- Bill
Hurricane Force
Anatomy of a Flood: 3 Deadly Waves
Canal, 2 Lakes Swamped
Eastern New Orleans
As Storm Tore Through
Mr. Mullet's Fight to Survive
By JEFF D. OPDYKE, EVAN PEREZ and ANN CARRNS
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 7, 2005; Page A1
NEW ORLEANS -- On Aug. 29, as Hurricane Katrina brought chaos to this city, three massive waves of water poured largely unseen into the eastern section of town and neighboring St. Bernard Parish.
One surged west, off a churning Lake Borgne. Another came across from Lake Pontchartrain in the north. That sent a steel barge ramming through the Industrial Canal, a major shipping artery that cuts north to south through the city, possibly scything a breach that became 500 feet long, letting waters pour into nearby neighborhoods.
The waves inundated the mostly working-class eastern districts, home to 160,000 people. In some places, the water rose as fast as a foot per minute, survivors say.
Until now, the world's attention has focused on the levee system protecting the city's central districts, and on the near-anarchy in the storm's aftermath. But a complete reckoning of the damage and death toll will likely focus on an entirely different event, hitherto overlooked: the devastating swamping of the eastern sections of New Orleans, hours before the central flooding began. The final tallying of the dead across the city will be substantially dictated by how many residents of these neighborhoods got out alive.
For auto mechanic Roy Mullet, who lived on Meraux Lane, where the streets fade into the marshes stretching toward Lake Borgne, the flood kicked off a furious and lonely fight to survive. His struggle, and that of his extended family and neighbors, was capped by an unexpected and critical act of charity.
For the rest of the city, and the investigators piecing together the puzzle, the floods in eastern New Orleans suggest a more complicated explanation for the disaster, one that raises new questions about how it was devastated and what must be done to make it secure. In particular: Why were the levees lining the Industrial Canal and parts of Lake Pontchartrain to the east lower than in other parts of the city? Should residents near Lake Borgne have been more clearly warned that the lake could rise so furiously? Are the levees outside the city limits sufficient to protect parts of the city that few tourists ever visit? Should shipping companies be required to do a better job of securing barges and vessels?
Only 83 deaths have been confirmed in Louisiana, but the death toll will clearly be higher. "It's going to be awful, and it's going to wake the nation up again," New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said yesterday. Katrina is blamed for a total of nearly 260 deaths in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi. The number unaccounted for is huge. As of yesterday, more than 23,000 messages had been posted on a "missing persons" Web site sponsored by the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper.
According to engineers, scientists, local officials and the accounts of nearly 90 survivors of Katrina interviewed in recent days, the first of the three waves swept from the north out of Lake Pontchartrain. How high the wave reached hasn't been determined, but the surge poured over 15-foot high levees along the Industrial Canal, which were several feet lower than others in the central areas of the city.
About the same time, a similar wave exploded without warning across Lake Borgne, which separates Lake Pontchartrain from the Gulf of Mexico. It filled the lake, engulfed its surrounding marshes, raced over levees and poured into eastern New Orleans.
As Lake Borgne swallowed those neighborhoods from the east, a separate catastrophic wave rose from the other side, possibly caused by the flying barge.
Trapped between three cascades of water were the neighborhoods of the Lower Ninth Ward, where nearly 14,000 African-Americans lived, a third of whom owned no vehicle and a third of whom had physical disabilities, according to U.S. Census data. Next door, just outside the city limits, were the virtually all-white areas of St. Bernard Parish -- Arabi, Chalmette and Meraux -- home to more than 50,000 people as well as oil refineries, docks and a fishing boat in what seemed like every other yard. Within a few hours of Katrina's arrival, those areas sat under as much as 15 feet of water, according to witnesses.
To the north, water poured through black and Vietnamese neighborhoods closer to Lake Pontchartrain, where another 96,000 people lived. Like Mr. Mullet and his family, large numbers of people in these areas had not evacuated.
Some families didn't think it was necessary to heed an order from Mayor Nagin to leave before Katrina arrived. Many others, particularly older people or the poorest residents without transportation or cash for hotels, say they couldn't comply. Other residents here adamantly refused to take shelter in the Louisiana Superdome, where crowds had become unruly during previous hurricanes.
"There was going to be thousands of people in there, and I knew that was going to be a problem," said Ernest DeJean, a 52-year-old carpenter who hunkered down in his brother's house on the western side of the Industrial Canal. They locked the wooden shutters tight and filled the bathtub and bathroom sink with water for drinking.
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). It needed to redefine itself multiple times as fortunes came and went. Many cities in Japan have had to do the same through both natural (earthquake) and man-made (nuclear explosions) tragedies. San Francisco and Chicago had their own disasters with tremendous human toll, as did the Arkies and Okies in the early 20th century. The didn't come back exactly the same way, and probably for the better.
