Storm recovery continues

Baking soda is in short supply on grocery store shelves across New Orleans. You might think that everyone was baking, but no - their refrigerators stink from whatever was in there when the power went out.

My street is still impassable with a fallen tree. I've got to zigzag across the neighborhood to get in and out. And, of course, there are the usual potholes. At least the downed power lines have been removed.

I see the little cafe has reopened for business. I got my car detailed as a sign to myself that everything is going to be okay. It was quite a job and worth every cent. I took it to a privately owned carwash in Central City, so hopefully, the money will go back into the hands of people in real need. I noticed, sitting alone in the office waiting for my car, that the owner, named Nemo, had a very impressive gun to protect the cashbox. He said he had been on track to be a pro football player until he was injured. He made his team work on my car an extra 20 minutes to get it spic-and-span.

The traffic lights weren't all working a couple of days ago, creating logjams at every intersection. Almost everyone is respectful and careful, however, knowing a terrible collision could result if we don't honor the rules. That means it takes a long time to drive across town. I totally forgot to renew my brake tag, which expired on the last day of August, but I wasn't the only one. I got a break because of the storm and was charged only a $2 late fee instead of $4.

Monday, I helped gut the home of an 80-year-old couple who lived in LaPlace, 45 minutes west of here. LaPlace never flooded before, so residents thought they were safe. The couple had lost their home in New Orleans' Gentilly neighborhood after Katrina. Gentilly had never flooded before either. Folks from a church pulled down sheetrock and ripped out fiberglass insulation. The guys yanked the cabinets out of the walls. The mold was only a little bit nasty with the windows and doors open. By the time we left, the entire household contents were in the yard. I hate to think where it will end up.

We think the city of New Orleans now has levees that work, but the outlying areas don't.

I'd recently read a story about Haiti's earthquake victims. Through all this inconvenience, I couldn't stop thinking about the poor Haitians who get hit almost every time. They can barely rebuild before the next one comes. I guess that's why they practice voodoo.

Post-Isaac recovery process

Congregants at the All Souls Church meeting outside Sunday morning

After several frustrating days, I finally got power back - which means electricity, lights, air-conditioning, phone and Internet. I had out-of-town friends pleading for me to tweet, text, post, e-mail or phone, but could do none. I could hardly move, it was so hot and muggy, and I was having trouble figuring out what I could still eat. Isaac was "only" a Cat 1. I can't imagine Katrina.

I was suffering from a major bout of caffeine withdrawal until I realized the gas stove still worked. I had to go buy one of those Melita one-cup-at-a-time brewing cones from way back when. I threw open the windows and enjoyed the warm breezes off the levee and got a few things accomplished.

Cafe Dauphine

A couple of days after the storm, I hoped to get some errands done Uptown. I figured that neighborhood would be in better shape. But the bank was offline. Tellers came outside to get customers' deposits and give us handwritten deposit slips. I saw the security guard coming back from Walgreens with bags of supplies. Walgreens was sold out of insect repellent given everyone had been sitting outside on their porches to keep cool and getting bitten. Winn-Dixie had no ice. I looked for an Internet cafe, but there were no connections. Home Depot had just a few lights on. I'd hoped to take a shower at the health club, but it was shut down.

The cafe's owner despondent.

I wanted to get out of the house and the dark Saturday night, driving first to the Chalmette movie theater. Not only was it closed, but the entire shopping center was dark. I then went to the Old Mint to see a cabaret, but it wasn't happening. Though lights were on in the French Quarter, they stopped at Esplanade. Frenchmen Street would have been completely dark if it hadn't been for The Spotted Cat where Washboard Chaz and his band were playing and folks lindy-hopping thanks to a generator.

The house is still standing and we're alive. There are many power lines, telephone poles and trees down, blocking roadways, but signs of recovery are already in view. Last night, our local restaurant was giving away grilled food the owners had bought thinking the power might come on earlier. They were planning to drive around the neighborhood and give it away.

But, generally, everybody is okay. We all stop politely at traffic lights that don't work, drink warm beer and eat canned spaghetti while we wait for the electricity and garbage trucks.

I somehow volunteered to clean out a house in LaPlace today - grateful it's theirs and not mine.

