Still, the area around Baptist Hospital in the Freret neighborhood remained the site of some of the worst flooding. The city failed to get a handle on it. Staff had to develop their own coping mechanisms. In the first years of the twenty-first century, workers knew a moderate storm could fill the streets around Memorial Medical Center with enough water that they would have to park their cars a block or so away on “neutral ground”—the high berms between lanes. Hospital maintenance men would put on waders and pull colleagues to work in a battered metal fishing boat kept suspended from the
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