HOME ALONE.(The Talk of the Town)(Hurricane Katrina, 2005)

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.

We finished boarding up the house on Sunday, the day before the expected hit, and my husband, Joe, prepared the attic with tarps and Visqueen in the hope of directing water leaks through the old slate roof into a copper cistern that hasn't had any use for close to a century. Our neighbors had left earlier in the day, their cars packed with kids, pets, photographs, and possessions that, at the next junction in life, might well look like junk.

The wind began in earnest that evening, gusts that blew off roof tiles and ripped branches from our neighbor's oak. We settled in, alert but calm, in that way that belies anxiety. During the night, the awning on the windows of the sunroom tried to get airborne and take the second story with it. We jumped out of bed, ready to take action, only to find nothing to do. Through the back glass doors, we could see the rain driving horizontally.

The phone rang, and we both laughed; we were shocked that it worked. It was a neighbor who is a reporter at the Times-Picayune. He said, "I'm stuck. The building is surrounded." He meant by water. He wanted to know if the neighborhood was flooded. "Not a sign of standing water," we told him. "But our crape-myrtle tree just blew out of the ground. "

"Anything else happening?"