Dear friends and family,
I thought I’d get this email written as soon as I returned from New Orleans, but it’s been really hard to start it. Since the trip home, I feel I’ve moved from the first phase post-Katrina in which numbness and shock predominated, to the second post-Katrina phase, where I am much more in touch with how truly awful it all feels. It’s good to move on past the numbness, but neither comfortable nor easy.
What the salvage trip really helped me to realise is the huge scale of the devastation, far beyond what words or photos or video footage can hope to convey. That’s probably the main reason I’ve hesitated putting it down in words.
We left Houston on Friday morning. Our newfound Houston friend, Marcia, gave us a lift to Hobby Airport, much appreciated because it meant we didn’t have to navigate peak-hour Houston traffic on the dreaded Loop. Walking up to our gate in the airport was the start of the strangeness. While everyone else was busy catching regular flights, here was this group of people at our gate, each one with a story. It was easy to tell the correct gate by the lack of children, the weary looks and the way so many strangers were talking to one another.
New Orleans airport had recovered a little over the past week, with a couple of concourses open and a few stores, too, but it still shows many signs of the damage. There was almost no water pressure at all in the bathrooms, but all the taps were leaking.
Lillie’s sister Jane picked us up and we drove straight into town. The airport is located in Kenner in Jefferson Parish, to the west of Orleans Parish (from west to east the main suburbs go Kenner, Metairie, New Orleans, St Bernard, with Katrina hitting the east side worst). Even before we’d landed, signs of devastation were evident well to the west of the airport, with thousands of trees blown flat in the swamps and a huge dump site right at the edge of the airport. From the air we could see thousands of blue temporary roofs, with many areas around 50 percent blue roofed.
Driving in on I10, there were battered buildings, fences down, trees snapped. Once across the parish line at the 17th Street Canal, though, it was an entirely different picture. Instead of pockets of devastation, it was complete and utter ruin. The colour was a pervasive dun. The once beautiful neutral ground between West End and Ponchartrain Boulevards – a park stretching about 100 yards by a couple of miles, where I used to fly my kites and hundreds of people walked and biked and skated – was gravelled over and filled with a massive dump site about 30 or 40 feet tall, full of dead trees and woodchip piles and totalled cars. Along West End, house after house after house was smashed or severely scarred.
Just getting to our street, which runs straight off Ponchartrain, was a feat. We had to wind our way around the dump site and various road closures. When we turned onto 22nd, it looked particularly bad. Our neighbour Nancy’s large saw-toothed oaks had fallen right across the street into our front yard, bringing power poles and lines with them and crushing cars beneath. Almost every tree and pole in the street was either down or leaning dangerously. Almost all the trees were dead, except for some of the live oaks, which once again proved that they are truly magnificent creatures.
When Jane stopped the car as far down the street as we could go, I could see Nancy in her yard so I jumped out immediately and rushed over and hugged her. Lillie sat in the car with Jane and cried for several minutes. Then we got started.
We walked up the driveway coated in shingles of mud. The front porch looked battered but the most striking damage outside was in the backyard. There the shed, absolutely jam-packed with tools and furniture including all the stuff we’d put in their before we evacuated, had moved four or five feet from the fence. Branches and other debris littered the whole of the yard. The lawn – highly admired by all because it is so hard to get grass to grow under a live oak – was the familiar dun colour and brittle. The large wooden deck had floated up, pulling its foundations out of the ground, and the live oak, although alive and green, had a decided tilt, with its outer branches sweeping the ground, where before they’d floated a couple of feet higher. We still have no idea whether the tree will live.
By this time Lillie’s other sisters, Laurie and Ann, and Ann’s husband Glenn had arrived to help. So we donned what everyone’s wearing in Lakeview these days: boots, coveralls, respirator masks, gloves and goggles. Jane gave Lillie and me tetanus shots (handy having an anesthetist – or, anesthesiologist as they’re called here – in the family) and then we tried to get in the front door. That proved impossible, so we went around the back and tried there. We had difficulty removing the hurricane shutter on the back door because it was jammed in by the raised deck, but we managed and got the door itself open without too much trouble.
Glenn went in first and cleared some of the furniture out of the way. We located one of the hurricane shutter poles and started raising the shutters – fortunately all but one manual, not electric – to let in some light.
Everything was gloomy and greenish grey, the floor covered in an incredibly slick and dangerous coating of slime, the walls covered in mould from the 5-6 foot water level up to a little below the ceiling, with mould across most of the ceilings. Furniture was all over the place, some of it two rooms from where we’d left it. The smell of the mould, even through our respirators, was almost overwhelming.
The fridge was on its backside with the door mercifully shut. Still, I think the virtues of vegetarianism paid off, because we were not greeted with the sort of stench, flies and maggots that many meat eaters have encountered.
Lillie and Glenn ventured down the hall into the den, first removing the sofa that had floated into the hallway, and then Glenn made his way to the front door where he found the reason it wouldn’t open: the floor boards had warped and blocked it completely.
It was still almost completely dark inside, and venturing up the stairs was surreal and frightening. The mould stopped about halfway up, but we had no idea what we’d encounter and walking up there with a lantern was eerie. Fortunately, the upstairs was mostly untouched, although the smell was awful and mould had wormed its way onto some items. We immediately recovered the three things we cared about most: Lillie’s mama’s jewellery, a hand-painted photo of my mum aged 6, and my favourite tech toy, a Canon digital SLR camera. I was delighted when I switched on the camera and it started up, with a full battery and empty memory card. I started taking photos straight away for the insurance company and for our own record. I’ve created a slideshow of these photos, from all three days we were in New Orleans. I almost hesitate to share the photos because they make everything look so sanitised and, well, manageable.
That first day we salvaged a few more of our most precious items from upstairs, tried to assess what could and couldn’t be saved, cleared pathways and cleaned up some of the slime so the work crew the following day could get in and out safely. We were extremely fortunate that the temperature had dropped 15 degrees Fahrenheit from the mid-nineties where it had been for weeks and weeks, and there was a stiff breeze. By the end of that first 5-hour stint, much of the floor had dried out. Those same conditions, however, dried up the mud in the streets, turning it into contaminated dust, so we needed our masks outside just as much as within.
It took Glenn almost two hours to get the front door open enough for us to take furniture out. In the end, a bloke who’d come to cut through the trees blocking the street had to cut through a few boards with his chainsaw to finish the job.
We stayed the night with Lillie’s aunt Olga and uncle Johnny in Reserve, about 35 miles away. The traffic exiting New Orleans was bumper to bumper because there was an 8pm curfew (moved up from 6pm a few days earlier).
(to be continued...)
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