Mopping New Orleans

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Everything conspires against progress. "We're not so worried about the criminal element now, but the latest problem is the wild dogs," says Susan Jean Jackson, the Corps' spokeswoman in New Orleans. "Poor things. Just starving. But yesterday one of our rangers had to pull a gun on one." A plainspoken woman who corrals her long brown hair with both a headband and a ponytail clasp, Jackson says that even though the Corps is pumping hundreds of cubic feet of water out of New Orleans every second, "the expectation is the lower you pump, the more muck you're gonna get. And if the pumps get clogged, it's gonna slow us down." What's in the muck? She drags on a cigarette. "I think there's bodies out there."

Currently the biggest engineering challenge is plugging the London Avenue Canal, a long thin stretch of water leading south from Lake Pontchartrain toward the French Quarter. The overused term breach is too delicate to describe what happened to the canal's floodwalls. (A levee is an earthen mound separating man from water; a floodwall is a concrete-and-steel wall that stands atop a levee or sometimes in place of one.) Two long sections of the floodwall, which is a foot thick and 14 ft. high, were shoved over as though they had been upright graham crackers. In what looks in hindsight like utter foolishness, a whole neighborhood had been built just a few feet from this wall; now only the roofs are visible in the fetid lake Katrina made.

How do you get to this lake? The Corps has commissioned an eight-chopper fleet of Black Hawks and Chinooks, three of them from Singapore, that drop 7,000-lb. bags of sand where the floodwalls should be. Roughly 50 bags are dropped every hour, fewer when the choppers need repairing or when dignitaries fly in for photo ops. (The Vice President's visit last week cost an entire hour.) With all the choppers flying around the sandy lakeshore, "it's like Apocalypse Now," says Jackson. The force of the choppers' blades was so strong that it blew out the windows on at least two Corps SUVs parked in a bad spot.

Amid this only partly controlled chaos--I saw a pump begin to leak Thursday, and Jackson warned that "even a hard rain" now could further delay New Orleans' unwatering--you encounter, incongruously, tourists. Pam Boston, who turned 53 last month, came to view the lakefront tumult with her brother Lloyd Acree, his wife Robin and their boy Alex, 15. "We're never going to see anything like this so close to home," says Boston. "There's just the last few pieces of New Orleans we want to hold close to our hearts." The Corps workers thought the tourists were nuts. "It's a contaminated area!" said one in disgust. But Robin Acree described the Corps engineers as heroes. "For him"--she gestures toward her son--"to get to see the good part, see the military and everybody pulling together, that's something."

DRYING OUT

Stormdrains in nearly every city in the world work on the same principle: water flows downhill, usually to a river or a coast. But in New Orleans, the river and the coast are uphill. To get the water out, crews are racing to restart the city's elaborate pumping system