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CHRIS TISCH and AARON SHAROCKMANThree journalists seek safety inside a hotel, but their refuge is not immune from what's going on outside.
NEW ORLEANS - The 17-story Doubletree Hotel swayed in the wind. Water ran to the bottom of an open elevator car. Concrete dropped 100 feet from the roof.
Doors clanged against their hinges, debris slapped the windows, wind whistled down darkened halls.
A wall on the 16th floor was blown out, offering an unobstructed view of the Mississippi River.
Hurricane Katrina was not the nightmare New Orleans feared. But it had its scary moments, and the coming weeks could provide even more.
* * *
The Doubletree on Canal Street provided refuge for two St. Petersburg Times reporters and a photographer as Katrina neared Sunday afternoon.
We could have ridden out the storm at the New Orleans Times-Picayune or at City Hall, but City Hall's large windows scared us and we worried our vehicles would be flooded at the newspaper.
Doubletree general manager Pat Schimon was kind enough to give us two rooms after several other hotels turned us down.
Schimon told us the windows would withstand 150-mph winds. We felt safe inside the squat, no-nonsense building. We settled in for a fitful night of sleep.
About 6 a.m. Monday, with Katrina's large eye about four hours away, we awoke to rain pelting our windows.
Minutes later, Schimon was in the lobby and light jazz was playing on the lobby intercom.
"As long as you got lights, everybody's going to be feeling okay," said Schimon.
Outside, the wind howled and moaned. "That's a horrible sound," said a hotel worker, shaking her head.
Wind sliced through the front doors, scattering leaves that were blown into the lobby. Then the wind snapped a door open. It took several hotel workers to close it.
For 20 minutes the lights flickered, the lobby computers squealed. At 6:24 a.m., the power went out for good.
Emergency lights went on in the stairwell and other parts of the hotel. But the rooms were dark.
At dawn, the sky was eerie and bruised, a foggy blue, but it gave enough light to calm the jittery guests huddled in their rooms.
New Orleans was bathed in a blanket of horizontal white rain. There were times we couldn't see more than a block away. Debris - black, pink, orange, blue - flew by so fast it was hard to tell what it was.
On the roof, the wind pounded the air-conditioning units like giant bass drums. The doors buckled, filling hallways with noise.
It was just after 7 a.m. when we felt the hotel sway. Then windows started breaking, mostly on the top floors. We had moved an armoire in front of our windows, just in case, but they held fast.
Several windows fell into the pool below, some dragging concrete with them. The pool became a depository of debris - garbage cans, pool furniture, bedding.
Outside, palm trees along Canal Street were uprooted. Parts of Harrah's Casino roof were mangled, though the purple globe didn't move.
Inside, the rooms were hot and sticky.
The wind died down for a while so we climbed to the 16th floor. An 8- by 10-foot chunk of the hotel was gone. We were looking at the Mississippi River; the only thing separating it from us was the back edge of Katrina. The wind buckled our knees. We headed downstairs.
About 9:20, the wind slowed. We thought maybe we were in or near the eye, but the virtual calm remained. Except for tropical force winds, it was all but over.
New Orleans was still standing, but reports of major flooding prompted us to leave our refuge. With a curfew in effect, the hotel would not let us return.
We left anyway, uncertain where the night would take us.