We devoted Wednesday morning to getting our smashed car window repaired. The dealership was busy, and we waited several hours for the mechanics to finish the job. In the waiting room all the televisions were tuned to Katrina coverage. Unfortunately, as the other customers watched they talked about it with one another, and then with us. It didn't take long for everyone to realize our predicament.

Wednesday was the first day stories leaked out about large numbers of people stranded at the Superdome and the Convention Center. Even more ominously, several major fires were burning around town. Despite the fact that the city was inundated with water, there was no power and no water pressure, which meant that fires were burning uncontrollably. New Orleans, it appeared, may not have been simply severely wounded, it was possibly dying. What was going to stop every remaining building from burning to the ground?

And help seemed to be nowhere. As my wife remarked, every single day looked worse than the day before. We expected Monday to be bad. But we did not expect to see Tuesday worse than Monday, and Wednesday worse than Tuesday. Louisiana Governor Blanco seemed to be calling a press conference every two hours, but nothing was getting done. The whole city was drowning and burning and being looted and no one knew what to do. And if New Orleans was in this kind of shape, I could only imagine what was happening to St. Bernard Parish, which was closer to the eye of the storm. There was no information whatsoever coming out of St. Bernard. Any fool could look at a map of the Gulf Coast and see this hunk of land jutting out into the ocean that Katrina cut directly through. But no one was talking about it, not even in passing. It was as if the place never existed. Maybe it no longer did.

A fellow sitting next to me was angrily talking on the phone. He hung up, and turned to tell me what was going on. He was the director of the YMCA in Tallahassee, and his office was handling a huge influx of calls from evacuees who were trying to find a place to stay. Evacuees were being forced out of their hotel rooms, he said with disgust. The weekend after Katrina was coincidentally the date of the biggest football game of the year, Florida vs. Florida State. The Florida game was a major social event — people had booked hotel rooms in blocks an entire year in advance. Game day was rapidly approaching and some of the hotels were telling Katrina evacuees they had to be out by the weekend. This was creating considerable anxiety.

For the second time in three days we heard someone apologize for Tallahassee. "The people of Tallahassee aren't like this," he said. "This is a nice town. It is outrageous that anyone would put these people out after what they have gone through."

We left town before the game, but I think the people of Tallahassee worked things out. If that guy had anything to do with it, they did.

We were finally ready to leave by about 2 o'clock. It was, I admit, a late departure for a 450 mile trip, but I was tired of being away from home. Not that there would be much for us to do in Baton Rouge; the city of New Orleans was closed to all traffic and, we were hearing, probably would be for weeks. Still, Baton Rouge was closer, if not all the way home. I also had the bright idea that by traveling at night we would avoid most of the traffic.

We left Tallahassee on I-10 west, and immediately came to a standstill. There was a major accident ahead. I got off the interstate and covered almost the entire remaining 400 miles on back roads.

Before we crossed the Florida state line we stopped for gas. We had heard that electricity was out over much of Mississippi and that we might not find an open gas station for awhile. This information was correct; in fact, after crossing the Alabama state line we did not find another open service station in 7 hours and 300 miles of driving.

Skirting Mobile, Alabama to the north, we saw the first sign of what Katrina had done to the Gulf Coast. Near the US 98 bridge over the Mobile channel was a 100 foot tall oceangoing oil platform. Katrina's storm surge had shoved it up Mobile bay and into the channel before crashing it into the bridge. Footage of this platform had been on all the news channels Monday. Then it was one of the more dramatic images of Katrina's power, but by now the horrors of what was going on in New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast had taken over public consciousness, pushing the wayward platform completely out of memory. The tugboats from the port of Mobile had pulled it safely away from the bridge and anchored it a few hundred yards downstream.

Taking 98 north and west, my plan was to exit at Lucedale, Mississippi and then travel west on Highway 26 through a town called Wiggins, then to Poplarville, and to cross into Louisiana at Bogalusa, far from the coast. From there I expected smooth traveling to Baton Rouge.

My wife thought my plan to cover 200 miles of Mississippi back roads at night was foolhardy. In retrospect, I have to admit she was right. While I would not say we were ever in significant danger, the trip was far more harrowing than I had planned.

We left Mobile, heading northeast on US 98. As we passed the outer limits of Mobile, we drove by illuminated homes less and less frequently. At first I thought we were entering less populated areas; but then I realized the homes were there, but they were dark. The electricity was out in vast areas of Alabama. No more than 25 miles out of Mobile we passed the last electrically lit home we would see until Amite, Louisiana — 250 miles later.

Lucedale was not just dark. It was smashed. It looked like an army of thugs had passed through, breaking windows and signs, knocking over fences, stripping shingles off roofs and branches from trees. It was obvious that the people of Lucedale had been hard at work — branches were stacked high on both sides of the road — sometimes so high that the houses behind them were invisible.

Past Lucedale, the tree stacks on the side of the road were getting larger. First large branches, then whole trunks lay in piles like kindling waiting for the largest bonfire since Sherman paused in Atlanta.

Another unexpected obstacle was wire in the road. We ran over the first one in Lucedale, and shortly recognized them as downed power lines. By the time we crossed the far end of the devastation we must have driven over 500 downed lines. Of course, none of them were electrified, or you would not be reading this now.

We made it to Poplarville, crossed over I-59 and entered Louisiana through a narrow two lane highway, putting us in Bogalusa. We were almost 60 miles north of New Orleans. I had expected some wind damage but what we saw was unbelievable. Tree trunks 4 feet thick snapped in half. Bogalusa was an endless lumberyard. The cut stacks of wood stood well over the top of our car, so tall in fact that I had a real concern that if we sideswiped one of them the toppling stack would crush us.

There were no lights anywhere, save an occasional candle in a window cutting the darkness. Most of the homes looked intact, though in the darkness it was hard to tell. The forestation helped shield the houses from what must have been howling winds, although we also saw an occasional home cut in half by a massive fallen bough.

I had been watching New Orleans on the news as everyone else had been, but had heard nothing about the parishes and counties to the north. The governor of Mississippi had said earlier in the day that 80% of the homes in his state were without power. I didn't believe it then but will attest to it now. As horrible as New Orleans was, it was worth thinking about the poor people of Poplarville, Bogalusa, Frankinton, Wiggins. They were well off the coast and probably had no idea what they were in for. Holed up in their homes in the woods 100 miles from the coast, almost none of them evacuated, and their punishment was watching Katrina rip their little towns to pieces. Country people know they cannot depend on police, or the National Guard, or boats, or helicopters to bail them out when things go to hell. They were on their own. A family hiding under its beds as a 60 foot pine crashes through the roof and into their living room, knowing there was no help for hours with gusts of 125 mph blowing overhead — a family like that must have had a story to tell indeed.

We just kept moving. Again and again we would come to a tree lying across the road, and I would think the road was completely blocked and we would have to turn back, but each time when we got right up to the fallen tree I would see that someone had come by with a chainsaw and cut just enough limbs away to let a car slip through. The Citizen's Highway Brigade. The road must have been blocked in this way ten times, and if any of the fallen trees had not been pruned back we would have been trapped at midnight on a pitch black road without enough gas to make it back to the last functioning gas station. My back road plan was clever in our escape, and stupid in our return.

