New Orleans: Decimation, Devastation, and Destruction

ABOVE: Chalmette is about 12 miles from the French Quarter. Andrew Jackson and a group of regulars, volunteers, and pirates routed the British in Chalmette @ the Battle of New Orleans (1815). Chalmette Medical Center, St. Bernard Parish, was destroyed by the 2005 Katrina-caused storm surge. Man-caused degradation of the wetlands between St. Bernard and the Gulf of Mexico exacerbated the situation.

ABOVE: The Lower Ninth Ward (Orleans Parish), between St. Bernard Parish and the French Quarter, was spared by the storm and surge, but fell victim to the breached levees. Many of the fragile light wooden homes floated off of their foundations and shattered. In the Lower Ninth Ward (above), nearest to the levee break, there was 100% destruction.

New Orleans, Louisiana

February 3, 2007

We are staying in St. Bernard State Park in St. Bernard Parish, about 18 miles SE of the Vieux Carre (commonly called the French Quarter). The park just reopened last month. St. Bernard Parish had as much as 30 feet of water for more than a week due to the storm surge. (In addition to the water, more than a million gallons of oil spread through the community from the Murphy Oil refinery.) Devastation is everywhere. More than 90% of the homes were severely damaged or destroyed. The library is gone as is the post office. Major stores such as K-Mart, Winn-Dixie, and Home Depot stand empty and boarded; some with FEMA trailer cities in their parking lots. The areas look like the European towns that one sees in WW II movies where fighting is going on: buildings hollowed by explosives, debris everywhere, no one in the streets. Many traffic light have been replaced by stop signs.

There is little debris in Plaquemine Parish. In some sections, the storm surge took almost everything except the foundations.

Some homes have been rebuilt and some homes have trailers sitting on their lawns as temporary homes while reconstruction is going on. Some homes have signs that they are scheduled for demolition.

A FEMA trailer city in a shopping center parking lot.

Fields, parks, cleared areas and shopping center parking lots have been turned into FEMA trailer cities in the city and surrounding areas. Some industrial plants have trailers on site for their employees. Domino Sugar is housing 200 employees on the grounds of their refinery.

We passed the Violet Elementary school (St. Bernard Parish) and saw many trailers in the schoolyard. Teachers?

We've driven through the 'Lower Ninth Ward,' many times over the last 20 years going from St. Bernard into New Orleans. The “Lower Ninth Ward' had always seemed to us to be a depressing pocket of poverty with many sections that should have been replaced by urban renewal fifty years ago; now it is just dismal. Destruction assaults the eye no matter where one looks. When the levee was breached, the water not only broke homes apart, but, in some cases, lifted the light wood-frame houses off of their foundations and dropped them on cars and homes blocks away. There are many blocks with only a house or two currently still standing, but uninhabitable.

The family is living in a trailer until their home is made habitable

New Orleans is shaped like a bowl with the center below sea level. The bowl filled with water when the levees collapsed after the hurricane had passed.

Most of the damage to the city was caused by the breaching of the levees; the six levee breaches are marked on the tourist map. The breaches were all in new levees; not the ones built in the 18^th century. After the levee breaches were plugged, the center of the bowl had to be pumped out.

A lawsuit against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for damages to homes has been introduced. The suit alleges that the CoE knew that if water spilled over the levees, the support for the levee would be undermined and that the levee would collapse. This is what happen in the Lower Ninth Ward. The suit also alleges that the fresh water that the canals spilled into the delta caused a change in the salinity of the water which resulted in the destruction of the plants in the ecosystem and that this exacerbated the storm surge. This is what happened in St. Bernard Parish. The CoE had claimed immunity from lawsuits. This week, a federal judge allowed the continuation of the lawsuit.

“I drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was gone,” reads a t-shirt. “N.O.P.D.: Not Our Problem, Dude,” read another. As you may imagine, many are uncomplimentary of FEMA.

Business is slow. On weekdays, we've been able to park on the street in the French Quarter right near the attractions or restaurants; sometimes at a meter, sometimes free.

New Orleans is one of our favorite cities and Sarah and I have many fond memories of good times spent here. We have come to help support its recovery by spending our travel dollars here and have a good time; the waiter at The Praline Connection already recognizes me and my appetite. I'm glad that it is still here as it is my favorite N.O. restaurant. There has been a change, however. The restaurant serves Creole/soul food and sports a motif celebrating African-American heroes and musicians. In the past, there was an all Black staff; the current staff reflects the post-Katrina demographics of New Orleans and includes whites.

While undamaged, some of the divisions of the Louisiana State Museum are closed due to staff shortages.

The population of the city is less that half of what it was pre-Katrina, but the crime and murder numbers and rates have shot up. The murder rate is now 20 times the national average and is reported nightly on the T.V. news. Hundreds of children had been on a waiting list for space in a school. Some think that that contributed to the increase in crime; lots of kids with too much time on their hands. The waiting list ended on February 5 when two schools reopened.

70% of day care centers did not reopen after the storm, so some parents can't get a job because they have no one to watch their children. No jobs = no money = no customers = no jobs; a vicious cycle in a struggling economy.

No jobs also equals no health insurance for many. Last week there was a week-long free clinic operating in tents. Physicians came from afar to help; some from third-world countries. (It's hard to imagine that a major U.S. city has to have physicians from third-world countries donating their services in order to provide health care for its citizens.) The lack of affordable health care has been a factor in the 50% increase in New Orleans' mortality rate.

The news reported that about 20% of contractors are dishonest; taking money and disappearing.

To add insult to injury, St. Bernard Parish instituted a new law this week that fines persons $100 per day for an unkempt lawn, even if one's home is uninhabitable and one is living in a trailer hundreds of miles away.

