Five Days at Memorial Read Online Free PDF

phoned complaints
     to authorities. An association representing the worst-hit district demanded an investigation
     of all responsible officials, contractors, and employees, down to the crews at the
     drainage pumping stations.
    After the storm, the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans—which built, maintained,
     and operated the drainage system—took a drubbing from New Orleans’s new mayor, Arthur
     O’Keefe, for failing to keep its drains and catch basins free of debris. Board officials
     fought back, blaming the city for failing to keep the streets swept, the public for
     “carelessly throwing trash in the streets,” and Mother Nature for launching lightning
     bolts at power lines that supplied some of its pumps.
    The board’s longtime general superintendent, George G. Earl, had warned for a decade
     that the system simply wasn’t capable of handling that much rain. Without funding
     to complete a planned expansion, flooding in the lower parts of the city was inevitable,
     yet residents professed shock when this occurred. “It is only when service fails that
     any thought is given to the provision of means for improving it,” Earl lamented. The
     neighborhood along Napoleon Avenue near Southern Baptist Hospital was his main exhibit.
     Like any good politician, he seized the moment to reiterate his call for more funds.
    Bonds would be needed to finance drainage system improvements, but increasing the
     city’s bonded debt ceiling would require, by law, additional taxes and approval from
     the state legislature. The city’s
Item
and
Morning Tribune
newspapers urged authorities to allow the city to borrow the funds. “An old and a
     finished city may well stand still, pay offits debts, stop borrowing and rock along. New Orleans, in the midst of vast private
     development projects, attracting the attention of the nation and of the world, must
     provide herself with needed funds and go ahead.”
    An article summarized the sentiments of prominent city businessmen: “Something must
     be done, and durned quick.” Charles Roth, president of the New Orleans Real Estate
     Agents’ Association, was willing to see the city bonded for any amount, even $50 million
     if that’s what it took to get New Orleans “out of the water and mud,” he said. “The
     damage caused by these deluges to our homes and streets, to our business enterprises
     and our utilities, costs us many times more than the corrective measures would come
     to.”
    Realtor Harry Latter agreed. “All this has a very harmful influence upon real estate
     values, and that is the basis of all wealth.”
    Superintendent Earl presented several options to ensure against flooding. With around
     half a million dollars, the Sewerage and Water Board could improve pumping. Three
     million dollars could widen canals. “How much does the public wish to invest?” he
     asked. “That is the real question to be decided.” The work would be done quickly “in
     the order in which it will do the greatest amount of good to the greatest number of
     people.”
    Earl aimed to improve the city’s ability to handle moderate storms. He argued it would
     be “physically and financially impracticable” to prevent flooding in the worst deluges,
     “for barely in the city’s history have such storms developed.” Another expert estimated
     that to handle a storm as intense as that Sunday’s would require eight times the current
     pumping equipment and eight times the outflow canal capacity. “There probably is not
     a taxpayer in New Orleans who would favor” the idea, he told a reporter.
    Enthusiasm for the drainage work quickly waned. By the end of the year, taxpayers
     had not yet approved even the less ambitious options Earl had presented. No bond was
     issued. The Sewerage and Water Board’s construction expenditures in 1926 were nearly
     identical to what theyhad been in 1925. Earl vented his frustration in his end-of-year report. “The general
     situation