A Tale of Two Hurricanes
When Hurricane Betsy, a Category 4 storm, hit New Orleans in September 1965—60 years ago—my family had recently moved into a new house in the suburbs of Metairie. Despite hurricane warnings being issued for the city, my parents stayed put. They figured we were too far from the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain to experience any flooding. They didn’t think about the pumping stations failing and the canals all over the suburbs overtopping their banks.
Although I was only four years old, I have a handful of clear memories of the storm: Watching water seep under our front door and flow toward our living room, as my parents, two-year-old brother and I huddled on the Naugahyde sofa in our den. Hearing an ear-piercing whistling noise, like a train blasting past our house, as we sat in utter darkness. Walking outside the next morning and seeing the house across the street without a roof, debris strewn all over the yard. Cooking meals on our grill in the backyard for days afterward, waiting for the power to come back on, the novelty of a “cookout” every day.
Even though the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Hurricane Protection Program came into existence after Betsy, the new levees that were built, which were taller and stronger, failed when Hurricane Katrina hit 40 years later—and 20 years ago this week—on Aug. 29, 2005. Many of the same parts of the city that flooded during Betsy also flooded during Katrina.
Twenty years ago, when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, I no longer lived there, but my mother did. She lived in a neighborhood that abutted Lake Pontchartrain; her backyard opened onto the levee.
As my brother and I kept an eye on storm forecasts, we encouraged our mother to start thinking about evacuating. She said she’d rather invite a friend over and they’d ride it out, a common refrain in the city when a hurricane is approaching. Two days before the storm hit, my brother, who lived near Houston, gave her an ultimatum—get on a plane to Houston or he was driving there to bring her back to Texas. Late in the afternoon, she decided to get on a plane.
A few days after Katrina, an old friend of mine, the novelist John Gregory Brown, provided a beautiful elegy for the city on Morning Edition. In his piece “Losing My New Orleans,” John Gregory mourns the loss of the city of his childhood, a city that existed in his imagination, and notes that the city has always been in a state of decay. Indeed, today, residents in some parts of the city routinely need to boil water because a significant percentage of the sewage in the city doesn’t get to treatment plants; they navigate potholes the size of cocktail pools; they wonder if the levees are really going to hold this time.
As the twentieth anniversary of Katrina approaches, I reflect on the loss I felt back then. For many of us who no longer lived there, we didn’t lose loved ones, material possessions, our homes, our livelihoods. Rather, perhaps, what we lost was the idea that the city would be there forever, the notion that our hometown would exist long after we’re gone, like our childhood bedrooms fixed in time. Perhaps we have a more tenuous hold on the place we grew up than we like to think.
New Orleans is still there, of course. But the water is so near. How can a city exist on such a sliver of land? It’s only a matter of time.