Two Years Later

There is so much I wanted to say this week about Katrina, but the words wouldn’t come. I’ve talked about the hurricane that wreaked havoc on my original hometown so many times during the past twenty-four months that I feel I’ve said all I can say.

Yet bubbling just under the surface, I still feel shock, sadness and anger.

Shock is my reaction to the sheer magnitude of what Katrina did to New Orleans. Tens of thousands of homes were damaged or destroyed, but it doesn’t really sink in till you drive through places like Lakeview. All 7000 houses in this middle-class neighborhood sat in eight to ten feet of stagnant water for two to three weeks. During the past two years, owners of those structures had to choose between rehabbing their moldy, soaked homes or tearing them down and rebuilding. My sister chose to rehab. One third of the homeowners on her block chose to demolish; some of them will rebuild and some will try to sell their now vacant lots. There hasn’t been so much open space in Lakeview since the 1950s when our family moved into the house that is now hers.

Sadness fills my heart this week because in addition to devastating the city where I lived the first half of my life, Hurricane Katrina killed my Mother. She was living in a nursing home in suburban New Orleans. She needed too much medical attention to evacuate with my sister, so she stayed. The staff chose not to evacuate the residents. They survived the storm but then had to face a total power outage and rising water. The flooding there was only a few inches, but that still was an intolerable situation in 90-degree heat with limited food and medical supplies at their disposal. To this day, we still don’t have the complete story, but we believe the residents were evacuated to the hospital across the street the next day, then a day or two later, began a travel odyssey that ended in a nursing facility in another part of Louisiana. Mom died within hours of reaching the new place … two years ago today.

Anger consumes me on a regular basis when I think about the ongoing nightmare of Katrina. I’m angry that after two years of struggling with insurance companies, government agencies and contractors, my sister is still not able to live in her home. I’m angry every time the President spews more bullshit about progress and promises. I’m angry at the guy who invented the pumps that drained the marsh that allowed Lakeview to be settled in the first place. I’m angry with the engineers whose faulty levee design led to the break and the officials who ignored two years of repeated warnings from concerned residents who lived next to the 17th Street Canal that the standing water in their yards was not caused by a leaking pipe. I’m angry that millions of dollars of Federal and State money that did actually make it to New Orleans was wasted, lost or stolen before it could help everyone it should have helped. At least my sister will be back in her house in a few weeks and her neighborhood will survive, even if it’s only a shadow of its former self. Many thousands of people in other New Orleans neighborhoods will never be able to return home.

From a distance, it appears that New Orleans has healed. Mardi Gras and JazzFest have been held twice since Katrina. The Saints won enough games in the repaired Superdome last season to almost make it to the Super Bowl. Slick TV commercials play all across the country enticing tourists to visit the city. Those that do can spend a whole week there and not see one damaged home. Walk a few blocks past the end of Bourbon Street and you’ll see the edge of one neighborhood that looks like it did just a few weeks after the water receded. Only 7% of that neighborhood’s residents are back. Get off any I-10 exit east of the Industrial Canal and you’ll see even more striking evidence of how much has not happened in two years. And FEMA wants those trailers back, even though the people living in them have nowhere else to live yet.

I began this post thinking I had nothing else to say. Guess I was wrong.