Katrina: A Near Miss, a Missed Show

Out of the way of Hurricane Katrina, I'm reading the news from the New Orleans paper this morning to see what chance survives for my Sept. 11 conference trip I planned to take to the city that lives below sea level. It appears, as daylight breaks over the Gulf Coast city where Abby and I honeymooned in another September 15 years ago, the chance of that trip is as sunk as the cars throughout New Orleans streets.

My earliest report on the storm, written for the 3000 NewsWire blog Monday morning, was hopeful, since the hurricane had then turned a little to the east of the city. But I was talking with the executive director of a computer user group who'd organized the first HP Technology Forum. She had to stay hopeful while the storm passed through the New Orleans area. The trouble was that the hurricane took eight hours to pass through.

Along the way, the winds and water from Lake Pontchartrain broke a key levee on Monday. The Times-Picayune had first-rate reporting on the breach:

"We were good until the canal busted," Sontag said. "First there was water on the street, then the sidewalk, then water in the house." Officials of the Army Corps of Engineers have contingencies for levee breaches such as the one that happened Monday, but it will take time and effort to get the heavy equipment into place to make the repair. Breach repair is part of the corps' planning for recovery from catastrophic storms, but nobody Monday was able to say how long it would take to plug the hole, or how much water would get through it before that happened.

In Lakeview, the scene was surreal. A woman yelled to reporters from a rooftop, asking them to call her father and tell him she was OK, although fleeing to the roof of a two-story home hardly seemed to qualify.

About 5 p.m., almost as if on cue, the battery power of all the house alarms in the neighborhood seemed to reach a critical level, and they all went off, making it sound as if the area was under an air-raid warning. Two men surviving on generator power in the Lake Terrace neighborhood near the Lake Pontchartrain levee still had a dry house, but they were watching the rising water in the yard nervously. They were planning to head out to retrieve a vast stash of beer, champagne and hard liquor they found washed onto the levee. As night fell, the sirens of house alarms finally fell silent, and the air filled with a different, deafening and unfamiliar sound: the extraordinary din of thousands of croaking frogs.

It seems the further away the storm gets from the city, the worse the reports become. That's because most of New Orleans lies below sea level, built behind levees. I've been to the city three times before, but only on the last trip, when we drove across from Austin instead of flew in, did I take any note of these massive, well, dikes, for lack of a better comparison. All along the road away from New Orleans, they towered above the rented T-bird we were driving. The sight of water high enough and fast enough to break down these hills around the lake is a perfect-storm-like picture of a catastrophe. People always say that weather invokes the greatest media mania, but it seems warranted today.

There's a part of me, the curious writer-reporter, that's thinking if the conference organizers get optimistic, I'll have an excuse to use my air ticket and hotel reservation (prepaid, no less) to have a look at a city under seige. But that's not really why I'm supposed to be going to New Orleans in hurricane season. It's about listening to HP, as I said in my podcast on the subject earlier this month. That, and watching another user group try to take the mantle from the bankrupt Interex group for HP customers.

Some people in the HP community are saying that this act of God is all HP deserves, somehow. The thinking is that HP's conference — scheduled one month after the Interex show that has been held every summer — killed off the user group. It might have; nearly all of the operating budget for the user group came out of the one annual show. But I wouldn't wish the death and destruction visited upon New Orleans just to see the score settled with HP's marketing officials who decided to get into the conference business for the first time this year in a much bigger way.

That said, HP is learning this week that the conference business can be pretty tough. This is a company working very hard to tighten down all of its spending right now. One manager told me the cost controls he's seeing this quarter are "unprecedented," and he's worked at HP for 20 years. The cost of rescheduling this conference certainly will make those controls harder. That's the thing about control: It's mostly an illusion, like security. We plan and visualize, but then life unfolds, breaks the levee, and then we get to find out what strong stuff we are made of.