Hurricane Gustav made landfall on the Louisiana coast on the morning of Sept. 1, spurring the evacuation of close to 2 million residents and causing mass power outages across the state. The storm was responsible for about 10 deaths in Louisiana, as well as dozens of others in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Still, New Orleans residents were breathing a sigh of relief. Gustav hit shore about 70 miles southwest of the city, and its winds and rains were much less severe than expected. The storm did not cause any major levee breaches, and a relatively orderly evacuation helped minimize casualties.

In other words, Gustav was no Katrina. But, three years after Hurricane Katrina battered New Orleans and spurred the most disastrously misguided emergency response in the history of the United States, how much has the country learned?

“It’s hard to say with any certainty,” said author Tom Piazza, a New Orleans resident. “Plainly, they thought more systematically about evacuation this time than they did during Katrina. … Whether the levee system is really strong enough to withstand other hurricanes that might come, we just don’t know.”

Gustav struck as Piazza was touring the nation in support of his latest novel, “City of Refuge.” Released by HarperCollins Publishers earlier this year, the story follows two fictional New Orleans families as Katrina slams the coast and sends their lives into disarray. Piazza will read from the book at RiverRun Bookstore in Portsmouth on Sunday, Sept. 14 at 5 p.m..    

The author of nine books, Piazza was evacuated to Missouri when Katrina wrought its devastation in late August 2005. From there, he spent five weeks writing “Why New Orleans Matters,” a nonfiction book that made him an unofficial spokesperson for the recovery effort in New Orleans. After six months of television and radio interviews, the author decided he’d had enough of talking about Katrina.

But, in March 2006, while enjoying a two-week residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Piazza found himself writing about Katrina again—this time in the fiction realm. The novel’s characters appeared to him with stunning clarity, and he jotted down 10,000 words in 10 days, along with a complete synopsis of the book.

“I’ve been writing for a pretty long time now, and I know that on those occasions when characters really appear to you very vividly and begin doing things and talking to one another, you’d best follow them, because it doesn’t happen all the time,” Piazza said.

“City of Refuge” illustrates two different but equally horrifying experiences of Hurricane Katrina. The first character introduced in the book is SJ Williams, a New Orleans native who lives in the city’s impoverished Lower Ninth Ward. The hardworking carpenter struggles to look after his dependent older sister, Lucy, and her 19-year-old son, Wesley, who is rapidly veering toward a life of crime.

The second chapter introduces Craig Donaldson, who moved to New Orleans from Michigan to immerse himself in the city’s rich music, food and culture. Craig loves New Orleans and his job as editor of a weekly newspaper, but his wife, Alice, is concerned about the safety and education of their two young children, Annie and Malcolm.

The two families experience Katrina in very different ways. SJ refuses to leave his home and encounters the flood head on. After navigating a lake of debris and corpses to rescue several stranded survivors, he winds up separated from his sister and nephew, each of whom are evacuated to different parts of the country. Craig and his family depart before the storm hits but encounter a wall of traffic and overcrowded shelters as they search for a place of refuge. The story carries readers through not only Louisiana but also Texas, Missouri, Mississippi, Illinois and New York.

Piazza said writing a fictional account of Hurricane Katrina enabled him to recreate the experience for readers who watched the disaster unfold on television. The shock instilled by viewing images of the hurricane’s widespread destruction and suffering wore off quickly for those who did not witness it firsthand, Piazza said. But the novel puts readers in the center of the storm and graphically exposes them to the chaos and misery that ensued.

“By the end of the book, if the book’s any good, the reader has had an experience or has shared the experience of the characters. And if you have an experience, it changes you,” Piazza said. “The idea is to try to understand experience that isn’t our own. That’s why we read.”

The book also views the hurricane with a wider lens. Piazza interjects commentary on the government’s dismal response to the storm, which left many people without food, water or medical supplies for several days, even as thugs pillaged the city, raping and murdering fellow residents.

Piazza writes of a study conducted by Louisiana State University a year before Katrina struck. A computer simulation predicted the exact scenario that the hurricane imposed and offered recommendations for preventing such a tragedy. President Bush would later disingenuously claim that nobody could have predicted the levee breaks.

“To say that nobody could have predicted the levee breaches is a damned lie. That’s what it is, it’s a lie. I don’t know what else to call it,” Piazza said. “It’s not the first time (Bush) has lied to people.”

But Piazza said anger over the government’s incompetence was just one of the surging emotions that surrounded Katrina. “Anybody with a brain and a heart, whether they lived in New Orleans or anyplace else, could not have watched those events unfold without being angry. If you could watch it unfold without being angry, there’s something wrong with you,” he said. “The anger was part of the experience, as was grief, as was compassion, as was sacrifice.”

The challenge of getting past the anger and properly protecting the city of New Orleans still remains. Although the evacuation for Hurricane Gustav showed improvements, Piazza said, the real disaster in New Orleans was created by the federally built levees, which were designed improperly and constructed incorrectly.
He described the wetlands that extend southward from the Louisiana coast, providing a buffer that weakens hurricanes before they reach the city, which are being rapidly depleted. Restoring the wetlands and overhauling the levee system would cost upwards of $20 billion, Piazza said, which is a hefty price tag, but represents only about two months of expenditures on the Iraq War.

Piazza said neither of the 2008 presidential candidates have adequately addressed the topic of how they would prepare for—or respond to—a disaster like Hurricane Katrina. He said disaster preparedness calls for a governmental effort that sets aside partisan differences.

“I think as a society gets more complex and our challenges get more complex, and we face things that can’t be solved by individual initiative alone or by local initiative, you have to have in mind, whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, some sense of what’s worth preserving in a society, some sense of common cause,” he said.   

Reliving Katrina’s spectrum of emotions as he wrote “City of Refuge” was a painful but cathartic experience for Piazza. He knows that New Orleans will never be the same as it was before the hurricane. But, as his novel ultimately demonstrates, change is an inevitability that opens up new opportunities.

“I think that ‘City of Refuge’ ends in a place where—the way any novel does—some things are possible that weren’t possible before, and some things aren’t possible that might have seemed possible before,” he said. “In any case, people have a new sense of what’s possible or not possible in their lives.”