The worst part of the trip was another kind of gas. Natural gas pipelines were broken everywhere and at times the smell was overwhelming. Whenever we hit a patch of heavy natural gas smell we just crept out way down the road and prayed none of the power lines we were driving across had enough juice to produce a spark. That I know of there were no major explosions or forest fires in that area that week, which was an unrecognized miracle. At least, unrecognized to anyone outside of Washington Parish.

We followed the country road, and followed it, and followed it, and it deteriorated to a gravel road (the blacktop had been stripped for resurfacing prior to the storm) and that point I thought we were completely lost. There was no hope for gasoline until Baton Rouge. We pushed on, and finally emerged in Amite, Lousiana and found Interstate 55. By the time we were on the interstate my wife was no longer talking to me. She thought my decision to drive the back roads in the middle of the night was a big mistake, and she was letting me know it. I guess she was right.

There was still no gasoline anywhere. This would be a fact of life for weeks in Southeast Louisiana. No electricity, no gas pumps. And even when the pumps worked, so many people rushed to top off their tanks that the station was empty in a matter of a few hours. But that night, the little red needle on my dashboard levitated just above "E," and we entered Baton Rouge city limits without needing any more fossil fuel. For the first time in my life I felt the urge to light a menorah.

We got to my aunt's house in Baton Rouge at about 3 am. Thirteen hours, 450 miles. Not a bad time, if I do say so myself.

To next Katrina Blog Project Entry: Thursday, September 1, 2005 

Tuesday was the beginning of the nightmare. Monday was expected — a terrible storm landed and there was great damage. Tuesday was supposed to be the Day After, the day to hear about heroic rescues, damage assessments, and assurances that we were back on the path to normality. That is not what happened.

 
The water was rising.

All the media were talking about it. Streets with only a trace of standing water in the gutters on Monday now had one foot, two feet, three feet of water, and the level was rising. I knew immediately what that meant. The levees had failed. New Orleans was filling up with water.

I had concluded, based on the thin knowledge we had gathered so far, that our house had suffered significant damage. Katrina, after all, had missed New Orleans, and veered directly our way. If our house was gone, at least, I hoped, New Orleans had survived. In a way, this was more important to me than the survival of my own home. I had insurance and a medical degree, which meant my losses would be paid off and I would eventually find a job. But New Orleans was another matter. New Orleans is a delicate place, a place of poverty and old architecture, of comforting decay, a town of haunting shabbiness and charisma. There was no great wealth, no Information Age economy to hold communities together after a catastrophe. The people there loved their carefree, idiosyncratic lives, but many, many of them lived on the edge. I could survive, but many of the New Orleanians I had known as my patients over the years would suffer great hardship if the city was wiped out.

It is one thing to lose your home. It is another to watch the culture you grew up in quietly drown.

The national media had backed off of their "dodged a bullet" assessment. The new metaphor of the day was the "bathtub" and the "toxic gumbo." New Orleans, as a city below sea level, was the bathtub filling up with a mixture of swamp water, lake water, sewerage, street sludge, and refinery waste. Though I again had concerns about the media's rush to cliché, I sensed this time they were closer to right. I had walked the levees many times. On one side families, homes, children playing in the street, bars, churches. On the other, water — billions of gallons of it. If the levees were gone, the destruction would be unimaginable.

That morning I hooked up my laptop to the hotel internet and started searching for information online. I sent off a email to a fellow St. Bernard physician suggesting an emergency plan. Perhaps all the evacuated St. Bernard doctors could get together in Baton Rouge, I opined, and organize to re-establish medical care in our parish. My colleague had a better grasp on the severity of the situation than I did. He wrote back to me:

Thus far I have nothing except what can see on TV.

We had to get my wife a new phone with Houston prefix as no 504-985 and 225 (Miss) [Gulf Coast area codes were out.]

Clearly the whole city is underwater with fires, no water, sewer or power,

Twin span and Hwy 11 bridge is out

Chalmette is under 12-15 feet so prob total loss.

Will be weeks or months before any possibility of normality.

Currently with family in Houston and I-10 closed to BR [Baton Rouge]

We are trying to find a place in BR to stay while hoping to get into town to see what can be salvaged.

Left with shirts on our backs

I was not ready to accept that St. Bernard Parish was "a total loss." It seemed as incomprehensible to me then as it does now. But it was, as it turned out, the most accurate assessment of what had happened at home that I would read in many weeks.

The time we spent in the hotel room was little more than slow torture. All we had was the TV and internet. The information was repeated and repeated, like the same train running through the same station, except that every once in a long while a new piece of information was added, like an additional boxcar to the long circuitous train. After awhile I learned that there was no need to carefully scan the reports for the new information; if I missed something it would be around again in fifteen minutes.

All the major channels were starting to broadcast footage of looting. It was the same handful of people looting the same store, over and over and over. (I wondered how they kept restocking that Walgreens so fast.) There was no telling how bad the looting was, but the media knew how to make it look very bad.

The gap in the 17th Street canal levee was another matter. The pictures were even more horrible than the rumors. As someone who had seen street flooding many times in his life, I knew how devastating even a few feet of water in a house could be. Nothing escapes filthy water, from pictures, furniture, and appliances down to the sheetrock on the wall and the electrical wiring inside. Then the mold comes and the whole place smells. A flooded house is a wasted house. When it comes time to sell no one wants to buy a flooded house any more than they want to buy a car that has been in an accident. A flooded house is a total financial calamity. And that doesn't even touch the emotional loss.

I saw the same picture everyone else did, a thin concrete wall that had been overwhelmed in a 500 foot stretch, the water silently flowing into the Lakeview neighborhood as if it had been invited. Just a black sheet of water with a few white wave crests outlining the breach to remind the viewer that the water was rushing at a rate belied by the serenity of the picture. Houses and scraggly trees in long, straight lines indicated that there might have been streets between them. The water just flowed and flowed, and it looked like no one was around trying to plug it.

Of all the things that happened that week, the one I cannot get over is that the city and the Army Corps of Engineers did not have an emergency plan to patch a levee breach. Certainly they would have a few helicopters or barges and a few hundred tons of sandbags sitting around waiting to be rushed to a breach. It was inconceivable that if a levee started to break the emergency plan was to watch it on television. But that, in fact, was the plan. I wish I could say members of Army Corps or the Levee Board were just standing around watching the city fill up with water -- fiddling as Rome burned, as it were – but even that accusation would be generous. There was no one in sight of the broken levees, unless you counted drowning people.

Every ship on the ocean has a bilge pump, every car on the road a spare tire, but New Orleans had no plan to rapidly fix a levee breech before it developed into a chasm. In fact, there was not even a sensor system to detect a levee breech. The first reports that the levee had broken came from eyewitnesses who waded to higher ground and told reporters what they saw. The authorities were denying that a breach had even happened up to 12 hours after the first levee broke. Twelve hours to discover a 500-foot levee breach, in the United States of America. Heaven help us.

Today, even more so than on Monday, we grasped at every shred of information, watching every video image over and over, first on one channel, then on another, then a third, hoping each time that the story would turn out better, and it was always, always the same thing, this is bad, far worse than we thought, this is no dodged bullet, I wonder how many people are trapped in those flooded houses.

