My Katrina

Rudderless

Dear friends and family,

 

It’s been over seven months since I last wrote about New Orleans. I had intended to send regular updates, but I hadn’t counted on a couple of things. First was the difficulty of writing about what has been, for much of this time, unremittingly bad news for the city. Second, I didn’t realise how inward my focus would become, and how much I would need to conserve my energy for friends, family and neighbours trying to rebuild here.

Now, with Katrina’s first anniversary sparking a flurry of media coverage, I wanted to give you my perspective on things.

Let me back up a little first, to earlier this year at the beginning of February, when the tornadoes hit. If there was one event that knocked the wind out of my writing sails, this was it. At the end of January, Lillie and I took a few days off to visit New York. The day after we flew out of New Orleans, tornadoes hit our old neighbourhood of Lakeview. Tornadoes are fairly rare in our part of Louisiana and nobody could remember one touching down in Lakeview at all. But this night, a tornado touched down repeatedly, exploding houses each time it touched and cutting a line across our already devastated neighbourhood. It uprooted a huge microwave tower, picked up a friend’s house and deposited it on her mother’s house next door, and generally caused havoc.

The event, of course, was full of irony. Had it occurred at any other time, lives would have been lost and the neighbourhood in turmoil. As it was, no-one was living in Lakeview and the houses “destroyed” had already been flooded to the roofline by Katrina. In fact, after the tornado went through, the most common response from fellow Lakeviewers was “I wish it had hit our house”. That’s because tornado damage is covered under homeowner’s insurance which provides “replacement cost” coverage; flood damage, as we’d all experienced, is covered by separate insurance with an arbitrary capped limit.

Anyway, at that point, I started to feel overwhelmed by keeping a running track of our misfortunes and stopped writing these letters.

Since then, on an everyday level, things have certainly become easier: the streets are no longer full of 8-foot deep holes; garbage, mail, phone, electricity and Internet services are back running (although the latter two are still erratic); the city has started removing some of the 60,000 abandoned cars; a few schools have reopened; we have a local supermarket, a couple of service stations, and some restaurants and small shops open nearby; a couple of hospitals have reopened (although psychiatrists and psychiatric services are almost entirely absent, in a city where the suicide rate has risen and almost everyone is depressed); and on the block where we rent, there’s about 80% occupancy. My fellow workers at the Death Penalty Discourse Network finally moved back to New Orleans at the end of May and our new office is up and running.

That’s the good news. Underlying the smoother-running surface, things are not going well. The worst of it is that there is no coherent plan for rebuilding the city. The leadership vacuum on this front has been total. Mayor Nagin, re-elected earlier this year, has apparently abandoned all sense of responsibility and appears intent on sabotaging the city’s chances of recovery and support. He has shot down all rational rebuilding plans and is currently talking about coordinating a couple of dozen neighbourhood-based plans, an approach which entirely overlooks the city’s needs and resources as a whole. I think post-Katrina New Orleans is a good example of the limitations of democracy: there are some decisions which need to be based not on what’s popular but on what’s needed, and Nagin and most other politicians can’t get past trying to please everybody.

The end result is that people are rebuilding on their own, in an adhoc fashion, with no guarantee that the city can or will provide services to their areas. And those who are rebuilding are doing so without any outside help: the federal money supposed to help people rebuild has not appeared and the process for applying for it becomes more complex and more restrictive month by month. Poor people just don’t have a chance to return and get back on their feet here.

Nagin occasionally breaks his extraordinarily protracted silence since reelection with outrageously boneheaded comments such as the city being well on the way to recovery. He plucks rosy population statistics out of the air, but the truth is the population is around 50% of its pre-Katrina level and looks like it has settled at that. That population is squeezed into the less-damaged areas while the vast majority of the city is still abandoned.

The city is still dependent on FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) for everything from debris clean up to public transport, and when that money dries up, who knows what services will disappear.

FEMA, of course, and Bush are widely regarded as four-letter words in New Orleans. Almost anything FEMA touches turns to dross and Bush has remained clueless and indifferent but oh-so-sincerely-caring for the duration. A former New Orleans mayor, Marc Morial, said in a recent speech that he believe that history would look upon the rebuilding of New Orleans as the “defining issue for this generation of American leaders”. If that’s the case, history will show the whole lot of them to have been abject failures.

Our levee protection is still not back up to pre-Katrina levels, meaning that we’re susceptible to almost any category hurricane and also more susceptible to tropical storm flooding than ever before due to the way the Army Corps (another 4-letter word) of Engineers has approached the levee repairs.

On the home front, Lillie and I have started rebuilding our place in Lakeview. After we fought for months with our insurance company, they finally paid us every cent of our policy value (I pity anyone who hasn’t the will or wherewithal to go toe-to-toe with their insurance company). When we made the decision to rebuild, we were only the second on our street to do so. We’re still not sure whether we’re nuts to rebuild, but when we made the decision in May, it was the first time either of us felt happy since Katrina. In the past month, others have started rebuilding on our block and so we have some hope we won’t be moving back into a completely devastated area. Still, the last time I drove around our neighbourhood, I estimated that only 5% of houses in the area have even been gutted, let alone remediated. Very little demolition has occurred, although it’s clear that a huge number of houses will have to go. Rebuilding is excruciatingly slow and exceedingly expensive, due to the huge demand for services and the high cost of materials and labour post-Katrina.

So here we are, a year after Katrina living in a rotting and rudderless city. The upside is the commitment and camaraderie we share with friends and neighbours and family. There’s even camaraderie between strangers: everyone has a story, everyone has a common bond.

In May and August this year I took some photos in our Lakeview neighbourhood and in the Lower Ninth Ward. The latter is a poor, largely black area. It took the worst of the storm (water up to 25 feet high). The Lower Ninth will have to be almost entirely demolished, and no-one knows if it will come back to life. (The easiest way to view the photos is to click the New Window link under the View As Slideshow link).

No matter how shocking the photos, they convey only a fraction of the impact of witnessing things first hand and seeing the devastation stretched across much of the city.

Love,

Rose

Getting the mail

Dear friends and family,

We’ve made it to the A list: we’re now getting mail deliveries at our house. That puts us among the privileged few and frees up a considerable amount of time.

Until now, we’ve been doing what most people in New Orleans have been doing, heading down to the post office to pick up mail. It sounds simple enough, but it’s not. The trouble is, we need to get mail addressed to our old house in Lakeview as well as our rental place here in Mid-City. We also have not one but three mail forwarding orders in effect: Lakeview to Baton Rouge; Baton Rouge to Houston; and Houston to New Orleans. Trying to cancel or change those is its own adventure.

The first time I went to pick up the mail post-Katrina, in mid-December, I headed off to the main New Orleans post office on Loyola Avenue, near the Superdome, directed there for our mid-City mail by the Post Office’s Web site. I first tried to enter the main building, but found it surrounded by ‘Postal Police’. The building, which is the largest mail sorting facility in the region and which used to serve Mississippi and Alabama as well as Louisiana, was flooded in Katrina. All the sorting machines in the basement were destroyed and there was water in the first floor. Who knows how much mail died a soggy death at that time.

The Postal Police directed me to the back of the Superdome, where they’ve set up a massive temporary post office. I waited in a long line to be directed to a parking place and then walked up to the entrance only to find a sign saying that mail for zip code 70119 was now being held at the post office on Jeff Davis, over near our place in Mid-City.

