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NEW ORLEANS, La. -- Seven years to the day after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, the Big Easy found itself once again pummeled by a powerful storm. While it lacks the force of its notorious predecessor, Hurricane Isaac has brought powerful winds and many inches of rain to the storm-weary Gulf Coast, leaving hundreds of thousands without power in New Orleans and elsewhere in Louisiana. Among the many people and places that have lost electricity: Dillard University, one of the institutions hardest-hit by Katrina.
While no campus wants to find itself in the path of a hurricane, Dillard's new president, Walter Kimbrough, said that he expects the university will come through the storm relatively unscathed, suffering only from downed power lines, fallen tree limbs, and perhaps some roof damage.
A key difference between Isaac and Katrina: "Last time, that levee [next to Dillard] broke -- it poured right into the back of campus," Kimbrough said. Now, Dillard is safeguarded by a whole new flood protection system -- which Kimbrough, in a prescient move, personally toured just a few weeks earlier. As a result, Kimbrough believes, flooding is "not an issue for us."
Dillard students were sent to Centenary College, in Shreveport, safely out of the way of the storm; Kimbrough remains at his home in New Orleans, waiting for the winds to die down enough that he can get out and inspect the damage to his campus. But he is confident that Dillard, along with the rest of New Orleans, is much better-prepared this time around: "I think now people understand the new realities of this region, [that] based on the things that are happening to the topography, we're more susceptible [to hurricanes]."
