Site Presented By
Thursday, Jul 9, 2009
I sold my house in the French Quarter three weeks before Katrina hit. I just went back to New Orleans to see what I missed.
AP Photo/Don Ryan
Alexander Francis Jr. sits in a swing on the mud-caked porch of his house after arriving to inspect Hurricane Katrina damage in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, Oct. 12, 2005.
Oct 14, 2005 | When Anderson Cooper announced he was leaving New Orleans, I knew it was time for me to come. How could I stay in New York without Anderson's stand-ups from the French Quarter to get me through the night? For the millions who now count ourselves exiles of New Orleans, Cooper's nightly display of outrage on CNN was a balm, a ministration, a prime-time expression of the disaster still ongoing in our hearts: heartache and anger and grief for the people who died, for the beloved city in ruins, the pitiful specter of destroyed lives and homes and businesses, the ruination of hundreds of thousands of people and all of their stuff.
But Anderson Cooper was tired. You could see it in the crinkles around his eyes, the tinny croak at the edge of his silvery voice. Who could blame him for wanting to leave? When he said he was heading back to New York, I knew it was the first sign that the country was ready to begin turning its back on the whole thing, and I just had to get down here. See, I had a house in the French Quarter until three weeks before Katrina, when I sold it. I still feel guilty about selling, even though the house stayed high and dry throughout the flood. I feel like the last guy to get off the Titanic before it sailed into history.
The only hotel taking reservations was a fancy place on Poydras Street that charged three times what I ever would have paid for a room in pre-catastrophic New Orleans. Along with a king-size bed, it offered no potable water, no cable TV, no daily maid service, no room service, all for $300 a night. What a deal! I'll take it! Click!
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Flying in, it seems almost the same great old, super-flat flood plain of a city as before, until we bank sharply and come around the west end of Lake Pontchartrain and I spy the huge traffic jam on Interstate 10 headed in from Baton Rouge. It is the first day Mayor Ray Nagin has invited the citizens of New Orleans to come back for a "look and leave," which means they can spend the day examining the ruins of their houses, as long as they get out before the 8 p.m. curfew. The interstate is clogged for miles with people headed in to see how bad it really is. It seems I will not be quite the lonesome Disaster Tourist I imagined myself when I filled my suitcase with antiseptic spray and distilled water, ramen noodles and granola bars -- the first time in my life I have ever taken food to New Orleans.
As the plane makes its final descent, I see that the cypresses in the swamps below are gray sticks, stripped of their leaves. Many of the houses in Kenner sport blue roofs -- bright, bright blue, the same blue as the blue dog in the paintings of George Rodrigue. These roofless houses have been covered with plastic sheeting, provided by FEMA's "Operation Blue Roof."
Ours is the only plane at the terminal, but otherwise things at the airport seem pretty normal, if slightly neutron-bombish. In the van on the way to the rental car place, I have a good view of vast temporary dumps growing in a field beyond the airport hotels. Giant yellow machines are arranging the debris into new pyramids. I'm reassured by the sight of these big machines at work -- evidence that some form of government has finally sprung into action to begin unbuilding the city.
The nice lady beside me in the van says she thinks her house on Claiborne is OK -- the first floor sits high off the ground and that intersection reportedly got only two or three feet of floodwater. But all three of her sisters live in New Orleans East. Their houses are completely destroyed. They're planning to stay on in Texas, with nothing for them here. "I'll probably go back to Texas, too," she says, "even though my house is probably OK. I like it here, but there's nobody left in New Orleans. It's no fun to be by yourself."
I wish her luck, she wishes me luck. I wish I had a disaster story to share with her.
I rent a car and drive into town, looking for signs of damage. I see some modern office buildings with their mirror-glass skins impressively shredded, but the ugly octagonal tower of the Landmark Hotel in Metairie, the one building in town I would like to see destroyed, seems to be untouched. Nature is not an architecture critic.
When you get downtown you don't have to look for the destruction because it's everywhere. The Superdome's wrecked roof is half-covered with white plastic sheeting, as if someone got tired halfway through the job and gave up. All down Poydras there's junk in the streets, and tall office buildings with half their windows blown out. At the hotel, they hand me a room key and a sheet of warnings, mostly to do with the undrinkable water and the lack of usual hotel services. I carry tiny bottles of complementary bottled water up to the room, put them down on the desk. I unpack, wander into the bathroom, and before I know what I'm doing I have brushed my teeth with the water from the faucet.
Only when I've finished does it dawn on me what I've done. Toxic floodwater? You're soaking in it!
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I try calling several friends, but their cellphones aren't working, so I decide to go have a look around before dark. The first people I want to check on are the sweet old man and his hard-of-hearing wife who ran a television repair shop in the Lower Ninth Ward. I took my TV to them because it was a cheap TV to begin with and their shop was called Dirt Cheap TV Repair. They were never able to fix it, but they were really nice about it.
I drive across the French Quarter, which looks fine and smells better than usual, then out St. Claude Avenue. Past Desire Street the disaster begins. Buildings on both sides of the street are flooded out, bombed out, burned down. A ski boat sits on the neutral ground in the middle of St. Claude. There's a flooded bus abandoned in midturn, cars with their doors open, dead dogs decomposing on the sidewalk.
At the Industrial Canal bridge, the men are wearing dark pants and T-shirts that say "Police." They turn me around politely. Nobody gets into the Lower Ninth without a press pass. I'm just a writer, not press. I make a U-turn. I'm driving around listening to United Radio of New Orleans when I hear that more than 1,000 people died across that bridge in the Lower Ninth and St. Bernard Parish. United Radio is a consortium of local stations that have banded together to broadcast round-the-clock disaster news, information, advice. It's a community-wide therapy session for people without cable, those still without electricity five weeks after the storm, listening in on their transistors, calling in on their cellphones.
