Word: pontchartrain
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...flood of Biblical proportions were to lay waste to New Orleans, Joe Suhayda has a good idea how it would happen. A Category 5 hurricane would come barreling out of the Gulf of Mexico. It would cause Lake Pontchartrain, north of New Orleans, to overflow, pouring down millions of gallons of water on the city. Then things would really get ugly. Evacuation routes would be blocked. Buildings would collapse. Chemicals and hazardous waste would dissolve, turning the floodwaters into a lethal soup. In the end, what was left of the city might not be worth saving. "There's concern...
...Orleans has always had a complicated relationship with the water surrounding it. Everyone told the first settlers this was the wrong place to build a city. It is wedged precariously between the mighty Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain, and most of it was once swampland. Aggravating the problem is the fact that much of New Orleans is below sea level, so that after a good rain, the water just settles in. There is now a decent pumping system, which helps. Old-timers, however, still talk of the days when, after a bad storm, bodies washed out of the cemeteries...
...midafternoon, as we skirted the broad waters of Lake Pontchartrain, we saw Spanish moss everywhere, dangling from cypress branches like the long, pointed beards scholars wear in old Chinese paintings. Herons and egrets waded, and turtles sunbathed amid fan palmettos and water hyacinths that sprouted from the water. It was a breathtaking contrast to the icy shores of Lake Michigan we had left behind 20 hours and nearly 1,000 miles...
...stop was not Reaganesque (20,000 adoring college students) or Bushian (mom and pop and the kids in the city square). Dole's crowds were 400 and 600, often at small, third-tier colleges, and they were Republican believers. One night, on the Wednesday before the voting, at the Pontchartrain Center outside New Orleans, about 700 people showed up, a big crowd. It was dinnertime, after work, and they could have been home relaxing, watching TV, helping with homework, but instead they got in the van and drove on the highway to stand and cheer for a man who they...
...hell. After the mother of his three young daughters dies, he marries Aimee Desiree, a wild Creole beauty half his age. The marriage -- and the faithless Aimee Desiree -- is doomed. She meets her fate at 3 a.m. in a white Thunderbird hurtling along a narrow causeway across Lake Pontchartrain. The daughters never hear their father mention her again, but the moment of her passing envelopes each of them. The author understands a fundamental truth about Southerners: to them, she writes, "sweet and sad mean the same thing." Like an expert mixologist, Bosworth measures out life's sorrow in equal proportion...