Jesse-Justin Cuevas, Staff Writer
Ideology: Liberal | Writing from: Brooklyn, NY
Approximately 100 miles northeast of the Louisiana border, on the Mississippi side of Interstate 59, there is a trailer graveyard that spooks like Hemingway’s white elephant hills. What looks like thousands of empty white trailers lay abandoned not far from the asphalt. Metal tombs replace cement in this cemetery.
I did not know this upon first glance, but those idle trailers were the emergency homes FEMA employed during Hurricane Katrina four years ago. Those were the formaldehyde stricken shelters that feigned protection and security for the hundreds of thousands of people forced out of their Louisiana homes in August and September 2005. The same illness sparring “refuge” FEMA denied responsibility for until two years after dwellers’ persistent complaints of respiratory difficulty, nosebleeds and migraines.
Admittedly, before my recent trip to New Orleans, I did not know much about the controversy surrounding the trailers, nor did I know exactly which New Orleans neighborhoods were hit hardest. I didn’t know quite what the Ninth Ward was, and I really wasn’t sure the extent of completed reconstruction post-Katrina. I knew Brad and Angelina famously poured their hearts into the disaster-laden region, but I wasn’t aware of their project’s touch-and-go dependability due to the complete reliance on volunteers and donations.
Like most Americans, I heard the immediate seven-day play-by-play of the formation and dissipation of the hurricane, and I kept up with the news during the following days and weeks to know about the levees and the final death count. But at some point, akin to my experience with 9/11, I stopped following the news stories because they were too overwhelming and I had no real-life ties to the calamity.
‘FEMA is incompetent, and Bush is evil. Someday all will be revealed, and it will be horrific.’ That was the gist of my Katrina retention.
As a consequence, I had no knowledge before visiting of the clinical depression plaguing the region’s children. I did not know about the severe stalemate in which the current governor, Bobby Jindal, has positioned New Orlean’s economic policy, nor did I know of the tension surrounding Obama’s presidency in the Parish. From Bush, Lower Ninth Ward residents expected dismissal, but they were promised more than a nickeled and dimed recovery from Obama.
So as I made the drive from Nashville to New Orleans last week, I did not know which questions to ask or what pictures to snap. As a veteran traveler, I kept my ears open and eyes peeled, and I knew that I would ultimately leave the city with a heavy mind. In no way, however, could I have anticipated the sensory overload I experienced. Nor do I think I can relay such magnitude here, so little time having passed since my trip.
I exited the ramp off of Interstate 610 and onto New Orleans Street, which takes you straight into downtown New Orleans and towards the French Quarter. I was instantly transported back to Buenos Aires, where I spent the majority of 2008. I saw the same discombobulated conjuncture of classic architecture and shantytowns. Three French style houses stand in a row, followed by a partially destroyed (or, rather, partially reconstructed) home with plywood over the windows and the Katrina emergency evacuation X next to the front door.
Amidst Buenos Aires’ tourism and metropolitanism, poor sanitation and cheap cost of living, I often forgot that its economy classifies Argentina as an “emerging” country as opposed to a first or third world status. I felt the same confusion wandering the streets of New Orleans, a city known internationally as both a hub of culture and a place of political (and natural?) massacre. As I walked around some of the most beautiful neighborhoods I have ever seen, Katrina’s presence was ever lurking.
While visiting, I was lucky enough to stay with a family friend and employee of Jefferson Parish. Because of his position, he and other government officials were required to remain in New Orleans during the evacuations and the hurricane itself. He was one of many confirming empty houses and keeping the peace when looters came to reap the abandoned treasures of fled households. He was there when Katrina hit and when the levees broke.
His stories were intensely tangible. He described rowing a boat down his own street, which he has lived on for twenty years, pistol in hand, watching water seep under his door. He only had to shoot it once, I learned. When I first entered his house, it didn’t take long for conversation to drift into talk of the hurricane. I remembered that his house had been affected, and I asked him how long it took to fix. He responded, “Well I’m still working on some areas where the ceiling caved in. So what’s that, five years?” Then he gave out a hopeless grunt.
He waved his arms fiercely and his voice faltered when telling me how the water’s depth changed street by street. “On [his street] North Dupre it was about, well, up to that third step, so about…about four feet high. But then, but then, on down towards North Crete…” he paused. He raised his hand to my eye level. All I could see were two slivers of light on either side of his flesh. “East of here it was five feet tall.”
He described with horror what it was like watching pictures, tchotchkes, animals float on top of the water during the many days that flooded streets remained in high tide. He said that because of the water, there were no street signs. Some of the handmade signage still marks the residential streets today. And because it took so long for the water to be pumped and drained out of the city’s streets, mold grew inside people’s homes and all over their belongings. He had to wear a facemask as homes were explored and cleaned out because the mold and residue were so dangerous.
