Live from the New Orleans Gentilly Neighborhood home from which he and his family of “four and a half” swam 15 years ago, Bruce S. Snow introduces the Hurricane Katrina 15th Anniversary Edition of Can Everybody Swim? A Survival Story from Katrina’s Superdome.
Book Excerpt from Chapter 2
Katrina: Her Sound and Her Fury
The four of us sat around the kitchen table sipping coffee and praying for a good outcome. The next couple of hours would make or break our little family. My mother, uncle, and I were calm for the most part, but Dolja and Jimena were beginning to show real signs of the strain. Normally, Dolja would run and hide at the first sound of thunder. He was lying on a couch pillow, keeping his fears to himself.
Jimena, on the other hand, had begun to show signs of a growing hysteria. She’d never experienced anything like this before. The empty streets, the howling winds, and the near-complete blackout of the sun. The candles in the center of the table gave off a macabre, shifting light that made our faces look waxen and dead. The fact that the three of us appeared so calm, I’m sure, added to her anxiety. Silent tears marched down her cheeks, and she began to chain smoke, as Mother and I were doing, subconsciously.
The scene was far too real for me. My Walkman radio could barely be heard above the furious gale. The time had come for the full strength of Katrina’s might. I excused myself to run back into my apartment, ten feet from the house, for a moment so I could brush the beer and nicotine from my teeth, and grab a couple more beers for what was about to come. My declaration was met with a volley of protest from my three companions.
“No, don’t go! We’ve got to stay together!” they said.
Finally, I negotiated three minutes to go next door while Mother waited for me, standing at the back door of the main house. I returned in the allotted time, clinking two beers in my hand. I would have never guessed that it would be the last time I’d see my apartment as it was, as I still see it in my dreams. I also wouldn’t have guessed that those three minutes were to be the last time I’d use running water or flush a toilet for a solid week. Once back in the main house, I threw one beer in the freezer—though the power was off, it was still cold in there—and opened the other.
My mother held the dog; Jimena, the flashlight. Uncle G held Jimena. We were forced to shout at one another to be heard. I grabbed the radio, the hippo, and a pillow to sit on. And the four and a half of us made for the hallway that separates the dining room from the bathroom and two of the bedrooms. We made ourselves as comfortable as we could in the narrow hallway and waited for the worst to pass. The noise intensified. I tried listening to the radio, but all I could hear was garbled voices. The small headphone speakers were terribly underpowered and could only be enjoyed in a close m; they couldn’t compete with the lashing rains and powerful gusts.
Through the windows, not much was visible. The sky was darker than I’d ever seen at nine in the morning. More like a clear night with a half-moon floating above. Not pitch black, but certainly not a summer morning in late August. The wind beat the sides of our home with such terrible fury that it was able to penetrate every microscopic point of entry. This created a sound akin to the wailing of ghosts in a bad horror movie. It felt like every bad thing I’d ever done in my life had found me and was seeping through the cracks to take me away with it. These ghoulish cries drove Jimena to more tears and started Dolja to shaking. Mother stroked his head and held him close, mumbling prayers to keep the spirits at bay.
The twilight darkness created by the thick, black clouds made the hallway a gloomy, depressing place. For sake of circulation, we’d opened the doors to the adjacent rooms, and the natural light from the exterior windows allowed a dim and diffused light to enter our tiny safe room. That is, of course, excepting those heartbeat milliseconds when the entire house would illuminate like one of my Abuelita’s New Year’s Eve gatherings.
It’s difficult to try to turn words on a page into the most brilliant flashes of lightning that may have ever hit planet Earth. Our house popped with dazzling white light, like a gigantic disco strobe with the hiccups. It’s even harder to turn words into sound. Glorious and ominous, like jet planes taking off all around you. The thunder reverberated through every nail, every floor board, every vital organ and toenail. BOOM! The sound waves hit our home continuously, not like a rumble of thunder, but like a shotgun going off in every room of the house at once. Big Sonic BOOMS washed over us from all directions at once. I could feel the thunder hitting me in the chest.
