The prospect of “another Katrina” has haunted New Orleans, and the rest of the nation.
As Hurricane Ida began violently tearing through South Louisiana on Sunday, Kelli Chandler was holed up in a windowless office, waiting and watching for the answer to a question that all of New Orleans was asking: Would the levees — the newer, stronger, more sophisticated levees — hold back the storm? Ms. Chandler, an official in the nerve center of the sprawling $20 billion storm defense system that was upgraded after the misery of Hurricane Katrina, spent hours fielding emails, calls, and texts from a web of officials and agencies that were keeping their eyes on the new system. The early signs, she said early Sunday evening, were good, but the final answers were far from clear. Ida was not finished with New Orleans. So the waiting and worrying went on. “We’re expecting peak winds later on tonight,” she said. The nation’s most flood-scarred city buckled in for a terrifying ride Sunday, its people gripped by an anxiety that was whipping around with the wind. Would Ida amount to a rerun of the epic disaster that no one has forgotten — and, of all days, on the 16th anniversary of Katrina? For residents like Erica Smith, the new storm protections offered little assurance. Ms. Smith,38, had survived Katrina, but, she said, just barely. She had no intention of living through this storm at her house in suburban Metairie. So she had come downtown, seeking the safety of a big hotel. Sunday morning, however, she had to move from one hotel to another. She cowered in the curve of a downtown building, contemplating the harrowing nine-block walk. The wind howled down Carondelet Street. “It’s horrific,” she said. “This could be another Katrina.” The prospect of that — “another Katrina” — has haunted New Orleans, and the rest of the nation, since the nightmare flooding of 2005 and the botched government response that followed. And Ida, which made landfall Sunday just south of New Orleans, seemed like a serious contender, with winds that reached 150 miles per hour, and a trajectory that appeared to be headed just west of New Orleans. But all storms are different, and the extensive investment in a remade storm protection system offered hope. It could seem, on Sunday, like pessimism and optimism were fighting it out like colliding weather systems.
