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suggested.They were both physicians in Atlanta with a home large enough to accommodate a crowd. So with Revius and Miriam Ortique in the backseat, Alden and Rhesa McDonald headed to Atlanta, followed by two of their three children.
    NORMALLY THE DRIVE FROM New Orleans to Atlanta takes around six hours. That Sunday, the McDonalds were on the road for twice that long—and they might be counted among the luckier ones. Ward “Mack” McClendon made the same trip from the Lower Ninth Ward several hours after the McDonalds. McClendon, who would eventually sacrifice everything in his fight to save the Lower Ninth, was already playing hero, rounding up a couple of his neighbors he knew had no other way out of town. McClendon was hoping to make the Atlanta home of his eldest daughter, but gave up past midnight, when they were still in east-central Alabama. There in the town of Opelika, in a cheap motel whose name none of them can remember, McClendon and the others would learn about the fate of New Orleans while watching a small television someone had set up in the corner of the lobby.
    Safe in Atlanta, McDonald flopped on his friend’s couch, watching the increasingly bleak storm coverage on a big flat-screen TV. The first burst of news out of New Orleans on Monday morning had left him breathing easier. As advertised, Katrina was on par with a Camille or a Betsy—a hurricane people would be talking about for decades to come. But the storm had jogged in the middle of the night. The destruction in towns such as Biloxi, Gulfport, and Bay St. Louis, along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, dominated the news that Monday, not New Orleans. A twenty-eight-foot tidal wave had destroyed properties along one hundred miles stretching from western Alabama to the southeastern corner of lower Louisiana. Where once thriving communities had dotted the coast, the TV cameras found little beyond empty foundations, broken-off pipes, and brick stairs leading to nowhere. “I can only imagine that this is what Hiroshima looked like sixty years ago,” Mississippi governor Haley Barbour said after taking an aerial tour of the devastation. By the time the storm reached New Orleans, Katrina’s winds were blowing at 125 mph, making it a Category 3storm. To the extent newscasters talked about New Orleans on Monday, they all seemed to repeat the same cliché: New Orleans seemed to have “dodged a bullet.”
    For years to come, people would speak about the collapse of the New Orleans levee system as if it happened twenty-four hours after Katrina made landfall in Louisiana. That’s how the president and his top aides saw it even weeks after Katrina; it’s a mistake people still make today. But the city’s 911 operators knew better. Early on Monday morning, the city’s emergency switchboard was deluged with calls from frantic residents. At first almost all the requests for help were from the Lower Ninth Ward, but soon dispatchers were hearing from other parts of the city. Later, the LSU Hurricane Center figured out that the first few levee breaches occurred at around 5:00 a.m. on Monday. It just took time for the wider world to catch up to what was happening in New Orleans.
    The city’s flood-protection system had been devastated. One major breach was along the Industrial Canal, a man-made waterway that separates the Lower Ninth Ward (and also New Orleans East) from the rest of New Orleans. I The storm surge spilled over the top of the floodwall protecting the Lower Ninth, creating a trench so deep that by 7:30 a.m., two segments of the wall had collapsed. The propulsive force of the water pushed homes off foundations and devastated the northwestern edge of the Lower Ninth closest to the breach.
    Other sections of the city flooded not because of breaches in the outer flood-protection system but due to failures in the drainage canals the city used to collect water after a heavy rain. Giant electric motors in two dozen pumping stations around New Orleans sop up