So I headed uptown to Louisiana Avenue to get the mail for our Lakeview home. The post office was jam packed, but they’d clearly been working on this routine for some time and it had its own ragged efficiency. I had to fill out a form stating my name and address and get in a long line to give this form to a clerk. As I made it to the head of the line, before I handed over my slip of paper I heard a voice wafting over the general hubbub calling out our address. It was our old postie, Jim, standing behind the counter together with a bunch of other posties. Jim’s been on our route for 28 years. It was such a delight to see him. He took my slip and went to check for mail in the bowels of the post office, while I waited out in the foyer, where they come and call your name and hand over your mail or tell you there’s none. When Jim emerged he had two items of mail for us; the rest must have been forwarded to Baton Rouge or lost. We hugged and exchanged flood tales (he lost his place), and then I headed off to the Jeff Davis post office.

Things there were less organised than at the Louisiana Avenue office, as they’d just newly started handling the mail. At that time, in mid-December, Mid-City was still very sparsely populated (it still is, but the population’s certainly on the rise). I got on another queue, handed over my ID and told them my new address, and was eventually handed a pile of mail, all of which proved to be for former tenants. The woman behind the counter asked if I’d like to be put on a list to have mail delivered, an offer I accepted although I’d heard that being on the list is no guarantee of delivery.

So, after about three and a half hours, I returned home with two letters, both offers from credit card companies mailed in September.

Since then I’ve gone through this rigmarole a couple of times and managed to cancel all but the Houston forwarding order, a process which required an hour-long wait in a separate queue. Unfortunately, as more people have returned to the city the wait at the post offices has become almost unbearable. Twice I went to pick up mail from Jeff Davis and gave up, facing a queue that snaked all the way through the building and out into the street. The thought of waiting in line two hours for a couple of pieces of two-month-old mail was too much.

But the last time I retreated from the post office, I returned home to find mail popping out of our mail box. Some of it was postmarked September, most of it October and November, but there was even a letter sent within the past three weeks.

Despite the welcome appearance of home deliveries, it’s still not a good idea to send mail to us in Mid-City. The system is so clogged and inefficient most local mail takes several weeks to deliver, if it gets through at all. If we send a letter to someone else in New Orleans, it gets sent first to Baton Rouge for a postmark, then to Houston to check for forwarding addresses, then back to Baton Rouge, then to the St. Rose sorting centre on Airline Drive in New Orleans, and finally to the local post office – if one is still functioning in the neighbourhood – a trip of about 720 miles. The system can only handle what’s called “first-class mail”, so things such as magazine subscriptions don’t even make it through the system. The upside to that is that junk mail is filtered out automatically.

I know this is a long tale about mail, but it’s what life is like here. We still spend a lot of time trying to accomplish everyday tasks, and in the end all we achieve is an approximation. Life certainly continues to revolve almost entirely around post-Katrina survival. About 80 percent of the articles in the newspaper are about Katrina issues, with a little bit of world news, sport, classifieds and death notices filling the rest of the pages. Even the latter two tend to have a Katrina spin, with many businesses announcing their reopening while the death notices still reflect the ripple effects of the hurricane, particularly on old people. The Times Picayune has been running a very touching series of profiles for several months on those who died in Katrina.

We’ve just had another blow. Our dear friend Denny’s sister, Marie, has terminal cancer. During Katrina, Denny and Marie’s partner Bill had to get her out of the city and then find care for her in Georgia where they ended up (I managed to track Denny down via text messages when we were still in Baton Rouge). We found it hard enough dealing with Katrina ourselves; it’s hard to imagine how difficult it was for Denny and Marie and Bill, trying to ensure Marie’s well-being.

In December, they returned to New Orleans and Marie recommenced chemo at a hospital in Baton Rouge. On Monday, Bill, who was driving from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, lost control of his car, crashed and was killed. The word “unfair” keeps springing to my mind, although I know fairness has nothing to do with it. But it seems like a particularly onerous burden for Denny and Marie.

Driving is still something which feels perilous. So many of us still have “Katrina brain”, a condition in which once perfectly adequate brain matter turns to mush. It makes driving pretty dodgy. Add to that roads full of potholes and gutted housing materials, traffic lights out of operation, heavy construction vehicles dominating the roadways, utility crews blocking the streets, and tens of thousands of tired, stressed people journeying back and forth from Orleans Parish to the surrounding areas each day, and it’s no wonder traffic accidents have quadrupled in some parishes here since Katrina.

We’re still waiting for word from our insurance company on the inadequate settlement they made us. We’re having an independent adjustor look at our claim and, if that doesn’t help. we’ll be calling in the law dogs. Clearly, we can’t make any rebuilding decisions until we have a final decision from the insurance company (what they’ve offered isn’t enough for us to pay off the mortgage let alone fix up the place), but that all may be moot given the latest urban redevelopment proposal. That plan divides New Orleans into areas where rebuilding is allowed, areas where there is a moratorium on building, former housing areas which will become parks, and areas marked for redevelopment, probably with tract housing of some sort. Our house is in one of the yellow moratorium areas, as is about 80 percent of the city. Having just driven one of my visiting Australian editors around a portion of this yellow zone, I’m staggered at how much of the city is completely uninhabited/uninhabitable. The redevelopment map makes that clear.

On a more upbeat front, I spent time last night working on a Web site for a friend, Monique, who’s trying to raise money for replanting trees in New Orleans by walking the Appalachian Trail. She’s going to get sponsorship for each mile walked (the trail stretches around 2100 miles from Georgia to Maine), and I’m designing a Web site to help her raise money and publicise the “Hike for KaTREEna”, as it’s called. The Web site isn’t finished yet, but you can check it out.

I also came up with a slogan the other night – Dikes for New Orleans – and designed a badge, fridge magnet and t-shirt and had them made up online. I wore my badge to a demonstration today in Jackson Square, in honour (ahem) of George Bush’s latest visit to the city he’s screwing. The demonstration was dominated by a very large and very vocal contingent of Catholic school girls. I’m so glad to see they’re getting a decent education.

Lots of love,

Rose

 

Zeta

Dear friends and family,

It’s early morning on 31st December and as I write this Tropical Storm Zeta is getting itself organised in the Atlantic. It’s unlikely to become a hurricane, even though winds are already up to 60mph, nor should it threaten land, but it ties the record for the latest named storm to develop in the Atlantic. Earlier in the month, Epsilon became only the fifth hurricane to form in December in the 154 years records have been kept. So that makes a final tally of 27 named storms this season, well past the old record of 23. If another storm develops tomorrow, it will be counted in the 2006 season. Perhaps next year they should abandon the clearly inadequate Roman and Greek alphabets and opt for Chinese characters instead to accommodate what’s predicted to be another active season.

So here we are with Winter upon us and we’re still to see the end of the current crop of tropical storms. It does nothing to reassure those of us trying to make decisions about when or whether to repair our homes. We have been repeatedly “assured” that the levees will be as “as strong as pre-Katrina levels” by the start of the official 2006 tropical storm season in June. That’s a phrase which belongs right there alongside “as honest as a politician”. Even though some people have already embarked on rebuilding their homes, a drive around the worst areas indicates that the overwhelming majority are doing nothing more than gutting, clean up and mold remediation to try to prevent structural damage going any further. In fact, most people haven’t done that much; instead, all they’ve done is visit their homes to see whether they could salvage anything, and then left them sitting with doors and windows gaping to dry out.

There’s been a lot of finger pointing going on about who’s to blame for the clearly inadequate state of the levees – so bad they couldn’t even handle a Category 3 storm. It’s finally emerged after study by forensic engineers (a profession I never knew existed) that the US Army Corps of Engineers, who designed and built the system, had their own doubts about the design back in 1990 but failed to pursue it. This is the same Army Corps responsible for shoring up the levees for the next season.

