Hurricane Katrina - New Orleans 2005

Ten years ago today, Hurricane Katrina hit the coast of Alabama, just to the right of New Orleans. Wind damage to the city was light, and everyone was greatly relieved that the city had avoided disaster. News reporters along Canal Street were making plans to leave town the next day. What they didn’t know yet was that the counterclockwise rotation of the storm had pushed too much water into Lake Pontchartrain, and the levees on the lake side (including those along the Industrial Canal) were going to fail overnight. Poor maintenance and inadequate inspections had left the levee system weaker and several feet lower in spots than anyone realized.

The US government had dealt with many big floods and levee failures in the past, but only in places where the water level went down by itself. This was a completely different problem. With 80% of the city below sea level, the water came in and stayed there. There was no game plan for dealing with anything like that.

As the Coast Guard plucked stranded survivors off rooftops with helicopters, and the water rose, I joined thousands of hardcore New Orleans fans in staring in disbelief at the TV all day and crying like a baby. You see, nobody who has ever been there is apathetic about the place. Either you love it or you hate it. It felt like a part of me died that day.

Meanwhile, heavily armed criminal gangs from Dallas, Memphis, and Miami were having no trouble getting organized, setting up communications, and operating ferry boat operations to move looted valuables out of the city. Gunfire could be heard every night as they fought turf wars with each other and shot homeowners who tried to protect their property. When the National Guard finally did show up, they had to fight their way into town, finding snipers on rooftops everywhere.

As the days wore on, rotting bodies floated in the filthy, toxic water. Survivors were left without the basic necessities of life and without word of when rescue might come, while politicians on TV congratulated each other for the fine job they had all done handling the situation. Unforgivable. News footage looked a lot more like scenes from a third world banana republic hell hole than a part of America.

To this day, I don’t know who made the decision to close the highway 90 bridge over the river to the unflooded west bank area. Several people trying to flee the city were shot by police. I also don’t know if anybody tried to walk out of town by following the river levee upstream, or what their experience might have been. West of town, the Bonnet Carre Spillway would have surely been flooded from the lake side for a while, but not two days later. I’m assuming a lot of locals know about this route, since I know about it.

A few days later, President Bush flew in by helicopter to Jackson Square for a photo op and bullshit speech in the middle of Decatur Street in which he made a lot of promises about rebuilding that were not kept.

Once the situation was under control and most of the water was out, which was about three weeks later, the hard work of rebuilding began. The 20% of the city that had not been flooded was mostly the French Quarter, where all the tourists go, but there were no city services available yet and nowhere for FQ workers to live. Yet, the spirit of the city was already starting to show signs of life. Over the shoulder of Anderson Cooper, I saw a man carrying an advertising sign for Huge Ass Beers, and soon a street musician showed up to play jazz.

Today, the city is in many ways stronger and healthier than ever, and the levees are much higher and stronger than they were before the storm. No other city in America offers better food, music, culture, or hardcore partying every day and night.

New Orleans has been through many changes in national ownership (French, Spanish, French, American, Confederate, and American), survived hurricanes, river floods, fires, epidemics, wars, extreme poverty, political corruption, rampant crime, and just about any other bad thing you can imagine. Nothing can kill it. Like a zombie from its Voodoo subculture, it keeps rising from the dead. It has to survive because we need it. It’s our national capital of hedonism. It’s the city that doesn’t give a damn about much of anything except living life one day at a time and making the most of it, and that’s a kick-ass formula for survival.

:cheers2:

 

Good post. Brownie did a hell of a job. New Orleans is such a unique place.

 

Do we not have any members left who live in that part of the country? I know we used to.

A lot of people ended up having a lot less fear of FEMA after seeing how hard it was for them to get anything done down there.

 

The whole situation was one huge cluster fuck.

I remember FOX News interviewed a Doctor working triage out of the superdome and after several rapes, robberies, and murders, refused to go back in without adequate military protection. He described the conditions inside as deplorable with a strong odor of urine and feces everywhere.

Don’t want to sound like PR but either everyone at all levels of the government dropped the ball or it was an opportunistic social experiment. Let’s see what happens during a disaster when basic services are denied or withheld for an extended period of time.

Hotwater

 

When New Orleans is dysfunctional on a typical day, people can laugh it off and say it's part of the quirky local charm and character. It's something else when a big life and death situation is going on, when people need to act like adults and get important stuff done. This was no conspiracy theory. This was the real thing. Real bodies in the streets, rotting in the sun, nobody in charge.

