Like many people who volunteered in the New Orleans area since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated the Gulf Coast three years ago, I eyed Hurricane Gustav with particular trepidation. Before Gustav, New Orleans had — for most people — slipped into a crevice of compassion fatigue.
But my empathy got a jolt this spring, when I tagged along with group from the American Osteopathic Association to provide doctors at a free clinic and laborers at two homes in St. Bernard Parish.
The Parish lies next to the Lower Ninth Ward, just outside New Orleans proper. There’s not much proper about the perilous situation there in the wake of the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history. After the 2005 hurricanes, officials deemed 100 percent of the houses in the parish uninhabitable. Many residents never returned.
Gustav evacuated nearly 2 million people and left 800,000 people without power, which could take up to two weeks to repair. As I breathed a relative sigh of relief, I remembered my visit and the vestiges of devastation remaining, sights impossible to imagine without witnessing them firsthand.
Bused from the French Quarter to St. Bernard Parish, we passed rows of house foundations like tombstones in a sprawling cemetery. We learned that after Katrina’s storm surge, between 2 and 28 feet of water stood for 13 days. Most residents in the parish had no flood insurance. Many people lacked medical insurance, as well.
We ended up on Reunion Street, at the shell of a small brick home undergoing slow repairs reliant on volunteer labor. My friend Mary Jo and I migrated outside to clean up the back yard. Gathering shards of glass from the grass, I noticed blackish, oval things — pecans from a nearby tree, distorted and blackened by the salt water.
Mary Jo and I hatched a plan to provide a touch of beauty in the midst of the post-hurricane ugliness — sort of a Gardeners Without Borders effort. With the help of a driver named Nick (also a gardener), who took us to a nearby nursery, Mary Jo and I planted Indian hawthorns flanking red shrub roses, and variegated Aztec grasses.
Diana, a stout and stern African-American, looked over our shoulders, hands on her hips. “I been watching, and you did all that in about 30 minutes. You put something beautiful in all this,” she said, adding, “And they say we got no power.”
That evening, I ate gumbo with the parish coroner, who explained that after Katrina, survivors dealt with other unnatural surges including mold, dust, pollen, and rampant poison ivy that bolted, nourished by delta mud. Snakes and rats showed up everywhere. All the birds flew away, which allowed the blood-sucking fly, mosquito, ant and termite populations to explode. Wild cats and dogs — one estimate is 70,000 — roamed.
That night, as hard rain fell, I pictured the local oak leaves unfurling for the first time in three years. Then I thought of the mighty Mississippi rising with rain and the miles of levees still requiring repair, and the stew of global warming, rising seas, stronger hurricanes, weakened floodwalls, systemic political corruption.
Before Gustav had landed, Hurricanes Hanna and Ike were beginning to swirl. The unpredictable hurricane season runs through November. Outside the French Quarter and the Garden District, there’s not much easy about the Big Easy, sinking, literally, and living with the sinking feeling that engineering never trumps nature.
Colleen Smith, a Denver-based freelance writer, contributes regularly to The Denver Post.