We tried to get out briefly, but I was not comfortable driving the car without being able to see out of the passenger window. So mostly we stayed in the room, and watched the other New Orleanian kids running up and down the hall as their parents worried in the rooms just as we did.

I learned one thing in that hotel room. Women are naturally better suited to care for children than men. Our room was small, and I would pass the time wrestling with our kids on the bed. When a man is on the bed roughhousing with two toddlers he can expect at least two good kicks to the groin an hour. For a woman that sort of play is much less hazardous business.

We finally escaped to a mall in the area. It was a pleasant enough mall at the bottom of a slope near one of Tallahassee's main highways. The highway ran on a ridge at least 20 feet above it. In New Orleans such a location would flood with every summer cloudburst, but I had to remind myself that we were not in New Orleans. In places well above sea level such matters are not a concern. In Florida water is a way of life. In New Orleans it is a way of life too, but today it was also turning out to be a way of death.

We went to buy shoes for my daughter and socks for me. I had forgotten to pack any socks, and as I watched the broken levees on TV it dawned on me that the socks on my feet might be the only socks I owned. So we shopped.

My daughter got a pair of Dora the Explorer sandals, which she was immensely proud of. Two saleswomen in the shoe department stood nearby and oohed and ahhed as she pranced around, showing off her new shoes. The more they encouraged her, the more she puffed up. I half-suspected we were once again being recognized as Katrina refugees. Maybe they were just being kind, but I couldn't help my self-conscious state of mind.

I tried to buy my socks in the shoe department, but this turned out to be a big mistake. The socks were technically from a different department and didn't scan properly at the cash register. So our whole family stood there while a clerk and two managers tried to figure out how to charge me for a $6 pack of white socks. Three people to close a sale on a pack of socks. And to think I wondered why the government couldn't figure out how to close a levee.

Since they were the only socks I was going to own, I felt a little like the guy in the joke who goes to the store to buy tampons for his wife and the price is not on the box, so the clerk calls for a price check on the overhead system. Price check on socks? Hell, just charge me the full amount and send the bill to my St. Bernard address. I'll be there to receive my mail, I swear.

While we were at the mall we decided to buy a luggage carrier for the roof of our car. Since we were probably out of a home and would be on the road for awhile, it made sense for us to get some extra storage capacity. In case we needed to buy more socks. We went to Sears and picked one out. In the automotive department we met a middle-aged man also looking at roof carriers. I hardly had to ask, but naturally he was from New Orleans. His home was in Metairie, and he was a professional musician by night and a school teacher by day. Classic New Orleanian: half community pillar, half seedy drifter. Well, in his case, to be fair, maybe 10% seed.

We had a pleasant talk with him; pleasant in the way chat at funerals is pleasant. We hoped he hadn't lost everything and he hoped we hadn't lost everything. There really wasn't much else to say.

Sears only had two luggage carriers left. Louisianans had been flocking in over the last two days and buying out the stock.

It would take about an hour to get the carrier installed on the car, so we walked around a bit more. In the food court we ran into more refugees. There was just no getting away from those people. We were sitting at a table minding our own business, when two families standing nearby started trading Katrina gossip. They were talking about which neighborhoods were flooded, how many people were killed.

After a few minutes of listening, my wife got involved with them. When they found out we were from Chalmette, they volunteered information for us. One member of the family had a husband with the state police. Ten thousand people were dead in St. Bernard, he had told them. The government was bringing in trucks full of body bags and refrigerated tractor trailers by the hundreds to take away the bodies.

None of this would turn out to be true. The final body count in St. Bernard was just over 130. Which is terrible enough, but an order of magnitude less than 10,000. Were they just making this stuff up, or did they really believe what they were telling us?

I doubted every word they said, and told my wife so even as they walked away. After all, how could a couple of women in Tallahasse, Florida know things the entire national press (who had the advantage of being in New Orleans) did not? On the other hand, I was amazed at how easy it was to pick up rumors about St. Bernard 450 miles from home. This may say more about my strangeness than of the strangeness of the situation, but I thought about ancient times and how chance meetings like this were the only way information about disasters was spread. It explains a lot about epic poetry.

That moment was probably the lowest point of the week. I knew nothing about our home. Nothing I could trust, anyway. I wondered if my two medical practice partners were dead. I wondered how many of my patients were now dead. If my house was wrecked, if my church, my daughter's school, Today's Ketch Seafood (my favorite spot to buy crawfish during Lent) — if anything was left. And here I was listening to pure gossip, to people who knew nothing more than I did making the reckless speculation that St. Bernard was America's Hiroshima. I didn't want to hear it. They should have kept their mouths closed.

It reminds me of know-it-all friends who volunteer medical advice. A person needs a gallbladder surgery, and tells his friend about it; instead of the friend responding, Good luck, Sam, I'm sure you'll do great, he instead says, Oh, I had an uncle who died from gallbladder surgery. Thanks for helping, pal. Everyone needs friends like you.

It makes it worse when people who do not know you at all think it is their duty to volunteer such information.

Katrina, as it turned out, would be the first major American disaster of the digital age. And the digits pretty reliably let us down. Every phone in the 504 area code was almost impossible to reach. We were constantly trying to call family members, and getting through about 5% of the time. By trial and error, we discovered a peculiar way to pass information around on my wife's side of the family. We were able to call my wife's father, who was in South Carolina on business, at any time and get through. He could call my mother-in-law and get through. But my mother-in-law couldn't call my father-in-law, and my father-in-law couldn't call us. And we and my mother-in-law couldn't call each other. So we fashioned a rickety information highway: We called my wife's dad every few hours, he called his wife, who then passed on news to my wife's sister and kids.

My mother-in-law had spend the night of the hurricane in a school in Baton Rouge with my sister-in-law and her three children, and then the next day found a room to rent there. Baton Rouge was jammed with evacuees, so this was a great stroke of luck. My mother-in-law had a friend who knew someone that managed rental property in Baton Rouge. She ended up in an apartment with my wife's sister, her husband, their three kids, my wife's uncle and his wife and their kids. And to think some were afraid to use the term refugees.

That night we made definite plans to leave Tallahassee. This was partly a financial decision. I was not certain how much money we had available to us, since our bank was in New Orleans and could be out of service for weeks. I supposed I was out of a job, and had no idea how long it would be before we had money coming in again. I didn't want to drain our resources at a rate of $100 a night. My parents were at my aunt's house in Baton Rouge, and we would be a lot closer to the action at her house if there was something we could do. And my aunt was not charging rent.

We still had the problem of the broken car window. Hopefully the car dealership would come through with the part and get us up and going by the early afternoon on Wednesday. For the second time this week we were depending on good service to get us by.

So we sat in the hotel room, and waited, as the water rose 450 miles away. In a way, it was drowning us too.

To next Katrina Blog Project entry: Wednesday, August 31, 2005 

This whole town does look like whatever hope becomes after it begins to weary a little, then weary a little more. But hope deferred is still hope. I love this town. I think sometimes of going into the ground here as a last wild gesture of love — I too will smoulder away the time until the great and general incandescence.

                                                                           — Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

By the time I awoke the next morning, Katrina had already landed and expended most of itself against the Louisiana and Mississippi coast. The morning was typical only in the sense that the children woke us up. In a two-bed hotel room that was a given.

