There were ceremonies — marches, Masses and speeches — all over town Wednesday. But the city hardly needs an anniversary to help it recall a disaster that upended the life of virtually every resident here. The still-ruined neighborhoods and, beneath the surface, the mental scars, are merely exclamation points for what Hurricane Katrina has become for people in New Orleans: a fixed point of reference around which conversations and lives continue to revolve.
At a memorial ceremony at the Charity Hospital Cemetery, Mayor C. Ray Nagin choked up, evoking “the young who cry every time there’s a hard thunderstorm, because they’re afraid another storm is coming.” Mr. Nagin rang a bell at the precise moment a major levee broke two years ago, and the musician Irvin Mayfield, who lost his father in the storm, played a raucous and angry dirge on his trumpet in the sweltering heat.
Unlike Nossiter, many local news outlets, including the Times Picayune, erroneously stated that Mayor Nagin rang a bell at 9:38am to commemorate "the time the levees began to break two years ago". Actually, the levees "began to break" much, much earlier than 9:38am. Anyone who read Disaster should know that fact. Heck, anyone who read the Metro section of today's Times Picayune should know that fact, too.
In a revision to previous accounts of the Industrial Canal failure during Katrina, a review panel now believes the first section floodwall along the Lower 9th Ward failed at 5 a.m., 1 1/2 hours before sunrise on the day Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, rapidly filling the northernmost section of the neighborhood with 6 to 8 feet of water.
That was some 70 minutes before Hurricane Katrina's eye first crossed land at Buras -- 70 miles to the south -- and well before water in the Industrial Canal reached the top of the 12.5-foot-high wall that was supposed to protect the neighborhood from storm surge.
...
In the newly released scenario, water in the canal rose, forcing its weight against that first section of floodwall, a so-called "I-wall" near Florida Avenue, and causing it to lean outward toward the homes it was supposed to protect, the report said.
The water never reached the top of the wall, never spilled over.
So next year, if Nagin* wants to ring a bell at the time the "levees began to break", he should do it at 5am, when the Nint' Woid began drowning in the dark.
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* or preferably Anita Ward
Labels: Federal Flood, Nagin