ON THE THIRD NIGHT OF FLOODING, we learned that the reservoirs upstream had begun to fail. Water had started to flow around their edges, flooding streets, neighborhoods, empty schools. It had been raining for four days. More water is coming, the officials told us at a press conference. The floodgates would have to be opened to prevent “uncontrolled release.”
We put our children to sleep that night on an air mattress in our bedroom, next to the sliding glass door, thinking that if the dams did fail and a tidal wave of floodwater arrived in the middle of the night, we could open the door and push them outside, where, floating on the air mattress, they might survive. I kept one foot on the floor all night so the water would wake me when it arrived. My children are both excellent swimmers, I assured myself. They were only six and ten, but they competed on our neighborhood swim team. My husband can cross the pool in a single breath. All night I thought of a wall of water arriving, the split second I might have to push them outside on their little raft, the horrifying realization, as the hours ticked on, that I’m the only one in my family who doesn’t know how to swim.
When the Army Corps of Engineers opened the floodgates at the reservoirs upstream, water came down the spillway and into the bayou, which flooded homes and highways, churches, restaurants, hotels. It happened in the middle of the night, one parent from my children’s school told me. They woke up to water around their beds and swam out the front door still dressed in pajamas.
In the morning, the bayou had swelled into the neighborhood and filled the street in front of our house. It covered the sidewalks and the yards, came almost to our door. The military arrived on airboats to evacuate our neighbors. More water would come, they said—maybe inches, maybe feet. We decided to evacuate on foot, wading in fetid floodwater across a shallow cul-de-sac into yards and out of the neighborhood. I carried one child on my hip and held the other by the hand, grateful we didn’t have to swim.
The bayou kept rising. When the storm finally moved off to the east, sixty-one inches of rain had fallen in some places—nineteen trillion gallons, enough to compress the earth two centimeters under the entire metro region. I heard it called the greatest rainfall event in North America in recorded history. A third of the city had flooded—nearly 200,000 homes.
A week after we evacuated, the flood had receded just enough
