Posted on 02/11/2013 7:45:31 PM PST by Anila
Yep...it was in Dec., 1996, well before Katrina.
We had been there on a business trip in October, 1996.
To be exact...Katrina didn’t hit New Orleans. It hit Mississippi.
New Orleans had problems several days after the storm because the levees broke, and the place flooded.
You won't sell Orleanians that idea. The eye passed over eastern Orleans and St. Bernard Parishes, and the city had winds well above 100 mph (my sister and her two girls were in it, in her husband's office on the third floor of Tulane Medical School Hospital). In fact, hurricane winds were experienced over a broad area from Baton Rouge to Mobile, where a mobile drilling rig broke its moorings and was driven into a bridge. That's a hurricane-wind footprint about 220 miles wide.
The flooding began even before the winds died away, and took about four-five hours to reach the Central Business District (the old American Quarter upriver of the Vieux Carre). The waters had the oddly useful effect of keeping the looting mobs out of Tulane Hospital, where my sister and her girls were sitting atop a mountain of drugs. (The water was 6' deep in the street.) Children's Hospital was the scene of an ugly confrontation and pharmacy looting. I think one or two of those hospitals that were looted never reopened.
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