Impressions of New Orleans

See also Impressions of Mennonite Disaster Service

[I typed this up last week and am finally getting around to posting it.] Late Saturday (March 25) I returned from a week long trip to New Orleans, doing hurricane/flood clean-up with Mennonite Disaster Service. It was one of those things that makes my “best things I’ve done in my life” list. Here are some of my impressions of the city as of March 2006.

It’s difficult to believe that the hurricane was seven months ago. One month ago would maybe be believable. Can you believe that much of the city still does not have electricity? Many intersections without stoplights; many streets without streetlights. Neighborhoods are pitch black at night. If you can still call them neighborhoods. Much of the city is pretty much a ghost town. The neighborhoods in which we stayed and worked were mostly devoid of people; sort of eerie, really. You can understand why many people are afraid to stay in their paper-thin FEMA trailers...on streets with no one else around and that remain unlit after the sun goes down. Would you believe that many of the houses have not even been entered except for by search and rescue teams? Most of the apartments and houses our group entered were just as they had been left seven months prior...tables set for family meals, laundry in the washing machine, dogs (now no longer living, of course) shut into a garage where I’m sure the owners believed they would be safe. Those particular owners hadn’t even been inside to find out if their dogs had made it out or not; students in our group had to inform the husband. His response was, “Don’t tell my wife.” We would go into an apartment or a house, and belongings would look fairly normal but nothing was. Couches and carpets are still seven months later wet from flood waters. Houses have been shut up this long and the air there is so humid that nothing has had the chance to dry out. Suddenly, people’s entire possessions become trash. An entire city’s possessions out on the curb. Where will it even all be dumped? Virtually nothing can be kept because it is all covered in mold. Mold climbs the walls from floor to ceiling in many cases. It all has to go. So we would enter these houses, discard of all of their belongings, tear out their floors/ceilings/walls, and eight hours to two and a half days later, all that is left is a shell of a house. Will people even be able to come back and rebuild? Will the mold removal chemicals work well enough on the studs that houses will be safe to live in once rebuilt?

A whole other factor all together is the lower 9th ward. This area lies right below one of the main levee breaks and is also a poorer section of the city. This was the first time I’d heard the rumor that the government blew up the levee here in order to divert the water away from the French Quarter and the Garden District. I don’t subscribe to this belief, but some people definitely do. This area is more or less flattened. Others observed that it looks like tornado damage, except that many trees are still standing and the area of damage is larger. Houses were washed clean off of their foundations. You can see the foundations but can’t spot the houses. The image that comes immediately to mind when I think of my tour through the lower 9th ward is of a house that was picked up off of its foundation and some time later set back down on it. But between the house and its foundation is an upside down pickup truck. The afternoon we were there, we saw search and rescue teams and dogs. As we came back by that location later, there were many flashing lights. That evening at a restaurant, the tv news reported that the body of a child had been found that afternoon in the lower 9th.

See also Impressions of Mennonite Disaster Service