You're On Your Own

(2 of 6)

Ask people in New Orleans about their hurricane plans, and they will give you a sad smile. These are people who saw the dead floating in the street, heard gunshots down the block and had to paddle their way to safety on a dinghy or a mattress. Dr. Dwayne Thomas, CEO of Charity Hospital System--the little left of it, that is--went through five hellish days after Katrina waiting for someone to rescue 367 patients at the flooded facility. He was siphoning gas from National Guard trucks to run generators to sustain the critically ill; eight patients died. "Our experience in Katrina taught us the same thing our parents taught us--to be self-sufficient, self-responsible, disciplined and organized," he says, a look of humor mixed with pain in his eyes. His staff members kidded him when he showed up the night before Katrina with a "hurricane box" containing a sledgehammer and life jackets. They laugh no more, he says. This year Charity, which can barely sustain an emergency room in a defunct Lord & Taylor store, plans to shut down and evacuate for anything greater than a tropical storm.

Forecasters at Colorado State University believe there's nearly a 50% chance of a major hurricane hitting the coast between Florida and Texas this year, up from a normal 30% chance. New Orleans officials are assuming the worst in planning for a big storm, having learned the hard way that commercial phone lines will fail, cell-phone towers will topple, repair teams could take days (or, more likely, weeks) to show up and the National Guard will come packing guns but no walkie-talkies. "In the end, you can only count on yourself," says deputy mayor Greg Meffert, the city's chief technology officer and a onetime tech entrepreneur. Like every other city employee, from the mayor on down, Meffert is worried that the "rookie levee system"--untested since repairs began--could fail again.

The truth is, New Orleans, if hit, will flood. How badly depends on the hurricane. In his book The Storm (Viking; 320 pages), out this week, Louisiana State University researcher Ivor van Heerden argues that Katrina wasn't the mythical Big One, a frightening conclusion for a city entering a new hurricane season. The storm made landfall east of New Orleans as a fast-moving Category 3, he notes, but the winds that lashed the city--weakened by wetlands and miles of subdivisions--registered only as a Category 1. Van Heerden, deputy director of the LSU Hurricane Center in Baton Rouge, warns that a slow-moving Category 3 hurricane passing west of the city would flood levee to levee--including the historic French Quarter, which was spared last time--even without the embankments breaking. Another man-made disaster, like the levee breaches after Katrina, could turn New Orleans into a "Cajun Atlantis," Van Heerden fears, crippling the coastal economy along with it. "The uneasiness is not just in New Orleans. It's right across the southern part of the state," he says.

On a tour of the city's earthen and floodwall defenses last week, Van Heerden said levee problems could endanger areas that were not flooded after Katrina, including the west bank of the Mississippi and the western suburbs of New Orleans, most notably near the airport, an area crucial to every evacuation plan.