I spent Friday evening with my parents in Southeast Texas and made the 4-hour drive to New Orleans on Saturday morning, arriving around noon. In the back of my mind was the knowledge that Hurricane Georges was churning somewhere out there in the ocean, but as far as I knew, the convention was going ahead as planned. I was scheduled to meet John, my cohort at the afore-mentioned software company, and Carter, a sales rep from my company, at the convention center around 1:00. But as soon as I turned onto Poydras Street, the radio broke in with ominous news: New Orleans had just been upgraded from a hurricane watch to a warning. Enter my first big mistake: not immediately turning the car around and heading home.
This warning wouldn't be enough to immediately call off the convention, but realistically, even if the convention wasn't officially cancelled, it was as good as dead. Who would show up now, except those who were already there? Nonetheless, I had to meet with John and at least find out what his plans were, and help secure the equipment if needed. Rather than check into my hotel, I decided instead to head over to the convention center first and assess the situation. When I got there, everyone was still busily setting up the booth, and other companies were doing likewise. Unfortunately, John and Carter were nowhere to be found. So I waited.
And waited... I kept checking the TV's in the lobby, all of which were tuned to CNN and The Weather Channel, both of which were running constant updates on the hurricane's progress. Georges showed no signs of veering, and the rumors were flying around crazily like frightened little birds ahead of the oncoming tempest. I overheard someone mention that an evacuation might be called for areas outside of the levee by 2 PM. At this point, I was getting an inkling of a notion that the worker ants diligently erecting their monoliths to capitalism in the next room weren't up on the latest headlines. I got the idea to call the hotel and ask whether John had checked in. He had, and they connected me to his room, but he wasn't there.
I waited some more. It was now about 1:30. I tried calling John's room again, this time from the phone in the convention booth. Fortunately, the booth supervisor overheard me and figured out who I was. She told me that they had been expecting me, that John and Carter had just stepped out for lunch, and that they were due back at any moment. We got into a discussion about the hurricane, and she mentioned that there was going to be a high-level meeting among the show's organizers at 2 PM, at which point the decision would be made whether or not to cancel.
I never found out the outcome of that meeting. At 1:45, the phone rang. The booth supervisor answered it and spoke in hushed tones for a few minutes, all the while motioning everyone in the booth to gather around. She hung up and immediately began addressing the group: due to safety concerns, The Houston office had decided to pull the exhibit regardless of whether or not the conference was going to be cancelled. Everyone was instructed to get out of town if they possibly could. Before the word "town" had left her lips, I was already on the phone to the hotel to cancel my room.
Thirty seconds later, I was jogging up the street toward Poydras, where I had temporarily parked my car. A cab pulled up beside me, and John stuck his head out the window to ask me what was going on. I hopped in the front seat and spent the next three blocks telling him and Carter what I had just heard. Both of them had flown into town (next bit of advice for travellers to New Orleans: if you can, drive whenever there's a hurricane in the Gulf) and had no rental car. They were now trying to figure out how to get home. The airport was about to close down, so the chances of getting a flight out were practically nil. I offered to drive them as far as my parents' place near Beaumont, where I was planning to crash for the night. They ultimately decided to thumb a ride off of Dave, one of John's colleagues, and they convinced him to drive his rental car all the way back to Houston. You would think that the rental car company would be thankful to have one of their vehicles rescued from impending doom.
John and Carter and I wished each other bonne chance, and with a rush of adrenaline, I leapt into my car and accelerated up Poydras toward the interstate. I needn't have hurried, though, for as I soon found out, all of the low-lying areas outside of the wall and all of the coastal areas had just been ordered to evacuate. And now we enter the nightmare that is the New Orleans freeway system ...
For starters, as those familiar with the city can attest, not only does every evacuation route lead over water (soon to be under water, I feared), but there are scant few of them. For those wanting to head west or east, you can follow any road you choose, as long as the road you choose is Interstate 10. Both I-10 west and I-10 east narrow to two lanes in each direction as they cross over the edge of Lake Pontchartrain, and the only way directly north is to go over the widest part of the lake via a 24-mile-long toll causeway (in retrospect, this probably would have been a better choice than I-10.) Once you get around the lake, the route options start to open up. However, there are essentially only 6 traffic lanes that you can use to safely evacuate New Orleans, and there are 1.5 million people to share them with.
And now, the piece de resistance: I-10 west between New Orleans and Baton Rouge had been narrowed to one lane in each direction for about seven miles due to road construction. I can properly sum up the experience by saying that it took me 3 hours to get out of the New Orleans city limits and past Lake Pontchartrain, and it took me another 3 hours to get through the 7-mile Civil Engineer's Joke. Traffic was going so slowly through that bottleneck that people turned off their cars and walked their dogs in the median while they waited for a car length to open up in front of them. I left the city at 2 PM and didn't see the lights of Baton Rouge, only 70 miles away, until around 8:30. From there, traffic was at least moving, but it was moving as a 50 MPH parking lot all the way across the 30-mile Atchafalaya Basin (another stretch of causeways with only two lanes each way) and into Lafayette. It thinned out a bit and increased to 55-60 MPH by Lake Charles, as many people were trying (probably unsuccessfully) to get off the road and secure lodging for the night.
It's a good thing that the Houston office decided to pull the plug on the booth. Otherwise, I probably would have waited for the official decision from the show, and had it not been cancelled, I'd probably still be there. It's sobering to think that, even though a four-hour trip back to Beaumont took 10 hours, I was only competing for freeway space with the people who evacuated early. I shudder to think about how much worse it would have been at 5 PM, when most people were starting to realize the gravity of the situation.
All routes into the city were closed as of 4 AM this morning. I-10 east from Baton Rouge was actually closed somewhat earlier than that, so they could turn the Civil Engineer's Joke into two lanes heading west. The airport closed as of 8 AM this morning, and all routes out of the city closed at noon. New Orleans is the only city in the nation that has a vertical evacuation plan, and those who can't escape by car must go to designated shelters (the Superdome being one of them) and then proceed to above a certain level to stay out of the flood waters.
All in the line of duty, I guess ...
Epilogue (8/29/2005)
Eight months after Hurricane Georges, I was laid off, and I joined the ranks of the afore-mentioned software company. After about 18 months in their Houston office, I transferred to Austin, where I became good friends with Dave. Through him, I heard the harrowing (and probably somewhat embellished) tale of his escape. In a nutshell, John and Carter asked him to stop at a drive-through hurricane stand on the way out of town, and the two of them sipped cocktails in the back seat while Dave navigated the back roads south of Old Highway 90 to avoid traffic. The story goes that they got so close to the ocean at one point that they had to dodge waves breaking over the road, but they got to Lafayette at least 3 hours ahead of me. Dave reported later that the rental car company charged him $200 for saving the car from impending doom.
It's amazing how life can change your priorities in an instant. On the way into New Orleans, my biggest priority was my job. On the way out of New Orleans, my biggest priority was my life. I became just another rat fleeing the sinking ship, and whatever status or money or importance I may have brought with me on the drive in were now gone. It was just me, the road, my late-model sedan, and the gas tank that I had fortunately had the foresight to fill up. I was no more or less important than every other soul on that road that day.
As Katrina bears down on the Big Easy, I can't help but wonder whether some of the same people who shared the road with me on that September day in 1998 are now fleeing New Orleans yet again.
