I recently visited New Orleans for the IABC conference and took the opportunity to take the Hurricane Katrina Bus Tour. While I vividly recall the coverage two years ago and mourned the 1,400+ deaths, I had no frame of reference from my Portland home. Even visiting The French Quarter, there was no indication that the surrounding areas were decimated, as the area received minor flood damage and was fairly quickly fixed. Check out my Flickr photos of the Hurricane Katrina bus tour.
Initially, the tour wound around the downtown area. I was mildly surprised that the floods crept up downtown towards the Mississippi River from Lake Pontchartrain, not the other way around. The river’s “sliver” edge was in fact one of the safest and driest places to be during and after the storm. As we headed out of town, you could see the old water lines visible on freeway underpass supports and buildings…ranging from 2 to 4 feet. We took the freeway to surrounding parishes and the damage was immediately and powerfully evident.
Keep in mind that the debris from the lake & canals, including the cars, has been long removed. The only remains in these neighborhoods are vacant houses. Some boarded up, many not, but all vacant. A vast majority still had a spray painted X with indicators of who checked the property after the hurricane looking for surivors, the date, whether they entered and if they found any dead (including pets). We passed more than one house with a number and location of the dead painted on the front doors and windows. The matter-of-fact records were hard to digest.
Some of the houses had escape holes hacked through the rooflines. Others had clean cut square holes from outside rescue teams. Most had water lines above 6 feet in height and others even above the roofline. Unfortunately for many of the lower and middle income neighborhoods (like 9th Ward) the houses are primarily one story, so there was little warning and little opportunity to get to the relative safety of a second floor. Too many people were trapped in their small attics and suffocated or drowned.
Equally as depressing and debilitating than the tremendous damage were the stories of miss-managed funds and poor decisions by the city, state and FEMA officials. According to the tour guide, the state turned away the free use of a Greek cruise ship for temporary housing, instead opting to pay Carnival over $250 million to use its ships. In addition, the US refused over $800 million in funding from other countries right after the tragedy, simply because our government “didn’t know how to manage it.”
While there are signs of progress in the city (Trump is still planning to build a huge tower downtown) and in the surrounding areas (Musician’s Village and Brad Pitt’s eco-housing project are moving along nicely) there are lasting and permanent affects. Many businesses lost everything, including customers and employees. Residents lack basic ammenities like convenience stores, and the big retail chains are hesitant to go back into the city, even though there is tremendous demand for supplies. The most telling yet hidden sign of Katrina’s lasting impact is in the suicide rate, which has doubled since Hurricane Katrina struck.
Most residents blame the Army Corps of Engineers for not building the dikes up to specification over the past 40 years, as well as the GO waterway and even FEMA’s latent and lackluster response. They continue to dust themselves off and head back to homes that are uninsurable to be near family and the river delta they’ve come to love. The problem that other bus tour guests and myself had with local residents was simply that they refused to take any responsibility for living in a high risk environment (residing at or below seal level in a storm-prone environment). A few of us on the bus agreed the best use of the disaster relief funds would be to relocate residents to areas that can better sustain a quality of life and would benefit from the population. I don’t think many of the locals I talked to were interested in the idea. Perhaps the greatest insight from the tour was the idea that we’ll be back there again in the next few years to rescue those that have returned from a very similar fate as those in September 2005.
[tags]new orleans, hurricane katrina[/tags]