After Katrina

Here at Cruising World--tucked away in Rhode Island, far from New Orleans--the first inkling that all hell was breaking loose in the aftermath of last August's devastating Hurricane Katrina was an e-mail to friends some 36 hours after the storm made landfall from author and contributor Jim Carrier ("Ranger's Refit--and the Real Rewards," June 2003; "Lingering on the Algarve," June 2005), who'd moved into a new home in the Lakeview section of the city just a month before.

Jim knows a thing or two about solid reporting and also about hurricanes. For years he rambled the rugged high country of Colorado as the Rocky Mountain Ranger columnist for The Denver Post. Later, he wrote a riveting book, The Ship and the Storm: Hurricane Mitch and the Loss of the Fantome, about the violent 1998 tempest that cut a deadly swath through Central America and brought down the 282-foot schooner Fantome and her 31 crewmembers, none of whom was ever seen again.

As the world now knows, New Orleans was more or less intact well after the eye of Katrina had passed, and for a good day or more it was believed the city had dodged a major bullet. But then a string of levees cracked, and the city began to flood; Jim had evacuated days earlier, but he learned from afar that Lakeview was under water from a photograph on a local newspaper's website.

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