Our Hell in High Water
Canal Street during Katrina, in front of the Ritz-Carlton on Monday, August 30, 2005. Photo © Cheryl Gerber
August 2025A writer with deep generational ties to the French Quarter flees the neighborhood in Katrina’s aftermath, only to find the storm strengthened his resolve to return - and to stay.
-by James Nolan
This column is underwritten in part by Karen Hinton & Howard Glaser
August 15, 2025:
Two days after escaping post-Katrina New Orleans in a stolen school bus, I wrote “Our Hell in High Water” for the Washington Post, where it appeared in the September 4, 2005 edition.
As stressed out as a war journalist under deadline, I wrote it sweating in a bathing suit in my friend Andrei Codrescu’s carport in Baton Rouge, his house teeming with other refugees. I later included it in my aptly titled memoir Flight Risk (2017), where it fits in perfectly with my other escape sagas.
During my exile after the storm, when we weren’t allowed to re-enter the emptied city patrolled by the National Guard, I went on to publish other pieces about Katrina in Florida’s St. Petersburg Times and La Vanguardia in Barcelona, cities in which I’d taught and where I was visiting friends until being allowed back into New Orleans.
Funny, because before Katrina, I’d been feeling antsy and was applying for university teaching positions elsewhere. Yet finally coming home to my Dumaine Street balcony and turning on lights that actually worked nailed my commitment to stay in the French Quarter—which many displaced former residents were calling the “Isle of Denial”—to help rebuild our city.
Editor’s note: Sadly, James Nolan passed away in his Bourbon Street apartment on August 22nd. We spoke with him just a few days before and he was very excited about the (re)publication of this piece. He also very much enjoyed the fact that his “Quarter Rats” essay had won over many new readers who were just discovering his work. Our condolences to his family and friends. The real nightmare began last Wednesday morning, when the city cut off the water supply two days after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. Until then, I hadn't regretted the decision not to evacuate my second-story French Quarter apartment, even when the electricity flicked off in the middle of the storm, plunging the city into darkness and ending most outside communication.
I still had hope.
I'm not particularly brave, but I am a fifth-generation New Orleans native raised in a culture that knows how to deal with hurricanes. As a matter of fact, the first light I ever saw streamed from a generator at Hôtel Dieu, the hospital that the Daughters of Charity had founded in the 19th century. I was born during the unnamed hurricane that wiped out New Orleans in September 1947, and was rowed home to the Faubourg Tremé along a flooded Canal Street.
So as clouds darkened on Sunday afternoon, generations of storm folklore—sheer instinct by now—sprang into action. I filled the bathtub with water, cut the wick on the hurricane lamp, froze water in plastic jugs to keep the refrigerator cool, secured the dilapidated wooden shutters on the front gallery, stocked up on batteries, food, and drinking water, and got out the portable radio and the plug-in white Princess phone.
Then I opened a bottle of wine. By the time my friends José Torres Tama and Claudia Copeland arrived to weather the storm with me, I'd cooked a three-course meal, which we topped off with a bottle of Spanish cognac.
"Here's to Katrina," we toasted, "the Russian spy," even as the TV broadcast its unrelenting instructions to evacuate, evacuate, evacuate.
After Katrina began to pound us at 7:00 a.m. Monday, the only moment of panic took hold when a storm shutter tore open and a buckling set of French doors threatened to usher the hurricane into my study.
While José and Claudia wired the doors shut, I held them in place with a wooden cooking spoon wedged inside the handles. Then we retired to the back gallery to watch the howling wrath of the storm whip through the brick courtyard. My building dates back to 1810, and has survived two centuries of storms from the Gulf. It knew what to do.
Or rather, the original architects of the city knew just what to expect, and designed houses on brick pilings, windows and doors with jalousied shutters, thick plaster walls, and enclosed courtyards. Most of the buildings constructed before 1910 have been waiting during centuries for a storm of Katrina's magnitude, and survived her with iron-lace grace, as did my place.
Houses with concrete slab foundations poured on reclaimed swampland, and towering plate-glass hotels and office buildings, were chewed up and spat out. As my mother complained after her River Ridge home was flooded several years ago, "Honey, things like this aren't supposed to happen anymore. These are modren times."
Nature hasn't changed, but the city certainly has.
Mid-city New Orneans, post-Katrina. Photo Historic New Orleans Collection, ©David G. Spielman, 2015.0225.5
Summer camp by kerosene lamp didn't last long. By Tuesday afternoon I was already beginning to hear about martial law, widespread looting, and the city's mandate that everyone leave and nobody return.
"You have nothing to come home to," the lone local radio station announced to the evacuated. "New Orleans as we know it has ended."
Friends from both coasts called to inform me that the French Quarter was under water, even as I was peering down from my balcony into a bone-dry street. When we took a walk around, the Quarter resembled a cross between the morning after Mardi Gras and a grade-B war movie. Choppers swooped overhead, sirens wailed, and army trucks rumbled through the streets.
At night, for the first time in my life, I could see the stars in the sky over the French Quarter, and all I could hear were tree frogs and the crash of shattering glass in the distance.
I began to notice groups of residents lugging water bottles and suitcases, heading for the Convention Center. Hours later they straggled back. At this point my chief means of communication was shouting from the balcony, and I learned there were no evacuation buses. The city had ordered us to leave, but was allowing nobody in to rescue us and providing no transportation out.
