MPPs Keeping Tabs on Katrina
Tim Coates
Issue date: 9/20/06 Section: KSG News
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One year after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans is still - as columnist Chris Rose tells it - "a one note town: all Katrina all the time."
Walk past any of the city's many coffee shops, and you're bound to hear someone retelling his or her Katrina story, a tale that never tires.
Jonathon Olivier lives in Broadmoor, the New Orleans neighborhood where I interned this summer to help residents revitalize their community after breached levees inundated it with eight feet of fetid water.
Katrina battered New Orleans on Monday, August 29th. The following morning, Olivier, visiting his wife at her hospital job, heard a radio announcer say the levees had broken. He rushed home to his two small dogs, not knowing what this meant. At home, everything was fine. The streets were dry, so he began cleaning up.
"At around 10 o'clock water started coming out of the storm drains," he told me. By early afternoon it was four feet high. The water rose until late Wednesday evening - a slow filling bathtub no one could turn off - cresting above the street signs.
"The whole time I was trying to think of what I could use to float out," Olivier said.
On Wednesday afternoon helicopters from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Coast Guard started rescuing people off their roofs, taking them in the opposite direction from Olivier's wife's workplace, where he wanted to go. "I knew then I had to swim out."
By Thursday morning Olivier had commandeered two pool noodles, an ice chest, a toilet seat shaped floating tube from his neighbor's pool and an 11-foot-long piece of crown molding from his kitchen. He duct taped the pool noodles to opposite ends of the ice chest, where he'd put in clean clothes, his laptop and cell phone and duct taped it shut.
Twisting the duct tape to make rope, he connected the tube to the ice chest. He sat on the tube, floating more than eight feet above the street, placing the dogs on his lap, one on top of the other. He then punted down the street towards the hospital using the three meter crown molding as a pole.
Walk past any of the city's many coffee shops, and you're bound to hear someone retelling his or her Katrina story, a tale that never tires.
Jonathon Olivier lives in Broadmoor, the New Orleans neighborhood where I interned this summer to help residents revitalize their community after breached levees inundated it with eight feet of fetid water.
Katrina battered New Orleans on Monday, August 29th. The following morning, Olivier, visiting his wife at her hospital job, heard a radio announcer say the levees had broken. He rushed home to his two small dogs, not knowing what this meant. At home, everything was fine. The streets were dry, so he began cleaning up.
"At around 10 o'clock water started coming out of the storm drains," he told me. By early afternoon it was four feet high. The water rose until late Wednesday evening - a slow filling bathtub no one could turn off - cresting above the street signs.
"The whole time I was trying to think of what I could use to float out," Olivier said.
On Wednesday afternoon helicopters from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Coast Guard started rescuing people off their roofs, taking them in the opposite direction from Olivier's wife's workplace, where he wanted to go. "I knew then I had to swim out."
By Thursday morning Olivier had commandeered two pool noodles, an ice chest, a toilet seat shaped floating tube from his neighbor's pool and an 11-foot-long piece of crown molding from his kitchen. He duct taped the pool noodles to opposite ends of the ice chest, where he'd put in clean clothes, his laptop and cell phone and duct taped it shut.
Twisting the duct tape to make rope, he connected the tube to the ice chest. He sat on the tube, floating more than eight feet above the street, placing the dogs on his lap, one on top of the other. He then punted down the street towards the hospital using the three meter crown molding as a pole.
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