I've been aware for a long time that nobody in New Orleans ever tries to do a good job at anything unless it's unavoidable or there's a huge financial incentive. Everybody is working for quitting time and payday, so they can go out and party, and go in late the next morning with a hangover and an STI. I get that. There's no other reason to live there. Probably everybody with an important job in the city should be required to live somewhere else. I'd hate like hell to be a business owner there and try to motivate employees to work hard. Might as well say "screw it" and go down to the Famous Door to start happy hour at 2:00. Is that PM or AM? Doesn't matter. When network TV news reported very seriously that the levee inspection committee had been spending all their meeting time drinking in bars and upscale restaurants with live jazz, my instant reaction was, "Of course they did! It's New fucking Orleans! Where else would they be?" Stiff journalists don't get it.

Ideally, New Orleans should be able to rely on state government to look out for their interests in the most important matters. Nothing could be further from reality. Baton Rouge is full of social conservatives who think New Orleans is an embarrassment to the state, and wish it would sink into the ocean permanently. Baton Rouge is a toxic hellhole, loaded with christian fundamentalist nut jobs, with nothing going for it except a really cool capitol building. The animosity between the two cities is quite incredible. FEMA was relying on guidance from the state that they never got. Nobody had ever thought about how you might start a rescue and recovery program in a place where there's no dry land. Duh.

I don't know what excuse the Army Corps of Engineers used for their fuck-ups. As far as I know, nobody there suffered any consequences for being clueless.

God, I love New Orleans. I've got to go back soon, before somebody figures out how to fix that place and make it "normal". Hedonism is so much fun until the levees break.

 

it is a story of defered maintainence (often for the sake of graft and greed) and the price of it and of indifference toward the well being of the economically disadvantaged, which in the case of new orleans, it was they who really made what it was, so its rebuilding has been mostly as a phony touristy shell, with little or no consideration for them at all. this comes from the whole idea of fema being about money and the monkey business of business.
a tragidy but not a real surprise.

 

All social classes suffered greatly from the levee failure. Most of the highest paid pro sports stars lived in the Lakefront area near the old yacht club, where the flood waters were deepest. They lost everything they couldn't put in their cars. Every business was closed for at least a month, including all the award-winning internationally known restaurants, and river traffic was shut down for a week. Most businesses took a major financial hit that lasted a year or two, even if their buildings were not damaged.

I'm quite familiar with the snobby attitude of many of the locals toward the French Quarter, the ones who claim to have not set foot on Bourbon Street in ten years and say they wish they never had to lay eyes on another tourist in their lifetime. I'm usually very democratic, but in this case I really wish all the folks who want to change the FQ would just move down the road to Kenner and Metarie, where everybody can live a boring, mainstream American lifestyle, and leave Orleans Parish the fuck alone.

We don't have a spare New Orleans, so if anybody or anything changes this one, we've lost a unique national treasure forever. If you compare Las Vegas to an R-rated movie that constantly offers more than it can deliver, New Orleans is the XXX real deal. I'm 100% with the French Quarter workers and business owners who live outside the FQ and come into it every day to make it what it is. I say give the visitors what they want and expect, and a little bit more. Parents who don't want their kids exposed to a hedonistic adult Disneyland have all the rest of America to pick from. Besides all the adult pleasures, FQ music is the real thing, and the food is the very best the US has to offer. Yes, there are some tourist trap businesses, but it's simple enough to walk past them. If you can look in the front door and see a frozen margarita machine rotating, that place is for fat slobs.

A few other tourist cities have copied NO's idea of letting people carry alcoholic drinks around, but it hasn't really caught on anywhere else on a large scale. No other American city allows flashing in public (FQ only) and Vegas is the only other place I've ever had a hotel concierge offer to make arrangements to have someone from an escort service come to our room! They also recommend local drug dealers who have trustworthy reputations and have immunity from the police due to bribes. It's the only place where strip clubs and sex toys shops are mixed in with other businesses of all kinds, and porn DVD's are not hidden away in a section restricted to 18+. In other words, NO is a European city without the high cost or long flights or language difficulties.

I think the rebuilding has been great. Some of the poorest neighborhoods haven't fully come back, but many of their residents had been unable to afford to participate in much of what the area had to offer in the past, and quite frankly they may be better off living in a less flood-prone city with a stronger economy. Many of them never returned to check on their damaged homes after finding work in Houston or Baton Rouge or wherever. I think there are some things that don't belong below sea level, including subsidized housing for the poor and nursing homes for the elderly. Evacuating them before a storm is so difficult and risky. The things that remain in NO need to be things that can never be anywhere else. The valuable space between the levees should be mostly for people who really, really want to be there because they love the unique culture and want to do their part to help preserve it.

 

Using a French phrase, Deja Vu about Katrina, there was Hurricane Betsy exactly 40 years earlier that did exactly the same thing. Came across South Florida went into the Gulf and up to New Orleans, made a storm surge in the lake that broke the levee and the 9th Ward was flooded.

That was two years before I first got to The Big Easy, but a black friend of mine described the fear and danger in the 9th Ward. Said he woke up with his mattress floating in the bed room and when he got off he sank under the water. He exited thru a window and went outside to crawl onto a rood - luckily he could swim. He said the snakes were swimming too and that bothered him. BTW, Alligators live in the wild areas in that part of the city.

