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
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