Saturday, August 27 was Move-In Day at Tulane University. At five in the morning, Hurricane Katrina spun itself over the hot, ceaseless waters of the Gulf of Mexico and transformed into a Category 3 storm.
The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale was created for times like this: to allow the weatherman or the friendly voice on the radio to encapsulate all the fury, all the wind-lashing, all the thunderous explosions of water that form a hurricane into one nice, clean number.
The people of New Orleans, and the students of Tulane and Xavier Universities, felt a Category 3 could be ridden out.
Tulane freshman Ben Earley, who comes from Baltimore, remembers Move-In Day. It was his first day at college, and no one seemed panicked, so he planned to enjoy himself. "I was excited, felt connected to the school. I'd unpacked all my things," he said.
Besides, history was on his side. "Look, the folks at Tulane said that they had been open 186 years and never missed a semester." He met his roommates and roamed the halls. "I never thought I'd be there for the first time," he said.
Tulane sophomore Ilan Roth was packed and prepared for his trip down south from Baltimore. He was finally free of the dorms, with a place of his own and friends already waiting for him at school. "I was ready to get down to New Orleans," he said.
By 3 p.m. on Saturday afternoon, Earley heard the announcement. Tulane was closing the dormitories by 6 that evening. "It was so extreme it didn't even hit me right then," he said.
Tulane president Scott Cowen addressed the gathered freshman class in the Assembly Hall at 6 p.m. "Go home with your parents," he said, "or we are putting you on a bus and taking you to Jackson State in Mississippi."
The address came a few hours after Governor Louise Blanco declared Louisiana to be under a federal state of emergency. By the time President Cowen finished his speech, the Federal Emergency Management Agency had been given complete control over the New Orleans area.
With the prospect of the storm, flights out of New Orleans in all directions were booked solid. Earley decided to go to Jackson State. "I figured we were only going to be gone for a day or two at most." The buses rolled out of Tulane in the evening, arriving at the university by midnight.
Two hours later, now Sunday, Katrina became a Category 4 hurricane. By seven in the morning, it was a Category 5, the highest the scale can offer.
The morning Lafayette Daily Advertiser reached doorsteps with the ominous warning: "Forecasters Fear Levees Won't Hold Katrina."
At Jackson State, "We were all calm," Earley said. "It was like part of orientation, people still playing around, meeting each other."
By four that afternoon, the National Weather Service predicted that when Katrina made landfall, "Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks, perhaps longer." This was splashed all over the news, along with the footage of reporters doing stand-ups in gale force winds. It made it onto the TV at Jackson State. "I got the idea right then that I should go home," Earley said. He was contacted soon after by his family in Baltimore. They agreed.
The Tulane administrators who had made the trip to Jackson State told the gathered students that they were free to go, any way they could. Earley's father rented a car and plucked his son and friends from their temporary refuge, beginning the slow route back to Maryland.
On the road, they joined a sea of other evacuees in a painful crawl north. A few hours into the journey, they received word that a plane was leaving Nashville for Baltimore. They pressed on, arriving twenty minutes before takeoff.
Earley, once a Tulane freshman, arrived home in Baltimore at midnight on Sunday.
At 7 a.m. on Monday, August 29, Hurricane Katrina made landfall. An hour later, the levees were breached. The Big Easy was flooded.
Ilan Roth was making preparations to leave Baltimore when he realized that Katrina had hit.
He had left his television and a few other belongings in storage near Tulane, and, as he watched the water spread over the city, he realized they were gone. The friends who had been waiting for him lost everything. "Clothing, computers, books," Roth said. By the end of the day, it became apparent that Katrina had forcibly canceled the semester.
For Arielle Berg, a Tulane sophomore who also watched the hurricane unfold from far away, it was the lack of knowledge that was the hardest.
"Not knowing what's going on with my friends and the school I love has been so difficult," she said. Hopkins welcomed her for a semester, and she took the offer. "They were very welcoming. So are the students -- very friendly and open."
For Earley, it was the struggle of dealing with a dream deferred. "All of a sudden, my freshman year was cut short," he said.
His decision was between Hopkins and University of Maryland, who accepted him with one phone call. Ultimately, he chose Hopkins. "The administration and the students are very sympathetic, but it's hard for them to understand."
For Ilan Roth, it was simply a feeling of ambivalence. "Some of my friends are having a good time, making the most of their time at other places, others are more depressed. I guess I'm somewhere in between."
While he's frustrated at being back home after a year on his own, "Hopkins kids have been great."
Yet small things still nag at them, little differences that remind them that they are not at home and not at peace.
"Hopkins kids don't have a lot of school pride," Roth said. "This isn't something I'm used to, because most people feel like Tulane is an amazing place and will tell you that. Hopkins kids put the school down a lot, but I really don't think it's that bad at all."
Tulane University vows to re-open its doors for the spring semester and reclaim its students, now scattered to schools as disparate as New Orleans neighborhoods.
Administrators have been operating out of Houston since the initial evacuation.They have been as busy coping as their students, performing the little routines that would seem trivial in any average semester.
From re-establishing communication with students and making sure employees get their paychecks to finding accomodations for the football team, Tulane slowly pieces itself back together and tries to find new direction after disaster.
Of course, even routine can't prevent lessons from being learned, as the transfer students know all too well. An event with the magnitude of Katrina tends to change perspectives.
Ben Earley now considers himself a survivor. "The evacuation was a completely new process. But now I'm experienced -- I know what to do in an emergency. And I certainly have a new respect for the power of nature. It's almost unbelievable that a major city can be totally decimated."
Ilan Roth, who grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa, until age six, has learned to see parallels between his two different hometowns.
"American inner cities are really no better off than their third-world counterparts. Only we tend to ignore that reality here as much as possible to feel more secure, but Katrina brought all these issues into the public eye, and now nobody can ignore them."
For her part, Arielle Berg has come away with optimism. "Things happen that are completely unforeseen," she said, "and, though they might destroy homes and lives, I feel like there is always a light at the end of the tunnel."
When you ask her where she goes to school, she says Tulane.
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