I recently left my job as an emergency medical technician in Baltimore and moved to Austin, Texas, to accept a James Michener fellowship in writing. Austin is about 500 miles from New Orleans, so on Sunday evening, when I heard what the news was predicting about Hurricane Katrina, I packed my car and headed for New Orleans.

I drove all night and got to the suburbs of the city around 11 a.m. Monday. The hurricane was still blowing and though the winds had slowed somewhat, the rain was sideways and visibility was almost nothing. Interstate 10 was blocked with downed streetlights, the roofs of homes, and every other kind of debris imaginable. It was like driving through a junkyard. Every so often a big piece of steel roofing would go skating across the interstate or down a side road. For the most part I was numb to it, but when the big debris started blowing I would tell myself: "Stay alive, stay alive, stay alive."

As I got into New Orleans proper, the freeway descended slightly and there was between five and 10 feet of water blocking it. At the edge of the flood, there was a full-size pickup sunk to its roof. I turned around and drove back the wrong way on the highway, hoping another car wouldn't run into me head-on. Finally I noticed a bunch of empty police cars parked on an overpass. I parked behind them and headed toward a building I hoped was the police station. It turned out to be the Kenner Police headquarters. Kenner is a city a few miles west of New Orleans, right on the edge of Lake Pontchartrain. Like New Orleans, Kenner is just at or below sea level. The police station itself, though, was built on slightly higher ground than the immediate area. The building was dry and the generators were running.

I was passed up the chain of command until I got to the captain, who promptly put me on a team that was going out to restart the pumping stations. New Orleans is kept dry by a network of massive pumping stations, and several of them are in Kenner. All were shut down. The conditions were so dangerous and unpredictable that everyone thought someone on the repair team might get seriously injured, so they were happy to have an EMT to go along.

The water in the streets was between three and five feet deep, and the only vehicles that could travel in it were military-style two-and-a-half-ton trucks, aka deuce-and-a-half trucks. I rode in one of them with about a dozen police officers and National Guard soldiers. There were downed power lines everywhere, across every block, it seemed. We swerved to avoid them but some were so low that we brushed them anyway. The driver would yell "Duck!" as if it mattered. If one of the lines was still energized, we would all be killed instantly.

There were façades ripped off hotels and apartment buildings, beds and furniture visible through the gaping holes, huge trees uprooted and flung down streets. Many of the big billboards were bent double to the ground, smashing whatever was beneath them. Where it was dry, there were bricks, wall sections, pipes and jagged tree limbs everywhere. Then there were the power lines. One was so low that I had to lift it up over the truck as we went under it. As I write now about the power lines it sounds like the stupidest thing I ever did, but the electricity was out everywhere, so you just did it and prayed.

We spent all day Monday getting the pumping stations restarted. The regular pump operators were nowhere to be found, so everyone pitched in and tried to figure out how to get the pumps working. The diesel engines that ran the pumps were big enough to power a battleship. Figuring out how to start them was impossible. After several hours, tempers were flaring and some of the police officers and National Guardsmen were having heated exchanges about what to do next.

Finally the pump operators showed up and got the pumps online. As it turned out, the stations were soaked but in good shape, so with the exception of wading all day in water and sewage among pieces of sharp debris, it was pretty safe. When we got back to the station, they fed me and bunked me with the officers. I examined my sewage-soaked feet and rubbed them with hand sanitizer. There was no running water anywhere.

The next morning they sent me out on a deuce-and-a-half to respond to emergency calls. The area hospitals were completely overflowing, and the city had set up a temporary clinic/hospital/triage center on the second floor of the airport. With the pumps running, the water levels had gone down a few inches overnight, but there was still three or four feet of water in the streets. Stores were already being looted -- every store I saw had its door kicked in or ripped off and a line of people going in and out of it. People were floating merchandise out of Wal-Mart on boats. The police tried to stop it but were completely overwhelmed. I know that President Bush has called for the police to stop the looting, but at the moment this is an impossible and ridiculous request. There are thousands and thousands of looters and only a handful of police. And there are thousands more people who still need to be rescued. If 25,000 military policemen had been sent in from the beginning, there would have been no looting. Another thing I'll say is that most or all of the civilians I saw were poor and humble folks. No one I saw (with the exception of the police officers) had decided to stay behind during the hurricane to "brave it out" -- they stayed because they had no means to leave.

By Tuesday morning, basic transportation was still a major problem -- the Kenner Police Department's functional vehicles consisted of its own two deuce-and-a-half trucks, plus one from the National Guard (under loan and command of the National Guardsmen), and one swamp boat (also on loan). Two of the trucks were assigned to drop officers at strategic locations where they would keep the peace. I was assigned to the third truck, with three officers going along with me as escorts. Folks in the street were already getting pretty desperate, most of them were running out of food and water, so while some were respectful, many others yelled profanities at us as we went by. Luckily the three officers I was with were pretty experienced --one of them was a long-time narcotics officer, another was on the SWAT team -- so I felt relatively safe. Later, we found out that in New Orleans, people were beginning to shoot at the police. But at the time, we didn't know it.

All of the patients I saw were trapped and had no way out. They were all living on the second and third floors of motels and apartment buildings. The first call was for a lady who was six months pregnant and thought she was going to deliver her baby right then (her other four children all were born at seven months). All I had was a blood pressure cuff and stethoscope and a couple of bandages. I tried to remember the section of the EMT textbook that talked about delivering babies. I thought I could do it if it was a normal birth but otherwise I was scared shitless. She was shouting at me, "I have to go to the bathroom, I have to push it out," and I was shouting at her, "Don't push, don't push, don't push!" I slipped aside her underwear and saw that she wasn't crowning, but I didn't know how far the airport clinic was. On the inside, I was thinking, "Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit." There was a downed power line blocking the road and we had to park far from the complex and wade a long way because of it. I yelled at the officers to get the truck right up to the complex. Somehow, they did it. Right then, an EMT from the fire department showed up and he had a bunch of experience delivering babies, and then everything seemed much easier. We got the lady to the airport triage center with no trouble.

The rest of the patients that day were people that in any normal situation should have been taken to the emergency room -- sick elderly folks, heart patients and diabetics, sick children and infants, people with sky-high blood pressure or fluid in their lungs, a guy with a deep cut in his arm six inches long and three inches wide. All of them were out or nearly out of food and water. Some had had their food and water stolen at gunpoint. All of the people were very, very afraid. One was shaking so hard he couldn't hold his medicine bottle. It was a hundred degrees out and incredibly humid.

I saw all this and my immediate reaction was "Get this person out of here right now," and then I would remind myself that all over the area, people were dying. I knew that in New Orleans, they were leaving the corpses in the water, tying them down if they had time, hoping they wouldn't float away. I'd also heard that when the power had gone out at one of the local hospitals, the backup generators didn't turn on and all the patients on life support died.

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