The Blue Death Read online

  Katrina had already sent a massive storm surge toward the city from the south. The waters of the gulf raced up the narrow concrete channel that confines the Mississippi and crashed into the city. At the same time, her winds circled around the back of New Orleans and pushed the waters of Lake Pontchartrain toward New Orleans from the north. Water from both directions roared into the canals that slice through the city and connect the lake with the river. The rising water slammed against the levee walls. The tired ramparts had no chance against the weight and erosive force of the water. It was only a matter of time until it found the weak spots in the walls that protect the city. When it did the catastrophe hit its stride.

  As the first gap opened in the Industrial Canal, less than a mile and a half from the wastewater treatment plant, a wall of water crashed into a residential neighborhood and toward the wastewater treatment plant. It flooded the low-lying buildings around the plant within minutes. Water soon rose to the second floor, trapping the four men at the remains of the East Bank Sewage Treatment Plant between the floodwaters and the shattered upper floors.

  The disaster was complete. With all the specially designed motors and controllers for the plant under at least ten feet of highly contaminated water, the plant had been dealt a devastating blow. A helicopter would finally reach the stranded crew two days after they took refuge in a bathroom.

  Back across town, the Carrollton Water Treatment Plant seemed to be faring better. A worker had forced his way through ferocious winds and vicious rain to the valve that controlled the ruptured water main. By shutting down a huge portion of the water supply, they could save the rest of the system, just as a tourniquet saves a hemorrhaging patient. The power plant looked like a battlefield with piles of empty fire extinguishers littering the floor and the smell of burned plastic hanging in the air. The ferocious struggle seemed over. For a few moments, the workers at the Carrollton Water Treatment Plant thought they had made it through the hurricane bruised, but not beaten. Then word came that the 17th Avenue levee a few miles to the north had broken. Floodwaters were surging south through the streets of New Orleans. It was only a matter of time until the plant would be underwater.

  They had already seen what water could do to their generators. As floodwater ran down Eagle Street toward the center of the plant, they had to make a decision. If they tried to run the system through a flood, they could destroy the generators and any hope of restarting the plant. There was only one choice. So for the first time in ninety-nine years, the plant shut down. They could only hope that the flood would spare the equipment they would need to bring it back on line.

  Beyond New Orleans Katrina would shut down 1,200 water treatment plants and 269 sewage treatment plants. In a matter of hours, a single storm crippled sanitation and water supplies across the Gulf Coast, leaving vast areas effectively uninhabitable. Recovery would take weeks, months, or even years. As raw sewage flowed into lakes, rivers, and the gulf, health officials tried to prepare for the threat to the public.

  New Orleans, as we have come to know it, is a fantasy, a technological magician’s trick. This sleight of hand relies not on smoke and mirrors, but on pumps and levees. The levees lay the foundation for deception. Ignore them and one might think that the Mississippi has always flowed through a fixed and regular channel rather than one that can routinely shift dozens of miles in any direction. One might assume that New Orleans sits on dry ground overlooking the Mississippi rather than ten to twenty feet below it. One might conclude that floods are a disastrous exception rather than an essential component of the river’s natural cycles.

  As any magician knows, the best place to hide the secret to the trick is out in plain sight. Dozens of massive pumps spread throughout the city run almost constantly and some have been doing so for almost a hundred years. With the capacity to suck a billion gallons of water out of New Orleans every day, they pile illusion upon illusion to make the fantasy almost completely convincing. If one failed to notice them, one might forget that most of what we now call New Orleans was once a deadly malarial swamp. One might not remember that without the pumps a minor storm, a mere inch of rain, would inundate the city with floodwater. Until Katrina the illusion was so compelling that even periodic dire warnings went unheeded.

  As New Orleans began to emerge from the floodwater, one of the major concerns that prevented people from returning to the city was the lack of clean water. Even after the city was pumped dry and drinking water began to flow, city residents were warned to boil their water for more than a month. Three months later large areas of the city still had no water. At the same time, the city was dumping tens of millions of gallons of raw sewage into Lake Pontchartrain every day.