Whoever screwed up, it’s so clearly a man-made failure. Driving across the 17th Street Canal, which is the dividing line between Orleans and Jefferson Parish, makes that abundantly plain. On one side in Metairie (Jefferson Parish) the traffic lights work, the shops are open, the traffic clogs the roads and life is not too far removed from pre-Katrina days. There are plenty of blue roofs and signs of wind damage, but nothing too dramatic. Drive across the bridge over the canal into New Orleans and instantly you’re plunged into a half-world where the lights don’t work, almost all ground vegetation is brown, grey or simply gone, open shops are a cause for celebration, and the traffic is scarce and obeys its own weird set of highly flexible road rules. The difference is stark. Had Katrina been nothing more than a hurricane event, there wouldn’t be this contrast. You’d see the same blue roofs and downed trees and the usual wind damage on both sides of the canal, and that’d be it. According to recent reports, it’s sheer luck that the 17th St Canal didn’t break on the Metairie side in addition to the Orleans side; evidently, at a number of spots it’s in worse condition on that side than where the break actually occurred.

We make the drive “across the border” – as we call it – quite frequently because there are still no supermarkets and almost no other stores open on our side of the line. Many restaurants, mostly downtown, uptown and in the French Quarter, have opened, although we keep learning of favourite places, like Michael’s Mid-City Grill, that won’t reopen. Most of those that are open have limited menus and take cash only. Getting experienced help is almost impossible, so we’re getting to know a whole new set of wait staff who are clearly learning on the job. We’re just glad they’re here.

The other night we went to one of our old haunts, Sukhothai, down in the Marigny (an old neighbourhood near the Quarter) with our erstwhile neighbours Jane and Al. It was so good to have time with them. When we walked into the restaurant, the fellow who runs it greeted us warmly, so warmly that it made me realise how important each of these renewed meetings is. It’s not just that it’s good to see faces and people you haven’t seen for months; it’s that it’s good to see that this person is alive, is safe, and is able to be back in New Orleans. It’s only after registering all that, that you then get down to the “how did you fare?” stuff.

Jane and Al are holed up in a very small apartment on the West Bank (the south side of the Mississippi), hoping to move back into New Orleans proper some time during the coming year. They’ve been through a series of trials over the past months, apart from Katrina. Three days after the hurricane one of their family members died (not hurricane related); then one of their cats, who had survived Katrina, was killed by domestic dogs gone feral; and finally Jane got rear-ended in her car. So it was very good to have some time together. Their rebuilding plans are just as much up in the air as ours. We laughed at one of our shared fantasies: that a house fire would completely destroy our houses. That way, we’d get to claim homeowners insurance and not have to make impossible decisions.

Our personal decisions are impossible to make because the politicians are incapable of making bold public decisions, something we desperately need. They haven’t even been able to decide where they’ll allow trailer parks in the city, because each time Mayor Nagin makes a determination, the council members get up in arms and the not-in-my-backyard-fest begins, and Nagin flip flops.

The same idiocy is happening with regard to rebuilding neighbourhoods. All the projections peg New Orleans at around 50 percent of its old population for the foreseeable future. Clearly if that’s the case, there’s no way you can justify maintaining the same city footprint we had of old; trying to rebuild and service the infrastructure to such an extensive area just doesn’t make sense. But, of course, no politician wants to turn around and say “You can’t come back to your neighbourhood, it needs to be razed.” So we end up with a plan such as the current one: people will be allowed to return to any neighbourhood, no matter how badly damaged, and start to rebuild in the next year. After a year, the local government will assess each neighbourhood to see whether enough people are rebuilding there to justify its long-term existence. If there are, well and good; if not, the homeowners will be bought out and have to go elsewhere.

This, of course, is completely untenable. Who can afford to be the first to rebuild in their neighbourhood, hoping that enough fellow neighbours will do the same to ensure the area’s viability? And what constitutes “sufficient rebuilding activity” to make a neighbourhood viable? That essential detail is completely absent from the plan. And will the government pay those pioneering souls not merely for their houses but also for all the rebuilding costs if, after a year, the neighbourhood is deemed unviable? Given the bankrupt state of our local and state governments and the increasing money-pinching of Congress, this hardly seems likely.

So, we wait.

By the way, it’s interesting watching the language changes wrought by Katrina. In a sub-sea-level, swampy city such as New Orleans, raising and levelling houses has long been a common procedure. These days, you can’t mention either of these terms without clarifying whether you mean raise or raze, and level (make even) or level (tear down). The word “demo” has also taken on the new local meaning of “demolition” instead of “demonstration”.

I’ve included several shots of Christmas decorations on one of the houses in Lakeview and a Christmas wishlist from the front yard of one of the houses on

Bellaire   Drive

, right near the breach in the

17th St

Canal. (Click each of the photos to see it at its full resolution.)

Love and happy 2006 to y’all,

Rose

Low finance

Dear friends and family,

I received several emails and calls from friends who’d heard that the White House has finally declared it’s providing funding for rebuilding the levees. Bush announced a package that would cost $US3.1 billion and I know many people thought this would be good news and a relief for us here in New Orleans.

Unfortunately, it’s all a piece of political legerdemain. Neither Lillie nor I could drum up any excitement when we heard this news, despite the fanfare and the cries of welcome from local politicians.

Firstly, the $3.1 billion is a pittance when compared to the money needed to build stronger levees. Half that amount will go to rebuilding the levees to pre-Katrina standards, and we all know what a comfort that is. The other half is intended to “armour” the levees by adding gravel and concrete to the existing structures. This won’t undo the fundamental flaws in the system, just bolster the existing shoddy job. The best news is that they will close three of the canals leading from the lake. These canals are largely unused, so closing them will eliminate long tracks of suspect canal systems from the flood protection system and focus protection at three small entry points on the lakefront. The $3.1 billion also includes several million to study a stronger system for the levees. My gut feeling is this is a sop to keep us quiet, until public interest in helping New Orleans has evaporated.

Secondly, the $3.1 billion is part of money already allocated for Katrina relief. It’s not new money at all, just money in the emergency budget so far unspent. This levee money will thus take money away from other needs, such as public housing, transport, electricity vouchers for the poor during winter, and so on.

And finally, we had little hope that Congress would actually pass the bill allowing this money to flow to New Orleans. The levee money was bundled with other Katrina relief money (once again, unspent pre-allocated relief money) and then attached to a “must-pass” defence spending bill. These bills commonly attract all sorts of add-ons which people try to pass together with the bulk of the bill’s spending, and it seemed highly likely that that’s exactly what would happen with this. And that’s what has happened: the Republican senator from Alaska has attached a “green light for drilling in the Arctic” provision to the bill. This is something he’s been trying to push through for years and which would be such an environmental disaster it has been voted down even by the Republican Congress. So, he went ahead and attached it again and the Democrats filibustered to stop its passage and succeeded, thus stopping the passage of the Katrina funding, too. I have no doubt that strategists in the White House new that this is exactly the scenario that would unfold; so Bush gets to look like he’s finally doing something for New Orleans while secure in the knowledge it’s unlikely to get through Congress.

So while I do expect that money will eventually flow to levee repair, I’m sure we’ll see much more political chicanery designed to cloud the issue, so the public gets to the point of saying “What, more money for Louisiana? Didn’t we already give them a bundle?”

