Because his station was the most immediate, moment-to-moment source of information in the region, I asked Cohen how it had felt to be inside the hurricane. “Friday before the storm, we were feeling good,” he said. “The National Hurricane Center said that this would really hit the Florida panhandle, not us. We were barely in the ‘cone of error’ in New Orleans. So I kicked off for the day on Friday at one o’clock and went to the gym. But at around four my pager started going haywire. Max Mayfield, the director of the National Hurricane Center, had changed his prediction. There was a hundred-and-fifty-mile shift to the west.” It was going to be a problem to get people in the city to adjust. “In New Orleans, people go home at lunch on Fridays,” Cohen said. “All year round. And Friday night was a football night. The Ravens were in town to play a preseason game against the Saints at the Superdome. It was also a big high-school football night, the jamboree games, which kick off the season. People were out drinking, having a good time. They were consuming very little media. But by Saturday morning we were told there was mandatory evacuation for Plaquemines Parish, to the southeast, and some coastal areas, though not yet New Orleans. On Saturday, Ray Nagin was still saying that we have time to watch this. A lot of people were clueless. They had no idea there were evacuations.

“We’ve always talked about the worst-case scenarios in Louisiana,” Cohen continued. “They talk about ‘slosh models’—computer-generated models on what would happen. The geography is obvious. If you are walking along the riverfront in downtown New Orleans, you are looking up at the Mississippi River. You look up at Lake Pontchartrain, up at the canals. When the water flows in, you have a city that becomes a tidal lake, with sharks and manatees and all the rest.

“By ten on Saturday night, Nagin was really concerned. He got a call from Max Mayfield saying that he should evacuate the city. And on Sunday morning Nagin issued a mandatory evacuation order. Sunday night, there were gale-force winds. We were told that if you weren’t out by now it was too late, that—and this was the quote—‘preparations to protect life and property should be rushed to completion.’ We were broadcasting all of Sunday night. The power went out in the city. The eye of the storm wasn’t even near us, but our windows in the downtown studio started cracking. And on Monday morning, while Garland Robinette was on the air, the windows blew in.

“Landfall was at 6 a.m. on the coast,” he went on. “We feared that it would get to New Orleans at exactly 90 longitude, 30 latitude, and it got to 89.6. At 1 a.m., it went due north, and it felt like Christmas had come early. It was staying at 89.6 at 2, 3, 4 a.m. with one-hundred-and-fifty-mile-per-hour winds, but still it did not look like the worst-case scenario. Roofs were flying off houses, cars moved around in the wind, there were rapids in the streets, but still . . . On Monday night, there were reports that water was coming over the Seventeenth Street canal, which separates Orleans Parish and Jefferson Parish, to the west. The water was coming over in the dark. The levee itself is in Lakeview, an upscale lakefront neighborhood near where I-10 and I-610 split. At six in the morning, we were told that the levee had been ripped apart and water was pouring in. I went on the radio and said that eyewitnesses had said ‘The bowl is filling.’ So I said, ‘Get out if you are to the east of the Seventeenth Street canal. That’s the whole city. It’s as bad as the Mississippi River breaking through. Lake Pontchartrain is emptying into the city of New Orleans. The water is rising and it’s not going to stop. Get out now.’

“We started getting amazing phone calls: a woman in her house with a two-year-old on one shoulder, a five-year-old at her side, no formula, no food, ‘What do I do?’ And what can I tell her? I’m just a guy on the radio!”

Like so many other news people in town, Dave Cohen had been preparing forty-years-later reports on Hurricane Betsy when Katrina hit. Although L.B.J. and the local officials of New Orleans and the State of Louisiana responded to their crisis with far greater coördination and speed than their successors in 2005, the memories of Betsy remain bitter, and not only because of the suffering and destruction it caused. As Edward Haas has made clear, Betsy was followed within days by widespread rumors that Mayor Schiro had ordered floodwater pumped out of his own well-to-do subdivision, Lake Vista, and into the Ninth Ward. At the time of the flood, Schiro was in a race for reëlection with another Democrat, the city council president, James E. Fitzmorris, Jr. There were also stories that he had ordered the levees breached. Thomas E. Allen, of Hunt Foods & Industries, an ally of the Mayor’s, wrote to him to say that two of his African-American servants “brought this tale to my wife yesterday and said that all of the Negroes were talking about it and were angry with you about it.” Haas quotes Schiro’s secretary, Marguerite Guette, who told the Mayor, “An old 71-years of age colored man by the name of Williams, who says you have helped him all of his life and who lives at 2630 Republic Street, called to say that he is very concerned about a rumor that is going around that may ruin you with colored voters. The rumor is that you cut the Industrial Canal to drown the colored people so that they would not vote in the coming election.” An aide to the Mayor later reported that people claiming to be relief workers and Schiro supporters delivered bags of “supplies” to flood victims in the Ninth Ward. People opened the bags only to find spoiled food and soiled, useless clothing.

Four years ago, a play staged in New Orleans called “An Evening with Betsy” explored the old conspiracy rumors. And although among historians Schiro earns high marks for his handling of the flood (if not for his obstinate views on race), the rumors persist. “That theory is why older people in the Ninth Ward still keep hatchets in their attics,” Dave Cohen had told me. “They remember what it was like to be trapped, with the water rising and no way to get to the roof.”

The pattern in Katrina’s wake is similar. Everywhere I went in Louisiana and Texas to talk to evacuees, many of the poorest among them were not only furious—furious at the President and local officials, furious at being ignored for days—but inclined to believe, as many did after Betsy, that the flooding of the city was, or could have been, a deliberate act.

In the town of New Iberia, south of Lafayette, a few hundred New Orleanians, nearly all of them African-American, were staying at a gym on the grounds of West End Park. It was dusk when I arrived, and people were wandering around the athletic field, shooing away clouds of mosquitoes, drinking bottles of cold water provided by the Red Cross, and recounting for each other, yet again, their exodus stories. “Biblical proportions”—everyone used that phrase, and why not? I went inside and noticed a couple of signs: “This is Our Home. Please Respect Us.” “Evacuees and Volunteers Only Beyond This Point: Curfew 730, Lights Out 10, TV off at 10:30.” Two of the Red Cross volunteers who had organized the shelter and were keeping it running told me that they had been at Ground Zero in New York four years ago and that, in many ways, this was worse. “A whole city ruined,” one said. “More than a million people leaving their homes.” “Biblical proportions,” the other said.