The Apocalypse Has Already Happened. We Know. We Were There

Or, the post-Katrina update on what's happening in our fair city.

Lord. Where to start. The first thing you should know about post-Katrina New Orleans is that, while things are vastly better than they were when I moved back a little over a year ago, they aren't as good as the rest of the country assumes they are.

No real, centralized plan has emerged, and now, a year and a half later, it seems unlikely that one will. I think the window for that has passed. People who wanted to come back did, and they're dealing with their shit themselves. There will be no vast restructuring or replanning of the city, which is too bad, because it seems like an opportunity missed. It seems like there could have been a new, exciting initiative, and then the enthusiasm petered out and the moment passed and people were left doing the same thing they were doing all along, which was doing it for themselves. The sad thing is, the demographic most affected by Katrina was the low-income and elderly. I guess they're left to fend for themselves, too. This might explain why so many people elected to just leave it all behind. Can you imagine starting over at the age of eighty, after perhaps saving for sixty years so you could finally pay off your house? And then your insurance company makes up some B.S. excuse to not pay out, and you can't afford to hire an attorney, so you get... nothing. Which is what's left of eighty years of your life. Nothing.

But someone, at some point, is going to realize we can't have blocks upon blocks of blighted, abandoned properties. Maybe then a plan will spring up. Or maybe we'll just be living amongst miles of urban blight for the next twenty years. It's not a very optimistic view, but I haven't seen anything out of the leadership that gives a person reason to hope. For one thing, the federal money? Those billions of dollars? Where the hell is it? Actual people aren't getting that money. From what I've read about the Road Home grant process, it's a joke. You fill out all this crap, only to have a computer spit out a piece of paper informing you that you can have 100 bucks. Whoo. Like that's going to rebuild a house.

Is the city hoarding the money then? Well, judging from the fact that there are car-sized potholes that the city can't afford to fill in and streetlights that have been dead for a year and a half, I'm going to have to conclude that they haven't seen any of that money either. The city can't afford to repair any of their facilities, hire enough police officers, or keep order during a rampant crime wave. Oh, and the pumps. No one seems to care that over half of the pump system is still offline, in a city that lies below sea level. Last month it rained for 24 hours and there was knee-deep water in the streets. Because this has devolved into a pretty negative rant on the State of New Orleans, I will throw out there that the new trash company is awesome. It was the cleanest Mardi Gras I've seen, and they are actually taking our trash consistently on a weekly basis. (For those of you in other cities, this concept is probably like, "So? Of course the trash gets picked up." But things like the trash getting picked up do not happen here post-Katrina. Just a small illustration of the crap that people have learned to put up with here.)

The second thing to be aware of is that we aren't talking about localized destruction here. You can drive through blocks upon blocks of... nothing. I don't mean after the storm you could. I mean today, right now, you could hop in the car and do so. Some of the houses still have the furniture sitting inside, covered in a layer of caked mud and dust. Katrina prompted a mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of people, which has not happened in the United States to that large a scale since the Civil War. I can understand why people are angry at the fraud that happened during Katrina... but you have to realize that was FEMA (I think we've all seen exactly how efficient that organization turned out to be), not us. It seems like all the media coverage is negative, and it frustrates me that people read these news stories about a few bad eggs among HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of people and say, "Well, don't send any more of my tax dollars to help 'those people.'"

Let me tell you what it was like, because I am not sure people understand what really went down. We had a car and were able to drive out on the last day. We didn't leave until they announced it was a Category 5, so we had very little time to pack our stuff. We were grad students, so we didn't have money saved. It's not hard to imagine that others didn't, either. Now picture being in a hotel (we weren't in a hotel, but many people were), and then the news filtering in that you won't be able to go back into the city-- as in, there are armed military people at checkpoints keeping you out-- for one month. How do you pay? What do you do? If FEMA hadn't acted fast and direct deposited that first $2,000, I certainly wouldn't have been able to make it. And I didn't have a carload of kids, pets, elderly parents, or other dependents relying on me. So the negativity of the coverage grates on me. Yes, money was wasted. But it is a fraction of the amount of money wasted in Iraq. (I would dig up the statistic, but I can't be bothered. So just think about it.) And if I was the leadership of the U.S., I would be embarrassed to have other countries look at us and think in their heads that we're quick to push the ideals of democracy on others, yet we don't seem to care about people within our own borders. New Orleans was left out of the State of the Union address for two years running. That certainly tells me where George W. Bush's priorities are.