Someone who has at least received something from FEMA is our friend Martin, whom I wrote about earlier. He finally has a FEMA trailer which he has installed on a small piece of land at Pass Christian, 70 feet above sea level. Unfortunately, he won’t get a cent towards the contents of the trailer he lost, so he has no way to replace his possessions, and the food stamps he uses to buy groceries are about to plunge from the dizzy $69-per-month post-Katrina level down to the usual $29-per-month level. On a fixed $600/month income life’s pretty hard. He’s just qualified for Medicare, which will pay for all his medications. And he’s started a garden on his plot of land, and planted veggies and daffodils, so he can have food and beauty (he describes the garden as “English with a cowboy gay twist”).

On the money front for us, we’re heading into a battle with our flood insurance company. They sent us a “final” check for the building structure that was such a pittance it was an insult. If we accepted it, we wouldn’t even be able to pay off the balance of the mortgage, let alone repair the house. It might be enough to repair three rooms. We don’t know why they’ve offered us so little, when others on our block are being given their policy limits, but it means we have to fight them. It’s exhausting just thinking about it.

Lillie’s been very depressed. In fact, we live in a city of depressed people. It’s a very strange experience and something you have to keep in mind when doing things like shopping or driving. Almost no-one has the usual resilience you expect to find in at least some of the people you deal with on a daily basis, and so you have to take particular care and allow people their prickliness or whatever else they need to feel. In queues (we have Russian-style queues for everything!), the usual question is not “How are you today?” but “How did you fare?”. I’m astounded how frequently the response is “I lost everything”. I keep on expecting to run into the people who did okay, but they’re fairly scarce on the ground.

To cheer ourselves up, we’re off to Ginger Berrigan’s “Holiday Cheer in Chambers” this evening. Ginger is the chief judge of the Federal District Court in New Orleans, a Clinton appointee (and so one of the few Democrats on the court) and a good friend. She holds a highly idiosyncratic and over-the-top party in her chambers each year, to which an extraordinary assortment of people come: civil rights lawyers who were practicing in the ’60s; the janitorial and catering staff from the Federal Courts building; newspaper columnists, clerks of court, many judges, death penalty defence attorneys, poets, the occasional nun or two (that’s where Lillie and I first met Helen Prejean), and a generally fascinating and motley crew.

Love to you all,

Rose

All gassed up

Dear friends and family,

 

I’ve been back in New Orleans a little over a week. Yesterday the gas came on, much to our delight. Tonight we’ll move into our rented place in Mid-City and leave Lillie’s sister Jane in peace.

 

Yesterday we also managed to buy a replacement truck. Pickups (utes) are hard to come by and very expensive at the moment, because everyone wants one to fix up their place. Small trucks are particularly scarce, but we managed to track one down on the West Bank (on the south side of the river) so I'm now the proud driver of a red Mazda B2300. It has air conditioning and that's about the end of the mod cons installed, but I love it already. And now we can offer it to friends, family and neighbours to help with all the moving that’s going on.

 

I’m coming down with a cold, despite my best efforts to avoid one, so I’ll make this short. But I wanted to share the following editorial from Sunday’s New York Times with you. It echoes many of my own sentiments and those of others I’ve talked to since my return to New Orleans.

 

Love,

 

Rose

 

---------------------------
The New York Times
Editorial
Death of an American City
December 11, 2005

 

We are about to lose New Orleans. Whether it is a conscious plan to let the city rot until no one is willing to move back or honest paralysis over difficult questions, the moment is upon us when a major American city will die, leaving nothing but a few shells for tourists to visit like a museum.

 

We said this wouldn't happen. President Bush said it wouldn't happen. He stood in Jackson Square and said, "There is no way to imagine America without New Orleans." But it has been over three months since Hurricane Katrina struck and the city is in complete shambles.

 

There are many unanswered questions that will take years to work out, but one is make-or-break and needs to be dealt with immediately. It all boils down to the levee system. People will clear garbage, live in tents, work their fingers to the bone to reclaim homes and lives, but not if they don't believe they will be protected by more than patches to the same old system that failed during the deadly storm. Homeowners, businesses and insurance companies all need a commitment before they will stake their futures on the city.

 

At this moment the reconstruction is a rudderless ship. There is no effective leadership that we can identify. How many people could even name the president's liaison for the reconstruction effort, Donald Powell? Lawmakers need to understand that for New Orleans the words "pending in Congress" are a death warrant requiring no signature.

 

The rumbling from Washington that the proposed cost of better levees is too much has grown louder. Pretending we are going to do the necessary work eventually, while stalling until the next hurricane season is upon us, is dishonest and cowardly. Unless some clear, quick commitments are made, the displaced will have no choice but to sink roots in the alien communities where they landed.

 

The price tag for protection against a Category 5 hurricane, which would involve not just stronger and higher levees but also new drainage canals and environmental restoration, would very likely run to well over $32 billion. That is a lot of money. But that starting point represents just 1.2 percent of this year's estimated $2.6 trillion in federal spending, which actually overstates the case, since the cost would be spread over many years. And it is barely one-third the cost of the $95 billion in tax cuts passed just last week by the House of Representatives.

 

Total allocations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on terror have topped $300 billion. All that money has been appropriated as the cost of protecting the nation from terrorist attacks. But what was the worst possible case we fought to prevent?

 

Losing a major American city.

 

"We'll not just rebuild, we'll build higher and better," President Bush said that night in September. Our feeling, strongly, is that he was right and should keep to his word. We in New York remember well what it was like for the country to rally around our city in a desperate hour. New York survived and has flourished. New Orleans can too.

 

Of course, New Orleans's local and state officials must do their part as well, and demonstrate the political and practical will to rebuild the city efficiently and responsibly. They must, as quickly as possible, produce a comprehensive plan for putting New Orleans back together. Which schools will be rebuilt and which will be absorbed? Which neighborhoods will be shored up? Where will the roads go? What about electricity and water lines? So far, local and state officials have been derelict at producing anything that comes close to a coherent plan. That is unacceptable.

 

The city must rise to the occasion. But it will not have that opportunity without the levees, and only the office of the president is strong enough to goad Congress to take swift action. Only his voice is loud enough to call people home and convince them that commitments will be met.

 

Maybe America does not want to rebuild New Orleans. Maybe we have decided that the deficits are too large and the money too scarce, and that it is better just to look the other way until the city withers and disappears. If that is truly the case, then it is incumbent on President Bush and Congress to admit it, and organize a real plan to help the dislocated residents resettle into new homes. The communities that opened their hearts to the Katrina refugees need to know that their short-term act of charity has turned into a permanent commitment.

 

If the rest of the nation has decided it is too expensive to give the people of New Orleans a chance at renewal, we have to tell them so. We must tell them we spent our rainy-day fund on a costly stalemate in Iraq, that we gave it away in tax cuts for wealthy families and shareholders. We must tell them America is too broke and too weak to rebuild one of its great cities.

 

Our nation would then look like a feeble giant indeed. But whether we admit it or not, this is our choice to make. We decide whether New Orleans lives or dies.

 

Coming home

Dear friends and family,

After an exceedingly long flight, I’m finally home in New Orleans. Instead of my original Sydney to LA to New Orleans flight, I had to go the long way round as United no longer flies into New Orleans. So it was a trek via LA, Chicago, Houston and finally into New Orleans on Sunday. I had an overnight with Marcia and Kirk in Houston, which helped sustain me. I also had perhaps the best pair of flight attendants I’ve ever had on the LA to Chicago leg of the flight. The flight left an hour late because of snow developing in Chicago, and that meant I was almost certain to miss my Chicago-Houston connection. Luckily, we made up some time in the air and when I told the attendants I had a very tight connection, they put me in a seat beside the door to ensure I was first off the plane. As we were chatting, they discovered I was a Katrina victim and I’d lost my home, and they were instantly full of compassion and offers of assistance. One of them even gave me her card and said “If you need to get out of there for any reason, come and stay with me and my husband in Wisconsin.” And I could tell she meant it. It’s amazing how generous people can be. Anyway, not only did they see to me getting off the plane first, one of them accompanied me (running) through the airport to make sure I made the connection. There’s no doubt I would have missed it had they not done so.