New Orleans escapes hurricanes one more year

2011 hurricane season leaves central Gulf Coast largely undisturbed

 By Bruce Nolan, The Times-Picayune 

The 2011 hurricane season ends Wednesday, closing the book on another yet another summer that, in the long view, was ominously busier than usual -- but left the central Gulf Coast largely undisturbed. The season's total of 19 tropical storms tied for the third-most-active since record-keeping began in 1851, and continues the trend of bustling hurricane seasons that began in 1995, the National Hurricane Center said.

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Yet this year's storms mostly lashed open water.

The local exception was Tropical Storm Lee, a storm that never developed to hurricane strength but dumped heavy rains over southeast Louisiana on Labor Day weekend.

Lee flooded scores of homes in low-lying parts of St. Tammany, Plaquemines and Jefferson parishes outside the federal government's multibillion-dollar hurricane defense system.

Otherwise, none of the year's seven hurricanes even entered the Gulf of Mexico, except perhaps little-known Hurricane Rina, which dawdled briefly at the doorstep in the Yucatan Channel before falling apart in late October.

For the sixth straight year -- a record -- the U.S. mainland was spared a strike by a major hurricane of Category 3 or higher. There were three such major storms this year.

Still, Hurricane Irene, the one hurricane to strike the United States, did $10 billion in damage and killed 55 people in late August, according to the National Hurricane Center.

EnlargeAndrew Boyd, The Times-PicayuneG. ANDREW BOYD / THE TIMES-PICAYUNE Rhett Hebert of Covington plays in the splash along the Mandeville, La., lakefront as water from Tropical Storm Lee pushes in September 3, 2011. Rhett was out with his mom and brother to see what the storm was doing.Tropical Storm Lee pushes water onto the Northshore gallery (22 photos)

The Category 1 storm scraped northward past Cape Hatteras and made landfall near New York City. After its winds dissipated, its rains destroyed billions of dollars worth of property further north in Vermont.

Closer to home, the Army Corps of Engineers continued rebuilding a completely redesigned system of levees, floodwalls, floodgates and other barriers to replace the flawed system that failed catastrophically after the near miss of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

At the opening of the 2011 hurricane season, the corps' deadline, the federal agency pointed to a much-improved system constructed after six years of breakneck work.

Although not finished, the new hurricane "risk reduction" system was built to protect against a target storm even before its last components are fully finished. That target storm is one that has a one percent chance of hitting the area in any given year.

During the 2011 hurricane season, work continued on a massive set of pumps and floodgates below Harvey that would protect most of the West Bank. Even short of completion, however, it now provides the mandated protection, said corps spokesman Rene Poche.

Among other projects, Poche said, work continues on raising some Mississippi River levees below English Turn in Algiers and Belle Chasse; on the reconstruction of the southern terminus of the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway where it ties into a protection levee; and on levee protection along the western edge of Kenner.

Bruce Nolan can be reached at bnolan@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3344.

© 2011 NOLA.com. All rights reserved.

In NOLA, a good weatherman is a king

WWL-TV meteorologist dead at 92

 By Times-Picayune Staff 

For more than 50 years, Gulf Coast weather-watchers relied on Mr. Roberts to tell them where tropical storms would come ashore.

From before Hurricane Betsy in 1965 to beyond Hurricane Georges in 1998, Mr. Roberts was widely considered the region's most authoritative source for hurricane news.

And in the age of Super Doppler and satellite imagery, there remained for hundreds of thousands of New Orleanians a great sense of relief in seeing Mr. Roberts on screen with his throwback bulletin-board-style weather map and felt-tip pens.

"He was old school, but you know what? I miss that," said Bob Breck, chief meteorologist at Fox affiliate WVUE-Channel 8 and a feisty competitor for many years.

Breck said he admired Mr. Roberts' independent approach to forecasting big storms.

"I think Nash wasn't afraid to fail. He trusted his instincts and he just followed his gut. I think that's what people remember him for.

"He was just a man who was a giant of the industry."

Even after his retirement from WWL-TV's nightly newscasts in 1984, Mr. Roberts would reappear on Channel 4 whenever a serious storm entered the Gulf of Mexico.

Bruce Katz, chief meteorologist at WGNO-Channel 26, grew up in New Orleans watching Mr. Roberts' forecasts and hurricane calls.