First thing we turned on the TV and collected a newspaper. From that moment on we were, unknowingly, at the beginning of the long process of figuring out What Happened. My wife and I realized we would not get all the details for a few days, but we had no idea that finding out What Happened would take more than six weeks.

The storm had hit just a few hours after midnight. All the news reports were saying that Katrina had jogged slightly to the east after its initial landfall in Buras, Louisiana. New Orleans had missed the worst of the storm. Dodged a bullet — this was the phrase of the day.

By 11 o'clock in the morning these dodged-a-bullet reports were starting to irritate me. Intuition told me they were wrong. I lay no claim to clairvoyance or voodoo priesthood, but the reports were problematic. All the news was coming from the French Quarter, the Superdome, and the Central Business District — relatively high ground. These reporters didn't know the geography of New Orleans, and the more they talked, the more obvious that became. Huge sections of the city were east of the Quarter and the CBD. My house was about 20 miles east of the Quarter. If the storm had shifted 25-50 miles east and was originally forecast to hit downtown New Orleans, didn't that mean the eye had crossed over my house?

The reporters had read too many tourist brochures, and, like a lot of people, thought the Quarter and the Superdome and the Riverfront were all there was. Not hardly. I would believe them when they started exploring further east. There was no telling how long it would take for them to figure that out.

Another thing that vexed me was the degree of agreement in the news assessments. It hadn't been that bad, they said in unison. New Orleans had dodged that bullet. That observation put me at unease, not because it was unwelcome, but because it seemed too tidy. A rush to judgment by a bunch that had not yet examined the most affected part of the city.

Eyewitness reports usually differ in specifics, sometimes sharply. Everyone has his own point of view, and so, one naturally expects that ten different accounts of the same event will differ from one another at least slightly. But when ten people tell the same story down to the particulars, it rings false. All these reporters were reading from the same script. There was no healthy disagreement, as if the source of all the information was one guy.

In a search for dissent I tried to raise some of the stronger AM stations in New Orleans on the hotel room radio, but we were too far away.

My wife and I held our breath, said a few prayers and hoped the suspicious news line was true to its last doubtful letter. The storm had veered east. That could mean it missed us too, or that St. Bernard Parish was now a polluted pond. I hoped no one had been dumb enough to stay down there, but I knew from personal knowledge that was not true.

The information was coming in bits and pieces, and in true modern journalism style each bit was recycled over and over. It was like watching a bunch of kids sing "Row, Row, Row Your Boat." One reporter would start his story, then another would join in shortly after, singing the same tune, then another, then another. Before long there was all this information looping through the channels, but it was the same thing, the same theme, over and over. We saw every window in the Hyatt Hotel blown out. We saw trees everywhere. We saw a video of a shopping cart being pushed by the wind across an empty parking lot. Street signs wagging in the rain. Exciting stuff like that. Most tantalizing to me were the satellite and radar images of Katrina. Over and over, every chance I could get to watch it, I stared at that spinning blob wobbling ashore. I saw it feint east at the last second. Was it passing over our house? Wasn't it? I felt like a Kennedy nut in a frenzy over the Zapruder film.

After a few hours of this misery we decided to get out for a while. The hallways of the hotel were full of kids and their dazed parents. Everyone was from New Orleans. I couldn't decide if that was a comfort or more misery. There is something unsettling about being 450 miles from home and seeing nothing but people from your home town. It was like being at an LSU Tigers road game, but a lot less fun. Then it occured to me: I am looking at the true lottery. Some of these people will make out all right; others will be, already have been, ruined. And at the moment none of us knew who was who. We were all holding lottery tickets. Some winners, some losers. The drawing was early this morning, but no one could find the results.

We drove around town for a while, got the kids something to eat, and ended up at the place most Americans drift to in a time of need — Wal-mart. By this time we knew from the news reports that we would not be going home for several days at least. New Orleans may have dodged a bullet, but the authorities did not want us back peeking under the bandages.

At Wal-mart we picked up a few supplies. As we came out of the store, an ugly squall swept in from the Gulf. Katrina weather, no doubt. It was amazing — three states away from New Orleans and getting bad weather from Katrina all the same. What an enormous storm.

I waited under the shelter in front of the store with the kids, and my wife ran out to get the car. Today I can't remember why I stood under dry shelter and let my wife get the car in driving rain. I thought I was raised better than that, but maybe not. Perhaps I had concluded that with my superior muscle I could better fend off pilferers from our purchased goodies.

My wife drove the car around, and I saw that the passenger window was open and rain was pouring into the passenger's seat. My first thought was, that goofy wife of mine forgot to roll up the car window. It was a mean thing to think and I was wrong, but that is what I thought at the time.

When she pulled up to the curb I saw a jagged ice-green edge along the bottom of the window where the glass should have been. Someone had smashed in our car window. Probably a delinquent cruising the parking lot and checking out the license plates, knowing that any car from Louisiana would be loaded with valuable stuff. Great to see people responding to natural disasters with that Amercian entrepreneurial spirit.

A quick inventory showed that there was nothing taken from our car, which was a relief. The parking lot was very busy, so probably the guy called attention to himself when he popped the window and didn't have time to complete the smash-and-grab. So he just went for the smash. Welcome to the refugee life.

To recap, we had all our stuff, but lost a window, and more importantly, it was raining like crazy. I ran back into the store and bought a plastic drop cover, a knife, and some tape. Eventually we got the window covered over, enough protection to at least discourage the water.

Unfortunately, the car was not easy to drive that way. The plastic made a godawful racket flapping in the wind when I went over 30. Worse, on left hand turns I could not see oncoming traffic. I had seen so many junk cars with busted out and taped-over windows in my life, and never realized how tough those poor suckers had it. It is like driving with your right visual field blocked out. The proper medical term is right hemianopsia, as I recall.

Shortly we realized the plastic was not going to work, and that going back to New Orleans would be impossible without a new window. The next stop was a car dealership.

Naturally the repair shop did not have the part, would have to order the part, but when they recognized our situation they were suddenly helpful. For the second time we had been quickly identified as refugees. I kept looking at myself in every available mirror or glass to see what it was that induced casual onlookers to conclude that our house had just been consumed by a tidal wave.

The people at the dealership made it a point to apologize for Tallahassee. Tallahassee is a good town, they emphasized; people usually don't go around victimizing hurricane evacuees by smashing their car windows. They offered to vacuum out the shards of glass that still covered the passenger's seat for free.  Truth is, I could never hold it against Tallahasse that car was broken into. Not considering the beating my own home town would take in the media for the next week — looting, shooting at rescue helicopters, raping in broad daylight. I will probably spend the rest of my days defending New Orleans against the charge that it is a pit of vipers. I may even think better of Tallahassee because I know it, like my own city, is not perfect.

The dealership promised the window would be in by Wednesday. This meant we would be in Tallahassee until at least then. Not that we had anywhere to go, but nonetheless, I was ready to leave.

To next Katrina Blog Project entry: Tuesday, August 30, 2005 

Six thirty AM I was awakened by the sound of hammering. George and Juan were back, and boarding the window directly above the head of my bed. I needed to get up anyway.