After the night at Marcia and Kirk’s, I arrived in New Orleans around 6pm on Sunday, after dark. I couldn’t see much of the city from the air and driving in from the airport, Kenner and Metairie looked moderately intact. As soon as we crossed the parish line at the 17th Street Canal, the picture changed dramatically.

I’d thought I’d notice some improvement after all the work that’s been done in the past few months, and there definitely is improvement. But all that effort has accomplished has been to take the city from “almost completely devastated” to “not quite almost completely devastated”. Driving around is deeply shocking. Even in the less affected areas, there’s destruction wherever you turn. And many areas are simply wrecked. In the daylight, it looks as if Martha Stewart has come up with a new shade of paint called “Drab” and, slaves to fashion, New Orleanians have daubed it over everything. At night, driving down formerly bustling restaurant and shopping streets such as Carrollton, it’s bizarrely dark, with the supermarkets boarded up and water lines evident on many buildings. “War-torn” is the phrase that comes to mind.

Heading up to Jane’s place where we’re staying until the gas is turned on at our Mid-City apartment, there are street lights along Wisner Boulevard until the bridge over the Interstate. Once you hit the top of that bridge, there’s nothing but darkness ahead. Driving up into Lakeview is like being on a remote country road. At least some of the ducks and geese have survived, looking remarkably plump as they wander about the banks of Bayou St John, beside Wisner.

Jane’s house is in a tiny intact area within the general destruction of Lakeview. Its almost pristine state is, in some ways, harder to accept than the ruined city. In fact, anything that works or is undamaged or looks beautiful instead of ugly is unnerving. For instance, driving Lillie in to work in the CBD on Monday morning, we had to negotiate miles and miles of roads with no traffic lights. All major intersections have 4-way stop signs, and it’s important to approach with caution as people are still sussing out the appropriate behaviour at some of the larger intersections. Every now and then, there are traffic lights flashing red in all directions. Then, as we came down Canal Street across Claiborne into the heart of Downtown, a long line of functioning traffic lights stretched all the way to the river. But even here, I hesitated each time I approached an intersection, not quite trusting that the lights would work properly or that the traffic would respect them.

Even where things function, they’re not quite right. That string of 10 or so traffic signals in a line through the CBD, for example, turns green simultaneously and red simultaneously. Niceties such as synchronisation of the lights to help traffic flow are way beyond the city’s capacity or priorities. You want lights? You get lights.

Our apartment is half a double shotgun. Shotguns are a traditional form of New Orleans architecture. A single shotgun consists of a long narrow house, one room wide, with the doorways lined up so if you open them all from the front door to the back, you can shoot a gun through the openings. I haven’t tried it, mind you, but no doubt someone in this gun-toting city has. A double shotgun glues two of these houses side by side. Ours is beautiful. It has gingerbread moulding on the front porch, dark wood floors and high ceilings. The back rooms flooded during Katrina (the house being on a slant – par for the course for New Orleans), but only minimally. Our friends and landlords, Katy and Kerry, have done a huge amount of work to get the place ready for us, and Lillie did a whole lot more moving stuff in while I was in Australia.

We now have electricity, phone, Internet, cable TV and running water. We still don’t have gas, so no hot showers, cooking or heating, nor are there mail deliveries or garbage pickup. It is very cold here already, around 5 degrees Celsius as I write this, so the lack of heating is a problem. I’m working here during the days but we return to Jane’s at night for hot meals, showers and a warm bed. We’re lucky to have such pleasures, but I am really looking forward to being in our own space and finally settling down. The Entergy guys in the streets say “Gas this week”, but such promises and deadlines have already marched by consistently for several weeks at least.

Tonight, while I write this, there are four other houses showing lights on our block. With around 40 houses/apartments on the block, that 10 percent occupancy rate overnight is right on the button for the city average: 50,000 residents stay overnight, the other 50,000 who are here in the day depart to the West Bank (south of the city) or Metairie and Kenner (west of the city) at nightfall. There’s still a curfew in the city, 2am-6am in Mid-City, Downtown and several other areas, 8pm-6am in Lakeview and the other badly affected areas. Driving at night is intimidating due to the lack of lights, debris scattered all along – and sometimes across – the streets, gaping potholes, and the absence of other traffic and people. Lillie’s already succumbed to the flat-tyre epidemic that affects most drivers here, with nails and screws and other sharp debris almost impossible to avoid.

The best thing about being back is seeing friends after such a long time apart. We had dinner with our friend Andrew in a Metairie restaurant the first night I was home, and it wasn’t until I saw him coming across the carpark that I realised just how much I’d missed him. I feel the same about all the other people I’m catching up with. Reconnecting is definitely the upside.

More soon.

Love,

Rose

Gamma

Dear friends and family,

I’m a little over halfway through my time in Australia. It feels like it’s going very fast, while at the same time I’m eager to be back with Lillie, who is now in New Orleans.

Lillie moved on Friday 18th, with the assistance of her sister Laurie and brother-in-law Glenn (Ann’s husband). It all went smoothly, with the help of a little hired muscle each end. We’d bought a bunch of household stuff in Houston prior to returning home, stuff we knew would be much harder to obtain back home, and so there was a full truckload to move. On the New Orleans end, the personal trainer of one of Lillie’s colleagues helped out. He’s doing moving work and various other bits and pieces at ridiculously low rates just to help people reestablish themselves in New Orleans. Lillie told him some of the items were very heavy and would require at least two people, and he said his girlfriend would help. Lillie suggested the weight might be excessive even so, and he replied that she hadn’t seen his girlfriend. She, too, is a body builder, and evidently they make quite a team. The two of them – I keep wanting to call them Atlas and Amazonia but I know that’s not right; both names start with “A” – managed to unload the truck and put everything in the house in an hour.

So, Lillie’s back in the city, but not living in our newly rented house. That’s because while it has electricity and running water, that’s the end of the mod cons. No hot water, heating (it’s getting chilly in New Orleans now), cooling (it’s also hot in New Orleans – typical “cold season” weather, where one day the temperature is a mere fraction of the next), no mail, no phone, erratic garbage service. The city is a dust bowl, with most of the streets looking like dirt roads. Around the corner from our place, part of the side street just disappears in a chasm. And it’s so dark at night without any lights it’s not good being out.

Until we get gas on – the date is anyone’s guess – Lillie’s hanging out at her sister Jane’s, one of the few places around to have gas and electricity. One of our Mid-City neighbours managed to get herself on TV complaining about the slow pace of gas restoration in our neighbourhood, and we’re hoping that may have an impact. Entergy says it has added hundreds of workers to increase the pace of reconnections, but we’ve yet to see the evidence of this.

The city now has around 100,000 residents, a bit over a fifth of its pre-Katrina population. All our activity has a temporary feel, and that’s because the Federal Government has yet to make any solid, clear commitment to giving us decent levees. Every other aspect of rebuilding is contingent on such a commitment, so the deafening silence from a White House which promised so much in the days after Katrina is a huge obstacle.

