Keith Weldon Medley

ROWELL: When I looked at the pictures the media released of the Katrina devastation of New Orleans, I could do nothing but ruminate backwards over the history of New Orleans and Louisiana (and I could have added the United States). There was a mixture of classes and races and persons of different national origins trapped in New Orleans by the flooding, but most of the people were black and poor. You are a working historian of the City of New Orleans. Will you tell us whether there are matters, past and present, that account for the desperate circumstances that so many citizens of New Orleans, Louisiana—that is, U.S. Americans—found themselves in during that very dangerous and horrific period?

MEDLEY: Well, Charles, it is hard to overstate the trauma of Katrina. Its effects have been social, psychological, economic, and cultural—you name it. For anyone—whether they lived in Lakeview, St. Bernard Parish or the Lower Ninth Ward—Katrina was unforgiving. It was particularly devastating to many aspects of African American life and communities in this city. Because of location, for them it was devastation of the worst order.

It didn't just strike the poor and working class populations. A number of those in the Superdome were professional men and women who just did not have the opportunity for hygiene. The professional and entrepreneurial classes of blacks, who left the inner city for the "inner burbs"—such as Pontchartrain Park (est. 1955) and New Orleans East near Lake Pontchartrain—found their lives and possessions directly in the path of the storm. If you want a chilling interactive graphical representation, go to http://www.nola.com/katrina/graphics/flashflood.swf.

The events of August 29^th proved horrific for the lives and neighborhoods of those unable to evacuate. At 4:30 a.m., leaks in the floodgates began flooding areas such as Pontchartrain Park. By 5:00 a.m., storm surges from the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet crumbled levee sections and the waters started seeping in toward St. Bernard Parish and the Lower Ninth Ward. At 6:30 a.m., storm surges pushed the water in the Industrial Canal over the levees and flooded all of New Orleans East, where large numbers of black professionals and entrepreneurs resided. At 6:50 a.m., the same surge began flooding the Lower Ninth Ward once more, as well as the mixed-race Gentilly area and Pontchartrain Park which had already flooded. Then the levee walls on the west side of the Industrial Canal failed, sending water cascading into New Orleans neighborhoods miles away, including Tremé. At 7:45 a.m., two sections of the floodwalls protecting the Lower Ninth Ward breached altogether, sending a savage wall of water into the Lower Ninth Ward and moving homes, cars, and anything in its path as if they were playthings.

A long-time resident of the Lower Ninth Ward, Keith Craft, described it to me for an article I did for The New Orleans Tribune:

The wind and rain were so bad and things were flying so bad, we went over to my little brother's house in the 5300 block of Dauphine. We left Monday morning around 4:00. We had my family over there including his father-in-law who was a double amputee and my "moms." We decided that we were just going to stay there that day, come home Tuesday and clean up the debris.

Lo and behold, I'm looking out the window to see how the wind was blowing and I see water. I told my wife "Here comes the water," and before she could get to the window it was over her truck tire. It didn't seep up, it came.

At 8:30 a.m. on August 29^th, the surge of water from Lake Borgne made its way through St. Bernard Parish, once again to flood the Lower Ninth Ward. At the same time Lake Pontchartrain began flooding New Orleans East again. Then at 9:30 a.m., the London Avenue Canal breached and once again thrashed Gentilly and Pontchartrain...