When I bought manuals for digital photography and blogging the other day, I also bought James Lee Burke's newest, The Tin Roof Blowdown, which takes Dave Robicheaux, his boss and co-workers, and his buddy, Clete Purcel, to post-Katrina New Orleans to try to help restore order in a city full of scenes out of Hieronymus Bosch (for whom Michael Connelly's detective, Harry Bosch, is named, incidentally). I had gone to my nephew's football game in Lincoln early and sat in my pickup reading until my sister arrived and was so unsettled by the book that I had to stop reading.
Burke is apparently using eyewitness descriptions, for it is chillingly graphic. Early on he has Dave lay the blame: "The levees burst because they were structurally weak and had only a marginal chance of surviving a category 3 storm, much less one of category 5 strength [Katrina]. Every state emergency official knew this. The Army Corps of Engineers knew this. The National Hurricane Center in Miami knew this./ But apparently the United States Congress and the current administration in Washington, D.C., did not, since they had dramatically cut funding for repair of the levee system only a few months earlier." [Page 32.]
Burke really opens up with the horrifying description, all the wrenching newscasts and news photos of that natural disaster returning:
"The smell was like none I ever experienced. The water was chocolate-brown, the surface glistening with a blue-green sheen of oil and industrial chemicals. Raw feces and used toilet paper issued from broken sewer lines. The gray, throat-gagging odor of decomposition permeated not only the air but everything we touched. . . . /They drowned in attics and on the second floors of their houses. They drowned along the edges of highway 23 . . . . They drowned in retirement homes and in trees and on car tops while they waved frantically at helicopters flying by overhead. They died in hospitals and nursing homes of dehydration and heat exhaustion, and they died because an attending nurse could not continue to operate a hand ventilator for hours upon hours without rest./ If by chance you hear a tape of the 911 cell phone calls from those attics, walk away from it as quickly as possible, unless you are willing to live with voices that will come aborning in your sleep for the rest of your life." [Page 37.]
"It was the literal powerlessness of the city that was overwhelming. The electric grid had been destroyed and the water pressure had died in every faucet in St. Bernard and Orleans parishes. The pumps that should have forced water out of the storm sewers were flooded themselves and totally useless. Gas mains burned underwater or sometimes burst flaming from the earth . . . . The entire city, within one night, had been reduced to the technological level of the Middle Ages." [Page 34.]
He pays proper homage to the Coast Guard and its heroic efforts in rescuing 33,000 and the police who remained loyal (many did not, including one group who set up a looting headquarters). But the bizarre and monstrous keep the surreal Bosch landscape alive. Clete remarks, "You think that's bad. Go inside the Center. All the plumbing is broken. There're dead people piled in the corners. Street rats are shooting guns in there and raping anybody they want." [Page 36.]
He also says to Dave, "Did you see that big plane that flew over? . . . . It was Air Force One. After three days the Shrubster did a flyover. Gee, I feel better now." [Page 41.]
For once the trite "Read it and weep" is too literal.
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