Amid the Devastation, Some Feel Relief

NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 29 -- The idea of the Big One, a hurricane doomsday scenario of floods and death, has long haunted this city, and Hurricane Katrina looked to many like its terrifying incarnation.

But on Monday evening, as crowds began filtering back onto city streets and inspecting the damage from glass-shattering winds and surging water, many here said with conviction that they were relieved.

"This wasn't it," concluded Demetrius Ralph, 42, as he surveyed the scene in the shuttered French Quarter while out walking his dog. Streets were littered with debris, but they were not covered with water, as many had feared.

In outlying eastern areas, where officials had yet to completely assess the damage, entire neighborhoods were flooded up to the rooflines. Scores of people fled to their attics, punched holes in their roofs, and awaited rescue by boat or helicopter.

Downtown, Canal Street and other fabled New Orleans promenades were rendered almost impassable by fallen trees, awnings, street signs and stoplights, and the destruction to hotel high-rises dealt a severe blow to the city's tradition of "vertical evacuation."

Instead of finding solace above the floodwaters, the vertical evacuees encountered a wind so severe that it imploded the windows, lashed the rooms with drenching rain and sent them scurrying for cover. Hundreds of guests at the downtown Hyatt Regency hotel pitched camp Sunday night on blankets in a ballroom with little more than inches separating one family from another.

"Did you see the side of the hotel where my room was?" asked Ed Freytag, 46, of New Orleans, with a room on the hotel's southern exposure, which bore the brunt of Katrina. "It was like a bomb went off."

Still, there was a palpable sense of relief among some longtime city residents that New Orleans, which sits six to eight feet lower than the surrounding waters, had avoided a far worse catastrophe.

For the Massa family, huddled in their front room around the light of a single gas lamp, the prospect of leaving New Orleans for the first time in at least a decade seemed far more frightening than Hurricane Katrina.

Despite the insistent evacuation orders relayed first by television and then on their battery-powered radio after the electricity blackout at 5:15 a.m., Janice Massa, 60, and her parents Vincent, 82, and Ruth, 81, decided to stay and face the storm in their two-story house on the outskirts of New Orleans.

Fearful of venturing outside too often to inspect the damage, they spent the day sitting in the gloom, with the wind whistling through the door like a frenzied kazoo player. The heat of the gas lamp, coupled with the lack of air conditioning, made the room almost unbearably stuffy.

"The way I feel is that if God had decided that our time was up -- then we would go regardless of where we were," said Janice, who indicated that her mother is unable to walk more than a few feet and her father has diabetes and a defibrillator. "At least this way, if it happens, we would be at home, not on a highway, not knowing where we were going. They say go towards Texas, but my fear was to be caught out on the road with my parents."