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blocked water
     from entering drainage canals. Streams in the streets grew to torrents. “It looked,”
     Realtor Harry Latter observed as he tried to get home, “as if the river had broken
     in New Orleans.”
    A train crashed into a car in the blinding rain, killing two people. Thousands of
     creosoted wooden paving blocks swelled, buckled roadways, broke free, and floated
     away. Cars stalled as water seeped under their radiators and drenched wires. Lifeless
     autos blocked streetcar tracks. Work crews braved the storm to encircle them with
     cables and tow them. Streetcar lines shut down, leaving people stranded beneath the
     clattering rooftops of homes, churches, and public places.
    At City Park, the sudden deluge brought baseball, tennis, and golf games to a halt
     and drove crowds of people into a bandstand for shelter. A musician took the stage
     to entertain them, but the storm only grew more intense and the festival had to be
     postponed.
    Lightning danced across the darkening sky above the peristylium in place of May fete
     fireworks. At around eight p.m., a bolt struck near the Telephone Exchange Building,
     throwing around 1,300 lines out of commission. Water backed up into the tubes that
     surrounded intercity telegraph wires as they ran through flooded manholes.
    On the grounds of Southern Baptist Hospital, thigh-level water smothered the new gardens.
     Even high-riding cars parked nearby onNapoleon and Magnolia Streets were bathed to within several inches of their seats.
    Inside, water poured into the basement, quickly rising to a height suitable for baptismal
     immersion. Medical records, groceries, drugs, instruments, linen, and the hospital’s
     main stove and dining room tables were submerged. Louis Bristow and other doctors
     waded into water filled with floating chairs. They reached for airtight containers
     and handed them up to be sorted by nurses.
    The lights stayed on, but the elevators stopped working. About a hundred visitors
     and nonstaff nurses were also stranded at Baptist for the night. They picked up phone
     receivers and tried to dial loved ones but couldn’t make a connection.
    Firemen were called to tap the hospital’s basement with their pumping engines. At
     five thirty the next morning, they were finally able to draw floodwater into the storm
     sewers faster than the basement was refilling. Employees and student nurses gathered
     in the small diet kitchens on each floor and filled patient trays with improvised
     meals, presumably from the Frigidaires. NOPSI, which also operated the city’s stalled
     streetcar lines, came quickly to Baptist to replace its gas-powered kitchen.
    Hundreds of unprotected cases of drugs and supplies had been destroyed. Of all the
     city’s businesses, the new hospital was thought to have sustained the greatest losses,with initial estimates ranging from $40,000 to $60,000 in damage (between $525,000 and $800,000 in 2013 dollars).
    Superintendent Louis Bristow sought to reassure the public. He told the
New Orleans Item
that each floor of the hospital had enough drugs and supplies to run normally for
     several weeks or until replacement supplies could be bought. “We are operating as
     usual,” he said. “There was no suffering to any of the patients. Our staff met the
     emergency in splendid fashion.”
    More than nine inches of rain fell between midafternoon Sunday and midafternoon Monday.
     The storm had produced the greatest one-hourrainfall totals in the Weather Bureau’s fifty-five years of record keeping in New
     Orleans—nearly three inches—and depending on where in the city the rainfall was measured,
     the heaviest or second heaviest twenty-four-hour rainfall. The city’s drainage system
     had extruded more than six billion gallons of water into Lakes Pontchartrain and Borgne,
     the grandest performance in its history. Yet it had failed to keep pace with the storm,
     and recriminations followed. Thousands of flood-affected residents