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
Comments