It wasn’t coming over the levees or through them, Kilpatrick explained. It was seeping under them.

A levee is like an iceberg. You see only the tip of it, while the structure extends deep below the ground. And that’s where the Tulsa levees weren’t working the way they’re supposed to, Kilpatrick said.

His phone rang. A National Guard Humvee had towed yet another water pump to the top of the levee a few hundred feet upstream. But again, there was no hose.

“Can you push the pump into the water?” Kilpatrick asked.

The National Guard was worried that the Humvee would sink into the wet sand if it drove down the bank of the levee.

“OK,” Kilpatrick said with a deep sigh. “We’ll have to get more hose.”

Where? He hadn’t figured that out yet.

Interrupting the phone call, an official from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers knocked on Kilpatrick’s driver-side window.

“I don’t have a lot of time,” Kilpatrick said, rolling down the glass. “You have two minutes. Go.”

“Well, first of all,” the Corps official said, leaning on Kilpatrick’s truck, “the forecast looks like sh--.”