New Orleans – They are signature scenes of the city: tourists on Bourbon Street, diners savoring breakfast at Brennan’s, revelers dancing at Tipitina’s, and crowds at the street fairs and music festivals.
Almost 11 months after Hurricane Katrina struck, these scenes suggest the city is “back.”
But most New Orleanians are stuck in a different scene, one set against a backdrop of moldy sheet rock, plywood, broken tiles and twisted metal that still litter some median strips for miles at a stretch, or the scene in which every available park or defunct strip mall has become a FEMA trailer city.
Much attention has been paid to the storm’s death toll and massive property destruction, but what is remarkable today is how much everyday life in this city has changed.
People make their homes in temporary lodging that offers scant stability or the familiarity their belongings would bring.
The market where they shopped: closed. The schools their children attended: still shuttered and empty. Lifelong bonds with cherished neighbors have been broken; in many neighborhoods there are few neighbors left. In their version of life in New Orleans, people wonder how their lives will feel normal again.
Marie Benoit, 52, feels the disjunction between the New Orleans the world wants to see and the one she lives in.
“They saw carnival. They saw Jazz Fest. They think everything is OK. ‘Get over it; it’s over,”‘ said Benoit, an elementary school teacher sent into premature retirement by Katrina.
Her house remains a pile of rubble in the city’s Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood. “But it’s not over.”
In fact, it’s far from over.
Although power has been restored to most of the city, in severely ravaged neighborhoods, street after street remain dark after sundown.
One source of daily shared frustration is a constant and ugly eyesore: the mountains of storm debris. Despite a cleanup effort by government agencies that has removed 17.6 million pounds of waste, the city’s unintended new emblem is a pile of storm debris.
“If you’re not in the French Quarter, you live with trash, blighted houses and abandoned cars,” said Patricia Meyer, who was flooded out of her home in the Bywater neighborhood. “There isn’t one person who isn’t touched by the devastation and the lack of assistance in cleaning it up.”
