Five Days at Memorial Read Online Free PDF Page B

remains unchanged,” he wrote, not “in any degree modified by the fact that
     recent events have happened.”
    The following spring, storms in the upper Midwest sent a great surge of water down
     the Mississippi toward the Gulf and New Orleans. The floodwater wiped out cities and
     towns as it went. In advance of its arrival, authorities attempted to reassure New
     Orleanians that the city’s defenses were strong enough to save them from a looming
     catastrophe. Panic would be bad for business.
    A storm hit on Easter weekend, days before the river’s predicted rise. In less than
     twenty-four hours, 14.01 inches of rain fell. It was the greatest total twenty-four-hour
     rainfall in more than half a century of record keeping—nearly a quarter of the rainfall
     for a typical year.Only once in the eight decades that followed would daily rainfall surpass April 16,
     1927, in New Orleans.
    Streets again filled with water, and the city’s drainage pumping stations struggled
     to keep pace. As the storm intensified around midnight, a lightning strike knocked
     down a 13,000-volt high-tension power line belonging to NOPSI where it crossed the
     main feeder wires for the Sewerage and Water Board’s system. The resulting spark caused
     a short circuit that crippled the switching system of the drainage plant, damaged
     a submarine cable distributing electricity, and burned out one of the two 6,000 kW
     generators powering the city’s entire drainage and sewage systems as well as the high-lift
     water pumps that provided reserves to the fire department. The wires were quickly
     repaired, but the generator coils would take weeks to replace. That left a patched-up
     power line and one-half of the normal power supply to dispatch the most intense rainfall
     ever recorded in New Orleans.
    The next morning, the mayor and city authorities set out for the site of the power-line
     accident to demand that NOPSI supply additional power to the drainage system’s plant.
     But the two power systems operated on different frequencies—one at 25 Hz and one at
     60 Hz—and, dueto the lack of an appropriate transformer, no transfer was possible. The engine of
     the mayor’s car failed in the rising water as he tried to leave. Marooned, he had
     to await assistance.
    Across the city, hundreds of cars were similarly trapped, and nearly all streetcar
     lines had halted operations. While floodwaters gradually receded in some areas, in
     others they rose again as Lake Pontchartrain overtopped levees and spilled out of
     drainage canals that cut through the city.
    Water flowed up to the stages of the city’s theaters, covered cemeteries, inundated
     stores, and stalled fire engines racing to respond to emergencies. City dwellers called
     police for help when water awakened them in their beds. Alarmed residents of one neighborhood
     fired gunshots into the air to attract attention. An armed band of robbers hit a series
     of abandoned homes by boat. Calls from “anxious mothers” poured into the
Times-Picayune
newspaper with “harrowing tales of suffering from lack of food and milk for children.”
     The mayor sent police reserves to commandeer boats and deliver aid, but they were
     overtaxed by the number of people in need of assistance. The newspaper declared “virtually
     a complete failure of city authorities to provide relief,” a charge the new mayor
     called “so manifestly untrue and unfair as to hardly need official notice.” He cast
     the blame, as he had the previous year, on the Sewerage and Water Board, whose chief
     engineer declared that the flooded streets were due “principally to an act of God.”
    City leaders refused relief offered by the Red Cross and National Guard, arguing it
     was unnecessary and that accepting it would give the city “a black eye before the
     nation.” Impromptu ferry captains shuttled people around town in flat-bottomed pirogues.
     Mothers pinned up their girls’ dresses and rolled their boys’