Thinking of You, New Orleans

Katrina hit landfall on August 29, 2005. Here is the timeline of the events of the days that followed. As the Gulf states hold their breath for Gustav, reread it. Three years later, it remains grief producing…..and enraging.

Below is a piece of an Op Ed written for the LA Times by Louisiana crime novelist James Lee Burke two weeks after the worst was over. Burke has memorialized his passion for New Orleans in eighteen different books, including last year’s novel about Katrina, the Tin Roof Blowdown. “New Orleans,” Burke wrote in the novel in a voice leaden with sorrow, “was a song that went under the waves.”

“All the meteorologists predicted Katrina would hit New Orleans head-on, at category 5 wind speeds of 175 mph. No knowledgeable person had any doubt about the consequences. New Orleans would have been nothing but a smudge in the storm’s aftermath, the levees reduced to serpentine traces in the silt. Instead, the storm shifted toward the northeast, and dropped in velocity by 35 mph, reducing itself to a category 4 storm by landfall.

Two days after the city was flooded, the president stated, on television, “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.” The disingenuousness of the statement, or its disconnection from reality, is, to my mind, beyond comprehension…..

….For the rest of my life, however, I want to remember not only the faces of Katrina’s victims but the images of the Coast Guard rescuers hanging from cables under helicopters; firefighters and cops who threaded boats through the darkness while being shot at; the medical personnel who used hand ventilators to keep their patients alive for six days; the soldiers and ministers and ordinary people who gave up all thought of themselves in service to their fellow human beings. In their anonymity, they glow with the aura of Byzantine saints.”

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James Lee Burke, Los Angeles Times, September 18, 2005