All the news about the levees has been truly dismal. What was supposed to have been a system which could protect the city from a Category 3 hurricane has now been found to be so thoroughly flawed in its initial design that it couldn’t provide that protection at all. But then, in true New Orleans fashion, it appears that the contractors took that sub-standard design and failed to build the levees even to that defective standard. So we ended up with a bunch of concrete poured into mushy, semi-liquid soil, just waiting for a little shove from the water to shift and collapse it. In fact, it’s been discovered that the levees were flawed in “conception, design, construction and maintenance”.

Now the Feds, after saying they’d do what’s needed to get New Orleans rebuilt, are trying to find ways to weasel out of any meaningful support. One has to wonder whether the Republican White House and Congress is all that perturbed at seeing one of the few Democrat strongholds in the South beaten down and its population dispersed and nicely diluted across many electorates. They certainly don’t seem to be too keen on doing anything to help get the poor reestablished.

The excuse that people hide behind is that it’s an awful lot of money to spend on a very vulnerable city. I find the “below sea level” argument against New Orleans not particularly convincing. It’s certainly a good reason not to build a city in the first place, but it doesn’t carry the same weight when you’re talking about rebuilding a city that has been home to hundreds of thousands of people for centuries, that has a big economic value and an even larger cultural one. I’ve yet to hear anyone suggesting that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger should lead his people out of California in anticipation of the inevitable disaster that will ensue when the “big one” hits the state. After all, at least in New Orleans you can build levees to withstand very large hurricanes; no-one has yet invented the staples that can secure the west coast to the rest of the US mainland.

Of course, the $13-$20billion required to build Category 5 levees doesn’t appear such a big ask when compared to the monthly expenditures in Iraq (around $5billion/month) or the tax cuts that have gone almost exclusively to wealthy Americans (around $1.1trillion for the top few percent of individuals and for corporations over the next decade). As usual, it’s all a matter of priorities. One of the starkest examples of this is the following series of photos contrasting the New Orleans levees with their counterparts in other parts of the world:

How the British do it on the Thames:

And the Italians in Venice, with tidal gates which can be raised and lowered:

And the clearly serious-about-protection Dutch:

And, meanwhile, this is the best attempt of the US of A:

While the funding for rebuilding gets knotted up in politics, life in the city remains hard for most people, on hold for many, and unbearable for some. The paediatrician who looked after Lillie’s niece Lisa (and her brother Stephen, before her) committed suicide a few days ago, hanging himself. He leaves behind a wife, who discovered his body, and children. It’s quite possible the almost childless state of post-Katrina New Orleans was too much for him on top of all else. Whatever the reason, I find it disturbing to know that my fellow New Orleanians – this doctor is not the first suicide I’ve heard of – can no longer take it.

To top it off, the current hurricane season has set yet another record by spawning Tropical Storm Gamma, the 24th named storm of the season. Although not a hurricane, Gamma has killed a dozen people in Central America.

In the meantime, I’ve celebrated my 50th birthday and have been working hard on getting as healthy as possible prior to my return to dusty, mouldy, precarious ol’ New Orleans.

Love,

Rose

Garbage service, yay!

Dear friends and family,

I head to Australia today for a month. I’m looking forward to it a lot and also quite depressed about it. I feel anxious about being so far away from others who’ve been through the same experience I have and I hate to leave Lillie, especially as she’ll have to pack up our apartment and move back to New Orleans while I’m gone.

Fortunately, she’ll be getting help. Her sister Jane is going to come over next weekend and help her pack, and then her brother-in-law Glenn will fly over and drive the Uhaul truck while Lillie drives the car. They head to New Orleans on 17th November, my birthday.

Glenn has plenty of free time to lend a hand, as he is now unemployed. Memorial Medical Center, which has been trumpeting big plans to the media about creating a “regional medical hub” has, in fact, been terminating almost all its New Orleans employees. Glenn, as former head of IT at Memorial, has just the sort of skills they need for rebuilding, especially as he had first-hand experience of Katrina’s effects on the hospital’s systems. But there doesn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason to the company’s plans. They appear to be mostly concerned about giving the appearance they care about New Orleans while abandoning the place. The lack of hospitals is going to be one of the big problems for the city.

Jane is the only one of Lillie’s family who has been able to return to her house. She had damage to her roof and pool, but miraculously escaped flooding in her home. This is amazing, as Jane lives right near the lake and we’ve all always expected she’d be the first to go if a bad hurricane hit. In fact, houses just the other end of Jane’s street were flooded, but not hers. Her place has electricity and gas, which places her in an elite group.

Of the rest of Lillie’s family, Laurie’s house was a single-storey in Lakeview, so it was completely flooded. She’s going through the same process of trying to figure out what she can salvage. Her boyfriend Greg’s house is a couple of blocks away, and it was flooded and shifted on the foundations. Ann, Glenn and Lisa’s house had several feet of water in it, so they’re going through the gutting process but don’t have to worry about whether it will need to be torn down. Lillie’s dad, Lloyd’s house was badly flooded in the basement (it’s really a half basement – true basements are not something you find in a city which is already below sea level) and he had to gut it for the first time ever. In the past, he’s usually just pumped out the water, cleaned things up and been fine; but not this time. Unkie (Lloyd’s brother Lionel) didn’t get flooded but lost part of his roof and so his ceilings caved in. And Lillie’s Aunt Norma’s place was badly flooded – it still has water in it because it has a sunken tile floor section – and may have to be torn down.

That’s one of the things that’s so hard: it’s bad enough when one member of a family suffers a major loss, but at least you can usually turn to the others for support. Katrina, though, has affected us all and while we still turn to one another for support, everyone is stressed, tired and anxious.

I do have some great news… garbage service will commence in New Orleans next week. The lack of it has been one of our worries about moving back home. It will be on a limited basis, with restrictions on the amount you can put out, but it’s a start. I’m not sure what’s going to happen with the backlog of garbage, and of course debris removal is another thing altogether, but we’re delighted to have any service at all.

Getting other services is trickier. Our apartment does have electricity and we’re hoping the gas will be connected within a couple of weeks of Lillie’s arrival there. Cox, our Internet service company, does not even answer its sales lines. Lillie has spent hours on hold without ever getting a response. BellSouth, our phone company, did answer her call and was happy to take her order for service. They even offered to connect us to their DSL high-speed Internet service as an alternative to Cox. When Lillie asked when, they said March 24th. She said “That’s for the Internet service” “Oh no, that’s for the phone service as well.”

Mail is going to be a major problem. There are no deliveries to most of the city, although you can go and pick up mail at a central depot. We’re going to use Lillie’s law firm’s address for much of our mail, as the CBD has mail service. Fedex seems to be up and running, but UPS has very restricted deliveries. Unfortunately, the post office has made it almost impossible for us to set up forwarding addresses for all our mail, because they’ve just this month introduced a system which requires you to submit a $1 credit card payment so they can use the credit card billing address to validate your information. The trouble is, the system does not allow for those who may have moved several times within a couple of months (most of the Katrina evacuees), as the credit card address database only gets updated every 30 days. It’s almost as if the post office introduced the scheme deliberately to frustrate Katrina victims. At least, that’s the result.

