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New Orleans Six Months Later, Still a Disaster AreaBy Rick Horowitz
NEW ORLEANS -- See it from the air, from a Black Hawk helicopter swooping in at 500 feet, and you begin to sense the extent of it. Long before you reach the city's center -- the hotels and tourist haunts, the Convention Center and the Superdome -- you start to see the evidence, in the tilt of the still-gray trees, in the stacks of stark white sandbags, in the first of those bright blue roofs. There are holes in these roofs, where Katrina's wind and rain did their damage nearly six months ago, and while the owners wait for the chance to make repairs, the bright blue plastic keeps things from getting worse. It's hard to imagine how things could get worse, but you're still at 500 feet, and you haven't even gotten to the really bad parts yet. Fly farther east, beyond the city's center, and you can see the really bad parts. More blue roofs now -- whole clusters of them -- and other places where there are no roofs, blue or otherwise. No roofs, and no houses standing for roofs to protect. And you're still at 500 feet. See it from the road, then, in a tour bus picking its way from neighborhood to neighborhood, and the breadth of the damage takes your breath away. Block after block of empty houses, each of them spray-painted with the famous "X" and the pertinent details. The number of the emergency-rescue unit and the date it got there. What (which is to say how many) the rescuers found inside. What they did about it. Block after block. Neighborhood after neighborhood. Six months ago, you remind yourself, all these places were alive. Then the water came, and stayed. Now you ride through Lakeview, through New Orleans East and the Lower Ninth Ward, through Chalmette down in St. Bernard Parish, and you strain to spot another human being. See it from the road, and you see the boarded-up stores and the empty parking lots. You see the street signs bent at preposterous angles, and the commercial signs missing letters -- or simply missing. In their stead, other, smaller signs taped to nearly every pole, stuck into the grass at nearly every intersection: "Randy's Home Gutting & Repairs." "Squeaky's Cleanup." "Flood Tear Out and Construction." "Interior/Exterior Demolition." "Mold Fog." "Diabetes Supply." And now you're riding through the very worst of it. You're riding down streets that sat closest to the levees, streets where the water burst in when those levees failed, streets where the devastation is total. There were houses here six months ago, but no more. There are rubble piles -- brick and wood and cinderblock -- that approximate the shapes of houses, and other piles that don't offer even that comfort. Here are stone steps that once led to a front door, to a house and a family beyond the door. No door now. No house. No family. Only the steps. Block after block of this. Neighborhood after neighborhood. See it on foot, then -- you have to get out of the bus and see it on foot. You walk along the streets, and atop the levees whose names have become so painfully familiar over the past six months. You walk, and as you walk, you try to catalog the ruins: Overturned cars. A water-soaked couch. A lawn trimmer. Another lawn trimmer. A CD player. A bathtub. An LP sitting in the bathtub. A wheelchair. A little red wagon. Six months ago, these places were alive. Now you catalog the ruins, and you stare at the levee walls -- at the fatal breaches and the temporary patches -- and you remind yourself that another hurricane season is only months away. Posted 2/21/06. Get
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Rick Horowitz
