7am Tues post Katrina, water is rising, no looters yet

jimsullivan1963, on February 14, 2009, said:

We were staying in a room that faced an interior well. There was no power, so there was no TV. I went to the roof to see whatever there was to see as soon as I got up that morning. This is how I found out that the levees had broken, and the city had flooded. It's hard to describe the chill I felt when I looked over the ledge and saw this. It was absolutely silent. The streetcar rails were not yet submerged. I could see a few cars pulled up on them to try to get out of the water. I took my picture, and then ran down to the room. Then we went to all the rooms of our friends and "called a STAT meeting" in our room. They all had interior rooms too. Noone else knew! I said, "Let's all go to the roof, now." There's another picture of us up there, taking it in and deciding what to do. It was on the roof that Joe seriously re-proposed setting up an infirmary. (It had come up the night before, but I scoffed at it, because we didn't have licenses in La. or malpractice coverage or anything, and the city was still functioning theoretically...we didn't know it was flooding.) An hour or so later, Joe and some others went with two policemen across the street with big floating laundry bins, and took away 5 carloads of medications and supplies, and we were at work...refilling medications, treating cuts and scrapes, and treating people who were getting sick in our building. (We joked that New Orleans was always a most European of American cities, so providing free health care "fit" so well.)