"He was kind of the inspiration for me doing what I do," Katz said. "Growing up in New Orleans, Nash was the guy. Before the advent of cable TV and satellites, he was the guy everybody turned to.

"He was the legend."

What viewers saw from Mr. Roberts, Katz added, was information and a presentation style from an era that predated today's sophisticated technology.

"His big marker board, the magnetic highs and lows -- it was well before computer technology," Katz said. "You didn't have the data modeling. The science was evolving back then, and he made that interesting."

Mike Hoss, news anchor and interim news director at WWL, came to town in 1989 as a sports anchor well after Mr. Roberts' reputation and loyal following were established.

"Affinity toward him was so strong; it made you, as an outsider, immediately take notice," Hoss said. "And certainly from a technology standpoint, with the greaseboard and the marker, you immediately (and) ever after took notice.

"He spoke to all ages, genders, races, across the board."

In July 2001, Mr. Roberts announced his full retirement, setting aside his black markers to care for his ailing wife, Lydia.

"I actually prayed that I would outlive her, so that I could take care of her," Nash told WWL news anchor Angela Hill at the time. "That's how it's working out."

Mr. Roberts' career in meteorology began in 1946, when he started a private weathercasting service after teaching meteorology at Loyola University and serving as a navigator and meteorologist for the Navy during World War II.

For Texaco and other clients in the oil and gas industry, Mr. Roberts watched the weather over marshes, on the coast and in the Gulf.

In 1951, he began appearing on WDSU as the region's first regular TV weatherman.

Mr. Roberts told Hill in the 2001 interview that he was enticed into the job when he was told about a Chicago forecaster's $80,000 annual salary.

Commenting on Mr. Roberts' premiere, New Orleans Item columnist Ted Liuzza wrote, "He's so unassuming and un-actorish that when he hails you with a shy 'good evening,' you feel like calling back, 'hello.' "

Mr. Roberts cemented his reputation with local viewers by making bull's-eye landfall predictions for Hurricanes Audrey in 1957, Betsy in 1965 and Camille in 1969.

After 22 years with WDSU, Mr. Roberts moved to WVUE, where he stayed until joining WWL in 1978.

Breck had the daunting task of following Mr. Roberts at WVUE, and competing against him after that.

"I was brought to this town to replace Nash," Breck said. "I wanted to beat the old man."

But Breck said he was deeply moved by Mr. Roberts' final retirement in 2001 to care for Lydia.

"He left the love of broadcasting to care for the love of his life," Breck said. "If there's any kind of thing that people should remember about Nash was that he had character. People trusted him."

Mr. Roberts' accurate prediction that Hurricane Georges in 1998 would make landfall east of New Orleans, while all the computer models and other television stations were still insisting Georges would drift to the west, earned him national attention.

"As long as Roberts and his Magic Markers are exclusive to WWL," The Times-Picayune wrote after Georges, "Channel 4 will remain the only place to get an answer to the first hurricane-related question asked by anyone who's lived in New Orleans for any length of time: 'What's Nash say?' "

Mr. Roberts and his wife stayed in town for every hurricane -- he at the station, she at home in Metairie -- until Hurricane Katrina.

Mr. Roberts told Times-Picayune TV columnist Dave Walker in 2006 that it was a joke on his block: During a hurricane threat, neighbors would wait for his wife's car to leave before they'd evacuate. Until Katrina, it never happened.

"I left my wife at home, and she rode out every one of them right here," Mr. Roberts said. "I wouldn't have let that happen if I thought it was dangerous. The story in the neighborhood was, 'I'm staying here unless I look out the window and Lydia's car is gone. If Nash tells Lydia to leave, we're all leaving.' "

Katrina, which struck when Mr. Roberts was fully retired, was different.

"For the first time in 60 years, I evacuated," Mr. Roberts said in 2006. "I was pretty sure the thing was coming in here. What convinced me that I better get out was the fact that I knew it was going to be a wet system. It was huge in size, driving a lot of water ahead of it. With my wife, with the condition she's in, I said, 'We'd better get out of here.' ''

The couple evacuated from their Metairie home to Baton Rouge for two months. Their home sustained minimal damage.