  On a sunny November morning, five weeks after Katrina, Kelly Mulholland’s rented Ford Explorer bounced across the top of an immense pile of gravel. On one side, brown water rippled through the Industrial Canal. On the other side, workers had already begun to cut through the twisted remains of the heavy steel sheet piling that had once held the levee in place. Beyond that, ten to twenty feet below the surface of the water in the levee, lay the mangled skeleton of the lower ninth ward of New Orleans. At the base of the levee, a massive river barge lay sprawled like the carcass of an immense steel whale. The remains of a school bus protruded from beneath the hull, crushed as the boat washed over the levee and beached itself amid the fury of Katrina. As we drove, I tried to imagine the moment that a man-made tsunami some twenty feet high pushed the concrete aside and twisted the thick steel with a horrifying groan before descending on the helpless neighborhood, lifting houses, cars, and trees and tossing them about like children’s bathtub toys. Lives, lifetimes, and livelihoods disappeared in an instant.

  Given some glitter and spandex, Mulholland could pass for a refugee from World Wrestling Entertainment. With a huge bald head, a pale brown goatee, and a strapping frame, he might appear menacing were it not for his garrulous good nature. He had come to New Orleans with a team of workers from Portland to help with the recovery effort in the wake of Katrina and wanted to show me the challenge they faced.

  As we drove into the ninth ward, past the checkpoint that controlled access to the area, and toward the levee break, the level of destruction built to a crescendo. Fragments of flooded households littered the road. Washing machines and refrigerators lay uselessly rusting on lawns and sidewalks. The twisted remains of an entire child’s playset hung from the branches of a tree. A motorboat blocked the road. Another, still on its trailer, rested upside down on a fence.

  An “X” in fluorescent orange spray paint with cryptic notes in each corner marked each house like some grim graffiti of disaster. Mulholland explained the markings, “The number on top is the date, on the right is the number of animals, and on the bottom is the number of people inside. A box around the “X” means there is a dead body.”

  At first most of the Xs had a 0 on the bottom. Mulholland pointed to a small single-story bungalow. “Look,” he said, “there’s a box.” Two blocks later, we saw another. As we approached the levee, we saw more and more. Then, on one corner, four houses, neighbors, all with boxes. As we got closer still, the grid of houses and streets began to break down. The water had lifted the small houses, leaving them twisted at odd angles. Some sat in the middle of the street. Others had been lifted and dropped on top of cars and trucks. Then as we approached the long mound of gravel that had replaced the busted levee, the houses began to disintegrate. Reduced to splinters there were no walls left to spray paint.

  Much of the city was still flooded when Mulholland first arrived in New Orleans. The city’s drainage pumps normally had the capacity to remove 22.5 million gallons of water from the city every minute, but most of the pumps had been submerged. Many were ruined and others were useless, deprived of electricity. As all of America focused on the problem of removing the water that had devastated New Orleans for weeks, Mulholland and his team were trying to get water back into the city.

  As a critical element in the
vast, hidden infrastructure that allows modern cities to exist, water utilities constantly plan and prepare for the disasters that can disrupt or destroy that infrastructure. Portland has some of the nation’s experts in disaster recovery and had sent Mulholland and his team to help. This remarkable act of interurban altruism was motivated in part by the realization that no city is immune from disaster. Someday Portland might be looking to the outside world for help. “You never know,” said Mulholland, “when a tsunami is going to leave us under twenty feet of water.”

  The water treatment plant was up and running by the time Mulholland’s team arrived, but most of the city did not have safe water. New Orleans drinking water runs through more than sixteen hundred miles of pipe laid out in a complex maze buried just a few feet below ground. Throughout the city magnificent live oaks have wrapped their roots around these pipes like a thousand boa constrictors. As Katrina ripped these ancient trees from the soggy ground and tore houses from their foundations, she left twisted and mangled pipes, most of them still hidden beneath the surface. All around New Orleans, water surged into the street from broken pipes.

