Ravaging Tide Strange Weather, Future Katrinas, and the Coming Death of America's Coastal Cities

Introduction It was a short phone call, lasting only a few minutes, but it formally launched the largest displacement of American citizens since the Civil War. On Saturday, August 27, 2005, Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center, told New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin that Hurricane Katrina was the "worst case" storm everyone had feared for decades. It was headed right for New Orleans with the energy of a ten-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every twenty minutes. Within hours, Nagin had ordered the first mandatory evacuation in the city's three-hundred-year history. Over the next two days a staggering 1.3 million people would abandon the city and much of south Louisiana. So many cars headed north, full of people and pets and valuables, that satellite cameras captured the bumper-to-bumper interstate crawl from outer space. In New Orleans, every rental car, every U-Haul van and truck, was gone. People walked, hitchhiked, hot-wired postal vehicles. They took flatboats up the Mississippi River. Amtrak and Greyhound sent their last cars and buses rolling north, east, and west -- anywhere away from the storm. Prisoners were hustled off in chains. Hospital patients who could be moved were evacuated -- babies in incubators, psychiatric patients strapped to gurneys. Drivers out of gas on clogged highways drilled holes in the gas tanks of abandoned cars for fuel to keep moving. The human tidal wave crashed first into Louisiana towns just to the north. Baton Rouge, the somewhat somnolent state capital, doubled in size almost overnight, taking on 200,000 newcomers and becoming the largest city in the state just as New Orleans shrank to nothing. Hotels everywhere were booked solid. Extended families of up to forty people crammed into three-bedroom homes, with sleeping bags spread across hallways and kitchens, and water running nonstop from showers, washing machines, and flushing toilets. And still they came, hundreds of thousands more refugees, arriving just ahead or after Katrina's harrowing landfall. Makeshift shelters sprang up across Louisiana and neighboring states and as far away as Nevada and Washington, D.C. Within days, Baton Rouge's modest airport was the second busiest in America, with passengers accepting any flight anywhere away from the storm and its aftermath, scattering themselves across America. By Sunday, September 4, the last fleeing inhabitants of New Orleans -- the poorest and most desperate people, abandoned on overpasses and littered sidewalks -- were finally bused by the thousands to Houston's Astrodome and convention center. A week after it started, the retreat was at last complete. It had occurred on a scale no one could have imagined. Over one million people displaced in Louisiana alone. A vast section of American real estate lay broken and eerily, impossibly, empty. The return date for evacuees was wholly uncertain. Many would never return. Yet as difficult and chaotic and disruptive as the Katrina evacuation was -- broadcast nightly in horrifying detail to the world -- there's one crucial element I'm sure most Americans have failed to appreciate, and it is this: At least those 1.3 million people had somewhere to run to. At least there was a safe and secure mainland to receive them. Imagine a different scenario. Imagine if all those men, women, and children had not been able to flee at all. Imagine if all the roads out of town had been blocked for some reason and all escape vehicles sabotaged to boot. What if, instead of the few thousand who couldn't or wouldn't flee Katrina,allthe people of New Orleans and surrounding parishes were left behind. Picture every last schoolteacher and grandmother and checkout girl and auto mechanic and kindergartner and musician and corporate lawyer all huddled behind those faulty levees as a nuclear-scale storm rapidly approached. Why imagine this? Because, like the long-ignored warTidwell, Mike is the author of 'Ravaging Tide Strange Weather, Future Katrinas, and the Coming Death of America's Coastal Cities', published 2007 under ISBN 9780743294713 and ISBN 0743294718.