Water defines New Orleans, so much so that the natives use “riverside” and “lakeside” to refer to the cardinal directions of north and south. In August 2005, water, roiled by Hurricane Katrina and abetted by faulty engineering, entered the city. A year and a half after the deluge, when a group from our church went to work in the city, New Orleans still struggled to regain its footing. It had roughly a third of its pre-hurricane population, a severely-damaged infrastructure, and an economy too weak to change the status quo.
New Orleans is one of the country’s premier cities. It commands the vast river network that drains North America from Pennsylvania and Montana to the Gulf of Mexico. This strategic location, the particularities that cotton, cane, oil, port-of-call and tourism bring to the local economy and the rich mixture of language and ethnicity, subsumed in the deceptively simple expression, “creole,” make it one of the most distinctive locations on the planet. Katrina’s waters, and the nation’s inability to completely repair the damage they did, add another note of distinction to New Orleans’ repertoire.
I’m back in the city now, a year after the work crew from Ithaca visited at Easter 2007. Things look better but not good. The city’s principal gateway, Louis Armstrong International Airport, has a freshness created by paint and cleaning that removes the hurricane look-and-feel and smell. The roadways seem less a work in progress, too, even during the morning rush hour. According to official statistics, the city has regained 2/3 of its pre-Katrina population, but that part of the recovery has stalled. New Orleans is a long way from recovery, and there’s not much visible construction underway.
I’ve come for the SALALM meeting, hosted by Tulane University and taking place at the Monteleone Hotel in the French Quarter. Wanting to see how much flood damage had been repaired, and wanting to add my drop in the bucket, I arrived a day early and spent the day before the sessions volunteering at St. Paul’s Homecoming Center, a group with an appealing web site. I was the old guy in a crew that, with a dozen middle schoolers from Maryland, cleaned up an overgrown lot in the Lakeview area northwest of down town.
The day began with a cab ride from the hotel to the worksite. The driver was Haitian, her knowledge of the city, sketchy. St. Paul’s provided directions from the French Quarter to their headquarters that involved only an exit from the freeway and two right turns on surface streets. I must admit that I was not paying attention, watching the neighborhoods rather than the road as the driver missed the freeway exit that was our primary point of reference. After a time she started to ask me for directions. We just avoided a disaster, taking the last exit off I-10 before the highway passes over the swamplands that separate New Orleans from Baton Rouge-- twenty miles without a turn around. As we headed back south, the driver and her dispatcher carried on an animated discussion in patois about where she went wrong. It began with screaming but gradually transformed to laughter; all’s well that ends well, and armed with new directions we found the work site pretty quickly.
The work group’s task was to mow and rake a large lot where flood-damaged houses had been demolished and removed the season before. The clean up has now moved past gutting houses to making neighborhoods more attractive for the people who have moved back into them. That is certainly an improvement. The abandoned houses are much fewer now, and unkempt lawns stand out as eye sores rather than the status quo. Like the RHINO group last year, St. Paul’s, an Episcopal organization, furnished the logistics. We volunteers received standard garden tools-- two lawn mowers, rakes, clippers and large plastic bags. In addition, the organizers provided a flock of gasoline string trimmers whose two-cycle engines mimicked the sound of angry wasps. The teenagers swarmed to these.
The temperatures reached the 80s by 10 AM but did never cracked 90, and the humidity was a relatively low 47 %. High pressure has kept New Orleans unseasonably dry, a good thing for us gardeners. By two o’clock, we had finished the lot and even did some extra work on a house across the street that retained its spray-painted “X” on the door and water stains on the exterior walls.
The taxi back, by a New Orleans native, was a very different experience. First, because he knew the way to the hotel; second because he had lived in the city for some forty years and saw Hurricane Katrina in a larger perspective. He remembers other storms, especially Betsy that hit the area more directly, caused extensive flooding, and brought more wind damage. The difference with Katrina was, of course, the levee failure. His take on the “recovery” is that most of the work has been done by volunteers (this may have been for my benefit), and he is very angry that government at all levels-- he was particularly unkind to Bush and Nagin-- have done practically nothing. At the end of the ride, he confessed that he has essentially given up. He is staying in the city because his attempt to change his life with government-underwritten training as a long-distance truck driver was no life at all.
No matter how much you know about the Katrina, you have to come to New Orleans to appreciate its huge dimensions. On my Haitian trip, I passed several landmarks: the Superdome, where storm survivors led a miserable existence; arching sections of I-10, once desolate refuges for flood survivors; and the infamous Industrial Canal that channeled flood waters into the Lower Ninth Ward. We also saw several maps that document the flooding. With the exception of the high ground deposited by the Mississippi, “the sliver by the river,” the entire city went under-- from a few inches to several feet and from a week to forty days. The water is gone now, but it left its stains, on the facade of any building not yet repainted and on the conscience of anyone with eyes to see.
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