Death of an American City

Here's the 11/11/05 editorial in the NYT. I am pasting it here because it needs to be read as part of this blog and not just a link.


Editorial
Death of an American City

We are about to lose New Orleans. Whether it is a conscious plan to let the city rot until no one is willing to move back or honest paralysis over difficult questions, the moment is upon us when a major American city will die, leaving nothing but a few shells for tourists to visit like a museum.
We said this wouldn't happen. President Bush said it wouldn't happen. He stood in Jackson Square and said, "There is no way to imagine America without New Orleans." But it has been over three months since Hurricane Katrina struck and the city is in complete shambles.
There are many unanswered questions that will take years to work out, but one is make-or-break and needs to be dealt with immediately. It all boils down to the levee system. People will clear garbage, live in tents, work their fingers to the bone to reclaim homes and lives, but not if they don't believe they will be protected by more than patches to the same old system that failed during the deadly storm. Homeowners, businesses and insurance companies all need a commitment before they will stake their futures on the city.
At this moment the reconstruction is a rudderless ship. There is no effective leadership that we can identify. How many people could even name the president's liaison for the reconstruction effort, Donald Powell? Lawmakers need to understand that for New Orleans the words "pending in Congress" are a death warrant requiring no signature.
The rumbling from Washington that the proposed cost of better levees is too much has grown louder. Pretending we are going to do the necessary work eventually, while stalling until the next hurricane season is upon us, is dishonest and cowardly. Unless some clear, quick commitments are made, the displaced will have no choice but to sink roots in the alien communities where they landed.
The price tag for protection against a Category 5 hurricane, which would involve not just stronger and higher levees but also new drainage canals and environmental restoration, would very likely run to well over $32 billion. That is a lot of money. But that starting point represents just 1.2 percent of this year's estimated $2.6 trillion in federal spending, which actually overstates the case, since the cost would be spread over many years. And it is barely one-third the cost of the $95 billion in tax cuts passed just last week by the House of Representatives.
Total allocations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on terror have topped $300 billion. All that money has been appropriated as the cost of protecting the nation from terrorist attacks. But what was the worst possible case we fought to prevent?
Losing a major American city.
"We'll not just rebuild, we'll build higher and better," President Bush said that night in September. Our feeling, strongly, is that he was right and should keep to his word. We in New York remember well what it was like for the country to rally around our city in a desperate hour. New York survived and has flourished. New Orleans can too.
Of course, New Orleans's local and state officials must do their part as well, and demonstrate the political and practical will to rebuild the city efficiently and responsibly. They must, as quickly as possible, produce a comprehensive plan for putting New Orleans back together. Which schools will be rebuilt and which will be absorbed? Which neighborhoods will be shored up? Where will the roads go? What about electricity and water lines? So far, local and state officials have been derelict at producing anything that comes close to a coherent plan. That is unacceptable.
The city must rise to the occasion. But it will not have that opportunity without the levees, and only the office of the president is strong enough to goad Congress to take swift action. Only his voice is loud enough to call people home and convince them that commitments will be met.
Maybe America does not want to rebuild New Orleans. Maybe we have decided that the deficits are too large and the money too scarce, and that it is better just to look the other way until the city withers and disappears. If that is truly the case, then it is incumbent on President Bush and Congress to admit it, and organize a real plan to help the dislocated residents resettle into new homes. The communities that opened their hearts to the Katrina refugees need to know that their short-term act of charity has turned into a permanent commitment.
If the rest of the nation has decided it is too expensive to give the people of New Orleans a chance at renewal, we have to tell them so. We must tell them we spent our rainy-day fund on a costly stalemate in Iraq, that we gave it away in tax cuts for wealthy families and shareholders. We must tell them America is too broke and too weak to rebuild one of its great cities.
Our nation would then look like a feeble giant indeed. But whether we admit it or not, this is our choice to make. We decide whether New Orleans lives or dies.

