Katrina +1
New Orleans - One Year Later

by Bernard Grover

Exclusive to www.UrbanSurvival.com


This reporter spent the week in New Orleans shooting a documentary for Microsoft, following up on various grants the company gave to help rebuild the infrastructure and the citizenry. This article is the result of what was learned post-Katrina on this field trip.


New Orleans is a superficial construct of its former self. About the only industry in town is reconstruction, which is paid for by tourism and the various grants and tax dollars. The tourism is not nearly what it was, though. Many bars close around midnight (Louisiana has no closing time for bars) and restaurants struggle to fill window seats to appear full. The Quarter was relatively unscathed by the devastation, but the crowds are minimal and the area is virtually deserted by midnight.


Nearly every intersection is dense with signs advertising construction jobs or various remediation services. One enterprising soul must have spent a small fortune on plywood and green spray paint, as his signs offering "discount tree trimming" are ubiquitous.


Much of the non-tourist industry is still closed. The Blue Plate mayonaise plant is dark and the boat yards are hardly utilized. Rush hour is primarily composed of folks coming from or going back to Baton Rouge and environs each day. It seems a good portion of the workforce is non-indigenous.


Ninth Ward is a ghost town. Though some lots have been cleared, for the most part, it remains untouched since last August. The devastation there truly brings home the magnitude of destruction. The houses are gutted and many are further destroyed by fire. All are unoccupied. The streets are littered with flotsam and jetsam and the grass is already growing over the asphalt. Though the locals joke that it doesn't look much worse than before the flood, it is a sort of gallows humor betraying a dark resignation.


In a more upscale neighborhood off of N. Claibourne, the scene is quite different. Though many of the houses took up to 8 feet of water, construction crews are busy stripping and rebuilding. Here and there, water lines can be seen graphically demonstrating the depth of the flooding. One two-story house still bore the mark evenly splitting the second story from the first.Even in this neighborhood, though, nothing is perfect. One woman, Pat, a skilled professional, had flood insurance, over $1 million in the bank and a number of resources that poorer folk don't. Yet, a year later she is still fighting to get her insurance to pay. Their initial offer for a two-story brick, with a pre-flood market value over $200,000, was $39,000. They are up to $94,000 right now, and friends are advising her to take it. Her house remains unlivable and she is living out of a FEMA trailer in the front yard, as a great number of families are currently doing. In fact, the trailers are everywhere in this neighborhood.


Anecdotal reports from St. Bernard parish say that the area south of New Orleans is virtually wiped off the map. The various small towns from Cameron eastward are totally destroyed. There is no rebuilding because there is nothing to rebuild. It will take a complete ground-up effort to make the areas livable again, if they ever are.


For the most part, New Orleanians are resigned to the fact that it may be 20 years or more for the region to recover completely. Some doubt that it will ever be the same, while others are hoping and working to make sure it never will be.


Several non-profits and NGOs are using their efforts to correct the past and make the future quite different. They are taking advantage of the situation to rebuild New Orleans as a showcase city of the 21st century. They are seeking to improve not only the physical infrastructure, but to correct centuries of intractable social and racial inequities in education and access. They are finding sympathetic ears with the governor and mayor, however, when priorities are simply to plug the dike (literally, in some cases), it is difficult to get action on more amorphous problems like social inequities.


One thing seems certain: New Orleans has changed forever. Whether it is for the better or worse will only be proven in time. One other thing is certain, as well. If the city receives another blow even a fraction of Katrina, there may be no resuscitation. The current recovery is at a very fragile stage and many of the rebuilding efforts are based on a relatively quick remediation. However, should the city be hit again, sympathy and largesse may be extremely rare commodities in the Crescent City. And that assumes that there will be anything to rebuild after another blow.


Grover's report is echoed by the East Texans I've spoken with locally. A a lumber yard on Thursday I heard that "There was some fellas that had a skid loader and a dump truck - and they was doing over a thousand dollars a day," reported one local. "But, as soon as the debris was picked up, there wasn't much happening because the insurance money had dried up to almost nuthin'," chimed in another lumber yard customer. "It's still like half blue tarps down there now."

So much for the aftermath of the web bot's "city slips into the mud" forecast, one year on.