The Drowning;
A
BREACH OF FAITH
Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of
a
By Jed Horne
Random House. 412 pp. $25.96
It is hard to imagine that, less than a year
after the worst natural disaster in modern
Breach of Faith begins and ends at the Lower Ninth Ward home of Patrina
Peters, 43, a resilient African American mother of two who's disabled by
epilepsy, a heart condition and Crohn's disease. With Katrina barreling up the
Gulf Coast, it is Peters, holed up in the "camelback"-style house
that had been in her family for generations, who eerily sets the stage. Exactly
40 years earlier, she recalls, Hurricane Betsy cut a similar course, killing 75
people and decimating much of the historic black neighborhood. "I have a
funny feeling about this," Peters tells her daughter.
From Peters's pre-storm premonition, Horne catalogues the catastrophe in
almost hour-by-hour fashion. From the early, misplaced sighs of relief that New
Orleans had "dodged a bullet" to the mid-storm mayhem to the hideous
finger-pointing by impotent officials, Horne paints in vivid detail what
amounted not to just one disaster but to disaster piled upon disaster.
An accomplished author and a veteran editor at the Times-Picayune, the
city's gallant newspaper, Horne blessedly brings order to the chaos. Breach of
Faith meticulously traces not only the storm's path but also the warnings
blared by his colleagues at the newspaper and such experts as Ivor van Heerden,
the outspoken deputy director of the Hurricane Center at Louisiana State
University. With a much needed calm, Horne helps clarify the record on what
transpired in the now-notorious twin cesspools of the calamity: the Superdome
and the
Nor does Horne flinch from other, less famous
tragedies that befell his beloved city. His chapter on the five-day nightmare
inside the public
The medical challenges, it turns out, were the
least of the woes; rampant rumors of violence and an amply justified sense of
abandonment took a far worse toll. "Kurtz-Burke would recall sitting up
Thursday night with a quadriplegic," Horne writes, with the doctor and her
patient listening to the thwack-thwack of helicopters rescuing patients from
the adjacent
Horne even traveled to
What Breach of Faith often lacks is passion. To steal a cliché, Horne's
account is more head than guts. By focusing on government agencies such as FEMA
and reports produced months later by congressional investigators, he sometimes
fails to convey the true emotional blow that Katrina delivered. Politicians,
Army Corps engineers, wealthy lawyers, hotel magnates and French Quarter denizens
frequent these pages more often than do the city's richer stew of
characters -- characters such as Malik Rahim, an erstwhile
Black Panther and armed-robbery convict turned civic leader who single-handedly
built a health clinic, feeding station and shelter out of the rubble. But we
never see the faces of the sick and hungry lined up at Rahim's Common Ground
clinic; we never ride along as Rahim's street medics visit illegal immigrants
injured on construction sites.
Horne deserves credit for producing an important book in such short
order. Yet by the time we come back to Patrina Peters and her now-drowned house
in the Lower Ninth, I found myself yearning for the soul of the Katrina story,
the smelly, quirky, gut-wrenching, deadly truth of a city disintegrating. Ah,
for just one peek at the unidentifiable bodies inside the makeshift morgue, one
drink at the Snug Harbor music club the night the great jazz patriarch Ellis
Marsalis made his return, one terrifying night camped out with refugees on the
I-10 overpass, one day with a grieving mother or one walk in an old-time jazz
funeral procession, the wailing horns just breaking our hearts. *
Ceci Connolly, a Washington Post staff writer
now on leave and writing in