We had to cancel our electricity service at our home in Lakeview in order to get Entergy, the electricity company, to read the meter. What prompted that was a sizeable electricity bill we received for the month of September, the month after Katrina. When Lillie rang to ask why we were being charged when there was no electricity service, she was informed that Entergy estimates usage rather than charging you for actual usage, and that the September bill was a “catch up” for the shortfall in previous estimates. When Lillie asked when was the last time they bothered to read the meter, the reply was “June”, and they told her to expect at least one more electricity bill. Some of Lillie’s colleagues are paying as much as $800/month for this phantom estimated electricity usage. Anyway, we figured out the only way to get a valid meter reading and bill was to cancel the account, in order to force them to read the meter. As we don’t expect electricity to be available in Lakeview for six months or so, it seemed the sensible thing to do. We’ve asked our building contractor, who is currently gutting our house, to read the meter herself, so we can ensure that Entergy’s final reading is not something they conjure up.

We still spend a huge amount of time dealing with this sort of stuff and I don’t think it will diminish when we return to NO.

I wanted to give you an update on my friend Martin, who lost his trailer in Mississippi during Katrina and holed out in a barn with his animals. I’ve talked with him a number of times on the phone. He’s doing appreciably better, but is still in a pretty bad situation. He’s still in the barn. He has some electricity, a small refrigerator, no air conditioning. He received assistance from FEMA and from the Red Cross (on the third try) and FEMA has said he can have a trailer for 18 months. The hurdle is finding a place for the trailer. He can’t get the trailer until he has a place with power and water hookups and because of all his animals, he’s not welcome in the trailer parks being set up. So he’s been trying to find a piece of land to rent with the hookups. Life’s a pretty tough grind for him, but his animals are a solace.

Love,

Rose

Not immediately hazardous

Dear friends and family,

It’s been almost a fortnight since my last email. After the salvage trip, emotional exhaustion set in in a big way, so I’ve been indulging myself by putting off anything non-essential.

Although things have settled down a little, life remains very far from normal. In fact, none of us really expects ever to return to a “normal life”. Although people have started trickling back into Orleans Parish, the situation there right now is grim, the short-term prospects are dim, and the long-term prognosis, given a whole lot of luck, is that the city will eventually grow to about half the size it used to be. Picture that in local terms (Sydney, the Blue Mountains, Portland…wherever you are) and you’ll get some idea of the enormity of what we’re facing.

We’re certainly heading back. Lillie’s law firm has already reopened its New Orleans office and will be closing the temporary Houston outpost in December. So, while I head to Australia for a break in November, Lillie will be packing up our apartment and moving us back to Louisiana. I’ll fly out of Houston to Australia on November 5th, then return directly to New Orleans early in December. It’s an unsettling prospect. In the meantime, we need to see if we can get someone to take over our lease here in Houston, as we had to sign a 7-month lease to get the place.

In New Orleans, we’ll be renting half a duplex from our friend Katy. We’re really happy to be getting this place. It’s in Mid-City, one of the most mixed of New Orleans neighbourhoods, with a lot of character and a sense of community. The house we’ll be in is lovely. It had a little flooding just in the back rooms (having a typical New Orleans slant to the building), and the electrical wiring had to be completely redone. But apart from that, the building did well.

Lots of Mid-City suffered extensively through flooding, but it’s not the total desolation of our old neighbourhood or places further east. Katy and Kerry, who live one street over, didn’t get flooded at all.

While the houses in Mid-City on the whole fared better than Lakeview, the infrastructure is shot to hell. Much of Mid-City now has electricity, but only tiny pockets have gas service, because the gas mains were flooded and they’re still trying to pump water out of the system. Other utilities are just as bad: few places have phone service or the Internet. There are no mail deliveries – you can pick up mail by going to one of the few open mail centres, but deliveries even to the central locations are highly erratic – and the garbage is still piled high.

We’re hoping some of this changes before we get there. I’ll be especially thankful if we have garbage collection. At the moment, the city is one giant refuse tip. The neutral ground dump site near our place in Lakeview, which two weeks ago contained nothing but mountains of trees and several hundred cars, is now piled four storeys high with mouldy mattresses and furniture and appliances. Thank goodness we’re heading into Winter, because if Summer were approaching the city would be completely unlivable.

As it is, even the “good” parts are pretty bad. Our friend Andrew, whose firm forced him to move back into the city last weekend, is living near the French Quarter, one of the parts least affected by floodwater and supposedly swinging back into action, if you swallow the news reports. Andrew’s first email from New Orleans gives a different slant:

Well today was a big day, I had a hot shower this morning.  Not because there was hot water at the apartment but because I remembered that there is a shower here at the office.

I have now been back in New Orleans three days and I will say it is grimmer than I expected.  I wanted to come back very badly but the reality is something else.  Even in the French Quarter which everyone holds up as a model of recovery is a ghost town.  I walked home at 5 yesterday and there wasn’t any one on the streets except at the A&P.  The reason people were there is because it is one of the few grocery stores open to buy food at.  I would say about 90% of the businesses downtown are still closed.  The mountains of trash everywhere are depressing and the flies are overwhelming.  I gave in and brushed my teeth with tap water today. 

The media and the Mayor’s Office keep focusing on the bars reopening on Bourbon Street and the nightlife returning to the Quarter. What they fail to mention is that this activity is restricted largely to relief workers, while actual residents are still scarce on the ground. With an 8pm-6am curfew throughout Orleans Parish except for the French Quarter, no-one even goes out to dinner. Andrew said he stays at home, not merely because of the early closing and the lack of restaurants open, but also because the streets are unsafe. There are no streetlights and no traffic lights, except for very limited areas of downtown. Kerry reports the same thing in Mid-City: the only places opening are bars, while open restaurants and shops of any sort are hard to find. No petrol stations, no place to buy milk or bread, no chemists, no doctors.

There are other perils, too. For example, there’s a plague of flat tyres, because screws and nails from battered houses litter the roadways. Service stations, most of them in neighbouring parishes, spend their whole days fixing flats.

We’re also still concerned about the toxicity of the city. The Environmental Protection Agency keeps giving “nothing to worry about” press conferences, but its credibility is less than stellar.

Take this quote from Dana Tulis, deputy director of the EPA Office of Emergency Management, who says the agency’s role “continues to evolve” in response to cues from the policymakers: “The locals are making the decisions, and we're trying to provide them with the best data we can.”

In other words, they’re doing what the Bush Administration has taught them to do: Give government what they want to hear. Over the years of the Bush Administration, the EPA has been reduced almost to being a rubber stamp for developers; so, just as the CIA provided the administration with the “evidence” it wanted to hear about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, so, too, does the EPA on the environmental front.

The EPA, for example, has deemed the chemical concentrations it has found not “immediately hazardous to human health.” Hmm…but what about in the long term? Evidently the EPA’s air sampling has registered levels of benzene that are way below the 24-hour acute exposure limit; that is, levels which are not immediately hazardous. But for a two-week exposure, those same measurements are hazardous. So, it’s safe for fully protected salvage workers, but as for residents…

It’s all part of the haste to rebuild. Instead of taking things slowly, making sure the city really is safe, planning the infrastructure, getting work started on really solid levee protection, providing solid information flow to residents (trustworthy, non-conflicting information is an appallingly scare commodity), there’s this urgent “come back, start up your business, get to work, rebuild” pressure.

The city, of course, is in a real bind. The mayor had to sack 3000 employees and more sackings could follow. With no residents and half the housing gone, the tax base has evaporated. Companies are trying to start up, but there are no workers, and with no housing there’s nowhere for workers to live anyway. It’s a sorry circular mess.

Of course, decisive action by the federal government could put a whole different complexion on things. How different things would be if Bush had said: “We’ll pick up the whole tab for the first year; rebuild the levees and public hospitals; get your schools back running; help develop a transportation infrastructure; fund public employees. Do all the things we all so clearly recognised needed doing as we watched the images in the week following Katrina. Then after the first year, let’s see how we can be partners in the redevelopment.”

