ON THE ROOF.(The Talk of the Town)(Hurricane Katrina, 2005 effect)

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.

The two families shared a one-story house on South Prieur Street with one good job among them. Thirteen-year-old Timesha Johnson and twelve-year-old Irelle Guidry might have been sisters, with their identically red-tipped cornrows and denim miniskirts. When the city of New Orleans ordered them to evacuate, they gladly would have gone. "I'm poor, but I'm not stupid," said Timesha's stepfather, Charles Covington, a roofer, who wears his own hair in short, blond-tipped dreadlocks. But none of them own a car, and their friends who do had no room for extra passengers. There was a rumor of buses, but none appeared. "We even called cabs, but they was all getting out themselves," Charles said. So they bought what food and water they could, and the eight of them, from Irelle's grandmother, Janet, down to Timesha's eleven-month-old sister, Alleiah, huddled up together in the living room.

The house, in which Janet was born, creaked and banged and sighed as the winds blew, but it held together as it always had. Then it was over. That wasn't so bad, they said. Not as bad as Camille. Not as bad as Betsy. It was only when they pried off the plywood that they realized that their ordeal had just begun.

The water rose so fast that they barely had time to snatch up some food and clothing before it got soaked. First they sat on tables. Then they sat on dressers. Then they pushed Janet and her obese thirty-three-year-old son, Mario, up through the hatch to the stifling attic and climbed in. Luckily, Charles thought to grab a heavy hammer from his tool belt, because it wasn't long before the water was bubbling through the cracks in the attic floor. They sat on boxes, then stood, and still it rose, pushing them against the exposed points of roofing nails. Charles began banging at the ceiling with the hammer and finally bashed a hole big enough for them to squeeze through. Then they were sitting, exposed, on the sloping, sticky, hot tar roof, expecting to be rescued. That was Tuesday morning.

They sat like that, in the hot sun, ...