New Orleans – It was warm for January, even here. Wood ducks were paddling idly on the algae-covered ponds. A few golfers were playing winter rules on the dormant grass. People were walking their dogs, running or biking. A Norman Rockwell moment if there ever was one.
But something was not quite right. It was too quiet, too funereal. There was almost a respectful hush.
I was at Audubon Park, one of this city’s many lush, greenspace gems. There should have been more people – many more people – than there were on the Sunday before Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
Audubon Park is in the so-called Garden District, across St. Charles Avenue from Tulane and Loyola universities. The site of many of the city’s plushest mansions, the Garden District was barely scathed by Hurricane Katrina when it ravaged this city last Aug. 29.
Like the famous French Quarter, the Garden District is hard by the Mississippi River, and this is what saved it from the worst. The land is simply higher here than anywhere else in the city, and that elevation protected the area from the water that was blown from Lake Pontchartrain up the drainage canals. When the canal levees failed to hold, the storm-pushed water rushed into homes and businesses, covering 80 percent of the city with anywhere from just inches to 10 feet and more.
For perspective, Denver and New Orleans are of similar size, according to the 2000 Census: Denver’s population was at 554,636 with a land area of about 153 square miles; New Orleans was at 484,674 and about 180 square miles. A similar catastrophe here would have been somewhat like leaving LoDo and Downtown Denver high and dry, but flooding the entire rest of the city.
We all saw TV footage of New Orleans immediately following the storm. We saw people rescued from their rooftops. We saw people by the tens of thousands trying to survive in horrendous conditions at the Superdome and the Convention Center.
Since the storm, we have also seen politicians pointing their fingers at one another. We’ve seen the government at all levels drag its feet. We’ve heard city fathers arguing with their constituents about the best way to rebuild and what the city will look like when they do.
In a drive through the city, what you don’t see is much of a physical effort to get that rebuilding started.
Driving into New Orleans from Alabama, you begin to see signs of the storm almost immediately. Some highway signs are atilt, and the occasional blue tarp can be seen on some buildings. The closer you get to New Orleans, the damage becomes more severe. On the interstate, you can’t see the devastation the storm caused communities on Mississippi’s coast, but you know it’s there.
On the eastern edge of New Orleans lies St. Bernard Parish. Filled mostly with middle-income residents, it’s the usual suburban blend of modest subdivisions, strip malls, mom-and-pop stores, restaurants, banks and the occasional government building or bank.
“Down the road,” or farther into the parish, which abuts the Mississippi River, are little settlements devoted mostly to shrimp and oyster boat fleets. These are places with names like Delacroix Island, Violet, Yscloskey and Shell Beach. They simply don’t exist anymore. All the levees broke out there, and the communities were washed away.
But closer to New Orleans, near the now-famous Ninth Ward, the subdivisions in Chalmette and Arabi still exist – sort of. The houses are there, but they are unlivable – virtually all of them – as are the local food market and the bank, the post office and driver’s license bureau.
It’s next to impossible to describe the destruction. For one thing, TV does not prepare you for the scope of the tragedy. You cannot get in two dimensions – height and length – what the third dimension, depth, can give you.
There is no sense of scale, and it is the scope of this tragedy that hits home. Mile after mile, neighborhood after neighborhood, as far as you can see, there is absolute tragedy.
It’s eerily quiet. There are no dogs barking or children laughing while playing on nicely kept lawns or riding bicycles on the cul-de-sacs. There are very few cars, which is probably good because most of the traffic signals are inoperable. The area is utterly deserted.
The signs of tragedy are pervasive. “HELP – 8 SOULS” is spray-painted in big letters on a rooftop in Chalmette. There is a big X painted on every house indicating that the property had been searched and whether people were pulled from the house dead or alive.
What isn’t so apparent is how they can be sure that no one was left inside. It was reported recently that more than 3,200 people are still unaccounted for, and the Louisiana state medical examiner said he wants the search to resume for those missing from the most devastated areas.
From the looks of the debris inside the houses, where belongings were tossed about like so many corks and grass and mud from the outside were pushed in, it will be a herculean task to search many of the buildings.
It’s easy for the scope of the devastation to overwhelm you during a drive through town. And with no one around, putting a human touch on the tragedy is elusive. But then you see personal belongings, like a child’s teddy bear, dangling in a tree, or a tricycle mangled in the mud, or a photograph lying in the middle of a street, and the reality sinks in. The human suffering is immense. Each of the thousands of homes and businesses that you see represent lives that are forever changed.
And the sense of disaster does not change as you leave St. Bernard and head into New Orleans proper. Traveling from the eastern part of the city to the western suburbs of Kenner and Metairie, with a detour to the north toward Lake Pontchartrain, pretty well covers the city.
Some of the things you see defy belief. There is the brick house that has been moved in one piece, including about 18 inches of concrete foundation, into the middle of a street. There are the eight or nine houses that once were about 10 feet apart, but which now are all touching. Cars are standing on end, boats are on rooftops and metal sheds are everywhere, usually in one piece.
In the area near the London Avenue Canal breach, dried mud is about 4 feet deep in houses and yards where it settled after the water went down.
And everywhere is the smell, an almost primal odor of decay, of mud and garbage and chemicals and who knows what else.
The people who are living on the fringe of the area, either in motels, on cruise ships, with friends and family or in the tiny FEMA trailers, wake up every day to the same misery they faced the day before. And from the looks of things, they will be facing the same unrelenting challenges for some time to come. It takes a strength that most of us don’t realize we have.
There are those who say this happened because God was angry at New Orleans. If so, here’s hoping he got it out of his system.
This is a city that likes to party; likes to laugh. There isn’t much of either going on at the moment. And that’s a crying shame.
Tom Walker graduated from St. Bernard High School in New Orleans in 1967 and still has several family members in the area.
