DELUGED.(New Orleans)

Tim Bruneau discovered New Orleans in 1997, when, as a twenty-three-year-old soldier at Fort Polk, Louisiana, he was close enough to the city to hit Bourbon Street on weekends. He'd spent two years in Panama as a military policeman, and New Orleans reminded him, in a good way, of Central America--hot, sensual, and easygoing. Rather than go home to Texas after leaving the Army, he joined the New Orleans Police Department.

Bruneau is tall and thin, with a big Adam's apple in a long neck. He walks like a marionette, lurching along with his knees slightly bent and his feet dragging. In 2002, he was hit by a car as he was running after a drug suspect. When he awoke, six weeks later, he couldn't move his left side. Bruneau assumed that his career was finished, but the department stood by him, paying for several operations, including the amputation of the little finger of his left hand, and keeping a job open for him. When it became clear that he would never be strong enough to return to patrol, he was made a detective.

The Hurricane Katrina crisis began for Bruneau on Monday, August 29th, shortly after the storm had passed through. A young woman lay dead in the middle of the 1900 block of Jackson Avenue. Her skull was crushed, and a fallen street light, blown down by the ninety-five-mile-an-hour winds, lay beside her. Along Jackson Avenue, people were emerging from shotgun shacks into a world of smashed oak trees and downed power lines. Some of them knew the woman. She had gone out during the storm to buy drugs.

Bruneau's police radio carried reports from the Lower Ninth Ward, three miles away: it was flooding rapidly, from a breach in the so-called Industrial Canal. But that was another district's problem. Bruneau radioed for the coroner. Nobody showed up. Bruneau called again. Nothing. An hour passed. The dispatcher told Bruneau that floodwater was heading toward him. The Seventeenth Street and London Avenue Canals had breached their levees, and Lake Pontchartrain was pouring into northern New Orleans. Bruneau asked for an ambulance. None was available, because most of them had been moved out of the city before the storm. He asked the dispatcher to try the coroner again, but the coroner's office was flooded.

Bruneau waited by the body for two hours, and finally left it with a patrolman and drove off to another call. When he checked back, in the early afternoon, the woman still lay uncovered on the hot pavement. Standard operating procedure, it seemed, no longer applied. In some nearby storm wreckage, he and the patrolman found a deflated water-bed mattress. Neighbors watched as the two men rolled the woman onto it and hoisted her into the back seat of Bruneau's unmarked white Crown Victoria. He explained to the neighbors that he planned to deliver the woman to the morgue. "So they wouldn't think I was up to no good," he told me. After informing the dispatcher that he had a 29-U, a victim of an unclassified death, in his back seat, he drove to Charity Hospital, about a mile away. Water was approaching the building's steps, and the doctors and staff members were evacuating. They couldn't take the body. At Tulane University Hospital, down the street, an emergency-room doctor refused to let Bruneau in the door.

By this time, Bruneau knew from police reports that his own house and car were underwater. He parked a few blocks from the Superdome, staring through the windshield at the huge structure rising incongruously from deep water. "I was dazed and confused," he told me later. All he had was his uniform, the cash in his wallet, and his gun. He didn't know what to do with the corpse. The entire edifice of city government seemed to have dissolved in the floodwaters. He sat gazing at the Superdome for two hours. Finally, the dispatcher got back to him.

"Undo what you did," she said.