Putting their own lives on the line, these “homeboys” made the nation proud. Yachts, dinghies, canoes, rafts, sailboats, scows and skiffs-even a floating wagon-became emergency ambulances, used to rescue people trapped in the flood zone. As 80 percent of New Orleans started filling up with water, ordinary citizens turned into superheroes. Brave first-responders risked their lives to save others. Storm survivors worried about walls of water, “toxic soup,” flooded streets, wrecked homes, police abandoning their posts, looting and larceny. Panic swept through neighborhoods like a prairie fire. Before long, water was up to the eaves of half the city’s houses. At night, with no electrical power, a grim eeriness held court. Brutal displacement permeated every district.

Once they cracked open, a monstrous spell engulfed New Orleans. The city’s flood walls were exposed as ugly monuments to shoddy engineering. Indeed, Katrina became the most expensive natural disaster in U.S. They told me that the Industrial Canal had breached, that disaster was upon us, that the Big Easy would soon be flooded. A contingent of city police, nervously huddling, looked panic-stricken. But that upbeat assessment soon dissipated as I wandered toward the Bywater neighborhood. My gut verdict was that structural damage aside, my city had survived the 130-mile-per-hour winds. Once the winds died, I went on an inspection tour of the French Quarter. As the storm arrived, I watched the white-capped Mississippi roaring backward and high winds blow apart the huge riverfront warehouse where Mardi Gras floats were stored. While it seems perverse in retrospect, my love of New Orleans, a faith in its specialness, convinced me not to evacuate back in late August 2005, even though the Weather Channel showed a blob of fearsome dimension brewing in the Gulf of Mexico.Ībandoning my house in the Garden District, my wife and I made a vertical evacuation with our kids to the 15th-floor condominium of my in-laws at One River Place, near the French Quarter. It was my conceit that New Orleans, a city with enormous cultural richness, the greatest port on the nation’s greatest river, was safe. That the federally funded flood walls looked unsafe and poorly constructed never concerned me, because in America we built structures-think Hoover Dam-the right way.

Army Corps of Engineers after all, its reliance on lessons learned from Hurricane Betsy in 1965 and old-fashioned American can-doism meant New Orleans was securely fortified. My flawed reasoning was that if the Netherlands had reclaimed miles from the North Sea since the devastating 1953 flood, then surely the nation that put Neil Armstrong on the moon had constructed a similarly reliable Dutch tool-kit of dikes, levees, pump houses and flood walls to protect the ragged-boot heel of Louisiana. Contemplating this section of breached flood wall ten years later-it’s from the London Avenue Canal-I’m astonished to remember that I thought this frail barrier could protect below-sea-level New Orleans neighborhoods from the Big One. I was a Tulane University history professor that August of 2005, when the hurricane hit town and dozens of levees were overrun. How mind-boggling to think that so much Hurricane Katrina history is contained in a ribbed fragment of concrete.

New orleans flood barrier