Of course, nothing of the sort is forthcoming. The words poverty and race have once more disappeared from the administration’s vocabulary and I think the whole Republican Party has remembered that, after all, New Orleans is a Democrat stronghold.

Not that I’ve been impressed with the Democrats either, although it’s good to hear John Edwards (John Kerry’s far more impressive running mate in the last presidential elections) consistently focusing on “the two Americas” and the huge opportunity presented to us by Katrina to confront entrenched poverty and racism.

In amongst it all, people are being people, and New Orleans people are being typically New Orleans. This Times Picayune photo of two brothers walking along City Park Avenue (near where we’ll be living) with electric guitars and battery operated amplifiers strapped to their backs is just one example of that.

Love,

Rose

The salvage trip - Part II

(continued from previous post...)

The next day, we started early because the gang of five workmen organised by our contractor, Julie was due on our doorstep at 8am, to be followed soon after by what passed for an insurance adjuster. Julie, by the way, also lives in Lakeview so her house is equally damaged; we shared the workmen and moving van with her.

This was a really hard day, but we had a huge amount of help: Lillie’s sisters Jane and Laurie, Laurie’s boyfriend Greg, our friends Katy, Kerry, Nat and Treschelle and their friends Mal and Sadie, and the five workmen. We’d never met Sadie before and only know Mal a little. Their single-storey house had been completely destroyed, and there they were spending the whole day working in the mouldy awful downstairs for us. I was so overwhelmed with making decisions upstairs I barely even said hello to any of the girls and they left before I had a chance to say goodbye, after having done a huge amount of work for us.

I think the very hardest moment was when I walked upstairs, with all the blokes following me and waiting for work to keep them occupied, and had to make the first decision. The day consisted of decision after decision after decision: can I keep this? does it smell too bad? can it be cleaned? where should it be stored? if we keep it, will we ever have a place to put it? On and on, trying to ensure people weren’t hanging around waiting for me to make up my mind.

It took about five hours just to pack up my office. I managed to salvage my computers and I know that at least one of them is working – not sure about the others. I also salvaged some software, some books (not too many, as they smelled so bad and I feared they’d turn mouldy after months in storage), a few photos (most of the albums were downstairs), and my files. I tossed out about two-thirds of my clothes.

Lillie was going through the same process in the other rooms upstairs, while the girls took apart our beds and marched them outside and, downstairs, went through the unbroken glassware to see what could be saved. Laurie took that away to drench in an ammonia bath to decontaminate it and then wash and store.

Apart from the glassware and some plates, everything else downstairs was a write off. We couldn’t even get into the downstairs bathroom or the large closet off the den because the doors were so warped.

In amongst the devastation there were some really odd touches. A pottery bowl containing onions and garlic had floated from the kitchen into the sunroom and deposited itself neatly on the tile floor, with the onions looking almost edible. A bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin and a tea canister had settled side by side on the kitchen floor, standing upright with a Mardi Gras king cake baby lying in front of them (the king cake baby is a little plastic doll that’s baked inside the cakes traditionally eaten during Mardi Gras; whoever gets the piece of cake containing the baby has to buy the next king cake). The big fridge must have floated the whole time, with the heavy bottom underwater but the top and front above, so all the fridge magnets and attached photos were intact.

The best things about these really hard days were getting to see our wonderful neighbours, including Jane, Al, Nancy and Babs (who lost her thriving day-care centre on the corner of our street as well as her home), and the willing help we got from so many people. If we do all manage to rebuild in our neighbourhood, we will have a unique bond.

On the negative side was the sorry excuse for an insurance adjuster whose first words to Lillie were “Nice tree” and first words to me when he came upstairs “Oh, this is just fine.” In the midst of the destruction, it was grossly trivialising. He also fobbed Lillie off when she asked about demolishing the place and said “Get quotes on gutting the first floor.” I guess having a wooden structure that’s been sitting in sewerage and chemical laden water for weeks doesn’t make a blip on the insurance radar. Fortunately, a conversation with the uber-adjuster several days later gave us more hope.

Insurance is one of the hot-button topics in New Orleans these days, and surely will be for a long time to come. Some companies and individual adjusters are being fair; others are clearly out to argue every cent. Most of them will avoid having to pay replacement value because the damage was caused by flooding and not wind; the latter is covered by replacement-cost homeowner’s insurance, the former by government-capped flood insurance. Nancy, across the street, suffered both flood and wind damage, making her one of the fortunate ones. When she heard we had no wind damage to speak of, she commiserated. A homeowner’s adjuster told our friend Judith that they’d pay for water damage from her missing roof “down to the four-foot mark”, but that up to that mark they refused to pay.

The end result of this is we all end up having to deal with multiple companies who toss responsibility back and forth and gather in our monthly premiums on unlivable houses while delaying payouts.

My pickup truck, by the way, was nowhere to be seen when we arrived on Friday. We didn’t know whether it had been stolen for parts or taken by the insurance company’s salvage people. A few days later we learnt it was the latter.

We returned to Reserve on Saturday night having farmed out bags and bags of clothes to be aired and then laundered by various generous members of Lillie’s extended family. Sunday, we took the day off and spent time with Lillie’s relos.

On Monday, I persuaded Lillie to return to New Orleans once more before flying out in the afternoon. I had a really strong urge to go back there, partly because I knew I wouldn’t see it again for months and partly because Friday and Saturday had been so consumed with working and decision making and numbness that I felt I hadn’t really allowed myself to take it all in.

So we headed back in and drove and walked around our neighbourhood. We went up Bellaire Drive, two blocks west of us, which runs alongside the 17th Street Canal, and went all the way to the breach in the levee. Several blocks from the breach we encountered a collapsed house which had floated all the way down the road. Mud was piled 6-8 feet high, cars were hanging in trees, houses cracked open. At the breach itself, all the houses were missing, including a house Lillie and I had contemplated buying before we ended up in our place on 22nd Street. There was a newly formed lake by the levee, with three ducks floating around in blissful ducky oblivion. Fleur de Lis Park was a shambles, with most of the beautiful live oaks knocked to the ground or dying upright.

We ended up travelling back down Ponchartrain to Harrison, the street one over from us, where we sought out C. Ray and George at our petrol station, Fleur de Lis Car Care. There they were, cleaning up their completely ruined business, intending to open again in four months. We got big sweaty hugs and kisses from both of them.

Parked at Fleur de Lis was a Salvation Army prayer and meal station, with a bunch of Northerner volunteers handing out 600-800 meals a day. We had already had encounters with the Red Cross, who gave us water and offered us food; FEMA volunteers, who handed us brochures about Federal assistance and offered to answer questions to which, they said, “we have no answers”; and a National Guard troop from New Jersey. The guardsmen came down our street on Saturday in a truck, stopped outside Nancy’s place when they saw that the American flag and marine flag outside her place had become entwined (her late husband was a marine). Out they got, untangled the flags, then chatted with us and gave us more water. There’s nothing that drives home the sense of being a disaster victim more than being on the receiving end of all this official and volunteer aid.

Leaving was really hard, despite the dreadfulness of what we saw. Lillie is heartbroken to be away from her family again, and we’ve both been very depressed since our return to Houston. Our trip home gave me a real understanding of how big this is, both personally and for my city. The extent of the devastation is mind-numbing, with areas that were not so badly hit mere pockets in a ruined city.

The people, though, are amazing. We experienced a whole lot of support and love and ironic laughter (our lunch breaks amidst the piles of debris were particularly tickling in their own sorry way). I’d like to live with these people again.

Love,

Rose