Read Online The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story by Julia Reed - Free Book Online Page B

we’d just sunk pretty much everything we’d ever had) was hardly a recipe for sanity. For years the nightmare scenario of “the big one,” a Category 4 or 5 storm barreling straight up the Mississippi from the Gulf, had been played out in series after series in the newspaper and on television, with lurid graphics showing the “bowl” that is New Orleans completely awash in floodwater and petrochemicals—“a massive tomb,” they’d always say, containing dead by the tens of thousands. Most of us watched with a half-wary eye and went on about our business, having already made the necessary bargain that living in New Orleans requires: the decision that the city’s ample charms outweighed the peril. And anyway, what could we do about it?
    Certainly no one at any level of government was doing much. Over the years, millions had been squandered on disaster models and, most recently, on a simulated Category 5 hurricane named Pam, but at the start of every season, the only truly serious discussion involved the evacuation traffic flow plan that, invariably, had been botched the year before. Politicians could get impassioned about the traffic because voters got extremely impassioned about being stuck in it. It’s a whole lot harder to summon outrage about something that hasn’t happened yet, so basic stuff, like coming up with the means to evacuate those unable to leave on their own (almost 80,000 households in pre-Katrina New Orleans were without a car) was never addressed. Nor did anyone bother to check the only structures that lay between us and certain inundation—the levees and floodwalls—even though residents whose homes backed up to the 17th Street Canal (and which, therefore, are no longer in existence) had been reporting standing water in their backyards for more than a year. On a national level, three months prior to Katrina, the United States House and Senate, including every single one of Louisiana’s representatives, had signed off on an obscene highway bill whose 6,000-plus pork projects cost $24 billion—more than enough to pay for both the wetlands restoration and Category 5 levees needed to protect New Orleans and its port, the country’s leading gateway for coffee, rubber, and imported steel.
    The port, and much of the rest of the commerce vital to the area—and to the nation—is, of course, directly dependent on the same water that puts us at risk. (Louisiana’s wetlands produce 25 percent of the nation’s oil and gas, and a billion pounds of seafood annually, hence the seemingly contradictory, and slightly scary, moniker of the Shrimp and Petroleum Festival that takes place in Morgan City every year.) The Mississippi pushes 300,000 cubic feet of water past the city every second, Lake Pontchartrain is so wide it is crossed by the longest overwater bridge in the world, and the Gulf of Mexico lies just 100 miles below us. We’re surrounded, which is the reason Bienville’s engineer was so adamant that he move New Orleans, as well as the reason that Bienville refused to budge.
    But the Gulf, the river, and the lake are hardly our only source of hydration. Roy Blount says he thinks the reason New Orleanians traditionally have taken “the threat of inundation so lightly” is not merely denial, it is that the city is “so moist as a rule.” He has a point—the humidity is so dense it is often hard to differentiate between the air and the water; it rains so much and the drainage is so bad that there are mini-flash floods all the time (during one of them, the car I was driving floated into a canal and I was forced to save myself by swimming out the window).
    Not only are we more or less constantly saturated, we have always had a more intimate relationship with death than the residents of any other place in the country, a fact which engenders a certain amount of fatalism. In 1853, six years after our house was built, 8,000 people died in one of the yellow fever epidemics that were a constant