First thing was to check the weather reports. Katrina was now a Catagory 5 hurricane, sustained winds about 160, and still predicted to make a straight hit on New Orleans. We had to leave; there was no going back now.

The house was oddly dark. It took me a moment to realize that was because all the windows were covered with plywood.

And there was a new problem: Katrina was big, big, big, much larger than the average hurricane, and the National Weather Service was now predicting hurricane-force winds in Mobile, AL. All it would take is for the storm to veer a few degrees to the east and Mobile would be a direct hit. We needed to move our hotel reservations much further east.

I jumped back on the internet, cancelled Mobile and found a hotel room in Tallahassee, Florida. Tallahassee was over 450 miles from New Orleans. We were in for a long evacuation trip.

My parents called for the 10th time. They had already evacuated to Baton Rouge, and wanted us out of there, understandably. Many people had left town yesterday, but I waited primarily out of concern for my patients. If the storm track changed and we could stay, I wanted to. But Katrina was now given an early Monday landfall, which meant we had about 15 hours to get out of town before the winds topped 100 mph. I would not be able to delay action much longer.

We loaded everything in my wife's car. Regrettably I left behind my own car, an Infiniti with only 11,000 miles on it. The Infiniti was worth more than the family car, a Toyota Highlander, but the Highlander was bigger and could carry more provisions. We did not seriously consider taking both cars. With over 500,000 vehicles headed out of New Orleans, we knew that if we two got separated it could be days before we found each other again. And we made this decision without knowing that Katrina would take out cell phone service across much of the Gulf Coast. So we parked the Infiniti in the garage and locked it up, at a time when it was increasingly obvious to me that we would probably lose it.

George and Juan worked quickly, completely boarding up the house by 10 am. I can't remember the last time I accomplished so much by 10 am. I walked around the house to inspect their handiwork. Our house was all brick, and the windows were aluminum, so rather than screw or nail the boards to the window frames Juan had drilled holes in the brick and inserted steel pegs to hold the plywood in place. Yeoman's work. All the times I had stood in line at a bank or a fast food restaurant and complained about the service, all the times I waited in vain for the cable guy to show up, and the one time in my life I needed someone to do a good job with no notice this guy Juan comes out of nowhere and does an outstanding job. I promised myself I would remember that next time I had to suffer through poor service.

On the side of the house where we had a small greenhouse window that bowed out from the wall, Juan had built a wooden shell that slipped over the glass and locked in place. Truly fine work.

We filled up the car and secured everything. As we packed up, my wife called my attention to the neighbor's back yard. Our next-door neighbor, Daisy, had left with her two kids the day before. Her yard was filled with junk, the kinds of things any person with a brain would realize could fly away in high winds (and probably smash our house) -- a swingset, a trampoline, a pair of bikes. I swore if I found any of that stuff in my living room next week I was going to find a lawyer.

Our neighbor across the street, Mr. Fred, came over to talk to us. "I have never evacuated for a hurricane in my life," he said, "but I'm getting out for this one." Mr. Fred was a widower, but his daughter and her family lived two doors down. He planned to leave with them by noon. As was true for many families in Chalmette, generations of his family lived within a few blocks. This was truly his home, and his children's home, and his grandchildren's home. His wife was buried in St. Bernard. He stood to lose a lot more than us. We had only been there for four years, and compared to him, our roots ran scarcely below the topsoil.

My wife expressed concern about water coming over the levee along the Mississippi river.

"Oh no," Mr. Fred said. "The water is coming from over there." He pointed to the north, towards the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet. "And if it does, it will flood every house in the Parish."

We said goodbye to him, expecting to see him again soon. Unfortunately, Mr. Fred would die during the evacuation. The story we were eventually told was that he caught pneumonia in the stress of the evacuation, and died hundreds of miles away from his lifelong home because his family could not find a hospital in time.

In Meraux, he lived across the street from a doctor.

Finally the kids went into the Highlander, and we strapped them to their car seats. As I locked up the door, I had this self-pitying feeling I was looking at my house for the last time.

I, like everyone else in America, have seen the following on the TV news: A woman gets out of her car to look at her house after a disaster and confronts a pile of sticks. The cause could be hurricane, earthquake, fire, tornado. The woman falls on her knees and breaks down crying. Every time I saw that in the past, I thought the same thing: "Stop crying. You lost your house, but you have your life, which is all that really matters. Your house is just stuff."

As I looked at the kitchen door for the last time, I decided when I got back and confronted my own pile of sticks I would probably cry too. It is just stuff. But it is my stuff, and I don't guess anyone else will cry for it.

The drive out of our neighborhood was unnerving. Meraux was completely empty, like 5 am on a Christmas morning. Except no cars parked in the street, no boats in the driveways, most windows boarded up. After the storm, authorities would estimate that about 10,000 people stayed behind in St. Bernard to ride the storm out. If so, I didn't see them.

The road remained deserted until we approached the interstate, then it was an endless traffic jam all the way to the Mississippi state line. We alternated between listening to children's CDs and the weather and news reports on AM radio.

My plan was to take I-10 East straight to Tallahassee. There was a problem, however. I-10 ran straight through the hurricane zone, following the coast, and we kept hearing rumors that the Mississippi I-10 was closed. On the radio we heard I-10 east was closed, then it was open, then it was closed. Finally we reached the point east of the town of Slidell where the interstate divided into I-59 and I-10 and entered Mississippi. As we approached the split, a reporter on the radio announced confidently that the State Police was allowing cars onto I-10 East. No more than 30 seconds later we saw a cop holding a cardboard sign that said, "All Lanes to I-59 North." That's the way it was that weekend. It was impossible to take anyone at his word. Except the National Weather Service.

We took I-59 all the way up to Poplarville, Mississippi, then planned to cut through a series of back roads to get to Mobile. The length of I-59 from the state line until Poplarville was converted to Contraflow, which meant the southbound lane was being used for northbound traffic so that all four lanes were going out of Louisiana. We were directed into the southbound lanes now going north, allowing us to enjoy a rare experience, if enjoy is the word, of driving the interstate the wrong way while sober.

It was a little peculiar. I felt like I was in England, driving on the wrong side of the road. The shoulder was on the wrong side. The passing lane was the outside lane, instead of the lane closest to the median, as it always is on this continent. Every once in a while I would forget where I was and give a start, thinking I had gone the wrong way and was about to get run over by a FEMA convoy loaded with food and water going south. The other problem was that all the signs were backwards. There was no way to tell exactly where we were, or what exits we were passing. I amused myself by counting the number of cars that pulled over for passengers to empty their bladders. Obviously the people leaving town had taken a lot of bottled water with them.

We got off at Poplarville and turned east on a state road. It was 3 pm. It had taken us 6-1/2 hours to go 80 miles. I was relieved when we finally got off and the traffic appeared to be light. Prior to that, as slow as we were going, I had real concerns that Katrina would find us stuck on the interstate.

We got through to Mobile and stopped off for gas and food just over the Florida border. The kids would not let us pass the golden arches, so we stopped to eat at McDonald's. The parking lot was full of Louisiana license plates. It was a scene I would get used to -- for the next few weeks, there were probably almost as many Lousiana license plates to be found outside the state as in.

