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trousers and let them
     wade. On Sunday, a matriarch hiked up her skirt and led her family on an Easter stroll
     through shin-high water as a newspaper photographer snapped a picture of them. A six-foot-long
     alligator swimming down a street was captured and sent to the Audubon Park Zoo.
    Again came calls for action. The homeowners’ association of the hard-hit Lakeview
     District demanded that the levees be raised and the drainage system strengthened so
     that “the ‘hand of God’ will not be blamed as often for what the hand of man has neglected
     to do.” It called on city authorities to use their charter rights to issue emergency
     bonds for the work rather than await approval of a larger refinancing plan. A
Times-Picayune
editorial backed the plan: “We believe the people of New Orleans stand ready to pay
     whatever sum may be needed for reasonably adequate and efficient protection against
     these temporary but costly flood nuisances.”
    Superintendent Earl agreed. He called for an increase in the 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