"As soon as they would let me, I went to the gap in the 17th Street Canal and looked it over, and then I worked my way through Lakeview and lower New Orleans," Mr. Roberts told Walker. "It just was breathtaking, spooky. To go through neighborhoods and never see anybody, just a bunch of old beat-up cars and nobody living in any of the houses."

Despite occasional pangs of professional nostalgia, Mr. Roberts said he was glad he wasn't at WWL's studio tracking Katrina's path to town via squeaky pen and wipe-board.

"The truth of the whole matter is I'm glad I wasn't on for this," he said. "It would've been a very, very trying and tiring ordeal. My method of fooling with these storms is I lock onto 'em and just stay with 'em 24 hours a day, seven days a week, until they're gone, and that is extremely arduous.

"But I could've done very little for anybody with this storm except do what I did. I left (with Lydia) on Saturday."

Lydia Roberts died in 2007, according to WWL. The couple had been married more than 60 years.

Mr. Roberts figured prominently in a 2006 book from Kensington Publishing, "Roar of the Heavens: Surviving Hurricane Camille," by Stefan Bechtel.

"A wonderful man," Bechtel said. "Kind of courtly, gentlemanly. We spent quite a long time talking, and he started making me little maps with what is now a rather shaky hand, like a football coach calling the plays."

To WWL's Hoss, Mr. Roberts' longevity on local airwaves was as remarkable as his forecasting prowess.

"You don't get to do five decades if you aren't respected," Hoss said. "You don't get to do five decades unless you do it right.

"Quite frankly, he did it right."

Survivors include two sons, Kenneth and Nash Roberts III; three brothers; and four grandchildren, WWL said.

Funeral arrangements are incomplete.

••••••••

TV Columnist Dave Walker contributed to this article, which was prepared by staff writer Stephanie Stokes.

Legendary TV weatherman Nash C. Roberts Jr., revered as much for his calm, level-headed presence as the accuracy of his hurricane path projections, has died at age 92, WWL-TV has reported.

EnlargeTimes-Picayune StaffVideo capture photo courtesy of WWL-TV--Nash Roberts, retired weather forecaster at WWL-TVmeteorologist Nash Roberts dies at 92 gallery (8 photos)

For more than 50 years, Gulf Coast weather-watchers relied on Mr. Roberts to tell them where tropical storms would come ashore.

From before Hurricane Betsy in 1965 to beyond Hurricane Georges in 1998, Mr. Roberts was widely considered the region's most authoritative source for hurricane news.

And in the age of Super Doppler and satellite imagery, there remained for hundreds of thousands of New Orleanians a great sense of relief in seeing Mr. Roberts on screen with his throwback bulletin-board-style weather map and felt-tip pens.

"He was old school, but you know what? I miss that," said Bob Breck, chief meteorologist at Fox affiliate WVUE-Channel 8 and a feisty competitor for many years.

Breck said he admired Mr. Roberts' independent approach to forecasting big storms.

"I think Nash wasn't afraid to fail. He trusted his instincts and he just followed his gut. I think that's what people remember him for.

"He was just a man who was a giant of the industry."

Even after his retirement from WWL-TV's nightly newscasts in 1984, Mr. Roberts would reappear on Channel 4 whenever a serious storm entered the Gulf of Mexico.

Bruce Katz, chief meteorologist at WGNO-Channel 26, grew up in New Orleans watching Mr. Roberts' forecasts and hurricane calls.

"He was kind of the inspiration for me doing what I do," Katz said. "Growing up in New Orleans, Nash was the guy. Before the advent of cable TV and satellites, he was the guy everybody turned to.

"He was the legend."

What viewers saw from Mr. Roberts, Katz added, was information and a presentation style from an era that predated today's sophisticated technology.

"His big marker board, the magnetic highs and lows -- it was well before computer technology," Katz said. "You didn't have the data modeling. The science was evolving back then, and he made that interesting."

Mike Hoss, news anchor and interim news director at WWL, came to town in 1989 as a sports anchor well after Mr. Roberts' reputation and loyal following were established.

"Affinity toward him was so strong; it made you, as an outsider, immediately take notice," Hoss said. "And certainly from a technology standpoint, with the greaseboard and the marker, you immediately (and) ever after took notice.

