BATON ROUGE, La.—Caroline E. Sloan ’07, horrified and numb, sat in a Little Rock, Ark. Doubletree Hotel room, scanning for her home in the flicker of the television screen.

Buck Farmer ’08 listened as Hurricane Katrina’s winds stripped the limbs off his backyard’s trees and wrenched out others from their roots. Later he wandered up and down New Orleans’ Magazine Street with a laundry basket, at last encountering a convenience store where a man sold him coffee and canned milk, letting in just one customer at a time before closing shop forever.

Turhan F. Sarwar ’06 threw on an old Boy Scout shirt and fled from New Orleans to Jackson, Miss. and then to Baton Rouge, La. before returning home. National Guardsmen drove by, waving, as he photographed dead fish on dry streets. He ironically renamed his city Atlantis.

For a handful of Harvard students living along the Gulf Coast or in the center of New Orleans, the hours trickled by after one of the most devastating natural disasters in American history. Day and night grew blurry, until telling one day from another became impossible. Goals were pared down to the shortest term: where to find food and shelter, how to check that stranded friends and family were alive.

Newly-appointed Assistant Dean of the College John “Jay” Ellison said Thursday that the College has heard from most undergraduates in the area and was continuing to try to get in touch with the rest.

The Category 4 hurricane dealt New Orleans a devastating blow that has already left hundreds dead and has decimated or practically erased towns from the Gulf Coast. Lawmakers have predicted that the hurricane would ultimately cost the federal government more than $300 billion, more than the combined cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to date. Mayor C. Ray Nagin had initially speculated that the death toll might reach 10,000, though a preliminary body recovery last week authorities shrunk those estimates. New Orleans, a city that had won fame among conventioneers and nighttime revellers, had become a waterlogged ghost town, patrolled by rescue workers and military police shouldering M-16s.

Katrina temporarily took the homes of a small group of Harvard students as well as their parents’ livelihoods. While many had already been preparing before the hurricane for a move to campus, none had foreseen that the start of school would ultimately become an alternate evacuation route, nor that they would need to negotiate new ways to pay for their education when family assets and incomes plummeted.

Lester Y. Leung ’06 had never needed to apply for financial aid. But after the storm, at the urging of his senior tutor, he called the office. His father, a professor at the Tulane University School of Medicine, was suddenly without a lab—or a job. Leung said Harvard will allow him to delay paying this semester’s tuition until an unspecified date.

Yesterday, Leung was moving into his room in Leverett. It was the beginning of normalcy, two weeks after the storm.

‘THE HOMELESS, TEMPEST-TOST’

While Harvard’s population was relatively untouched by the storm, students at Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge saw a routine hurricane evacuation become one of the most extensive relief operations in the country.

The students had been told to vacate the school the weekend of Katrina, and many thought they would simply return after a few days as they had for storms in the past. But classes wouldn’t reconvene until a week and a half later, as Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) workers from as far away as New Mexico and U.S. Public Health Service staff in bulky camouflage converged on the school.

An arena normally used for concerts and basketball games was converted into the largest emergency care center in the state. White cloth partitions sectioned the gray concrete into an intensive care unit, pediatrics, a pharmacy, and other units normally found in a hospital. Caffeinated doctors stood along the sloping ramps of the arena, resting between buses of refugees fresh from the New Orleans Convention Center and other havens of last resort.

FEMA workers, who had volunteered for little pay to take on a job that would ultimately include body collection, waited on metal folding chairs outside the hospital’s entrance. They smoked long menthol cigarettes and squinted their eyes at the track field, where once in a while a Blackhawk helicopter would land.

They waited, as did the others: LSU student volunteers waited to deliver a bottle of water or pass out styrofoam boxes of jambalaya, but had little chance in a chaotic and loosely run relief operation. Refugees waited for answers to simple questions. Where was a phone? Did the mother have her hypertension medication? Where would the family sleep tonight?