Where does one begin?

The lad has been back home for a couple of days now and we have been talking and talking and talking. His pictures have also been developed and they are, as expected, not the quality we are used to with digital pics. They required a lot of Photoshopping to make them clear, with limited success in some cases. The pictures were taken from the car on the fly. One doesn’t go crawling around the 9th ward or any flood area without appropriate safety gear. One of the new illnesses among the residents and volunteers of the flood afflicted areas is Katrina Cough. Respiratory infections brought on by the mold and, well, other decomposed and rotted things. The place stinks and it permeates the air and everything in it. The lad brought back a pile of belongings with a rather distinctive odor. Like nothing you’ve ever smelled. Unless you’ve been in a rotting, moldy city.

I’ve been struggling to find a way to even start this story. I’ve been overwhelmed and I’m not the one who went to New Orleans. The lad talks in bursts. Then withdraws into his own thoughts. Then another burst of talk, then more withdrawal. His stories are coming out gradually and we agreed that I should transcribe them as he talks.

His pictures, I have to admit, disappointed me at first. When I asked him if he’d taken any photos of the destruction in the 9th ward, he looked at me as if I was from another planet. “What do you think these are?” he asked. He said going in to the 9th ward, he hadn’t had a clue what to really expect and so shot pictures until his camera was spent. The bleakness and eerie silence crawled into his gut and turned it inside out. Then they got to the total destruction that defies words or even pictures. “But that’s not the story,” he insisted. It’s a foregone conclusion that the catastrophic destruction in parts of the lower 9th ward will never be repaired. There’s so little left to repair or rebuild. It is a ravaged landscape that would require surveyors to figure out what street you’re standing on or, in many cases, where the streets actually are beneath the rubble. Whatever happens in the most ravaged areas will have to be brand new and with the substandard condition of the Industrial Canal’s levees, the survivors aren’t flocking back for another go. And it will take months more to clear the rubble and debris before any kind of rebuilding could take place.

The lower 9th ward, he said, is a convenient symbol that a growing contingent point to as a reason not to rebuild New Orleans for the people. Almost as if, on the basis of the lower 9th ward alone, the city should be left to its own sink or swim devices. Why? Many rumors fly—eminent domain and a refinery among them. But, in reality, the lower 9th ward is a very tiny part of the city of New Orleans and it’s not in the “bowl” location of the main part of the city which went relatively undamaged. It’s funny, he said, how no one seems to know that St Bernard Parish to the east was devastated and is still off the electrical grid or that the area way up north by the lake, where a lot of rich and middle class people live, was devastated by breaks in the 17th Street Canal (weakened levees caused by, it turns out, the Army Corps of Engineers’ shoddy cost cutting construction.). Why is it that the lower 9th ward has become the entire focus of post-flood New Orleans? Well, maybe it’s not such a mystery, he conceded. The people who lived there were poor and hidden away from the world’s eyes for decades. Many elderly. Some white, many black, a neighborhood of Vietnamese. An assortment of mostly poor and many retired on low fixed incomes. High crime rate and a symbol of everything wrong with ‘those’ kind of people. The kind of people who have little influence, who are easy to blame and forget and use. It was a place that suddenly amplified the city’s failures. It shocked a nation and embarrassed a city. Maybe the kind of people the city planners don’t want back rather than face their failures.

One on-going tragedy among tragedies is what’s left standing and structurally sound in the areas that were flooded (including almost the entirety of St Bernard Parish where the lad was stationed and the neighborhoods along the Lake Pontchartrain shore), but not ravaged by roiling waters. These homes are ‘merely’ uninhabitable because they are toxic and must be totally emptied of furniture and possessions, gutted, power washed and disinfected. After sitting in 6 feet or more of toxic water and sludge for six weeks, the houses absorbed the toxic brew and then, in the Louisiana heat, the varieties of mold immediately began growing on every surface and behind the walls. Stuff that makes you sick to breathe. But the houses are eminently salvageable—and less expensive to do so than raze them and start over with new construction.

The residents and the volunteers are fighting against time (August 30) to preserve as many of their homes and businesses as they can before the authorities step in, condemn them, and raze them. And it will have to be done. The ungutted buildings are a health hazard. But where is the help? National Guard? Lots of National Guard type of work begging to be done. Where is the committed federal effort to repair and rebuild what can be rebuilt? How many people know what is going on and that there is still such a desperate need for help? The people feel helpless and abandoned. But not hopeless. They are frustrated by the constant roadblocks thrown in front of them by the insurance companies and the gov’t agencies who are supposed to be there helping. They are frustrated by the gov’t agencies’ adversarial attitudes. But they struggle on, determined, making do with virtually nothing and with many living in deplorable conditions. The on-going tragedy is that these people are going it alone with precious few resources (save for volunteer help and their own two hands) and, 10 months later, the progress is still excruciatingly slow while most of the nation remains blissfully unaware of how badly the metropolitan area is suffering.

More tomorrow.