New Orleans' Garden District, big expensive homes

The tourist areas, which are on the rim of the bowl, are still here and in good physical shape. The French Quarter, Garden District, and downtown were not flooded; they are all on higher ground.

The Cafe du Monde has been a fixture in the French Quarter since the 1860s.

Allen studies the art of Peru @ the New Orleans Museum of Art

The New Orleans Museum of Art is in the center of the bowl, but on a ridge. Its 40,000 piece collection was undamaged by the surrounding floodwaters, but the sculpture garden and building required $6 million in repairs. NOMA is the largest art museum in the south and covers all aspects of art, but their collection falls very short in pieces from the ancient world (Greece, Rome, Egypt); almost all objects are Renaissance or newer with nothing spectacular. Of particular interest, however, are several pieces that appear the be from Europe's Renaissance, but are from 18^th century Peru.

Some of the mansions that we toured include the Hermann-Grima House and the Gallier House in the Vieux Carre and the House of Broel in the Garden District.

Also on the ridge in the center of N.O. is Longue Vue, the home and gardens of very rich people and philanthropists, the Sterns. Mr. Stern had varied business interests and was the president of the N.O. Cotton Exchange, Mrs. Stern was the daughter of the CEO & majority stockholder of Sears. The mansion's structure was undamaged, but both basement and sub-basement, which had work rooms, were flooded. The gardens lost hundreds of plants and sustained damage to the fountain system. On our tour, we saw photos of the temporary humidity control system which had huge ducts going into various windows. The building sat untended for a month until staff was allow by police to go into the city. [Looter control] Wallpaper is peeling and otherwise damaged by the high humidity.

On all of above tours, we were alone with the docent except for the Hermann house where the was another couple. I don't think that there were more than six people in NOMA in the hour that we were there, except for the kindergarten school group.

Mardi Gras season is here. The first parade, the Krewe du Vieux, rolls through the French Quarter tonight. The parade is composed of floats from numerous sub-krewes including the Krewe du Mishagas handing out their rock-hard decorated bagels with a schmear (of glue).

Laissez le bon temps rouler,

A&S

Mandeville, Louisiana

February 9, 2007

We moved to the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain so that we would not exceed the 15 day limit at St. Bernard State park when we return for N.O. Mardi Gras parades on the 14^th. [There are parades daily from the 15^th to the 20^th (Mardi Gras).]

In the last post, I mentioned that the Domino Sugar is housing 200 employees in trailers on the grounds of the refinery. The elementary school in Chalmette (St. Bernard Parish) has house-trailers in the school yard. Teachers?

A causeway connects Mandeville to the New Orleans suburbs. It is the longest bridge in the world. Lake Ponchartrain is a very large lake. It is so large that, combined with the winds of Hurricane Katrina, it produced a 15 foot storm surge which hammered the northern coast of the lake and destroyed the ground floors of many lakeside homes. The sloshing of the lake's waters following the storm surge probably played a major role in the failure of N.O.'s levees.

On the way here from N.O. along the eastern shore of Lake Ponchartrain, we stopped in Slidell to watch Sunday's parade. Being at 1 p.m., it was 'family friendly'; lots of kids and toy throws. Sarah still got her beads.

While here we learned about the FEMA Limbo. The government of Slidell is housed in trailers. They are unable to move into permanent quarters because of FEMA requirements. FEMA requires that if their building is less that 50% damaged, it must be repaired and if it is more than 50% damaged it must be rebuilt. One division of FEMA has ruled that the building is less than 50% damaged; another division has ruled that it is more than 50% damaged: In Limbo. This rule has affected other city governments in the Katrina-devastated area, as well.

In another twist, the Federal government requires that local governments pay at least 10% of a Federally financed building project. What does a community do if it has no more money? That's why only 1% of allocated Federal funds has gone to Louisiana's devastated communities.

The Tammany Trace Rails-to-Trails bikeway (once the Illinois Central Railroad track bed) passes through Fontainebleau State Park, where we are staying, and goes 15 miles in either direction. The trail is is just the way Sarah likes to do her biking: flat as a board and straight as an arrow with no motorized traffic. It traverses forests of loblolly pines, magnolias, and live oaks and Bald Cypress swamps. When biking the trace, one hears the chirping of frogs and sees numerous southern birds. We've biked to towns in both directions.

Sarah goes for lunch in Lacombe via the Tammany Trace. It's a 12 mile round trip. As Sarah burns up more calories biking than she gets from the Lucky China lunch special, the trip is not cost effective, calorie-wise.

One of the workman repairing a trestle on the trace told Sarah about the alligator in one of the bayous and the panther that hangs out along the trail. We did not see any sign of an alligator.

As far as the panther is concerned, we saw the scat, but not the cat. That's a good thing because Sarah didn't bring a change of underwear with her. Also, Sarah and I have an understanding: She does the shopping, cooking and cleaning and I protect her from panthers.

[When we examined the scat up close, we saw that it contained small feline claws and lots of fur; Fluffy isn't coming home.]

“When called by a panther, don't anther,” said Sarah, quoting Ogden Nash.

There are parades in many cities and towns in the region this weekend. Tonight there is a parade in Mandeville, Krewe of Eve, which we plan to attend because we're here.

We have reservations for St. Bernard State Park for the last few days of the Mardi Gras season. Beginning on March 15, there is at least one parade each day in New Orleans until Mardi Gras. We are returning to New Orleans because that's where the big parades and the big floats are to be found.

More on the Mardi Gras festivities in the next post:  

Baubles, Bangles, and Bright Shiny Beads

Laissez le bon temps rouler,

Allen & Sarah