In the first hours after Katrina, it looked like my mother's house and the rest of the city where she moved my three sisters and me when I was 17, had dodged a bullet.
While hurricane-force winds were experienced downtown, the worst of the Category 5 storm had bypassed New Orleans.
But it's not wind hurricane experts worry most about. It's water. Which New Orleans is surrounded by. Adding to the peculiarities of the city is an average elevation of six feet above sea level, which means even a few inches of rain can cause major drainage problems and flooding. A complex system of pumping stations, canals, flood walls and levees normally keeps rainwater moving and storm surges from Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf of Mexico from encroaching. This time, though, the system would not hold.
All told, flood walls and levees broke in 53 places, bringing tons of mud and silt, water, and sewage tearing into homes and streets, knocking buildings off foundations, pushing cars atop houses and ultimately flooding 80 percent of the city. The parts of New Orleans on higher ground, most notably the French Quarter and the Garden District around famed St. Charles Avenue, escaped without major water damage. Everywhere else came under water _ as high as 15 feet. As if flooding itself weren't enough, water sat for weeks, stagnating in 100-plus-degree temperatures, creating rot and dangerous mold, before receding.
While most structures did not escape harm, fortunately, most people did. Ninety percent of the city's 500,000 residents were able to comply with the first mandatory evacuation of an American city since the Civil War, marking the largest mass migration since the Dust Bowl.
Those evacuees included two of my sisters and their families, who spent 17 hours driving 400 miles north to the home of a third sister in Memphis.
Eleven people, a dog, and two cats would eventually take refuge in Kim's two-bedroom house, staying with her family for parts of six weeks before being allowed back into the city.
My sister and her husband slept under their dining room table to make room. One sister and her disabled son never returned to New Orleans but lived in an RV for a year in Memphis until they could find more permanent housing.
There were those, we all know, who did not get out during the storm for reasons still misunderstood or outright dismissed. With rates of 38 percent poverty in the city, thousands of people didn't have money for gas or a hotel. Twenty-seven percent didn't even own a car. People stayed in the city because they had nowhere to go; because they'd been through false alarms; before because they wanted to protect their property. There were the elderly and the sick who couldn't leave nursing homes and hospitals, many of these folks added later to the death toll: a documented 200-plus patients died, mostly because of inadequate care and poorly managed emergency efforts.
My sisters and I watched the surreal news in shock and horror in the days before Labor Day 11 years ago, as residents of New Orleans were forced to higher ground in their attics, which they chopped through to rooftops, where they stood waiting for rescue helicopters to come. And there was the Superdome. Who can forget the images of mothers with babies screaming for water, grown sons shouting into TV cameras next to elderly relatives in wheelchairs and CNN's Anderson Cooper standing in the middle of it, begging, "Why"?
An estimated 16,000 people, most all of them poor and black, had been relegated to an ill-equipped sports arena where they were forced to live for five days with inadequate food, water or infrastructure. One mother told a reporter she was given two diapers and told to scrape them off when they got dirty and use them again. When people tried to leave, they were chased down by National Guardsman, charged with keeping people out of the city. One desperate man jumped 50 feet to his death.
The Superdome became a living symbol in the days following Katrina, a touchstone for outrage about poverty and people of color in America, prompting New Orleans' director of emergency operations to later say, "This is a national disgrace. We can send massive amounts of aid to tsunami victims, but we can't bail out the city of New Orleans."
It was into the belly of this beast that homeowners were finally allowed to go that fall, six weeks after the storm, to begin pulling rotting refrigerators to the street and scrubbing walls of mold, to begin the work of agency and action, recovery and restoration.
Those homeowners included me and my three sisters.
Still reeling from the death of our mother, who had accidentally set herself on fire four months before Katrina in her house near the French Quarter, my sisters and I suddenly found ourselves co-owners of a drowned house in New Orleans.
