I guess the people at Bacardi thought the folks of the Ninth Ward in New Orleans needed a strong drink to deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. You can see the waterline on the empty billboard space below the Superior Comeback sign. The flood waters ranged from 12-15 feet deep in places…
by Glynn Wilson
NEW ORLEANS, La. — On August 29, 2005, I watched from afar as Hurricane Katrina veered east once again, like so many storms before that took aim at New Orleans up the Mississippi River. I went to sleep that night, like so many, thinking the city had been spared.
I could have been there, on the payroll of The Dallas Morning News and The Christian Science Monitor. But I had just made it back to Birmingham from Washington, D.C., and the free-lance offers with no health insurance or guarantees of battle wages made me hesitate. I figured I could get down to the coast and cover the aftermath, like so many hurricanes before, including Isadore and Lili.
Hurricane Katrina was no ordinary storm, however. It turned out to be “the big one,” not so much for the category 4 winds that mostly lashed an evacuated Mississippi Gulf Coast. It was the one that breached the levees, filling New Orleans like a bowl.
Even if I had wanted to go down after the storm, I would not have been able to get into the city without a boat. Even with a boat, there was no way to communicate out by phone for days. No power either, no Internet access, and the cell phone towers were down for weeks.
Watching the coverage on CNN, I wrote then, Katrina was “no doubt the worst natural disaster in U.S. history.” But a big part of the disaster, we now know, was not natural at all.
Call it Hurricane George.
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