Read Katrina: After the Flood for Free Online Page A

husband and their twenty-four-year-old son, Todd, who worked for the bank as a loan officer, outvoted her. Her job was to pick up her parents on Park Island—a small, genteel community of good-size houses on the Bayou St. John closer to the center of town. Her father was eighty-two years old and her mother only a few years younger. Rhesa was an only child. Her parents would go wherever she was.
    Rhesa McDonald’s husband was a big deal in New Orleans. He had had his picture taken with every president stretching back to Ronald Reagan and had met a pope. He was one of the few African Americans who had ever been honored with what the city’s once-daily newspaper, the Times-Picayune ,calledits Loving Cup—a person-of-the-year award given to someone in honor of his or her public service. But Rhesa’s father, Revius Ortique Jr., represented black royalty in New Orleans. Ortique, a civil rights attorney, had been the first African-American justice to serve on the Louisiana Supreme Court. Whereas Alden McDonald had shaken hands with presidents, Ortique had been named to five presidential commissions, including the Commission on Campus Unrest that Richard Nixon had created after protesters were gunned down at Kent State and Jackson State Universities. As president of the National Bar Association, an organization of African-American lawyers, he had sat with Lyndon Johnson in the Oval Office, where he pressed the president to name more black attorneys to the federal bench. Several months later, Johnson appointed Thurgood Marshall to the US Supreme Court.
    Rhesa crossed the short bridge that brought visitors to Park Island and pulled into the driveway of the home her parents owned directly across the street from Ray Nagin’s. Thirty minutes later, she was at the Hyatt. The time was 9:00 a.m.
    At the front desk, Rhesa picked up the keys to four rooms to accommodate not only themselves but Todd and their thirty-year-old daughter, Heidi. Rhesa helped set up her parents in their room on the twenty-third floor before entering the room she reserved for herself and her husband.
    Thirty minutes later, she was knocking on the door of her parents’ room. “We’re leaving,” she announced. She knew they would put up an argument, but on TV they were warning of mass blackouts. The image of her parents walking down twenty-three flights of stairs made her stand her ground. “You can’t check out, you just checked in!” the clerk said when Rhesa reappeared at the front desk. “Oh, yes, I can,” she responded. She phoned her husband. “I’m picking you up wherever you are. You’re getting in the car and we’re leaving town.” After thirty-one years of marriage, her husband knew better than to argue. Besides, the car radio continued to impress on him the might of Katrina. The line that stuck with him was one the broadcasters kept repeating: Only three Category 5 hurricanes have hit the continental United States in recorded history .
    Talk of flooding caused the McDonalds to take several extra precautions before leaving town. McDonald drove one of their cars, a gold-colored Lexus sedan, to Liberty’s headquarters, where the bank had a two-story parking structure. McDonald parked the car on the second floor, where the Lexus would at least be above the flood line if the streets filled with water. He locked the sports car he had been driving in the garage of his house. That at least would protect it from falling debris and hide it from potential looters. At 10:00 a.m. on Sunday, as the McDonalds were preparing to take off, Mayor Ray Nagin declared a mandatory evacuation—the first in New Orleans history.
    McDonald got behind the wheel of Rhesa’s dark blue Lexus and pointed the car east. Heidi and her dog pulled in behind them, followed by Todd and a friend. The McDonalds had just said good-bye to houseguests, a couple visiting from Atlanta, who had cut their trip short because of the storm. “Come stay with us,” the couple had