To the right is the Ninth Ward, taken from the bridge. You can see here the new levee wall built by the Army Corps of Engineers (click and enlarge). Note that this "new" levee does not actually provide protection beyond the level of the old levee. This means it's just as inadequate, should the same storm hit again. We have all these promises of Category 5 protection, but is anyone making sure it's delivered? We don't get a sense of who's on that. Is anyone on that? Shouldn't they be? The picture to the right was taken in late November. See the field to the right of the levee? That wasn't a field in the summer of 2005. It was a neighborhood, rows of houses. You can drive through and see the paved driveways leading to nothing. In New Orleans, they call it the Federal Flood. Which brings me to the third thing I'm not sure people know-- this field of brown grass where houses used to be, it wasn't caused by an unstoppable force of nature. It was caused by human error. Really, do people know that? Because you read all these editorials where people are like, "See? It snowed/tornadoed/stormed/flooded here and we aren't demanding money!" Yes, Katrina would have caused billions of dollars in wind damage on its own. But the catastrophic flooding that caused the majority of the 1,500 casualties? It was the shoddy construction of the levee built by the Army Corps of Engineers. Of course they aren't liable, because you can't sue the federal government. So really, when people here demand help from the federal government, we aren't being greedy. We just want them to clean up their mess. Because it is their mess.

So, to refresh: This city does not trust the federal government. People don't seem to trust governor Kathleen Blanco either, though most of the ire is directed toward George Bush and Ray Nagin. When someone says they saw Nagin, the mayor, out somewhere, 9 out of 10 times someone will bust out with, "You did? Wait, you saw him? Where?" This is because he's frustrated people with his tendency to lay low and go silent for months on end. It pisses people off, as does the fact that he bought a house in Dallas after the storm. I remain baffled as to who, exactly, re-elected him, because no one seems to want him around. Crime is way up in the city, and population is down. Maybe if there weren't so many abandoned, deserted houses, there wouldn't be such rampant crime. But again, no one has a plan for that land. We're sort of in limbo here. Still, every day a new store opens. Every day a dumpster appears on the street, and a house is gutted, the contents of someone's old life tossed in the bin for the world to see. Every day a house gets torn down, a basement gets sheetrocked. The Hispanic population is booming, and there are taco trucks parked on the corners selling lunch to the workers. Stores are actually open 24 hours again, because there are enough people to work in them. So it goes.

I have opinions on what's going on in the city, but I'm not as up on current events as many New Orleans bloggers. Really, you want to go read Wet Bank Guide for that, because he does a far better job than me. I'm sorry that this turned into more of a rant than an update. The whole Katrina thing tends to bring that out in me. Now I'm off to take a shower and go for Thai. Because the fact that there is Thai food means the city is probably going to make it. Oh! And I nearly forgot my plug: in spite of the eight paragraphs of rant appearing above, I should mention that the French Quarter is fine, as is the Garden District. So basically, everything you would want to see as a tourist is still there, except the streetcars, so you'll probably want to stay downtown rather than on St. Charles. None of the tourist areas were flooded, and the other damage is mostly repaired. If you come today, you will see the same architecturally and culturally unique city you saw before the storm. The city is up and running for tourism, so please tell everyone you know. The city desparately needs the tourist dollars (I know, I know, as a waitress they wouldn't do me any harm either).

Tags: new orleans, katrina, post-katrina, recovery