"He spoke to all ages, genders, races, across the board."

In July 2001, Mr. Roberts announced his full retirement, setting aside his black markers to care for his ailing wife, Lydia.

"I actually prayed that I would outlive her, so that I could take care of her," Nash told WWL news anchor Angela Hill at the time. "That's how it's working out."

Mr. Roberts' career in meteorology began in 1946, when he started a private weathercasting service after teaching meteorology at Loyola University and serving as a navigator and meteorologist for the Navy during World War II.

For Texaco and other clients in the oil and gas industry, Mr. Roberts watched the weather over marshes, on the coast and in the Gulf.

In 1951, he began appearing on WDSU as the region's first regular TV weatherman.

Mr. Roberts told Hill in the 2001 interview that he was enticed into the job when he was told about a Chicago forecaster's $80,000 annual salary.

Commenting on Mr. Roberts' premiere, New Orleans Item columnist Ted Liuzza wrote, "He's so unassuming and un-actorish that when he hails you with a shy 'good evening,' you feel like calling back, 'hello.' "

Mr. Roberts cemented his reputation with local viewers by making bull's-eye landfall predictions for Hurricanes Audrey in 1957, Betsy in 1965 and Camille in 1969.

After 22 years with WDSU, Mr. Roberts moved to WVUE, where he stayed until joining WWL in 1978.

Breck had the daunting task of following Mr. Roberts at WVUE, and competing against him after that.

"I was brought to this town to replace Nash," Breck said. "I wanted to beat the old man."

But Breck said he was deeply moved by Mr. Roberts' final retirement in 2001 to care for Lydia.

"He left the love of broadcasting to care for the love of his life," Breck said. "If there's any kind of thing that people should remember about Nash was that he had character. People trusted him."

Mr. Roberts' accurate prediction that Hurricane Georges in 1998 would make landfall east of New Orleans, while all the computer models and other television stations were still insisting Georges would drift to the west, earned him national attention.

"As long as Roberts and his Magic Markers are exclusive to WWL," The Times-Picayune wrote after Georges, "Channel 4 will remain the only place to get an answer to the first hurricane-related question asked by anyone who's lived in New Orleans for any length of time: 'What's Nash say?' "

Mr. Roberts and his wife stayed in town for every hurricane -- he at the station, she at home in Metairie -- until Hurricane Katrina.

Mr. Roberts told Times-Picayune TV columnist Dave Walker in 2006 that it was a joke on his block: During a hurricane threat, neighbors would wait for his wife's car to leave before they'd evacuate. Until Katrina, it never happened.

"I left my wife at home, and she rode out every one of them right here," Mr. Roberts said. "I wouldn't have let that happen if I thought it was dangerous. The story in the neighborhood was, 'I'm staying here unless I look out the window and Lydia's car is gone. If Nash tells Lydia to leave, we're all leaving.' "

Katrina, which struck when Mr. Roberts was fully retired, was different.

"For the first time in 60 years, I evacuated," Mr. Roberts said in 2006. "I was pretty sure the thing was coming in here. What convinced me that I better get out was the fact that I knew it was going to be a wet system. It was huge in size, driving a lot of water ahead of it. With my wife, with the condition she's in, I said, 'We'd better get out of here.' ''

The couple evacuated from their Metairie home to Baton Rouge for two months. Their home sustained minimal damage.

"As soon as they would let me, I went to the gap in the 17th Street Canal and looked it over, and then I worked my way through Lakeview and lower New Orleans," Mr. Roberts told Walker. "It just was breathtaking, spooky. To go through neighborhoods and never see anybody, just a bunch of old beat-up cars and nobody living in any of the houses."

Despite occasional pangs of professional nostalgia, Mr. Roberts said he was glad he wasn't at WWL's studio tracking Katrina's path to town via squeaky pen and wipe-board.

"The truth of the whole matter is I'm glad I wasn't on for this," he said. "It would've been a very, very trying and tiring ordeal. My method of fooling with these storms is I lock onto 'em and just stay with 'em 24 hours a day, seven days a week, until they're gone, and that is extremely arduous.

"But I could've done very little for anybody with this storm except do what I did. I left (with Lydia) on Saturday."

Lydia Roberts died in 2007, according to WWL. The couple had been married more than 60 years.