9/9 After the Flood Episode 296 True stories hit home

Episode 296 was basically a collection of stroies of people who either experienced or survived the effects of Katrina. It brings up the the "blame game." It turns out that this particular disc jockey feels the federal government is to blame because they declared a state of emergency so it was their responsibility to evacuate Louisiana; I found this to be particularly interesting. I don't feel that we can point the finger at any one organization at this time because there is so many opinions, victims damage and New Orleans is total chaos.
This piece really hit home because of the personal accounts of these people, their sadness and frustration is and emotional tidal wave; my heart truly goes out to them. All I can think of when I hear the desparation in their voices is "How can I help? How can I make a difference?" Actually hearing their voices makes their stories so much more real than magazine and newspaper articles. These are real people and these horrnedous stories are true accounts of what actually happened.
I would reccommend this episode to anyone who wants to know more about what happened to some of these people. I feel that if we could convey the emotions and hardships of these people through a dialogue as heartfelt as this one then we might have a chance of stroking the heart strings of some of these organizations. We coul possibly recieve a positive response by showing them and anyone else the pain a hardship that has been dealt and hopefully one day, we could move past it a grow together as a communtiy. We can help each other get through this tragedy and move on to see a better day.

Katrina Photos

http://Don McClosky
massive wave crashes over a floodwall near Michoud's Entergy plant near I-510. This massive wave is yet another frightening scene of Katrina's wrath.

The following photos are pics that were emailed to me of Katrina approaching land. They look pretty scary but I bet it was even scarier for the person taking the pictures.
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The Significance of these photos is for the opportunity to "peek" inside the storm. For those who were not actually "there" this is a great opportunity to see the wake of disaster. These photos will be forever etched in my mind reminding me of Hurricane Katrina.

After the Flood

After The Flood 9/9 Episode 296
While Bush and Blanco fussed over who would control the National Guard, people died.
That was the greatest tradgedy of Hurricane Katrina. And that's what this episode is all about. It starts off summing up the Blanco/Bush fiasco and then moves onto actual acounts from people who had to find a way to survive after the storm.
Listening to these accounts is just enraging. I mean, just to think about it, the girl from the Lafitte project saying she went without water for so long that her stomach sucked into her back, the lady outside the Convention Center describing the Convention Center floor as a sewer of crap and piss and how trucks with water would just pass them up without stopping, all the accounts of the people who were turned away, shot at or harrased by Gretna police because they simply wanted to cross a bridge, it's just disgusting. It makes you sit down and say, "this is my country? This is what I'm apart of, a country that is buried in so much politics and racial hate that citizens, most of them black, are left to die on national TV?
Hearing their voices is what really made the episode work. It's so much different than reading it in print. You could hear the sincerity, the sniffles letting you know that there were tears behind those words. Anybody who wants to hear an upfront account of what happened post-Katrina should log on to www.thislife.org and listen to this.

9/9 After the Flood, Episode 296

This episode was a collection of stories from people who experienced and survived Katrina. At the end there was a story about a trailer park community in Florida due to Hurricane Charley in 2004. The stories range from everything to a woman who was stuck in the Convention Center, to people not being allowed to cross the Mississippi River Bridge. Hearing these stories from the voices of the people who experienced it, as opposed to written accounts, was very moving. I could hear the frustration and sadness in their voices as they told their stories. That extra emotion made me imagine how I would have felt in their situation - much more than any article I have read made me imagine the horror of being in New Orleans days after the hurricane or the sense of betrayal these people felt. The girl that described being so thirsty she hallucinated seeing water bottles and so hungry she was literally starving and her stomach felt like it was going into her back, had an effect that needed to be heard by voice.

I would recommend this audio episode to anyone who wants to hear what it was REALLY like living in post-Katrina New Orleans. Newspapers and news shows can help you learn alot, but do not convey the emotions and hardships some people had to go through.

Katrina Picture

Picture of a flooded neighborhood in New Orleans, one of the many.

Katrina Picture

This is another picture of fishing boats pushed onshore and jammed together, helping destroy Louisiana's fishing industry.

Katrina Pictures

This is a picture of a shipping vessel pushed onshore in Plaquemines parish by Katrina's strong winds.

