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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Sneaking past the police lines, we find a surreal scene where tourists are sleeping on bridges, restauranteurs are eating high on the hog, and looters lurk on every corner.
Sep 1, 2005 | Nineteen miles west of New Orleans, near the LaPlace exit on Interstate 10, there's a roadblock where harried police officials check vehicles and press credentials. We tell an officer we're with the press, although we don't have an official badge. "You'll be in the way," he responds, and turns us back. But we manage to enter the city by state Highway 90, slipping into the cracks of a porous rescue operation.
Passing over flooded thoroughfares, Highway 90 cuts through the suburban community of Metairie. Dodging windfallen corrugated roofing and downed telephone poles, we pass a man determinedly mowing his lawn, and drive by an evacuated hospital, where bewildered people still wearing backless patient tunics wade through flooded streets. A plainclothes detective gives us a hint as to how to proceed downtown, and we ford a street under 3 feet of swamp water.
Along River Road, which runs along the Mississippi, things dry out. Although tree limbs are scattered about, we almost believe that it's not quite as bad as it seems. As we drive through the stately Uptown section of New Orleans, it appears that there is no one around at all. Finally, we come upon a lone pedestrian carrying a garbage bag on his back. He angrily yells at us for a ride, but we don't stop.
On a peaceful, dry side street, an elderly woman is holding court on her front porch while her family mills about on the street. Rose Jerrell, 65, has weathered the storm with her three children and several grandchildren. Now that the weather has blown over, they're sitting on the porch eating corn on the cob and listening to the radio. They're not planning on leaving, no matter how long it will be until services are restored. "We're just fine here," she says. "We don't run from hurricanes. You guys going sightseeing?" she asks us with a grin as we head toward downtown.
The only accessible roads into the city that have not been flooded are in a narrow stretch running along the Mississippi levee, which forms the highest point of land in the area. The Mississippi levee that protects the French Quarter and Magazine Street district from the river is a large earthworks structure, and one of the first levees built in New Orleans. Throughout Katrina, the levee kept the river from overflowing and joining the waters of Lake Pontchartrain coming in from the north side of town. The newer, heavy-duty steel canal floodgates broke under the strain of the battering storm surge.
Surrounding this slice of passable streets are scenes of grim destruction. Smoldering ruins, twisted pieces of corrugated metal, hundreds of downed and uprooted live oak trees litter the streets. On the outskirts of downtown, clusters of shellshocked survivors wander down empty thoroughfares, pushing what's left of their belongings in shopping carts and strollers.
"I don't really know where I'm going," says Kendall, a woman from the Ninth Ward neighborhood, who declines to give her last name. "Wherever they take me, I'm going. Anywhere with electricity. At the Ninth Ward, the water is 20 feet. The water ain't draining. We have got to start all over." She rejoins a long, aimless caravan of New Orleanians from the eastern side of the city, who are congregating in the business district.
The Ninth Ward is one of the most flood-devastated neighborhoods. Lying to the east of the French Quarter, the Ninth Ward, which is predominantly African-American, is one of the poorest parts of New Orleans, and was also the area that sustained the most damage from Hurricane Betsy in 1965, in which 200 residents died.
On our way into the city, most of the media appeared to be gathering on the expressway, waiting for the evacuation to begin before rolling camera. Inside the city, where contaminated floodwater is beginning to stink in the midday sun, a few camera crews remain. The CNN crew stands in the middle of Canal Street, downtown New Orleans' main thoroughfare, bargaining to buy a truck from a soon-to-be evacuee. "How much gas does it have in it?" asks a producer. "Will you throw in the canoe? Can we siphon some gas off another vehicle?"
