Last week I had the opportunity to visit New Orleans for a few days on business. One evening a number of us went out with some New Orleanians to see some of the areas hardest hit by Katrina. Courtesy of Canadian Reader's similar, recent
diary, I see that someone else shot
video in the Lower Ninth Ward a few weeks ago. The utter destruction shown in that video is truly horrifying, but I also saw much more subtle injuries that, in their own way, were far more chilling.
Those who showed me these scenes did so in order to bring the devastation home to the rest of the country, and this is as fine a soapbox as any.
A lot of this will be old hat to those of you who have lived and breathed this story for the last seven months, but it's a story that needs to be told again and again. When the storm after the storm came, much of the city was flooded, with the exception of the oldest part of the city built on the natural levees formed by the Mississippi, when that river was still allowed to run its course. This would include most of the French Quarter and the downtown area, and parts of the Garden District. But in that part of the city below sea level, the floods were anywhere from 2 feet to 14 feet deep. Because of the unusual topography, the flood waters did not recede after the rains stopped. A 2-foot deep flood in ordinary circumstances is a catastrophe, but not in the same way that water sitting for weeks is. When water remains stagnant for that period of time, not only does it create dangerous, moldy conditions, you can kiss the wiring in your entire house goodbye. It all has to be redone, and finding a qualified electrician in the current labor market is extremely difficult. Those lucky enough to own a second story may be able to move into the top floor, but they will still find themselves without electricity for some time. While the storm flattened many houses, the flood damaged many more, including everything from shotgun shacks to million dollar mansions. Merchants in these areas also suffered total losses, particularly auto dealers. (And the city's arborists are predicting that many parks will lose all of their trees within the next three years, including beautiful live oaks, due to the stress of being under salt water for so long.)
The upshot is that even in some of the more middle class neighborhoods, no one is spending the night. (Most of the New Orleans workforce lives in Baton Rouge, and traffic james have returned to the interstate.) As I rode around at dusk, I saw miles and miles of darkened neighborhoods with only the occasional flicker of light. In the middle class areas, such as Lakeview, it almost looks somewhat normal at night until you realize that the windows and doors of houses have been removed and the houses stripped down to the studs -- and that it's time to eat and obviously no one is sitting down at the table.
That's the really eery part. In most neighborhoods, signs of life are very different from what one would usually anticipate. Unless it obviously has been recently washed, a car may simply have been left behind and not yet towed away. (The bridges downtown look like junk yards, with hundreds of totalled cars parked under them, including many of the police cruisers.) The only advertising in these areas is in the hundreds of cheap roadside signs hawking drywall and tree removal and offering the vain hope of "hurricane lawsuits." The children who bring life to even the most squalid conditions are gone, one hopes, to safer territory. That a building is still standing is also meaningless, as many unoccupied house frames made it intact through both the storm and the flood. No, the signs of rebuilding are dumpsters, enormous piles of trash, and trailers -- in some cases, parking lots filled with dozens of trailers for first responders and volunteers.
And the scariest thing? I've seen the section of levee where the barge entered the Ninth Ward and landed on top of people's houses. I've seen the "new" levee. It will not hold. It will not survive a glancing blow from a Cat 1 Hurricane. It will not survive heavy rains of the sort that flooded the Midwest in 1993. I built earthen dams in the Peace Corps. This one will not hold. (Experts appear to agree with me.) Hurricane season is two months away. Those few hearty souls who are spending the night while trying to pick up the pieces? Living in trailers.
To call New Orleans post-apocalyptic is not hyperbole -- if anything, it just fails fully to capture the feeling you get when you see row after row of empty houses, as though a neutron bomb had exploded, or Stephen King's superflu had made an appearance. I have seen firsthand the destruction wrought by poverty in Africa and in our own cities (e.g. Detroit, North Philadelphia, the Bronx, New Haven, etc.) It never prepared me for this.
Rebuilding this area would have been a challenge even if Mary Landrieu had been elected president, Democrats enjoyed healthy majorities in both houses of Congress, 9/11 had never occurred, and the Iraqi army had overthrown Saddam in 1992 and installed a constitutional monarchy. In the current political climate, with the current budgetary constraints, the federal government will not be there for anyone. It just won't. That's why you hear New Orleanians still angrily cursing FEMA amongst themselves as you walk down the street.
If Adam Smith's invisible hand is the only game in town, what is the kind of city that will result? The Ninth Ward will remain a wasteland. Even if the levee holds -- and it will not -- few people will want to return to an area with no local businesses and hundreds of empty houses. St. Bernard Parish, with one of the highest rates of home ownership in the city, will have a higher rate of returnees, but also a large number of vacant buildings -- much like Detroit. (One of the great tragedies is that because many of the people in St. Bernard owned their homes outright, they were not required to hold flood insurance and did not. This is one of the reasons that Nagin's "caution" that "You can rebuild, but you may not get flood insurance" is wholly preposterous.) The future of other areas may not be rosy, either. Although, based on the number of dumpsters, there certainly are quite a few people hard at work, I think it's a given that future buyers, lenders, insurers, and developers will all reasonably assume that all property within the Katrina flood lines is at risk. Simply put, those who pull up stakes will do so on the cheap, and those who stay and rebuild will pay a premium for which they may not be able to obtain any financing. New Orleans will not be a good place to be poor, and not a great place to be rich, either.
There is one alternative. A Democratic party that once reigned supreme in the Gulf Coast states might at least regain a competitive foothold by running on a platform of phased force reductions, the reversal of the Bush tax cuts, and the funding of a public corporation tasked with the job of Gulf Coast reconstruction and relocation. Such a platform would return the Democratic party to its New Deal roots and its core values. As a start, real Democrats could at least slam the Republicans for their vote denying funding for such essentials as FIXING THE FUCKING LEVEES THAT BROKE. MY GOD, HAVE YOU PEOPLE EVER PLAYED WITH SAND CASTLES ON THE BEACH!
There's also a problem with that strategy. The next elections in Louisiana will be marked by massive vote theft accompanied by hypocritical accusations of "election fraud." So this isn't a short-term strategy for the Gulf Coast states. But if we don't stand up now for those Americans who are the most vulnerable, who are we?