First destruction, now desperation
The woman was holding court in the lobby of my hotel in downtown New Orleans on Tuesday as the floodwaters lapped across the threshold. Her name was Hilary Callaghan, and she was in town with her husband, Kevin, for 'a cheap thrill'.
They had come from their home in Ohio, knowing that the room rate would be lower during storm season and believing that the incoming Hurricane Katrina might all be rather fun.
'We thought we would make the hurricane part of the adventure,' she enthused as others hoisted suitcases and bags of possessions over their heads and waded through the rising water to get out while they could.
I am sure that from her hotel room, where she almost certainly spent the next five or so days holed up with little or no food or water, sewage backing up in the toilet and her fellow guests weeping in fear, she might have changed her mind.
I am sure too that if she had seen what I have seen over the past few days, she might have thought twice against her ill-advised trip.
I wish that she had seen the tears rolling down the faces of the mothers who came off the evacuation helicopters clutching their naked babies, unsure whether their husbands were dead or alive.
I wish she had seen the elderly nursing home residents that I witnessed seeing being winched off rooftops onto a helicopter, wrapping sheets around their heads to block out the water below.
I wish she had seen the squalor in which evacuees were made to wait because state and federal officials couldn't get their act together to evacuate them faster.
Mrs Callaghan might also have been horrified to hear the tales of woe that poured forth from refugees who waited for help on bridges, on rooftops and in trees, their tongues becoming dry as they survived for days without water as the sun beat down.
She could have made a few friends on holiday, such as Althea Castillo, whose new home is an indoor baseball stadium in Houston, Texas, a venue she shares with 11,000 new neighbours who have nowhere else to go.
Ms Castillo and her children, Keron and Ketaj, lived off tinned peaches and pears for three days on the roof of their apartment block. Like Mrs Callaghan, they had hoped to ride out the storm in a hotel with Althea's niece, Tiffany Washington, 26, who worked there. But the morning before the hurricane hit, hotel managers announced that staff could not shelter there, leaving the four of them, with Althea's husband, Catalino, no time to leave the city.
'I don't never want to come back to New Orleans again,' Althea, 32, says at the highway refugee post. 'There's nothing here for me no more.'
Then there was Charlene Brown-Williams, 41, lying on the floor of the city's airport with 10,000 others awaiting emergency flights out. She does not know what happened to any of her friends or relatives and is being sent several states away to start a new life in a shelter.
'I went to sleep on the night of the storm and I prayed. I'm still praying for those angels to come and take me. There's somebody out there with wings on their back but so far they're not coming through for me,' she said.
Warren Kermitt folded his aching body into a small alcove of the airport concourse and refused to join the thousands of people queueing to be airlifted out: 'I ain't going nowhere without my wife and my kids. If they're gone, if they're floating in the water or lying dead with a bullet in their heads, the good Lord might as well come and take me right now.'
