great deluge

Three years ago tomorrow, Hurricane Katrina steamed through the Gulf Coast and left a trail of human and environmental suffering that is still largely unhealed. As Gustav eyes the Big Easy this week, I can't help but think back on my time as a New Orleans resident. From 2001-2005, I maintained the naive idea that "the big one" would always miss the city. In 2004 I waited out Hurricane Ivan at Igor's on St. Charles Avenue, sipping Bloody Marys and playing pool.

Katrina was big enough to expose the shoddy engineering and poor planning that plagued southeastern Louisiana three years ago. It's easy to get mad when I think about everything that went wrong, but a book I'm reading now is helping put things into better perspective by acknowledging the countless heroes who helped save people's lives and sanity.