As we took the kids around to the side door, a huge Oldsmobile pulled up into an open spot in the parking lot and an elderly couple got out. Both of them were well over 80. The husband was using a walker, the wife a cane. My wife observed that they were traveling completely alone. Two people who could barely walk, evacuating New Orleans to God knows where, to return to God knows what. I could only imagine how many thousands of people there were like them.

I guess something about us told people we were fleeing Katrina, because as we ate a man and his wife at the next table asked us where we were from. We told them.

"We lost everything we had to Hurricane Ivan," the wife said. "Then, one year later, our house burned down and we lost everything again."

The husband said, "We are praying for you. We know what you are going through. Just remember that the only thing that really matters is sitting with you at this table." He was referring to our children. I told him we would remember.

I appreciated their concern. On the other hand, I was a little distressed that they had picked us out as evacuees so easily. Did we really look as morose as we felt?

It also bothered me a little that they had assumed we lost everything. How did they know? Katrina hadn't landed yet. Of course, I felt we had lost everything. Maybe I was broadcasting that too.

We arrived in Tallahassee at about ten. Twelve hours, 450 miles. Compared to other evacuation times I was hearing on the radio, we had done very well. I was proud. I had gotten us through Mississippi via a dozen local roads and highways, and had beaten most people by hours and hours. Folks were calling in on the radio complaining that it was taking 20 hours to get to Houston, 100 miles closer. Yes, I was the man.

The hotel parking lot was loaded with Louisana plates. People were hauling paintings, furniture, computers, all kinds of things you would never expect to see in the car of a business traveler or vacationer. Clearly this was not the usual hotel crowd. It looked like the traveling flea market had come to Tallahassee.

The more I looked at the assorted junk in all those cars, the more I wished we had packed more of our own assorted junk. Another lesson learned from Hurricane Katrina: The junk you miss and the junk you think you will miss is never the same junk.

As soon as we got to our room, my wife called her mother. They evacuated the same morning we did with the goal of reaching a hotel in Kinder, Louisiana, about 80 miles from Houston. Unfortunately, the traffic was so heavy going west that they couldn't get past Baton Rouge. They ended up at a public school that was set aside as an emergency shelter. My wife was furious. Her mother was in her sixties, only one year out from chemotherapy for throat cancer, and she, with her three school age grandchildren, would be sleeping on the floor at a Baton Rouge elementary school. "Next time, if there is a next time," she said, "my mother is going with us."

I was sorry to hear what had happened to them. But I could not resist selfishly congratulating myself that we had outsmarted the crowd and gotten out in good time. We had escaped safely to a decent place.

As I fell asleep, I worried about our house, now in the path of this monster. And then I thought about my patients, many of whom lived in trailers, many of whom were disabled or retired, and almost all of whom had far fewer financial resources than I did. These people would be victims of Katrina to a degree I would never fully comprehend.

To next Katrina Blog Project entry: Monday, August 29, 2005 

On the morning of the 27th things were rapidly changing, but I was not yet aware of that. The first item in my Saturday morning ritual was to read the police reports.

Prior to Hurricane Katrina, my family lived in Meraux, a small town east of New Orleans. Meraux (pronounced MEER-oh) is one of a string of towns that runs along the Mississippi River as it flows southeast from the city to the Gulf of Mexico. Meraux is in St. Bernard Parish, and is about 10 miles from New Orleans city limits (In Louisiana, we call our counties parishes.) One can visualize the geography of our area by thinking of the towns along the river as a train of boxcars parked along the east bank of the Mississippi. The first car after downtown New Orleans is the Lower Ninth Ward, now known worldwide, thanks to media coverage, as the epicenter of the worst of Katrina's damage. The next boxcar is Arabi, the first town in St. Bernard proper; then Chalmette, the parish seat and St. Bernard's largest town with a population of about 25,000; then Meraux. After Meraux comes Violet, and beyond Violet is mostly swamp country, an area usually referred to as Lower St. Bernard.

Meraux is not incorporated, so there is no specific population estimate, but I would guess at least 10,000 people lived there. It was a sleepy collection of subdivisions plus a K-mart, two grocery stores, a small Sears, about ten restaurants, a drive-through daiquiri shop, and a half-dozen churches. (As I liked to brag, St. Bernard had almost as many churches as bars.) It was also modestly affluent, though not impressively so — recent census data showed our zip code to be among the 5 with the highest average household income in the immediate New Orleans area. The people who lived there, especially the ones in my neighborhood, worked white-collar jobs in the city, or were in the oil business. A few were fishermen, primarily oysters and shrimp, but most people who fished for a living lived "down the road" in Lower St. Bernard.

St. Bernard Parish — or the Parish, as it was known to its residents — was, despite its proximity to New Orleans, a very isolated place. The Mississippi is to the south, the Gulf of Mexico to the east. To the north is swampland — it was a 10-mile hike up Paris Road through that swamp to reach civilization in New Orleans East. To the west is the Ninth Ward, the only direct contact the Parish has with improved territory. Longtime St. Bernard residents rarely strayed from its borders, giving the Parish a very definite air of isolation from the rest of Greater New Orleans. St. Bernard is both part of a large metropolitan area and a place all unto itself. It was a place where everyone knew everyone.

Which is why I routinely spent Saturday mornings with the police reports. Almost every week I found at least one person in it that I knew, and frequently it was several. It was a way for me to keep up with my patients, to learn the social history I never got in the examination room. I was not the only doctor in St. Bernard that checked up on his patients this way.

A brief scan of the police reports that pregnant Saturday yielded an unexpected find. A patient of mine and his brother had been arrested for running a prescription forging scheme out of his home. He wasn't caught with a single fake scrip. He and his brother had an entire operation for faking prescriptions and apparently (or allegedly, if you please) was trafficking both the fake scrips and the medications he got with them out of his home. It was a fairly serious busness enterprise. And, no doubt, some of those fakes had my name and DEA number on them.

I have been betrayed by patients before, so I can't say I was surprised. But I was disappointed. I had cared for this particular patient since I started practicing in Chalmette four years before. He was one of my very first patients. His need for pain medication seemed obvious enough — he had a severely disfiguring case of rheumatoid arthritis, and was unable to walk without crutches. Most of the joints in his fingers were frozen from the disease, and his right leg was fused at the knee in the flexed position, making even crutch-walking or sitting in a chair awkward. I had never doubted he needed pain medication, and could not believe he would break the law to get it. I had never turned him down. I could only surmise that his brother had put him up to it.

The report deeply disturbed me, because of all the patients I saw for chronic pain issues, he was the one I felt most likely had a real need for pain medication. As a physician, I carry this arrest with me to this day; if my most trusted patient was deceiving me, what was I supposed to think about all the others?

So I had that to consider, even before I turned to the television, which was now running Katrina coverage nonstop. Have you ever been watching television, only have the signal interrupted by a high-pitched screech and then an announcement that "This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System"? That morning, for the first time in my life, after I heard that annoying screech an announcer said, "This is not a test" and then directed me to an emergency channel. The world, or at least St. Bernard Parish, really was coming to an end.

