Hurricane Force In the Path of America's Deadliest Storms

Chapter One New Orleans, 2005 I t was an awesome storm. Howling gusts tore at the roof of the New Orleans Superdome, peeling away long, narrow strips that sailed out of sight in a loopy trajectory in the wind and rain. Inside, thousands of people were camped on the playing field, the tiers of seats, and in the raw cement corridors. Rain poured in. People were soaked and shivering. But the worst was yet to come. Hurricane Katrina had roughed up the outskirts of Miami and now it was hammering New Orleans-wrecking the city and setting the stage for massive flooding. Before the storm and the flooding were over, more than 1,800 people would be dead. New Orleans, a huge swath of southern Louisiana, and the entire Mississippi coast would be in ruins. The damage would run to perhaps $135 billion, and Katrina would be remembered as one of the deadliest and costliest hurricanes in history. From my lookout in the garage at New Orleans City Hall, I watched as a dangling traffic light shot across an intersection like a bullet pass, then swung back on its tether. Nearby, windows shattered and glass sprayed down on the sidewalk like lethal snow. It was 7:00 a.m. on August 29, 2005, and the wind was clocking more than one hundred miles an hour, chewing at office buildings, homes, the Superdome-everything in the city. As I peered out through the gaps in a latticed brick wall, a big sheet of twisted tin came skidding and tumbling at me, then spun away like an out-of- control toboggan. Somewhere, there was the crash of glass-more windows were breaking. The metal garage door clanged against wrought-iron gates. It buckled like a prizefighter taking a punch to the midsection, shuddered, then straightened out, only to be banged and buckled again. Outside, cars lined the sidewalks, parked nose to tail as they would have been on any ordinary day in the center of one of America's great cities, a city of jazz and Creole culture and old-fashioned houses with gingerbread and wrought-iron trim. But on this day, New Orleans was not itself. The city and its people-at least those who had not fled-were tucked in, off the streets. The music had stopped. Clubs and restaurants were closed. Even the police were hunkered down. Water was rising in the downtown streets. Soon it would cover the tires of the parked cars; in some places, it would rise above their hoods. The wind and the rain owned the city. The storm had taken over. That is what hurricanes do. They stop the world-your world, when they choose to come your way. They are among the most powerful, most mysterious forces on earth, and they have been terrorizing people along the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean Sea, and the Gulf of Mexico for centuries. The Mayan Indians in Central America, whose civilization faded long before the first Europeans arrived in the fifteenth century, provided the word Hurakan-probably the earliest version of the name we use today for these monstrous storms. Hurakan was the Mayan god of the big wind, and his image was chiseled into the walls of Mayan temples. In the Caribbean, the Taino, Carib, and Arawak Indians cowered before an evil god they called Hurican. Early explorers in the new world picked up the native names. In Spanish, the word became huracan. In English it was hurricane. Christopher Columbus got tangled up in hurricanes in the Caribbean in 1493 and 1494 and, according to his journal, was determined not to run into one again. "Nothing but the service of God and the extension of the monarchy would induce me to expose myself to such dangers," he wrote. The ancients personalized the hurricane, believing that it was bearing down onTreaster, Joseph B. is the author of 'Hurricane Force In the Path of America's Deadliest Storms', published 2007 under ISBN 9780753460863 and ISBN 0753460866.