On Tuesday evening, my skeletal neighbor Kip, a kidney-transplant patient, waded home alone by flashlight from the Convention Center, where there were neither dialysis machines nor buses to get him to one. His last treatment had been four days earlier, and he was bloating.
"I hate to bring this up," my neighbor Tede told me, "but what are we going to do with his body when he dies?"
We had to get him out.
By Wednesday morning, when the water was cut off, the city was already descending into mayhem. A looter had shot a policeman in the head, a car was hijacked by someone wielding a machete, gas was being siphoned from parked cars, mail trucks and school buses were being stolen, and armed gangs of kids were circling the streets on bikes. The social problems in this impoverished city had been simmering for decades; now the lid was off, and the pot was boiling over.
Despite orders to evacuate, roadblocks had been set up, and nobody was being permitted either to enter or leave the city. Molly's, a bar on Decatur Street, opened by candlelight and the rumor spread like wildfire: They have ice.
If evacuated residents and proprietors had been allowed to return, to take a stand, some public order would have gradually prevailed. Yet the only advice from the city was to head for the Convention Center and not to drink the water.
Two weeks after James Nolan left the French Quarter, Scott Saltzman photographed this makeshift eatery set up on St. Louis Street, “Please Seat Yourself.” Photo © Scott Saltzman
We knew the water wasn't potable, and seldom drink it anyway. If I learned anything growing up here, it was never to buy a dead crab or to drink the tap water after a hurricane, the two most sacred writs in the Creole catechism. The water was turned off to force us out, and the city's heavy-handed tactics made me bristle.
"We got too many chiefs and not enough Indians," the mayor complained. I knew what that meant: Nobody was in charge. The Homeland Security police-state had collided with Caribbean inefficiency, and the result was disaster.
I took action. I latched the shutters, kissed my deceased mother's rabbit-foot and cat's-tail ferns goodbye, and in five minutes had packed a bag. In a daze, I was acting out a recurring nightmare: The borders are closing, the Nazis on their way, grab grandfather's gold watch and run.
Canal Street, August 31st, two days after the storm passed. Photo © Cheryl Gerber
I'd heard that hotels might be busing their guests out, and the place to head was the Monteleone Hotel on Royal Street, a Quarter institution. So at 5:30 p.m., José, Claudia, Kip, and I arrived trailing luggage and low expectations.
But it turned out that the Monteleone had gotten together with several other hotels to charter ten buses to the Houston airport for $25,000, to do privately what the authorities should be doing publicly.
We bought a few of the remaining tickets at $45 each. The sweltering lobby was littered with fainting bodies, grandmothers fanning themselves, and children seated in shadowy stairways, a scene straight out of the film Hotel Rwanda. The last bus out of New Orleans was set to leave at 6:05, the Austrian hotel clerk informed me.
I had my doubts.
We weren't the only locals in line. I spotted the legendary jazz musician Allen Toussaint.
"Allen," I said, "where did you hear about this?"
He shot me a broad grin and walked on, as if we shouldn't talk about such things.
By 9:30 that evening the buses still hadn't arrived. Five hundred people were milling around in front of the hotel, guarded by a hotel-hired security force of teenagers in "New Orleans Police" T-shirts with shotguns slung over their shoulders, the pitch-dark street illuminated by the beams from a lone squad car.
An obscenely obese man was hauled in on a beeping fork lift, and a row of passengers in wheelchairs formed at the corner. A run on the buses was expected, and we were warned that only those with tickets would be allowed to board. Anyone else would be dealt with by the kids with rifles.
The French Market, September 16, 2005. Photograph @ Scott Saltzman
Bus headlights appeared at last. A cheer went up. And then a single yellow Jefferson Parish school bus rattled up, bearing the news that the ten chartered buses had been confiscated by the state police.
We heard on the sly that this bus was offering passage to the Baton Rouge airport at $100 a seat. Allen Toussaint was the first to jump on, and after negotiating the price down with the driver, we crouched on the floor and held our breath. Ours was the only vehicle sailing along the dry, unlit Crescent City Connection highway.
Why, we wondered, isn't the city providing hundreds of these vehicles to carry people out by the same route? The authorities may fix the electrical grid one day, but who is going to fix the authorities?
Later my neighbor Tede, who stayed behind, told me that the ten chartered buses never did show up. The five hundred passengers waiting for them were ordered to walk to the Convention Center, and then attempted to march across the river on the Greater New Orleans Bridge, where they were shot at by the Gretna police.
"You mean you all escaped on that stolen school bus?" Tede shrieked. “The news is all over town.” As in the Battle of New Orleans, the pirates were better organized than the soldiers, and saved our day.
We're now luxuriating in my friend Andrei Codrescu’s air-conditioned house in Baton Rouge, taking hot showers and sucking on ice cubes. I'm safe and dry, but however comfortable, this isn't New Orleans.
The minute the lights flash back on, I'll be back home, unlatching my shutters and staring down a French Quarter street that I hope stretches as far into the future as it does into the past.
As Stella says to her sister Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, "I wish you'd stop taking it for granted that I'm in something I want to get out of."
One of the first French Quarter businesses to open after Katrina, September 16, 2005. Photograph © Scott Saltzman