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city’s debt limit from 4 percent to 5 percent of its assessed value (a negligible change when compared with the35 percent limit in effect at the time of Katrina). Earl also called for higher and stronger levees. His board had no responsibility for the city’s levee system, but levee failures affected his ability to drain the city. He also foresaw the rapid growth of New Orleans, as transportation companies increasingly used America’s interior waterways. He feared that as the city expanded and land that accepted Lake Pontchartrain’s occasional overflow was walled off with levees, the water level in the lake would rise.
    Municipal employees spent days after the storm cleaning up debris, digging drainage ditches, picking up animal carcasses, and spraying pools of standing water with disinfectant. In much of the city, the flooding was shallow and short-lived, as the half-powered pumps gained traction.
    In the area around Baptist Hospital, as well as Lakeview in the north and Gentilly in the east, the water rose for a longer time and reached a higher point than anywhere else in the city. Along Napoleon Avenue, the water rose to six feet and flooded the first floors of homes. The basement of Baptist filled with eight feet of water. For the second time in the hospital’s short history, its operations were disrupted by flooding.
    The swell of water from the upper Mississippi reached Louisiana twoweeks after the Good Friday storm. On orders from the State of Louisiana, workers dynamited a levee below New Orleans to relieve pressure on the levees protecting the city, sacrificing the Parishes of St. Bernard and Plaquemines to save New Orleans at the behest of the city’s business elite, who then failed to deliver promised restitution. This launched a grudge that would persist into the next century.The Mississippi River floods of 1927 led to one of the most expensive peacetime legislative initiatives of its time, the 1928 Flood Control Act. It tasked the Army Corps of Engineers with improving the levee and flood-control systems of the lower Mississippi River, giving the federal government full responsibility for the river, and granting the Corps immunity from liability for damage that might result from its work. Decades later, the Corps became more involved in flood protection projects for the city of New Orleans itself, including the drainage canals leading to Lake Pontchartrain.
    Over the years and decades following the 1927 storm, the Sewerage and Water Board obtained funds to improve the New Orleans drainage system. One of its engineers designed the world’s largest pump, and fourteen of them were custom-made for the city. Drainage capacity had nearly quadrupled by the end of the twentieth century to more than 45,000 cubic feet per second.
    Still, the area around Baptist Hospital in the Freret neighborhood remained the site of some of the worst flooding. The city failed to get a handle on it. Staff had to develop their own coping mechanisms. In the first years of the twenty-first century, workers knew a moderate storm could fill the streets around Memorial Medical Center with enough water that they would have to park their cars a block or so away on “neutral ground”—the high berms between lanes. Hospital maintenance men would put on waders and pull colleagues to work in a battered metal fishing boat kept suspended from the ceiling in the parking garage basement. Equipment, supplies, food, records, and linens were again stored in the basement. Many Memorial employees had long ago stopped seeing water as a significant threat.

CHAPTER 2
BEFORE THE STORM
SATURDAY, AUGUST 27, 2005
    GINA ISBELL PULLED a white scrub shirt and navy-blue pants over her ample frame. The forty-year-old registered nurse had received a worrisome call at home from her boss that morning. Hurricane Katrina, revving in the Gulf of Mexico, had strengthened overnight and now had a good chance of steering into southeast Louisiana.A hurricane watch