A Personal Hurricane: That Smell

Tuesday (August 29th) is the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s devastating Gulf Coast landfall. Katrina is a personal story for me because I grew up in New Orleans and most of my family still lives there. My sister evacuated 50 miles north, rode out the storm with friends, then learned that her neighborhood was flooded.

She stayed with us in Maryland for several weeks then I helped her return to a friend’s house in the New Orleans suburbs when her job came back last October. She is still living in that friend’s guest room. Her house is gutted and she’s waiting for loans and other financial assistance in order to begin the process of elevating the house, a required step before moving back in.

The pictures that accompany this post were taken in and around her house last October. The montage at the beginning is before and after; her house is third from the bottom. The following is something I wrote while taking a break from dumping her water-logged belongings on the front lawn for pickup by debris removal crews.


October 20, 2005

After seven weeks of saturation coverage, much of America is tired of Katrina. The hurricane recovery is no longer front page news or the lead story. But in New Orleans the nightmare of her aftermath has just begun.

My sister Ann Marie owns and lives in the 50-year old house where she and I grew up, in a middle- to upper-middle class New Orleans neighborhood called Lakeview. Despite its name, Lakeview starts a mile from The Lake, but the west boundary is the 17th Street Canal of levee break fame. The entire neighborhood sat in 10 feet of water for more than 3 weeks. No home was spared, none are currently inhabitable and many will be a total loss.

My little part in the recovery effort is to help clean out Ann Marie’s house.

The worst part is the smell. I could mention the devastation; describe the toppled trees, water-logged abandoned cars and mounds of ruined personal belongings piled next to the brown shrubbery. I could help you picture the water line as it painted stripes across the little white house a few inches below the top of the front door. You might share my tears as I bag bundles of wet clothes and muck-covered remnants of photos spanning five decades.



But nothing is worse than the odor.

The smell of wet decomposing leaves is similar but far more tolerable than the scent of a lifetime of paper, clothes, furniture and wet carpet that has been saturated with the muddy, brackish water of Lake Pontchartrain that spilled through the levee less than a mile from here.

I smell it in the house, near other houses; sometimes a breeze sends it my way as I stand in the dusty yard changing into my clean clothes (hey, whose watching? I’m alone on this block today). The minivan interior absorbs the aroma during a 30-minute ride to my cousin’s suburban home where I promptly place the jeans and long-sleeve t-shirt in the washer. Last night I woke up with that scent in my nostrils. Just looking at photos of the house tricks my nose into acknowledging the stench.

New Orleans used to smell like magnolias, hot sauce and chicory. Now mold is the signature scent of this ghost town.




New Orleans is still The Big Empty. As of August, 2006, less than half of the 455,000 pre-Katrina residents have returned. Some neighborhoods look like they did a few weeks after the storm. The nightmare that began a year ago is ongoing for a few hundred thousand of our fellow Americans.

You may wonder why someone would live there after all of this. To find an answer, imagine if the place you’ve lived and loved for five decades was seriously damaged in a matter of days. Your whole life is tied to the buildings, people and culture of the place. It is difficult to rebuild, but it is possible. Wouldn’t you consider that option?

It is some kind of blessing that I left that region 28 years ago to chase a dream. But New Orleans never really left me. Jazz, jambalaya and hours of Katrina anniversary media coverage still grab my attention and shred my lifetime of memories almost as if I still lived there. And now the smell of mold produces the same reaction.