At some point in my life, I heard that when lightning strikes, if you slowly count the seconds until you hear the thunder, you can calculate about how many miles away the lightning flash occurred, or something to that effect. The equation may not be scientifically “perfect,” but light travels faster than sound, and all that jazz. This practice works just fine for an afternoon thunderstorm, sitting on a friend’s porch passing a blunt, but this is Katrina. Just forget all that shit. The magnificent flashes and the nerve-shattering claps occurred simultaneously, like the muzzle flash and report of the heavens’ own artillery exploding in the very hallway in which we sat. The thunder shook the house. No, seriously. Shook the house. As an earthquake must still shake a proper, modern earthquake-proof building, I imagine the ground tremors must still vibrate the structure, but it’s made for this, so it won’t fall apart. It’s no earthquake in New Orleans, just tremendous thunder claps. And we were not in a modern earthquake-proof building. We were in a sixty-plus-year-old termite-eaten Gentilly residence, set on a stack of cinder blocks. The sound waves created by the lightning strikes all around pounded the earth beneath. The ground around us relayed this force up through the foundation pilings, the cinder blocks, and through the entire wooden frame of 4899 Mandeville Street. I could feel the shotgun crack of thunder as it passed through the very grain striations of the wooden beams overhead and underneath. BOOM. All at once. The flash and the crash. BOOM. Add to this the constant, almost sublime, rumble of all the distant thunder. The 16 Can Everybody Swim? average thunderstorm count one-two-three-BOOM type thunder, the sustained 100-plus-mile-per-hour winds, the wailing fucking ghosts, and the crazy sheets—hell, blankets—of rain pounding our home. We endured the barrage at maximum intensity there in the hallway for close to three hours.
After an eternity, Uncle G dared, “It’s letting up . . .” We all strained our ears. He was right. The rain torrents had slackened to slapping sheets of a heavy downpour, much more like a thunderstorm common to sub-tropical New Orleans in the summertime. It took us some time to appreciate this change, for the wind continued to gust with unabated power. We’d been in the cramped hallway for hours when we decided that the worst must have passed and stood up on our sore legs. We wandered from window to window to survey the damage. Much to our surprise, the world was still there. A couple of downed trees and street signs, the awning over our front porch had detached and landed atop Uncle G’s van, but it hadn’t busted the windshield. The van had already looked beaten to death. No one would notice a few more scratches.
My little green truck parked next to the van appeared to be in perfect health. We made our way to the backyard patio for a much-needed cigarette. The wind still came in strong gusts, and driving rain fell from above, but the intensity had diminished from a 10, like what we experienced in the hallway, to about a 5 on the terror scale. The sky had lightened and the outdoors had gained the appearance of something resembling daytime.
“G, look!” I shouted
A section of the corrugated aluminum roof covering the garage had come loose and was flapping in the wind. Just a corner of the section over the little window, totally reachable from the ground. The garage at our house had long ago been converted from a place to store cars to a place for my grandparents to hang out. Amenities included couches, chairs, a decades-old stereo, even a wet bar. Within the prior six months, Jimena and Uncle G had bought them a flat screen television for the garage, so they could watch their novellas and baseball games on a 50-inch LCD.
The space was decorated with dozens of vintage bar lights my grandfather had collected. Some of the brands advertised on these electric signs had been out of business for well over thirty years. They were all functioning, all lit up, and some would even spin or had other moving parts inside. They were beautiful, they all worked, and they were all plugged into some kind of electrical outlet. Add to this Abuelita’s sewing machines and equipment, as well as the laundry appliances, and you can appreciate why the loss of a section of this roof would have been catastrophic. Falling rain and electronic appliances simply don’t mix.
“G, we’ve gotta do something,” I said.
“No!” Jimena shouted. “Don’t go out there. What if it falls on top of you?”
I stepped in and asserted control of the situation. “What if? What if we sit here and watch the roof blow off the garage, knowing we could have stopped it, M onday 17 Jimmy? This is why we didn’t evacuate. To protect the house. C’mon G.”
