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 17th St
Love and happy 2006 to y’all,
Rose
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