Forty fucking years later and the same thing happens - Deja Vu all over again. Only the city is bigger and more populated.

I left New Orleans in 1980 and haven't lived there since but visit on occasion. In 2004 I visited with my 13-year-old grandson



We stayed at the Ramada Inn on Gravier Street downtown about a block away from Charity Hospital where Brenda, Kevin's grandmother was born in 1950.



In 2007 I happened to be going thru New Orleans again. I could not book at the Ramada Inn because it was no longer a hotel. I stayed uptown on St. Charles & Jackson, the original neighborhood where I lived in 1967. I did a lot of walking downtown to see how the city fared 2 years after Katrina.

I passed by the former Ramada Hotel ...



... and Charity Hospital, still boarded up. It is sort of a landmark building made during the WPA in the 1930s and I could not find anyone who knew what was to become of it. It may seem strange that big hi-rise bldgs like this would be shut down because of a one-story flood, but consider all the hotel and hospitals vitals are in that first floor, heating, A/C, kitchens, laundry, storage, elevators.



Downtown was rather depressing to see in 2007, with all the boarded up windows, deterioration of buildings and obvious lack of prosperity. That could be my own history with the city in the '60s & '70s when Canal Street downtown was bustling and active with open stores and movie theaters. It could just be the result of the belly up economy but we can blame some of it on Katrina I suppose.

I am really impressed at the engineering abilities of Beinville and Iberville, the guys that laid out the original one square mile city we now call the Vieux Carre but they called New Orleans. The fact that it did not flood showed that they determined it to be the highest ground around, next to the river and South of Lake Pontchetrain.

I am also dismayed at the lack of foresight many generations of so-called leaders have shown who came after those guys. They advertise New Orleans as "The City That Care Forgot." In 2007, seeing the chaos still present with no public announcements for long time residents or new tourists (which I was at this time) I now call it "The City That Forgot to Care."

Still, I have fond memories of new and exciting experiences from my dozen years in that Scorpio city. Went thru many trips there (figurative & literal). I hope they can get it together again - there are ppl in the 9th Ward still waiting on their money to rebuild and it is still a mess.

 

I still sometimes run into visitors in hotel bars who are surprised that they haven't seen anything like the footage they see on TV news of places like the Lower Ninth. TV doesn't make it clear that most such places have nothing to offer a visitor, and aren't close to the French Quarter. Even the plantation tour routes that follow the river go in the opposite direction. This is not something that the average visitor needs to worry about, unless they are interested in donating money to help the poor. Actually, the best thing most of us can do is visit and support jobs in the area. People need work, not a handout, at this point.

The last time I looked around the modern part of downtown was two years ago. Canal Street had rebounded nicely, at least between Rampart Street and the ferry. I saw one office tower that still had a construction fence around it, near the Intercontinental Hotel.

Since downtown is modern and not much different from what you can find almost anywhere, I never did spend a lot of time in it. The only storm loss there that had any sentimental value for me is the old glass domed dining room at the Intercontinental Hotel. Built in a plaza area in between tall buildings, it was beautiful and used to be one of the best spots in town to have a Sunday morning jazz brunch. Their trumpet player did a great job on Louis Armstrong classics. The storm broke all the glass and crumpled the frame. Instead of rebuilding the room, the hotel apparently sold or leased that strip of land to their next door neighbor. They still have a restaurant, with a view of nothing.

For large businesses, the biggest problem was not so much the dollar value of the storm damage but the long disruption to business operations. Hotel chains realized right away that it would be a year or two before the city needed all those big hotels again. Office towers had to set up temporary operations elsewhere, and had plenty of time to think long and hard about whether or not to return those operations to a place below sea level. Their insurance companies were advising them not to do it.

Last I heard, Charity Hospital has been used as a set for several scary movies and TV shows. No other firm plans at this time.

The best thing they decided not to rebuild is the government subsidized apartment complex nearest to the FQ, near the cemetery where Marie Laveau is supposedly buried. A lot of criminals used to walk to the FQ from there. Terrible location for such a thing.

Also, instead of refurbishing 100% of the vast City Park, they're only doing about half of it and spending the rest of the money fixing up long-neglected Armstrong Park and its performing arts center. I think that's a smart decision, especially in light of increased interest in the Tremé neighborhood brought by the HBO series of the same name.

Unfortunately, there are also no plans to repair and reopen the museum in the old federal mint. The most significant artifact they had was Louis Armstrong's trumpet, which is going to be put on display in a new African American cultural and historical museum in Washington DC, in between the Washington Memorial and the Holocaust Museum. The block surrounding the mint has become a high crime area of concern to those walking to Frenchmen Street from Decatur.

 

Thanx Karen for the update on my old home town.