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Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Hello Angela,
I want to let you know that all is well with this law student, though New Orleans has taken a severe blow.
I decided to stay in the city on Sunday as the storm bore down. This was an encore of last year's Hurricane Ivan, which ultimately hooked east and barely ruffled the City, and I thought the same might well happen with Katrina.
Professor Oliver Houck, an expert on river and coastal law and a great naturalist, felt the same and he and his wife chose to stay and have a hurricane dinner party Sunday night.
I joined them and a neighbor who is a Tulane lawyer and his wife and children had escaped to stay with friends in Washington, DC. We sat outside under
rising winds, but in very good spirits.
In fact the storm proved considerably LESS powerful and LESS damaging than its forecasts, at least as to the Garden District of New Orleans where Tulane is. At its most powerful point, Monday morning around 9 or 10 am, I was standing on the veranda and even went across the street to the Houck's house to check on them. I doubt that we saw winds any greater than 75
miles per hour. Not enought to break windows, though certainly enough to bring down branches and trees and power lines all over the neighborhood.
Monday evening, after the storm moved through, the sky looked calm and benign and Professor Houck and his family and the lawyer across the street and I had a fine candlelight dinner on the terrace, surrounded by a tumult of broken branches and downed trees. But buildings perfectly intact.
Mark Klyza, the neighbor, and I slept outside on the upstairs veranda of his handsome 100 year old home under the stars and a crescent moon... in a silent city without a light or human sound anywhere...completely deserted. Tuesday morning dawned with a pink horizon, parrots squawking and
herons flapping overhead. But by midday, the news began to filter in that breaches in the levees had developed, with a torrent of water flowing into the
city from Lake Ponchartrain.
We reconnoitered and found only a few streets with standing water, but the threat seemed too serious to ignore.
We packed two SUVs and made our way out of the city, navigating around downed trees and power lines, telephone poles, to the one bridge over the
Mississippi that remains intact. Angela, I did not have a chance to check on your friend Tim ____ and I hope that he too was able to leave in time...
Ominous military caravans were rumbling along the deserted highway into New Orleans as we drove out.
We came along the Mississippi's west bank to Baton Rouge, where I am now staying with a kind family, Rick and Susannah Moreland. They had a superb dinner last night for us refugees: okra and tomatoes, pulled pork, beans, various salads, peach cobbler, good bottles of wine.
The question of when floodwaters in the city may be stabilized or drained is now paramount. I may lose many of my possessions, but this seems like a trifle compared with the others here whose homes are at risk; yet their spirits are remarkably chipper.
It's ironic that the Army Corps of Engineers has its largest and most venerable installation here in New Orleans, only a few blocks from my office along the river levee... They had better come up with an effective way to plug the dikes and save the city.
If I am forced to head home, one consolation will be having our often postponed dinner.
Un abrazo,
Holliday