  With pipes that are often more than one hundred years old, the drinking water distribution system is the dark secret, the hidden weakness of almost every urban water supply. Many sections of these networks lie buried beneath subsequent construction. Many stretches of pipe are so old they have descended into terra incognita, lost to maps and memories. Also hidden underground are improper connections that can contaminate tap water. Old and worn, drinking-water distribution systems always leak.

  New Orleans was no different. Even before the storm, its system was riddled with leaks. Many of the pipes were more than one hundred years old. Rust, decay, accidents, and even aggressive tree roots had made holes throughout the buried and neglected system. On an average day before the storm, more than 40 million gallons, almost 40 percent of all the water entering the pipes, seeped through thousands of leaks beneath the city.

  Leaks are a fact of life in water distribution systems. It is not uncommon for a third of a city’s water supply to disappear through leaks. Now two things made matters much worse. First Katrina had ripped hundreds if not thousands of new holes in the system, many of them major leaks. Whole sections of the system would remain shut off until these were fixed.

  The other problem involved the contamination of the system. Water supplies rely on the fact that water leaks out of the pipes because of the pressure in the distribution system. If pure water is constantly leaking out of a hole, pathogens are unlikely to enter. Loss of pressure is the enemy. When pressure is low, water (and pathogens) can leak into the system. When the storm forced the Carrollton Treatment Plant to shut down, the pressure in the pipes dropped to zero. With the distribution system under more than ten feet of floodwater, contaminated water streamed into new and old leaks all over New Orleans.

  For two months Mulholland and his team had been working with local crews, moving methodically from one leak to the next, fixing them, flushing the pipes with chlorine, and moving on. Much of their time was spent simply finding the pipes. The maps for many older areas in the pipe network were lost or never drawn. Even with a map, finding the pipes was a challenge. The storm had generated more solid waste in a few days than New Orleans ordinarily produces in thirty years. Mountains of garbage and debris lined the streets and often covered hydrants, meters, and pipelines. Then there were the refrigerators.

  More than 100,000 refrigerators full of food had been abandoned. Many had floated out of houses and lay scattered about. All of them were covered with flies and filled with rotten food. Mulholland recalled that when his teams first arrived in New Orleans the houses reeked from the sewage left by the flood waters and the mold that grew in the damp, but the stench of abandoned refrigerators was overpowering. They could hardly go near the houses until the refrigerators were cleared out.

  Even after Mulholland and the team from Portland leaves, the staff of the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board will have years of work ahead. Three months after the storm, work on the water system hadn’t even begun in the lower ninth ward and other severely hit areas of the city. As we drove through an underpass on the way back into the center of New Orleans, the truck splashed through six inches of water. I was a bit surprised to see areas of the city still flooded. “Broken main,” said Mulholland, “they still can’t find the leak.”

  Some have suggested that global climate change lies behind the record hurricane season that spawned Katrina. Whether or not this is true, increasing global temperatures will certainly raise sea levels and make coastal cities more vulnerable. The increase in severe storms predicted by most climate scientists will also increase the frequency of flooding, the flow of contaminated runoff into our water supplies, and the frequency with which raw sewage flows into our rivers, lakes, and streams.

  Whatever the cause, the winds of Katrina blew much of the water supply for New Orleans and the Gulf Coast back to the nineteenth century. One hundred years ago, New Orleans did not treat its water or its sewage. Two hundred years ago, no city in the world had effective water treatment, and wastewater treatment did not exist. The catastrophe of Katrina reminds us of the past, lays bare the illusions of the present, and tells a cautionary tale of our collective future.

  Lack of clean water made New Orleans uninhabitable long after Katrina had passed. Many illnesses could be traced to the hurricane and its aftermath including two cases of cholera, but most of these arose from eating contaminated food or wading through toxic floodwater. The story could easily have been far worse. A massive outbreak of waterborne disease was narrowly avoided only because massive shipments of bottled water reached the city in the days after the crisis and because in the end the refugees from New Orleans found other places to go. Places with clean water. Without the bottled water, without other sources of clean water, the scale of the disaster would have been difficult to imagine. To offer a glimpse of the true potential of water to do harm we need only travel to the African city of Goma. A city that became, for a moment in 1994, the worst place on earth.