Mr. Roberts figured prominently in a 2006 book from Kensington Publishing, "Roar of the Heavens: Surviving Hurricane Camille," by Stefan Bechtel.

"A wonderful man," Bechtel said. "Kind of courtly, gentlemanly. We spent quite a long time talking, and he started making me little maps with what is now a rather shaky hand, like a football coach calling the plays."

To WWL's Hoss, Mr. Roberts' longevity on local airwaves was as remarkable as his forecasting prowess.

"You don't get to do five decades if you aren't respected," Hoss said. "You don't get to do five decades unless you do it right.

"Quite frankly, he did it right."

Survivors include two sons, Kenneth and Nash Roberts III; three brothers; and four grandchildren, WWL said.

Funeral arrangements are incomplete.

••••••••

TV Columnist Dave Walker contributed to this article, which was prepared by staff writer Stephanie Stokes.

© 2010 NOLA.com. All rights reserved.

Hurricane exhibit packs category 5 punch

By Bruce Eggler
Staff writer, Times-Picayune

Hurricane Katrina barreled toward southeast Louisiana in late August 2005 with winds as high as 175 mph.

The Louisiana State Museum's new Katrina-focused exhibition about hurricanes, by contrast, has taken its time in arriving, finally opening more than five years after museum staff members began collecting Katrina artifacts and thinking about how they should be presented.

But those who visit the exhibition, whether or not they experienced Katrina firsthand, will find that it, too, can pack a powerful emotional punch.

On the way to the show's opening, the museum has gone through managerial turmoil, a legislative battle over its direction and control, budget cuts and staff reductions. Raising the $7.5 million needed to design and build the exhibits took years.

But after a gala opening party Saturday night, "Living With Hurricanes: Katrina and Beyond" opens to the general public Tuesday at the Presbytere on Jackson Square.

The show is billed by the museum as the largest hurricane exhibition in the world, and it covers a lot of ground: the nature of hurricanes, Hurricane Betsy and other storms that hit New Orleans in the past, levee engineering, coastal marshes, Hurricane Rita and, of course, the full story of Katrina's impact -- from evacuation to flooding to the city's gradual repopulation, rebuilding and recovery.

The first object that will meet visitors' eyes is one of the most striking: a ruined Steinway baby grand piano recovered from Fats Domino's flooded Lower 9th Ward home.

Stories to tell

Scores of other objects have their own stories to tell: a pirogue used to rescue stranded residents, a re-creation of a St. Bernard Parish home's attic and the actual ax its residents used to chop an escape route to the roof, a waterlogged teddy bear, sacred objects from a flooded synagogue, a flag that flew at Charity Hospital during the storm, seats from the Superdome where tens of thousands took refuge, one of Pete Fountain's clarinets from his home in coastal Mississippi, a Mid-City garage door covered with the spray-painted markings and messages so ubiquitous after the storm.

A pair of blue jeans shows the identification and medical information their owner wrote on them in case he was injured or killed as he sought help.

One of the most memorable items is the "Mabry wall," the daily diary that B.W. Cooper housing complex resident Tommie Elton Mabry wrote on the walls of his apartment with a black felt tip marker, starting the day before the storm hit and continuing for weeks afterward. The museum staff painstakingly peeled off the paint bearing his journal before the building was demolished.

Visual, oral records

Besides actual artifacts, exhibits incorporate some of the hundreds of oral histories the museum has assembled. Some of them play while a simulated helicopter hovers overhead, recalling the aerial rescues of stranded residents.

Videotapes of actual TV broadcasts recount Katrina's approach and arrival. Another 20-minute video provides a visual record of the mile after mile of devastation the storm left behind.

Exhibits discuss how levees were supposed to protect New Orleans and why they didn't. They look at the role the now-closed Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet played, at climate change and wetlands loss, at lessons learned and new strategies for disaster management.

They take note of major changes since Katrina such as consolidation of levee boards, infrastructure improvements and new initiatives in politics and education. Carnival costumes made from the blue tarp roofs seen everywhere throughout the city post-Katrina recall the sense of humor that helped people get through the ordeal.