Lemann article: In The Ruins

Nicholas Lemann's article, In The Ruins, had it's moments, but overall I think the article suffered from bad timing. Lemann starts the article off by describing New Orleans as a city vulnerable to nature. True enough, but at times he seems to exaggerate, like the part about rats, roaches and snakes crawling out the gutters. What city doesn't have a rat and roach problem especially those close to water? But despite this the beginning of the article was good enough to draw readers in. It's about New Orleans two weeks after a hurricane, so it suceeds in getting attention.
He then moves on to the literary history of hurricanes in the city. It's a nice middle section, shows our history with hurricanes and how, for the most part, a lot of us are stubborn when it comes to evacuating. In the next transition, he brings his daddy in as an example. His daddy is a typical New Orleans man when it comes to hurricanes - he knows more about the weather than anybody.
Also the section where Lemann talks about the incompetence that surrounds and runs the city is nicely done too, gives the reader an idea of the danger, both natural and human, that awaits anybody who decides to ride out a storm down here.
All in all this wasn't a bad article. It would have actually been pretty good if it was written at a different time. I mean, he wrote this two weeks after Katrina, two weeks after city flooded, two weeks after people waited on rooftops, marched across bridges, sat stranded outside the Convention Center, waiting or looking for help. So considering that, it didn't seem like good timing for a cynical-like artcile that points out the problems of the landscape and government and the personal hang-ups of the people.
The narrative voice throughout it seemed fine, though at times his tone did seem a little too nonchalant and cynical. Still, a decent article.

2nd testimony

This 2nd testimony comes from a conversation I had with my father in law, Herbert.
Like my cousin Darryl, he and my mother in law rode Katrina out too. They stayed at the Wyndam hotel in Metarie, next to the Galleria. That evening, after Katrina passed, he and my mother in law walked to the Wyndam's parking garage to get their car. Both of them were stunned by what they saw. "Every car in the garage had all their windows blown out except ours," Herbert said. "You had to see it, glass was just everywhere." After they left the garage, he dropped my mother in law off Uptown where they lived and went to work. By the time he came home from work, the water was already covering the drains. "When I pulled up my podna from the NOPD flagged me down. He was like, 'Y'all gotta get outta here. That water coming.' I went inside and told'em we had to get my grandmother in the car. She's bed-ridden so by the time we got her in, the water was up to the steps. It was just coming so fast. Somehow we made it up to Magazine where it was dry, then we got on the Interstate and headed for the Westbank. You shoulda seen the people walking across the Crescent City Connection. Packs of'em. If I had room I swear I woulda gave somebody a ride." He said all that then paused and looked at me. "Kenneth," he said, "that's something nobody could tell you about. You just had to see it with your own eyes - all those people struggling acrosst that Interstate." They rode until they got to Houston. The first night in Houston they slept in the car. The next night he found his cousin's apartment in Houston and went over there. "They had so many people in that house," he said. "At least 25. People sleeping in the kitchen, the closet, on the front porch, even in the tub." He and my mother in law stayed there for about two weeks. Then FEMA kicked in and gave them all apartments. As of right now he's back in New Orleans staying with friends and working at a lumber yard.

1st Katrina testimony

This first testimony is based on a conversation I had with my 23 year old cousin Darryl.
Instead of evacuating to Houston like most of my family did, Darryl stayed behind in New Orleans and rode the storm out in Carrolton near Rock N Bowl. The day his mama left, she begged him to go to the Superdome. She warned him about the wind, the rain, the levees. But he wouldn't listen. Like a lot of people he figured the storm wouldn't be that bad. The day after the storm he called and told us about it. "Katrina wasn't nothing," he said. "A lil wind and some rain but that was it."
Four days later he would rethink that statement.
Later that day he kept hearing running water, like a faucet was left on or something. When he finally looked out the window, water was up to the curb. "It was just coming so fast. People was jumping on top of cars,running on to the bridge, whatever." That bridge, the Tulane overpass to the left of Rock N Bowl, was where he spent the next four nights. "That was the longest four nights of my life .They had people everywhere, pregnant women, kids."
Nobody came to bring them food or anything. During the day helicopters would pass, but none of them stopped. Besides the memories of the heat and waking up on scorching cement, one of the things he'll never forget is the evening he and a Chinese man floated on a makeshift boat and went looking for food. "When we got to the store, we could hear people screaming," he said. "It sounded like a whole family trapped in there. We floated around to the side and told them we was coming, but it was getting dark, fast, and the water kept falling and rising. I looked through the side window and all I could see was the top shelves. That had to be the spookiest scene I saw in my life. And that's when the screaming just stopped. We called and called but they wouldn't answer. So we reached through the window, grabbed whatever we can and left." Back on the bridge he had to hold a flashlight in front of him just to see the food he was eating. On the fourth day, some dudes from the neighborhood passed in a boat. He paid them to bring him to the Superdome. He stayed there for two days before a bus brought him to Houston and he was reunited with the rest of our family.