dealt

>> with by the kids with rifles.

>> Bus headlights appeared at last. A cheer went up. And then a

>> single yellow

>> Jefferson Parish school bus rattled up, bearing the news that the 10

>> chartered buses had been confiscated by the state police. We heard

>> on the

>> sly that this bus was offering passage to the Baton Rouge airport

>> for $100 a

>> seat. Allen Toussaint was the first to jump on, and after

>> negotiating the

>> price down a bit with the driver, who I assumed was an evacuator

>> trying to

>> make some extra money, we crouched on the floor and held our

>> breath. Ours

>> was the only vehicle sailing along a dry, unlit highway. Why, we

>> wondered,

>> isn't the city providing hundreds of these vehicles to carry

>> people out by

>> the same route? The authorities may fix the electrical grid one

>> day, but who

>> is going to fix the authorities?

>> Later a neighbor who stayed behind told me that the 10 chartered

>> buses never

>> did show up. "You mean you all escaped on that stolen school

>> bus ?" she

>> shrieked. The news, she said, was all over town. As in the Battle

>> of New

>> Orleans, the pirates were better organized than the soldiers, and

>> saved our

>> day.

>> We're now luxuriating in a friend's air-conditioned house in Baton

>> Rouge,

>> taking hot showers and sucking on ice cubes. I'm safe and dry, but

>> however

>> comfortable, this isn't New Orleans. The minute the lights flash

>> back on,

>> I'll be back home, unlatching my shutters and staring down a

>> French Quarter

>> street that I hope stretches as far into the future as it does

>> into the

>> past. As Stella says to her sister Blanche in "A Streetcar Named

>> Desire:" "I

>> wish you'd stop taking it for granted that I'm in something I want

>> to get

>> out of."

>> James Nolan, a poet and writer, teaches at the Loyola Writing

>> Institute of

>> Loyola University in New Orleans.