Crossposted from AFL-CIO Now blog
Marcy Rein, a communications specialist with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Organizing Department, took part in the International Labor Communications Association annual meeting in New Orleans and describes how the reality of New Orleans is not the one portrayed by traditional media.
We pile onto our buses during a break between late-season thunderstorms. Muggy skies hug the city's flat streets as the tour heads out through the busy Central Business District.
The International Labor Communications Association (ILCA) has set up a media center here, gathering nearly 100 of us labor communicators to spotlight the real stories of Hurricane Katrina and her aftermath (check out more of our work here). Before we begin our reporting, we get a tour.
"I have to be honest with you," said the guide on our bus, Chet Held. "I left before the storm. Twenty-five of us piled into my wife's cousin's house in Tampa." Held, an assistant business manager for Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 130, is a wireman by trade and hails from a family of shrimpers and fishermen. He lives in St. Bernard Parish on the southeast side of the city.
We had 42,000 houses under water in St. Bernard, only the rooftops showing.
Katrina had no prejudice. She hit rich, poor, black, white.
His rhythmic Cajun twang misses a beat.
Bear with me, people, it still gets emotional. I was sitting in front of the TV at my wife's cousin's house crying. I ain't lying to you. From my front doorstep I lost three neighbors. My house was under 14 feet of water for 15 days. An oil storage tank ruptured and sent oil into our neighborhood.
When we came back, there was the smell of death in the air. Rotting dead fish, friends, whatever it is. On a rainy day by the house you can still pick it out.
The rain starts up again, streaking the bus windows as we ride past Methodist Hospital, which sticks up out of an asphalt field that used to be a parking lot.
We have no health care here now. In St. Bernard we have a trailer with three doctors.
Charity Hospital, which once served 350,000 people, remains shut. People with no insurance have nowhere to turn for care.
You can't come back with children and not have a school to put them in. You can't come back with someone with health problems and not have hospitals.
Major work needs to be done on the infrastructure around the city. The Lower Ninth [Ward] just got water in the last year. Public transit is running but it's very limited.
A burger stand squats by the side of the street, the only thing open for blocks. We pass three boarded-up strip malls before we see a live one. Turning on to the residential streets of New Orleans East, we see trailers sitting in front of the one-story houses. Some have piles of splintered lumber and broken sheetrock still in the yard. A few have signs of rebuilding, like windows ready to hang.
Held continues.
It was black dark at night, an eerie feeling driving around. This was a very busy area. It's like a ghost town now compared to what it was.
New Orleans East wasn't even the hardest-hit. Katrina washed whole blocks out of the Lower Ninth, leaving front steps or foundation stones to mark the places where houses stood. Scraggly weeds fill those lots now. Even the street signs went. Residents put up their own homemade wooden markers.
Held got back to work Oct. 3, 2005, a bit more than a month after Katrina. He and other electricians worked seven days a week, 10–12 hours a day until May, trying to restore power to the city.
I wasn't able to touch my house till the weekend between Christmas and New Year's. The mud was 18 inches to two feet deep inside, just slop. One rubberized container of Christmas ornaments in the attic and two baby blankets. That's all that survived. No pictures. We lost all the pictures of our babies and old family members.
When I went into the house, it looked like someone turned over a Portalet, then turned on a blender. Construction worker humor...
Held and his neighbors were worried about contamination from the oil spill, but the Environmental Protection Agency said it was OK. "They said we were an acceptable risk," he said.
People are still having respiratory issues from the mold. In St. Bernard Parish we still have no sewage treatment.
We asked for $35 million to fix our plant. So far, they've spent $60 million pumping raw sewage into trucks and hauling it out. We asked the federal government, the state, the locals, but state and local governments are limited. It was promised to us. It was promised.
Mississippi is doing better. They have a Republican governor. We have a Democratic governor. That speaks for itself.
The government's just not helping much, we need to get the word out. Take what they spend on the war in Iraq for one day and you could rebuild New Orleans.
As we cross over the Industrial Canal, Held tells us, "People were on these bridges in 100-degree heat."
Bodies floated around here a few days before they were recovered. We have about 150 bodies that haven't been identified to this day, countless people missing who washed out to sea.
"Ninety percent of the commercial fishing fleet is gone too," he says, looking over the water.
I saw boats I've known all my life, boats with beautiful names like Hemisphere Dancer and Miss Bonnie...flipped over, upside down, stuck in the marsh. The Coast Guard picked them up, stacked them like toys. That hurt too.
The black communities, Vietnamese, all of us came together as one and did a march on the capitol. We weren't heard.
The bus pulls over by a sign that reads, "Survivors Village. The people must decide. Till we all come home." Two activists with People's Hurricane Relief greet us and invite us to come see St. Bernard's housing project.
"This is people's history. This is their core," said one of them, Stephanie Mingo. Rapid-fire words explode out of her.
I worked my whole entire life for everything I have. I lived in this place for 40-plus years. I worked for the state and sometimes my rent was higher than my check. I knew who lived here with me, knew I could ask a neighbor to watch my grandbaby and they'd discipline the child like I would. I could make a big pot of red beans and rice—I love to cook—and whoever was around and needed to eat would come up.
People just want to come home and they need us here. Who's going to do the work? But They don't want us to come back, because we're poor and black and underemployed.
They're right there in the community center making plans, but we should decide how we're coming back."
Public housing has not re-opened in New Orleans. Some 5,000 families were evicted.
"This is a beautiful place," Mingo says. The rain has stopped again and a faint rainbow hangs over the solid brick buildings. They sit behind a chain-link fence, the houses empty but the lawn groomed like a golf course.
Several of us duck through a hole in the fence. Doors to many apartments hang open. Some sit empty. One looks like someone just left in the middle of cleaning. A bottle of Clorox sits on a chair, dishes and a blender litter the counter, a healthy rubber plant sticks out from behind the door.
Back on the bus, we skirt Lake Ponchartrain, which stretches to the horizon like the sea. Many of the sleek lakefront houses have already been rebuilt. Through one picture window, we see a table set for a white-tablecloth dinner.
Tacking back up from the lake, past City Park, which became a camp in the months after the storm. When Held and his crew were trying to get power back on, they went to get a hot meal from the commissary in the camp.
We walked through the cots set up there. I saw people I'd known all my life, just like the boats, people sitting on those cots with nothing under them and a thousand-year stare on their faces. They'd lost everything.
"Please bring a message back," Held says as we head back to the hotel.
This is just a little of what you see and there's people living in the middle of it. Good people. Working people.