G hugged his wife and calmed her. I grabbed an oily work towel from the patio and a milk crate to stand on and dashed into the rain. The slightly rusted flapping corner of the roof required more than one attempt to catch, but once I got a grip on it, I held it down with all the strength in my two hands. The wind desperately wanted it back. Uncle G had run to Papi’s toolshed around the side of the garage and came speeding toward me carrying an enormous C-clamp, a kind of mobile table vise for wood cutting. We both stood on the milk crate, me holding the flap, G tightening the clamp.
“It’s good,” he shouted at me. And together we ran back under the cover of the patio roof, thoroughly soaked.
“We did it, Bruce!” “Hell the F yeah!” I shouted.
The wind still created ripples along that section of roofing, but the clamp was holding. We’d saved the garage. Morale soared over our accomplishment. There were hugs and high-fives all around. Time for another cup of coffee and some dry clothes. Katrina had thrown her best at us and we’d bested her. We’d saved the garage. Everything else would be fine. Everything was going to be okay. These prideful delusions would prove to be very short-lived.
Buoyed by this tactical victory, Uncle G and I decided to take a quick walk on the other side of the fence, out into the abandoned ghost town, for a reconnaissance. Why not? We were already wet. The rain had slackened into a light summer shower. The gentleness of the precipitation was disguised by darkened skies and the wind, which had lost very little of its brutal strength. We stepped out from under the protection of the patio overhang, through the six-foot privacy fence, and out into the naked light of the cloud-covered day. Things didn’t appear to be so bad. The storm drains were doing their jobs, no water had collected in the streets. Several small trees were down, some in yards, some in the streets, but all the large trees in sight had stood firm. I could see that our neighbor’s shed, up a block and across Mirabeau, had collapsed in on itself. Some of the wreckage had blown into the street to intermingle with the trees and other debris scattered across the neighborhood. We walked maybe halfway down our block on Mandeville to check out the homes of friends. The story was the same: some small trees down, plenty of yard debris, nothing catastrophic. Nothing that a couple rakes, maybe a saw, and some elbow grease couldn’t repair. There were no signs of life out there. No other curious people snooping around, no dogs barking, and no squirrels. Just Uncle G and me in this ominous, gray-skied I am Legend scenario. The feeling of being in a movie of some kind or a fantastic alternate reality was never too far from my thoughts. Every bit of life had been removed from a vibrant and thriving neighborhood. That’s not to say that things were quiet or still, not in the least. The gale-force winds assured there would be no true silence on the deserted streets.
We started on our way home, back the way we’d come. As we approached the corner, something stopped Uncle G where he stood.
A manhole cover in the middle of the street was releasing small gulps of water up into the street. Pumping one brown mouthful at a time up through the pry bar hole, like some kind of filthy aorta. We watched as the large, flat manhole lid filled and the water poured over the rim onto the wet street. On our walk, the rain completely stopped falling. No rain would fall on my head for the next week.
Another manhole across the street also went under. The storm drains on the curbs were steadily submerging. All of these puddles quickly united into one flat sheet of water from one curb to the other, creeping up the grass line to the sidewalk where we stood. This process couldn’t have taken more than five or ten minutes.
“I wonder what’s wrong with the pumps,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s no good. It’s the drain, right Bruce? Should be sucking the water up, not pushing it out into the street.”
“Word. They’ll figure it out. Let’s go back inside. I need a nap.” The beers were really starting to weigh on me.
“Sad. Set me up with the radio, Bruce Juan.”
Once inside, I grabbed Klaus the hippo, stretched out on the loveseat in the living room, closed my eyes and nodded off. The rising water had swallowed the sidewalks, and the wind continued to send the occasional ghost spinning through our home, but I was exhausted. Sleep came quickly for once.
Chapter 3
When the Levee Breaks
We had no way of knowing that less than a mile away the London Avenue Canal had broken its levee, almost in a straight line from our front door. The levee broke just north of the point where Mirabeau Avenue crosses the London Avenue Canal, flooding neighborhoods on the east side of the waterway. Our side of the waterway. The image of a furious tidal wave may come to mind, and for the homes right against the canal walls this certainly must have been the case. Over a month later, I would see one of these houses washed from its foundation and pushed more than thirty feet into the middle of Warrington Avenue. . . .
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