New Orleans – The last neighborhood in New Orleans that had remained closed after Hurricane Katrina reopened Thursday, with some residents of the Lower Ninth Ward saying they planned to abandon the area and others vowing to rebuild.
Residents were allowed in for the day to gather what belongings they could. Until now, people had been able to view the destruction only on bus tours. Residents still cannot stay in the neighborhood, which has no electrical power.
“This is all I know, right here,” Palazzolo Simmons said as he stepped onto the sidewalk from the roof of a collapsed house he shared with his mother until Katrina hit Aug. 29. Simmons said he would rebuild.
The Lower Ninth Ward was the last section of the city to reopen, owing to the destruction wrought by the storm and floods after the London Avenue Canal levee breach.
Darlana Green said floodwaters carried her house off its foundation while she and her two children remained inside. She scoffed at Mayor C. Ray Nagin’s public pronouncements that he wants all evacuees to come home.
“Come home to what?” she said. She and her husband recognized the heap of debris that used to be the family’s home only after spotting their children’s Spider-Man bedsheets and trick-or-treat bucket amid the wreckage.
“We just came for a little closure, just to see,” said Vandell Smith, standing in his front yard with his wife, Terri, and looking at what was left of their barely upright home. They could salvage nothing from inside – the wood-and-brick building was too rickety to enter.
“It’ll be bulldozed, and we’ll move on,” said Smith, who said his family had already planned to move to a safer neighborhood on the west bank of the Mississippi River even before the storm.
Before the hurricane, some residents had decried growing violent crime in the Ninth Ward, which has long had a reputation as one of the city’s most dangerous areas. Green said she saw a gunshot victim lying on the ground near her house about a week before the storm.
Others were determined to stay. “This is where you’re from,” Michael Merricks, 18, said as he tossed salvageable clothing from the second story of his family’s flood-ravaged home down to his mother and sister.
