New Orleans' Tragic Paradox
In 1718, French colonist Jean Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville ignored his engineers' warnings about the hazards of flooding and mapped a settlement in a pinch of swampland between the mouth of the Mississippi River, the Gulf of Mexico and a massive lake to the north.
Ever since, the water has sustained New Orleans and perpetually threatened it. Somehow, until this week, the mystique of the water had always washed away the foreboding of disaster, as if carrying the city's worries downstream. That was true even early Tuesday morning, when Hurricane Katrina's last-minute veer to the east convinced many residents they had once again eluded the Fates.
But when the rainfall brought by Katrina breached levees and overwhelmed the city's pumping stations, the catastrophic consequences of Bienville's miscalculation could no longer be ignored.
New Orleans, a city that has struggled to keep its head above water, physically and economically, is now a city submerged.
City officials estimated that 80% of the town was under standing water Tuesday, with some areas beneath as much as 20 feet. Water at times coursed through the French Quarter, one of the highest points in a city that is largely below sea level.
In broad swaths, the flooding submerged low-lying neighborhoods up to the rooftops and left one of America's most enchanting cities a sodden ruin.
For locals, it is a cruel paradox. The water that has given New Orleans its very life -- its commerce, its cuisine, even the meandering flow of its daily pace -- has now rendered their beloved city almost unrecognizable.
The charming quirks of its geography -- like the practice of entombing the dead aboveground because high water tables make burial a short-term proposition -- may no longer seem so charming. The water, cherished by Bienville for its potential to open the region to commerce, has now all but strangled access. Bridges and causeways are shredded, and city streets are buried in debris.
"The river gives and the river basically takes away," said novelist Richard Ford, who lived in New Orleans until last year. "There really isn't a vocabulary that I have access to that describes this. And as always, it's the least able to recover from this disaster who will suffer most intensely."
Ford, like other New Orleans devotees, said it was a facet of the city's famed insularity that residents managed to avert their attention from impending disaster.
