PORCH DUTY.(The Talk of the Town)(analysis of storm damage)

HURRICANE KATRINA

Nicholas Lemann talks with Daniel Cappello about the fate of his home town, New Orleans.

From 1992, James B. Stewart on his Illinois home town, threatened by floodwaters from the Mississippi.

From the front porch of his rather grand house on South Carrollton Avenue--which had suddenly become Pontchartrain lakefront, even if the lake here was a foot deep and toxic--the world looked pretty damned stupid to H. J. (Pepper) Bosworth, Jr., last Thursday. Not so much the lack of electricity in the ninety-degree torpor, or even the desultory procession of loot-laden shopping carts that passed, grim parodies of Mardi Gras parades. No, what seemed dumb, plain bad science, was all that talk that New Orleans needed to be evacuated because a storm surge could have put all of it, even the relatively elevated French Quarter, under twenty feet of water.

"That's just lies," Bosworth said, shifting a heavy Ruger pistol in his lap and sloshing the beer around in his cup. Bosworth, who is forty-seven, claims to know what he's talking about. He's the engineer who designed drainage for the new P.G.A. golf course near New Orleans. The way water moves over land is his specialty, so even when the levees burst last Monday he didn't budge, because he knew the waters of Lake Pontchartrain, six miles away, wouldn't rise any higher than his curbstones.

The other reason he didn't move is the looters, whom Bosworth followed with his eyes as they trudged along the raised streetcar median to and from the burst Rite Aid drugstore three blocks away. Neither Bosworth, nor his girlfriend, nor the couple next door had slept properly for days; somebody was always on one porch or the other, with either the twelve-gauge pump gun or the 8-mm. Mauser rifle, and either the Ruger or the Glock pistol. By this point, they could tell the looters from ordinary refugees. "New shirt," Barbara Ann Locklear, Bosworth's coppery, part-Indian girlfriend, said as one young man in a gleaming blue dress shirt struggled his bundle along. "Hey!" the man yelled, and Bosworth's hand moved toward his gun. "Hey! Y'all want some Crown Royal?" he held up a purple velvet bag. "No, thank you!" Locklear yelled with the forced good cheer of a flight attendant on a crashing plane, but the man kept approaching across the median. "Just leave it right there!" Locklear shouted. "You don't want to step in that water!" The man looked down drunkenly, past his drenched pants and flip-flops, to the rusty water in the street. Then he looked up and smiled. "All right," he said softly, setting the bag on the grass. "All right." He moved along, well watched.

"As I was saying," Bosworth said. "Lake Pontchartrain is twelve feet deep; that's all. The levee that divides it from the city is on average eighteen feet high. Even a twenty-two-foot storm surge would have put four feet of water over the levee, which, given the size of the city, would have made people's feet wet." It was a scandal that the levees ruptured, Bosworth went on. But that doesn't change the fact that everybody who left ...