New Orleans: Up from the Deluge

In New Orleans, America’s most hedonistic city, the humid air last week was laden with the stench of death, the streets overlaid by a fetid crust of mud. Day after day, as the floodwaters seeped back into the Mississippi, armed police and health crews pursued the macabre task of recovering human bodies and countless animal carcasses. They shot hundreds of snakes—and two alligators —that had been swept up from the swamps and dumped into the city by Hurricane Betsy. Dozens of citizens had been bitten by stray dogs crazed by hunger and salt water.

By week’s end, water still stood up to 4 ft. deep in parts of the 300-block area east of the ruptured Industrial Canal. In the city and nearby lowlands, the death toll had reached 65 and was still climbing. No one could tell how many more bodies the muddy waters might yield. And, as medical teams inoculated citizens against typhoid and diphtheria, New Orleans sweated out the threat of epidemic.

$1 Bread. Inevitably, New Orleans’ tragedy brought out the best, and worst, in its people. In a filthy emergency shelter, a pair of nuns worked tirelessly to bathe a long line of Negro children in a commandeered garbage can. Some areas had to be cordoned off against looters. Many merchants gave supplies to the hungry; others battened on privation by charging $1 or more for a loaf of bread, $5 for a block of ice. A dozen high school students volunteered for the grimmest duty of all—sorting victims in the morgue.

Inevitably, also, officialdom squabbled and squirmed over charges that residents of the stricken area had been given little or no warning of Betsy’s approach. The most authoritative critic was disputatious Dr. Edward Teller, of H-bomb fame, who was in the city for a speaking engagement five days after the hurricane struck; he noted that a well-run warning and evacuation system in Alaska had given residents ample notice of a tidal wave in the wake of last year’s devastating earthquake. “Six people died,” said Teller, “but the figure could have been hundreds.” In fact, New Orleans officials had expected flooding from Lake Pontchartrain to the north, whereas it was a 14-ft. wall of water sweeping up the canal and the Mississippi from south and east that actually inundated the city.

Gas Threat. Louisianans were too weary to panic when Army engineers reported that a barge loaded with 600 tons of liquid chlorine was missing. If the chlorine should escape, the engineers warned, a wave of deadly gas might engulf the delta. (Civilian chemists disagreed, said it might even help purify the polluted water.) The river was closed to shipping for 40 miles below Baton Rouge while the Army brought in 116,000 gas masks, and a flotilla of Navy and Coast Guard ships searched for the barge. When divers finally found it after five days, its chlorine tanks were intact.

Lyndon Johnson, who had visited the stricken area hours after the hurricane swept through, poured in millions of dollars worth of federal aid to ease Louisiana back to normalcy. Property damage in the delta would total at least $1 billion, and shipping losses, including 700 vessels sunk or grounded, would amount to another billion. “The hurricane,” said a Louisiana politician, “was the worst disaster here since the Civil War.” This time, at least, its people could hardly reproach Washington.