Digging In, Getting Out, Surviving
NEW ORLEANS--In the flooded wreck of her city, cut off from water, electricity, and her dialysis treatments, Violet Jackson simply wasn't ready to leave. Her 79-year-old husband had died in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and was still slumped over in his easy chair in their white shotgun shack on the edge of the Garden District.
When her neighbor, Henry McEnery, a pastor, visited her the next day, she was sick and disoriented, having missed several days of treatment. But she simply couldn't abandon her husband, she said. McEnery offered to hold a makeshift funeral service for him. "I even happened to have a bunch of flowers," he says. So he wrapped the body in blankets and plastic bags and held a brief, 15-minute service in her house. "Right after, she finally smiled, even as she was crying," McEnery says. "I said, 'Now, can we go to the hospital?' "
Jackson agreed. A week later, though, her husband's body was still out on the front porch, wrapped in a light blue blanket under a hand-lettered yellow sign: "Alcede Jackson. Rest in peace."
With much of New Orleans still accessible only by water, crews launched rescue boats from highway off-ramps and even from Napoleon Avenue, part of the Mardi Gras parade route. Under live oaks strewn with Mardi Gras beads, crews from as far away as Kentucky took boats deep into the city. To Oliver Thomas, the New Orleans City Council president, the city is "Ground Below Zero."
"We got Tabasco." Some of those rescued were in bad shape. Matthew Minson, a medical specialist from Texas, helped treat a woman who had been floating on a cushion in her flooded house for five days. Suffering from severe exposure and dehydration, he figured she couldn't last much longer. "We took a rowboat and jury-rigged it to get an IV in," he says. A helicopter whisked her away.
Amazingly, thousands of people remain holed up in their island homes. For many, it's all they have. Ray Menard was born in New Orleans in 1928. "I've got lots of manuscripts and drawings," he says. "Where does it go?"
Others are just plain stubborn. In one poor neighborhood, a rescue boat piloted by volunteer Howard Johnston pulled up alongside a house with two men relaxing on their front porch. Their home, perched on stilts, largely escaped water damage. But they were surrounded by blocks and blocks of deep water. Still, they politely rebuffed Johnston's repeated attempts to get them to leave, insisting they have enough food for several weeks. "We can stretch it," one said. "We got Tabasco. We're gonna be OK."
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin's order of a mandatory evacuation was backed up by vague but unmistakable threats of force, and the prospect of people being expelled at gunpoint is unnerving both locals and rescue workers. "The people have been through hell," says Steve Marshall, who works with We Care, a Christian relief organization. "The last thing they need to see is a gun in their face telling them to leave."
Even now, no one knows how many residents drowned in attics or died waiting for rescue boats that came too late. So far, hundreds of bodies have been recovered. On a boat near the Garden District last week, soldiers with the California National Guard retrieved at least 28 bodies. It will take weeks, perhaps months, to collect all the victims.
The anger at the muddled response to Katrina, even weeks after the storm hit, is almost palpable. "It's going to end up not just being the worst natural disaster," McEnery said, "but it will also be the worst man-made relief disaster ever." The anger was especially bitter because everyone knew the killer storm was coming. "No one knew that planes would fly into the World Trade Center," says Roy Glapion, a local businessman who stayed behind to weather the storm. "People knew this storm was coming for days."
There are a few bright spots here, however. Neighborhoods like the French Quarter and the Garden District are surprisingly dry and largely intact. Power and water were even restored in a few places last week. One dive in the French Quarter managed to stay open the entire time. Johnny White's Sports Bar--renowned for having no locks on the doors--became not just a watering hole but a community center and even a hospital. Volunteer bartender Joseph Bellomy, a former special forces battlefield trauma specialist, stitched up a customer's ear after he was mugged.
Mucky Bayou. Almost forgotten, however, was the plight of New Orleans's working-class eastern suburbs, which took the brunt of the hurricane's eye wall. At the Econo Lodge in neighboring St. Bernard Parish, the storm surge came in so fast that in only 30 minutes a two-story building filled with water up to three steps below the second floor. "I left a goodbye message to my daughter," says Ralph Simmons, who manages the gas station next door and helps out at the hotel. When the water receded, it left behind 4 inches of black muck in the lobby and casino, called Lucky Bayou. "I can hook you up with a room if you want," says Simmons, "but the maid hasn't been by in a few days." Simmons has been unable to find even the remains of his house behind the gas station.
On a rescue boat cruising through the town of Chalmette in the parish, the crew passes a boat suspended between two neighboring rooftops. Down the street, a camper is perched on a roof, and an ornate rocking chair is speared on a high branch. Says Chris Schlechta, a volunteer firefighter from Milwaukee: "They might have to change the city name to Atlantis."
This story appears in the September 19, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.