“There is one thing you have to understand about Katrina,” his girlfriend told me. “Everyone here who lived through it has Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Everyone.”
One day she went out back to the apartment, in hopes to give the add-on some much needed order. “He came running out of the house screaming,” she recounted. “He was flailing his arms and yelling at me, ‘What are you doing!? You’re not wearing a mask!?’ But everything toxic had long been disposed, and we both knew that.”
The eeriness radiating from New Orleans these days is from more than just the Historic Voodoo Museum, the ghost tours and the Vampire Clan conspiracy. Now, four and a half years after the disaster, Katrina dwells not only in the streets of the city, but in its people.
Jesse,
This was a really eye-opening piece. I’d had no idea about the trailers, and now that I think about it, post-trauma stress among the population makes a lot of sense.
Do you think too much of the population has been displaced (to Houston, other places) to make a full recovery? One of the explanations I’ve heard regarding New Orelans’ stagnation is that theres simply no demand to rebuild, those who lived in the destroyed areas have simply left. Was this your experience?
Great story
A large part of my family is from New Orleans and I’ve seen much of the lasting damages first hand, and sort of responding to conor’s question about displacement, yes displacement is a big problem. It’s a problem because it represents the government’s forfeiture of some areas’ recovery, and it creates this odd phenomenon of economic degeneration in the cities that receive many displaced citizens. My grandfather lived in Baton Rouge (up north) and after the storm, much of the ninth ward was placed in his city. As a result, crime went up dramatically, the cities unemployment sky-rocketed, and there was no definitive end to the problem. The fact that people have found new places and haven’t had their old homes rebuilt or even touched in some areas perpetuates their displacement delaying recovery and perpetuating the degeneration of other areas.
Thanks, guys.
To respond, I haven’t even BEGUN to think about displacement and how it has affected other cities. My experience in NO, however, most certainly is not that there is a lack of desire to rebuild. On the contrary. In the Ninth Ward, at least, there is insignia everywhere demanding for government attention to the rubble. From what I learned from the gentleman who hosted me, everything is so dependent on volunteerism. Many people simply don’t have the financial backing to rebuild and reconstruct. I feel like a lot of the migration probably has to do with a lack of funding, rather than a want to live elsewhere. But Matt may know better than me on that topic…
Yea, perhaps I didn’t phrase my post correctly. At least in my eyes, it doesn’t seem like there is necessarily this desire to stay in new locations,but, as you said, there is little motivation to move back because a lack of funding has pretty much left the ninth ward in shambles STILL. Certainly Katrina has mobilized America’s philanthropic core in a profound way, but they can only do so much. Why move away from a place where I have a home in a job to rebuild my old house on my own?
This is a beautifully written and heart-wrenching account of New Orleans. It saddens me deeply that, now five years later, the city still hasn’t been repaired, and bureaucracy and government mismanagement are keeping people from returning to their pre-hurricane lives. It’s unspeakably tragic.
I have a lot of issues with this article, as a New Orleans native who evacuated for Katrina and returned for college.
Mainly, I don’t know what the article is about. Is it about FEMA trailers? Bobby Jindal or Obama? Katrina destruction? Most of the piece strikes me as the typical superficial account of “Katrina damage,” without any sources or data to back up its claims (clinical depression plaguing the region’s children? Where is the source for this?). This is in addition to typos and grammatical errors which preclude easy reading and supply misinformation: for example, New Orleans Street is a 3-block stretch of road in the suburb of Gentilly, not a thoroughfare to downtown. You finish with anecdotes from your host about the dangers of gutting a flooded home, which, while personally interesting, lead further away from any informative goal.
Articles like these, which depict New Orleans as hopelessly stagnant and unable to recover from Katrina, are more harmful than helpful. There have been enough pieces memorializing and describing the floodwaters, spray-painted Xs, evacuation, and destruction. This is not the best of those, and because it is not, it should provide another perspective or at least more in-depth analysis (for a more up-to-date Katrina/New Orleans status piece, I would suggest this: http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/columns/story?page=hotread14/Saints). Katrina will always be a part of New Orleans’ history; but 4.5 years after the fact, the emphasis should be on “history.”
I would have been very interested to read an article about Jindal’s economic policies or how Obama is viewed in the New Orleans area; instead, you vaguely reference these and move on, never returning. As an account of your trip to New Orleans, this piece is disjointed and reminiscent of others already written; as a closer look at how New Orleans is functioning and developing post-K, it provides nothing.