On Friday Katrina was forecast to curve through the Gulf and land somewhere near Apalachicola, Florida. Saturday, the projected path had shifted radically west, and the dreaded dashed line now bisected the city of New Orleans. We were about to get skewered. Katrina was a Catagory 3 hurricane by then, with winds approaching 115 miles an hour. She was 435 miles away. The Gulf of Mexico was very, very warm, and Katrina was expected to intensify markedly over the next 24 hours.
It was the first time I had to acknowledge to myself that his storm might hit us, and that it could be catastrophic.

Like most people who grew up on the Gulf Coast, I had inherited a natural nonchalance about hurricanes. Storms entered the Gulf almost every year. So many years, so many storms, and in all that time nary a scratch. Most of the time a storm projected to hit New Orleans veered to the east or west; this had happened so frequently in recent years that many New Orleanians began to feel our city was charmed. Prayers were our civil defense instead of stronger levees. In 1969 Camille struck the Mississippi coast just east of New Orleans. In 1992 Andrew passed through Florida and rolled through Morgan City to the west. Georges grazed the Louisiana coast in 1998 before fading to the east and hitting Pascagoula, and in 2004 Ivan, a truly devastating Catagory 4 storm, turned away from a direct path to New Orleans and crushed Pensacola, Florida.

The Ivan and Georges near-misses were particularly harmful to the ever-unrealistic New Orleans psyche. Both times the city was evacuated, with great confusion and cost, and both times the storms turned away at the last minute, hitting the Alabama-Florida coast. People who evacuated told stories of massive traffic jams and confusion. Some spent 14 hours in evacuation traffic just to get as far as Baton Rouge — and all for nothing. Folks were getting tired of leaving, and many now favored taking their chances at home instead of spending hours waiting on the interstate for a storm that just might veer away as the others did.

One of my indelible hurricane memories came courtesy of a hurricane no one remembers — a storm that threatened the Louisiana coast when I was in grade school in the 1970s. I remember the storm as Carmen, though I may have the name confused with another. It was a Catagory 3 storm at least, and was for a time projected to hit New Orleans. Then it drifted west and out of my memory, possibly hitting Texas or Mexico, or maybe breaking up into hurricane oblivion. Carmen whipped New Orleans with fierce winds as she sat indecisively off our coast. School was cancelled, and I spent my unexpected day off (the best holiday of all!) with friends, riding bicycles on our neighborhood street. We had contrived a thrilling game. The wind was so strong we could ride to one end of the block and raise up a trash bag on our handle bars. The trash bag, acting as a sail, would carry us down the street at close to 20 mph. It was great fun.

Unfortunately, that was my first hurricane lesson. Hurricanes meant school was out, and we could coast on our bikes in the wind in the street. Not exactly healthy respect.

A lot of people, including some of my friends and neighbors, felt that Katrina would be another close call. I wanted to share their confidence, but didn't quite. I had noticed that hurricane prediction had gotten much better in recent years. With Hurricane Ivan, for example, the National Weather Service predicted days ahead of time that the storm would head straight for New Orleans and then curve off to the east, which is exactly what it  did. The National Weather Service nailed Ivan's path so perfectly that I was not willing to write them off this time.

The NWS's prediction on Saturday morning: Katrina was going to hit the New Orleans area dead on, its eye possibly passing directly over my house. This was a storm to take seriously.

Since I had two children to think about, I was not going to ride this one out unless it was absolutely necessary. But I had patients to consider. One of my partners was on call for the weekend, but Katrina was to make landfall Sunday night. It was technically my responsibility to make rounds on Monday. If getting back on Monday was at all possible, I would need to do it.

Our medical practice had plans for an office party at Drago's restaurant in Metairie on Saturday evening. Although I was off, I had agreed to help my partner on call, John Green, by rounding at Methodist Hospital. This would allow him to finish up weekend rounds in time for the party.

After I took in the weather report, I headed out to Methodist to see my four patients there. Word was out that we were in Katrina's sights; Methodist was emptying quickly. On all the floors doctors were discharging every patient that could walk.
As I went in I ran into a nephrologist on the way out. He had just rounded on one of my patients, and I stopped to talk to him about her. I had intended to send her back to the nursing home where she lived, but we agreed instead to leave her in the hospital for Katrina. She needed dialysis, and we both thought she would be more likely to get this continuously if she stayed in a hospital, instead of a nursing home, where she stood a chance of being stranded. (As things turned out, Methodist flooded out and the patient eventually had to be evacuated by boat after spending days in the hospital without electricity or running water. The nursing home, on the other hand, evacuated prior to the storm. She would have been safer there.)

On my way through the ICU, I asked one of the nurses what the hospital plan was going to be. Methodist had evacuated for Hurricane Ivan, transferring all of its ICU patients by ambulance 120 miles away to Lafayette, Louisiana, and then back when the storm passed. The whole process was very, very expensive and very chaotic. I was concerned that, like the many citizens of New Orleans who had been burned by the disorganized Ivan evacuation,  Methodist administration might be likewise hesitant to evacuate again.

The ICU nurse told me that administration had not made a decision yet. The official word was that all staff scheduled to work Sunday morning were to bring an extra change of clothes. In other words, the Sunday morning shift could be asked to stay more than the customary 12 hours. I was surprised that plans were no more specific than that. Katrina was expected to make landfall in the next 48 hours. Of course, by Saturday morning it may not have mattered. It may have already been too late to get the ICU patients out.

I finished rounding and called my wife. The TV stations continued to report a direct hit. She asked me if I could pick up some hurricane supplies — diapers and batteries. I told her I would try, but when a storm is coming there is always a run on batteries in the stores.

The Sav-a-Center in New Orleans East was mobbed. Then I noticed an empty parking lot nearby — Toys R Us. Certainly a toy store could spare a few batteries.

Toys R Us was deserted. The only active cash register was at the customer service desk, and there were two employees in the entire building. But sure enough, the place was flush with diapers and batteries, as well as a treasure of junk food perfectly fit for a brief evacuation.

The store was disconcertingly silent. Toys R Us is usually a chicken coop on a Saturday, and it felt very strange walking though it by myself. Where were the kids running up and down the aisles, turning on all the toys? Where were the mothers shouting after the runaway kids? Usually the Nintendo section was a din of gunfire, skidding tires, laser beams, ninjas grunting. Today nothing. This was the first time I felt a pang of anxiety about Katrina. This was all wrong. Normal life was not going on.

People often say that a prime sign of a coming natural disaster is the silence of nature. All the birds gone. No chirping in the morning. All the dogs and cats quiet. All the squirrels hiding. I did not notice that, but for me that silent toy store was the same thing. The silence of coming disaster.

I got my diapers and batteries and got out of there.

I can pass on this piece of advice, though. If you are ever in an area where there is a pending civil emergency and you need batteries, go to Toys R Us. No one thinks of going there, but it is loaded with batteries.

From there I went home. I got back in touch with my partner John Green. Dr. Green was on call that weekend, and intended to ride out the storm in his home in Chalmette. We decided to cancel the office party that evening. My other partner, Bryan Gold, was the coroner of our small parish, and John told me he felt it was his duty as a public official to stay also. I thought both of them were crazy. Katrina was starting to look like a major storm, and there was no reason for any patients or medical personnel to remain in St. Bernard, a low-lying parish with water and levees on three sides. Chalmette Medical Center should be evacuated, and it was stupid that it was not. Even if CMC did not flood out, there were only three major roads into St. Bernard, and all three crossed over water and so could easily flood or even wash away completely. There might not be a way out. Why did anyone think there was a reason to stay?