  15

  THE WORST PLACE ON EARTH

  A s the sun rose over Zaire, a lone cargo helicopter lumbered through the shadows of the Virunga mountains. Ahead, past the steaming summit of the Nyiragongo volcano, was Lake Kivu, the highest lake in Africa. In the nineteenth century, vacationing colonists had flocked to the shores of this beautiful mountain lake for a respite from the busy work of exploiting the region’s natural wealth. In the summer of 1994, its deep blue waters gave rise to the worst outbreak of waterborne disease in human history, an epidemiological perfect storm.

  Inside the helicopter Les Roberts, an epidemiologist for the World Health Organization (WHO), peered out at the lush jungle that clung to the mountainside. Beyond the mountains Rwanda stretched out toward the sunrise. Ahead on the ancient lava flow that separated the mountains from the lake, the city of Goma seemed to be under siege, surrounded by the makeshift shelters of hundreds of thousands of refugees.

  In the long and bloody conflict between Rwanda’s ethnic Hutus and Tutsis, the tide had recently tipped toward the Tutsis. On July 14 a vast river of desperate Hutus had begun to flow into Zaire. Lake Kivu and the Virunga volcanoes formed a natural funnel that squeezed the refugees through a single border crossing and into Goma. As they arrived the winds of the deadly epidemic were already beginning to stir.

  Six days later, as Dr. Roberts flew toward Goma, those winds had reached gale force. He had initially set out by car from Kibale, Uganda, but Zairian soldiers had turned him away at the border for lack of a proper visa. Undaunted he returned to Kibale where he learned that the WHO would be sending a helicopter to Goma the next morning. When it took off, he was squeezed in among the aid workers and crates of food. He still did not have a visa, but as they approached their destination, he had a plan.

  The roar of the helicopter reduced its occupants to the solitude of thought. Just two months earlier, Dr. Roberts had bee
n in Atlanta, completing his training as an epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Now he was flying to the heart of a surreal world ruled by death and disease. He had been working with the WHO to monitor the epidemic and knew the statistics as well as anyone, but they could only hint at the reality on the ground. The scale of the epidemic in Goma and the speed with which it was unfolding stunned even the most seasoned veterans with experience in refugee camps throughout the world.

  When the helicopter landed Dr. Roberts blended in with workers from the aid agency CARE and helped them unload the relief supplies. As he worked, he watched and waited for an opening. With aid shipments and workers from around the world pouring into the airport, the beleaguered customs officials could not begin to keep pace. After a cursory inspection, they had moved on to other arrivals. Dr. Roberts seized the opportunity. He slipped through the cargo area of the airport and in a few moments disappeared into the confusion that was Goma.

  A red-haired cork bobbing on a dark-skinned African ocean, Dr. Roberts made his way from the airport to the command and control center of the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) in Goma. Officials there directed him to the medical facilities of Médecins du Monde (MDM) in the Mugunga camp, one of three camps around Goma. As his motorcycle taxi entered the camp and rattled slowly across the sea of human misery, Les Roberts began to grasp the unique horror of Goma. Along the two-mile road from the airport, hundreds of corpses, sometimes stacked two or three high, awaited pickup by workers in the camp.

  The dead were not the victims of Tutsi soldiers. A far more ruthless predator had been waiting for the Hutus as they arrived in Goma. Long before the coming of the Rwandans, a microscopic killer had found its own refuge amid the poverty of Zaire. For years it had moved slowly from one Zairian to the next, leaving a trail of disease behind. The sudden appearance of the refugees, exhausted, malnourished, and thirsty from their flight, presented this killer with a rare opportunity. Within days of their arrival, an explosion of cholera had begun to consume the refugees.