One of my first tasks when I moved to New Orleans three months ago was to find a place to live. I had heard from friends for years finding housing in the south was always easier and much, much cheaper than on the east coast, where I'd spent most of my life. And, I thought to myself, it must be cheap there, because a third of the people who lived there before Katrina still haven't come back. I was golden, I thought - The Big Easy would be my city, and I'd get some really cheap
rent to boot.
It turns out I was wrong. Rent is just as high, if not higher, than it was in Philadelphia, where I'd been for six years. Riding through neighborhoods where rent was nearly half my monthly paycheck, I could still see the spray paint X's left by rescue workers in September of 2005, which signified what they found in the houses they searched. There were shells of houses everywhere, and on some of them you could still see the water lines - some higher than my head - left by the flood waters.
I finally found a place less than a month ago, in the city's Seventh Ward, an area devastated by Katrina's flood waters but largely unnoticed by national media coverage. As I left for two weeks of vacation last Tuesday, Tropical Storm Gustav starting threatening Puerto Rico and Haiti. Very quickly, I had to confront the issue I had avoided thinking about during my long moving process - what do I do when another major hurricane threatens this city I'd started to love, where the elevation is as low as six and a half feet below sea level?
For many, the question was non-negotiable: Katrina left nearly 2,000 dead and countless thousands displaced and homeless, so why would they risk sticking around for what Mayor C. Ray Nagin called "the mother of all storms"? According to the New York Times, two million people evacuated from southern Louisiana for Gustav in the first mandatory evacuation since Katrina. According to one estimate I saw, only 10,000 people, out of a population 470,000, stayed in the city during the
storm, almost certainly all clustered along the city's high ground next to the Mississippi River.
And what happened? Soon after it made landfall, "the mother of all storms" was downgraded to a Category 2 hurricane. No levees breached in New Orleans (one did breach in one parish south of the city, though no houses suffered any significant damage). About a million people in Louisiana lost power. There were branches in the streets and some downed power lines. The levee bordering the Upper Ninth Ward was overtopped and the streets there flooded, but no homes were damaged. Shortly after the storm brushed the city, it was merely windy. Police
and the National Guard roamed the streets looking out for looters, but there were not many arrests to be made.
The city had escaped the significant damage forecasted by the mayor and even the Army Corps of Engineers, who remain responsible for repairing and maintaining the city's levee system. The city's West Bank, which had been braced for a storm surge twice as high as their ten-foot levees, sustained no flooding at all.
So what does this mean for New Orleans? I'm afraid that many people will believe that the city is repaired, that the levees will hold in the next major storm that will, inevitably, threaten this strange and beautiful place. The Associated Press interviewed
people who did evacuate, and many, like one Texas woman they interviewed, say that "people who evacuated like us aren't going to evacuate," she said.
This terrifies me. The levees are not fixed, and it's likely that they will still be susceptible long after the Army Corps finish their current improvements in 2011 - the Army Corps has no oversight outside the government agencies that supervise them, so we have no way of knowing the quality of their work. The federal government remains incapable or unwilling to help in huge natural disasters, and their department in charge of handling such emergencies, FEMA, remains a punchline to a cruel, twisted joke. Three years and three days from when Katrina irreparably damaged the psyche of New Orleans, we were reminded of the total ineffectiveness of the Bush Administration, on the eve of the convention where John "Another Four Years" McCain was to receive the nomination from the party that has failed us for eight years.
In a startling reminder of how badly President Bush failed the people of New Orleans in 2005, FEMA announced today that they would be providing limited assistance to evacuees, and no financial assistance, instead deferring to NGOs like the Red Cross.
What it comes down to in The Crescent City is that another major flood could be the end of that wondrous and seemingly doomed city. I can't even begin to imagine the strength it took for people to come back after Katrina, but I don't know that anyone is strong enough to do it twice. To see the grim determination in spite of dampened spirits of all those thousands affected three years ago has been one of the most
inspiring things I've ever witnessed - but the threadbare courage in the face of a city government determined to make less affluent leave and state and federal governments indifferent (at best) to their struggles can only last for so long.
So we will keep living and keep hoping that mother nature continues being kind to us. The spirit of New Orleans does not lie in the levees, or the flood lines on houses, or faith in any government, or the countless young people who have come to call the city "home" in the past three years. You can see it in the jazz funerals that still close down busy streets on hot summer afternoons, and you can see it in the new restaurants that open every day, and you can see it in the children playing in empty lots in the Lower Ninth. And that is why we must not forget New Orleans and the way the Bush Administration failed in three years ago and how it continues to fail it today.