A concluding eight-minute video montage shows people remembering the bad days and looking hopefully to the future, cleaning the muck out of buildings and thanking the thousands of volunteers who arrived to help the Gulf Coast rebuild, and celebrating the survival and revival of the region's myriad of distinctive cultural phenomena.

Emphasis is on the future

Museum Director Sam Rykels said the exhibition presents a more optimistic picture than was originally envisioned in the immediate aftermath of the storm, when New Orleans' continued existence seemed in question and anger was raging toward what many saw as failed leadership as well as failed levee engineering.

"We've taken the personalities out," he said. "We're critical of the process, not of individuals."

There also is more emphasis on recovery and facing the future than on the storm itself, and a broadening of geographic scope, though the focus is still squarely on Katrina and its impact on the New Orleans area.
About 80 percent of the visitors to the state museum system's main local buildings, the Cabildo and Presbytere, come from outside Louisiana, and Rykels said he hopes they go away from the Katrina exhibition thinking that New Orleans and southeast Louisiana are important to the country and should be protected and rebuilt.

He hopes they also go away realizing that natural disasters can happen anywhere and everyone needs to find ways to live with and minimize risk.

Finally, Rykels said, he hopes visitors go away thinking, "This is a different museum," one interested not only in Louisiana history but also in the state's entire culture.

"We really see it as a game-changer for us," he said.
. . . . . . .
Major support for the exhibition was provided by the National Science Foundation, Louisiana Museum Foundation, W.R. Irby Trust, Booth-Bricker Fund, RosaMary Foundation, Entergy, Ella West Freeman Foundation, Selley Fund, Iberia Bank, Goldring Family Foundation, Woldenberg Foundation, Lupin Foundation and National Park Service.

Bruce Eggler can be reached at beggler@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3320.

Evacuating New Orleans

I planned to ride out Gustav in a condominium on the fourth floor of a brick warehouse before I heard Mayor Nagin's speech Saturday night, warning any residents who planned to stay though the "storm of the century" that they would be on their own. Poised for a relaxing, long weekend, kicking off with the gay celebration "Southern Decadence" and lolling with books and slumber, I'd stocked the fridge with plenty of fresh food for the next four days.

Suddenly, I was mobilizing to evacuate. The mayor's press conference message had its intended effect. Preparations began immediately -- checking the United Airlines Web site for ticket vouchers -- and packing bags, pouring milk down the sink and sending good food down the garbage chute. Friends in Atlanta and Tuscaloosa, Ala., called to say I was welcome in their homes.

At 4 a.m., a United agent left a voicemail message, saying my Wednesday morning flight had been postponed until the afternoon, but I had already planned to go out to the airport and get on any plane anywhere. I took the elevator down to the lobby where some young guys were laughing over the mayor's speech, mocking his admonitions. They, apparently, were ready to party. I paused on the way out the door the next morning, wishing good luck to residents who had weathered Katrina in that building, two blocks from the Convention Center, and planned to do so again. The question in my mind was not whether the windows would blow out, but whether marauders would break in through the glass doors.

I drove my car to the Tulane hospital garage where I was greeted by the security guards I saw almost daily as an employee. The ER windows were boarded up and the brick garage almost full -- most likely with the cars of other employees having the same idea. I did not want to find my little VW convertible upside down, smashed or flooded.

The National Guard troops were already in the streets, which were almost empty. After unloading the car, I trudged down Canal Street, dragging my suitcases behind me. At the corner of Elk, a man with dreadlocks stood, holding a plastic bag on the handle bars of his bicycle. I was surprised to see a public transit bus on the deserted street and said something to him. When he responded in Spanish, I realized he was looking for the city-sponsored buses that were taking residents without their own transportation out of town. In pidgin Spanish, I pointed him toward the Greyhound station four blocks away and he took off on his bike.

Two lonely blocks later, I encountered another man, dressed in shorts and carrying his possessions in black garbage bags. "This experience is a new one for me!" he joked and and I agreed. He said he had been evicted from the hotel where he was staying and had booked a flight to San Antonio. When I tried to direct him to the Sheraton where the only airport shuttles were leaving, he said he had one more stop to make first. I trudged on.

The shuttle was free and the staff loaded my bags without question. We were a quiet group, the last remaining evacuees from the ill-fated city, silently awaiting the arrival of Gustav.