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