Worse, Chalmette Medical Center and Methodist Hospital were both owned by the same company, Universal Health Services of King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. Why not at least move all Chalmette patients to the larger sister hospital? Methodist was at least 5 miles further inland, and a 7-floor facility. CMC was a few hundred feet from a levee, and only had two floors. Its intensive care unit was on street level.

But I was not the one in charge. I decided then that I was leaving. Between them John and Tom could handle the patients left, which for our group was now less than two dozen people. I had two children under the age of five to look after, and I had other doctors covering my patients. It was silly for all three of us to risk our lives. One was enough, two was overkill. Three was lunacy.

After the storm was over, I planned to get back as soon as possible to help.

The rest of the afternoon I mostly wasted. My wife was fairly industrious, organizing and packing a few days of clothing and collecting important papers. I spent my time trying to back up my computer hard drive onto an external firewire drive. The program I was using was cantankerous and kept crashing. After fighting with it for hours and hours, I would finally unplug my entire computer the next morning and toss it in the car in disgust. I am lucky I did that; I still have the computer today. If that worthless backup program had worked I would have taken the backup hard drive and left the computer behind. Sometimes bad luck turns out to be good luck in the end.

The only useful thing I did was to videotape the entire house inside and out for insurance purposes, in case of total loss. It is the last record I have of my house as it was. I got everything done except the back closet in our master bedroom. My daughter, fascinated with what I was doing, kept following me around, trying to get in the picture. The last 30 seconds of the video is nothing but a blurred picture and the sound of my voice yelling at my little girl to get out of the way.
All day the news reports were getting more and more dire, and the National Weather Service predictions of the hurricane path were not shifting even a single degree. This one was coming our way, and it was now a category 4, edging towards a category 5.

The phone never stopped ringing. My parents, my mother-in-law, my father-in-law (who was in Florida on business), my brothers. We were all comparing notes. Who was leaving, where was everyone going? My parents were going to stay with my aunt in Baton Rouge. One of my brothers was also going to my aunt's house. The other was taking his wife and children to Baton Rouge to stay with his in-laws.

My wife was concerned about her family. Her mother, who lived in Metairie, planned to leave with my wife's sister and her 3 children, but my wife's brother-in-law planned to stay. Another crazy one.

We also got word that a family friend, a practicing physician, was planning on staying in her home in Lakeview. Lakeview was a low-lying area and certainly not safe from flooding. (As it turned out, her house took on 7 feet of water.) Our friend wanted to leave but her father refused. Her father lived in the Rigolets, a string of small islands near New Orleans that were totally exposed to the storm. Our friend was able to convince her father to come stay with her in Lakeview, but he would not evacuate. So she was staying with him.

This would prove to be the case again and again. It was one of the tragedies of Katrina that many people who had the good sense and the means to leave would stay behind to suffer and possibly even die because close relatives refused to leave with them.

My wife and I worked into the evening trying to get our house in order. Our biggest fear was the wind — the reports were that Katrina would be packing 150 mph winds at landfall now — so we were moving valuable items to areas of the house that would be most windproof. I put some important items, including the Gibson electric guitar my parents gave me on my 16th birthday, in the trunk of my car and parked it in the garage.

But as the day progressed, it occurred to me that high water might be a problem. I started to put things on the counters and tabletops, and some of the most valuable items overhead. Little did I know that the 6, even 8 feet I thought would be safe would still not be high enough. We would eventually get 14 feet of water.

As evening came we heard hammering next door. Our neighbor George and a relative were boarding up his house. Unfortunately, the thought of boarding the windows on my house came to me way too late, and I was not a skilled carpenter. So I had put the idea aside, intending to trust my luck.

George came over and asked if we would like our house boarded also. George and his relative Juan were professional carpenters, and agreed to board up our windows for $200. I was pleased that at this late hour, when everyone was racing out of town, they would be willing to take the time to help us with our house. It was a first class act. Nor was it the first time George had helped me out. He also helped me cut broken branches off the tree in my yard a month earlier after Hurricane Cindy.

George and Juan took their measurements as the sun was going down. For such a frightening weather forecast, the sky was deceptively clear. They promised to come back first thing in the morning and get all the windows done.
That night we stayed up late, watching the weather reports continue to roll in.

One thing stands out in my mind about the broadcasts that evening. At about 10 pm, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was on TV being interviewed about storm preparations. He was in a television studio, and he and the reporter interviewing him were standing in front of a phone bank. Behind them, a group from the New Orleans Society of Jewish Women were answering phone calls from viewers.

As I watched, I recall thinking, "What can those women be telling the callers? How to board up windows? How to swim? How to build your own coffin out of scrap plywood? What was there to say to a caller except "GET THE HELL OUT, GET YOUR ASS OUT OF NEW ORLEANS RIGHT NOW BEFORE YOU GET KILLED!" Why would anyone be calling instead of planning to leave?

At any rate, Nagin was standing in front of this phone bank, and the reporter, a fellow named Norman Robinson, was asking him if he planned on issuing a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans.

Nagin was saying well, he was looking into it, but he wasn't sure if he had the legal authority to do that, that he was talking to some lawyers and he hoped he would be able to get it done sometime in the morning.

And I was thinking, Ray, you are an idiot. I know you don't have the resources to evacuate a city of 550,000. There simply aren't enough cops to do the job.  Moreover, there are a lot of people who are simply too stubborn to leave town no matter what. (I should know, there were two of them working in my medical practice.)

Ray, I wanted to shout at the screen, you will get nailed for this one day. One day, after this storm has passed, people will wonder why the mayor did not order a mandatory evacuation. It just looks bad. So what if he has no legal authority to order it? Who cares about that now? And maybe, just maybe, a few people will hear the word mandatory and finally get out of town. It was worth a shot.

If I thought it would have done any good, I would have ordered a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans.

Nagin was more concerned about legal procedure than he was with getting as many people out the way as possible. As it turned out, his real concern was about getting sued. He was afraid if he ordered all the tourists out of town and the storm missed its target, the hotel owners would sue the city for lost revenue. I think that is the most pathetic thing I have ever heard, and it scares me to think that politicians really have these kinds of thought processes. That money comes before safety. But I know politicians think that, every day. I could read it in the eyes of the President and his pals all of Katrina week.

The mayor didn't have to ask me to get out. We were leaving. Better to be out of the way and safe, rather than rescued by boat. In a hurricane, people who are out of the way don't use up rescue resources.

Before I went to bed, I checked on my computer backup program. It had fouled up again, for about the 6th time. Then I looked up hotel reservations on the internet. My wife and I had discussed it, and we decided to flee to the east rather than west. Everyone was going west, and traffic delays to Baton Rouge were already reportedly over ten hours. So I had it in my mind to go in the direction of the hurricane path, to the east. We would go far enough to get out of harm's way.

I found a vacancy at a hotel in downtown Mobile, Alabama, put down a deposit with my credit card, and went to bed.

Worries frustrated my sleep a little; then I thought of old Hurricane Carmen, and drifted into quiet dreams.

To next Katrina Blog Project entry: Monday, August 29, 2005