NEW ORLEANS — On Bourbon Street in New Orleans’ famous French Quarter, this place could still be mistaken for “the city that care forgot.” Swarms of people wore multiple strings of shining beads around their necks. They smoked, slurred words and sloshed drinks. Neon lights offered sex and drink and the pavement smelled of vomit. A prostitute was bent over in a shop window, gyrating her lace-clad bum in time with blaring music. Only her legs and arse were visible. Along the side streets, restaurants with shuttered windows and chandeliers were reminiscent of distant European capitals. People dined late on Creole food.
The signs of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath were elsewhere. On this trip to the U.S. I’d already been through five other airports. None was as quiet as New Orleans.
Driving from the airport into town we saw boarded up, moldy buildings and falling-down houses. Bricks and decayed furniture lay in piles on the sidewalk. Our van sped past a sign on the Ritz-Carlton Hotel which said it would reopen in December. Some people had sprayed messages for Katrina on the side of their dwellings. One of them simply said “Bitch.”
David Meeks, city editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, gave up his Sunday morning to meet me and nine other journalists from the World Press Institute. To help us understand what happened, David showed us through his own gutted house. Slowly, it was being rebuilt.
“We’re 13 months later and it’s still very real.” he said. “You want it to be over with and you still have to live with it every day.”
David drove us to the Lower Ninth Ward, a neighborhood which borders the Mississippi River to the south. It is not yet clear how many of Louisiana’s 1,464 Katrina victims died in this predominantly working class, African-American neighborhood. However, this was the community which suffered the highest death rate per capita.
Our van stopped next to a green area at least as big as a football field. This was where three blocks of houses were smashed from their foundations when two huge levee breeches on the Industrial Canal unleashed a 16-foot wall of water into the neighborhood. In their book “The Storm: What Went Wrong and Why During Hurricane Katrina,” Ivor van Heerden and Mike Bryan explained that at around 7:45 a.m. on Monday, August 29, 2005, nearly 400 yards of the levee along the eastern side of the canal’s southern end abruptly collapsed.
“A wall of water, literally, exploded into the Lower Ninth Ward, with truly catastrophic results. … Hundreds drowned in the space of about 90 minutes. Thousands were left scrambling for their lives,” the authors wrote.
In one of the stranger Katrina incidents, commercial barge ING 4727 — which was a block-and-a-half long — surged through the breeched levee wall into the Lower Ninth near Claiborne Avenue. Opinions differ on how many houses the barge destroyed.
Signs of Unspeakable Loss
Any building which remained standing bore an inscription spray-painted on the side. These markings showed the structure had been inspected by an emergency services team. After learning to read the letters and numbers, I wished myself ignorant. There, across the grass, on the wall of a weatherboard home was the number “4.” It spoke of the dead people found within. There was a “0” written there, too. No people found alive. Involuntarily, I pressed my right palm to my forehead.
At first it seemed there was no life there, only mud and the rotting remains of homes and lives. But on Deslonde Street people were coming and going from a little blue cottage. Next door, the framework of a gutted house was covered in tarpaulin sheeting. Hand-painted signs announced there were tools, boots, mops, respirators and suits for loan. You could get food and water there and you could volunteer to help. The most prominent placard said “Solidarity, not charity.”
These buildings comprised the Common Ground Distribution Center, a volunteer-run organization which aimed to help Lower Ninth Ward residents gut their houses and return home.
Along with some 15 volunteers, the husband-and-wife team of Albert and Belva Bass ran the center seven days a week.
Belva said for a person visiting the area for the first time, it was hard to imagine what the community was like pre-Katrina.
“The houses were so close together that if you sneezed, the next person’s going to say, ‘God bless you,’” she said.
Albert’s family had lived in the Ninth Ward for five generations. He and his wife constantly talked about “roots.” This was not surprising in an area steeped in a history of struggle and activism. A number of prominent musicians came from the neighborhood, including the legendary Fats Domino.
The Greater New Orleans Community Data Center used the 2000 U.S. Census to conclude the population of the Lower Ninth was 14,008 before Katrina. There were no reliable figures on how many people were living in the neighborhood one year later but Albert said there were about nine families. He believed that with support, displaced residents would return to live. Up to 60 people used the center’s services each day.
“We have people coming from Texas (and) Atlanta saying ‘We wanna come back home’ but they don’t have a place to come to,” he said.
Belva described her husband as her “hero.” She said when their house began to flood Albert tied her to his arm because she couldn’t swim. As the rooms filled with water he took them both upstairs to the attic where they were eventually rescued by the National Guard.
While Belva looked to the future, she was frank about the Lower Ninth Ward’s situation. She acknowledged the community had no electricity or street lights and the tap water was undrinkable. The few residents got their potable water from cans.
Show Us Your Love
“We know it was a disaster that happened but we passed that now. We have to deal with what we have in front of us,” she said.
“It’s alright to say ‘I feel sorry for them’ but show us (your) love by putting something into it and we’ll be so appreciative. I mean, we are trying to help as many people as we can but we need people to help us.”
Albert lit a cigarette and went to deal with a customer. Former Lower Ninth resident Alfred Green, 47, was picking up some canned beans. He started eating them immediately and told me his rented home was destroyed by Katrina. In the same sentence Alfred explained that he saved nine people from drowning, including a quadriplegic woman. He was still homeless.
While showing me through the center’s neatly organized supplies, Belva said the Lower Ninth Ward residents needed everything from food and water to clothing, sanitary products, nappies, tools and volunteer labor. Her smooth skin seemed to hide her stress.
“I’m not going to lie, I am begging because this (is) home and this place looks like it’s totally dislocated, it (looks) abandoned. And we need them to not abandon us and just step through and help us out. I mean we lost a lot of lives, let’s not lose the families and the roots here because roots run real deep here.”
For more information go to http://www.commongroundrelief.org
Notebook
By Claire Gorman, WPI '06
